Элизабет Бир - Machine

This is what people who know what they are doing and aim to save lives can accomplish even when they can’t effectively communicate.

Somewhere behind me, I heard screaming. Human, possibly. I could have treated that patient competently without an ayatana, but I didn’t have time to worry about it now, already being in the middle of my own primitive surgery. Somebody less qualified would have to deal with it. I tuned my racing heart back: my current patient could not wait until we had appropriate facilities, until we could grow grafts and perform the surgery while they slept painlessly through it. Right now, we didn’t even have an anesthesiologist. Just a lot of sedatives.

I held out my hand on an arm that was too long and too short and not flexible enough and very squishy, and realized that I couldn’t ask for the forceps precisely as one of the blood-spattered medics laid them in my hand. I wanted to smile my gratitude, but the mask would have hidden my expression, and anyway very few systers take teeth-baring as a friendly gesture.

So I said “Thank you,” out loud, hoping that if I said it a few times the sound would acquire meaning for my colleagues, and bent down to bathe my hands in the blood of the wounded.

I clamped and stitched and cauterized, somehow finding myself in a zone of total focus where the noises of half a hundred different species trying to make themselves urgently understood seemed distant, unreal. By any standard from the current millennian, the work I did was horrifically crude. There wasn’t enough skin to stitch across the stumps. It didn’t matter, because the limbs would be replaced with grafts eventually, but all I could do right now when I’d stopped the bleeding was to seal the raw ends with synth.

When I finished with that patient, somebody grabbed my elbow and walked me to decon, and then to another casualty. I almost understood some of what it was telling me—almost. Could I use the ayatanas for translation purposes, if I had the right ones?

No time to find out, currently.

Somebody else brought me an external battery for my suit, which was when I realized I ought to charge my exo from the suit, too. In an emergency, keep your batteries close and fully charged.

There was another patient after that one, and another. I looked up once and found myself assisting Rhym. That was good, because Sally could translate for us. And the mere fact of being close to my surgeon friend made me feel 50 percent less anxious that something would go horribly wrong.

However horribly wrong it went, Rhym could handle it.

Another time, I looked up and the person across the table from me, holding out the tool I needed before I knew I needed it, was Hhayazh. Best surgical nurse I’ve ever known. I spotted Tsosie once or twice. Everybody was head down, working, grunting and waving to communicate.

Somebody brought me soup and water. I drank the soup with my eyes closed, holding my nose so my neural passengers wouldn’t notice what was in it and potentially take offense. Later, somebody brought me tea. I ate sandwiches with my eyes averted, trying not to gag. The suit was equipped to handle bathroom breaks.

I looked up again as another patient was slid out from under me. Directly into the glittering compound eyes of a massive adult female Rashaqin.

It stridulated at me, one raptorial forelimb snapping. I recoiled so hard I almost sat down on the floor. I would have, if there had been any gravity. As it was, I rocked ridiculously on my mag boots before my exo and my core muscles stabilized me.

Then I realized from the bolero jacket and the glittering badge that it was Cheeirilaq, and swallowed against my racing heart. It felt like it was stuck in my esophagus, but I got it down on the second try.

“Oh Well,” I cursed. “What now?”

Cheeirilaq reached out, delicately draped a barbed hook around my bloody glove—I was on my fifth shade of blood already todia—and tugged me very, very gently toward the door. It was holding on to various railings and appurtenances with assorted limbs.

I realized how much my feet hurt. They were so swollen that I could feel the insides of my mag boots pressing creases in my flesh. My hands, if anything, were worse. There’s some stretch built into my exo, but the suit was less accommodating.

I looked back over my shoulder, toward the station where I’d been operating. Somebody else was already mag-stepping into the place I’d vacated.

Cheeirilaq herded me into a corner with gentle pokes of its spiky, razor-edged forelimbs.

“I need to go back to work.” I raised my hand and pointed. There was less chaos now, I realized. Fewer people bleeding and waiting their turn. Staff members bunking in their suits on tethers along the walls.

Exaggeratedly, distinctly, the Goodlaw shook its head.

I stared at it in disbelief.

It did it again.

The gesture was utterly nonhuman, a quick rotation back and forth more like a timing gear than an organic entity. But it was unmistakable, and very obviously a copy of the gesture I made all the time.

Cheeirilaq was regarding me with all its eyes, antennae trained on me like the ears of an attentive dog.

It placed a barb tip under the placket of my hardsuit and lifted gently. Not enough to tear the suit away, though I was sure that was within its capabilities. I realized how horrible the suit was when it touched me: decon was just sterilizing the ichor; it wasn’t removing it.

I stepped back, shaking my head inside the helmet.

“I know it’s bloody and disgusting, but it’s the only one I have. And what are my odds of finding another charged one under these circumstances?”

Cheeirilaq took a breath so deep that bright-colored lines appeared along the green length of its abdomen. It let the breath out again, the transparent oxygen tubes that enriched the atmospheric mix near its spiracles pulsing in time.

I had never seen Rilriltok sigh. Or maybe it was just less dramatic when it did so.

Cheeirilaq pulled its raptorial limb back, and unclipped something from the tool belt that also held its gravity nullifier. With its smaller manipulator arms, it held the object out to me.

Another hardsuit nucleus.

Oh.

I stripped out of my filthy suit even faster than I had slapped it on myself, stopping only to retrieve the auxiliary battery pack. It felt so good to get the thing off my feet I almost cheered.

The suit was so dirty it wouldn’t retract back into the actuator. And it was even grosser on the inside, though less gory. I floated above it and stabilized my weightless body against a grab rail.

Cheeirilaq pressed the hardsuit core to my chest. It was Judiciary issue, I noticed.

Not surprising. Consider the source.

It adhered. A moment before I triggered it, I looked at Cheeirilaq’s tool belt once more.

Wait a minute. Antigravity belt. Functionally, a gravity control belt. I also had one of those. It had been sealed inside my suit, along with my exo and my body.

I thought about how the grav stretchers maintained their distance and orientation from the deck. I thought about what an idiot I had been.

I took off the gravity control belt I was wearing, handed it to the Goodlaw, and triggered the hardsuit. It unfurled around me with a clatter that seemed enormously loud to ears used to hearing everything muted through a helmet.

It sealed me in, and I sighed.

Thank goodness you listened, Cheeirilaq said, and held my belt back out to me. I wound it around the suit, clipped it, and turned it on.

Effortlessly, the grav belt oriented me to the floor. I didn’t need the mag boots and the effort of pulling them free with every step. I just needed this tool right here.