Элизабет Бир - Machine

“Oh, I’m an idiot,” I replied. “Of course, Judiciary translation is working.”

We’re trying to hack into the hospital system and reboot it. But Linden is still walled off, and all the back doors are her back doors. If I understand what our AIs are telling me.

“What the hell is going on?”

Terrorists, Cheeirilaq said.

I tried to look up the word. Senso still wasn’t working. “Is that a sophipathology?”

I believe you would term it an illness of thought, yes. Except… it is also a weapon of the oppressed and powerless. I believe the relevant term from human history would be… monkey-wrenching?

“This is the Synarche,” I said. “This is Core General . Who’s oppressed?”

But I thought maybe I had heard of monkey-wrenching . A form of civil protest of unfair labor practices: workers destroying machinery.

I made sure I had a channel open to Sally’s frequency, and said, “Sally. Has it occurred to you that this is really weird sabotage? I would expect a lot more people to be getting hurt if these were serious attempts to cause harm.”

Plenty of people are being harmed.

“Yes, I’m pretty intimately acquainted with that right now. But not as many as should be, if hurting people were the intent.”

I nudged my blood-soaked, sweat-soaked, abandoned suit with an armored toe. Actually, I was going to clean that thing up right now. I picked it up and turned toward the recycler.

Sally asked, Do you think we’re being… pranked?

I thought about the blood on the suit in my hands. And all the blood that had washed over it through the course of the dia. I checked the time. I’d been in Casualty for seventeen hours, patching people together enough so they could survive until we got full functionality back as a, you know, Void-damned down-Welling sun-forsaken unrebirthing hospital .

I shoved the filthy suit into the recycler hatch much harder than was strictly necessary.

I was still trying to get my temper under control when the Goodlaw buzzed. It seems to me, friend Dr. Jens, friend Shipmind, that once a prank results in amputations and deaths, it is no longer a prank, but a felony.

“That’s accurate,” I agreed. “What did you want me for so urgently, Goodlaw?”

Cheeirilaq made a very strange noise, like a hissing cat or a lock depressurizing. Specialist Jones. From the generation ship crew.

“Yes,” I said, turning toward the ladder that would bring us down to Cryo in the absence of the lifts.

It’s escaped.

IADJUSTED MY GRAV BELT OVER the hardsuit to make it easier to reach the controls. It did a good job of keeping me oriented to the deck. Not that a lot of other things were maintaining their alignment, but reasserting a little influence over my local environment made me feel more like I could cope with the larger situation.

A larger situation over which I had exactly no control.

All I could do was handle my tiny corner of it as best I could. And right now, that meant figuring out what had happened to Jones.

Even with the help of my exo, a grav belt, and the hardsuit, I could not keep up with an upset Rashaqin moving as fast as it was able. The Goodlaw noticed that I was falling behind. It didn’t turn its head, but spoke over channels. Friend Doctor, may I be of assistance?

I frowned at the enormous multilimbed body and felt a chill of premonition.

“As long as it’s survivable assistance,” I said.

I startled back. Was that what it sounded like when a Rashaqin guffawed? It reminded me of a whole orchestra’s string section tuning.

Raise your hands over your head and relax your contractile tissues, Cheeirilaq instructed: exactly the kind of advice that is guaranteed to produce the opposite effect.

Nevertheless, I tried. I accomplished the first part, and enough of the second not to scream out loud when Cheeirilaq produced a coil of silk from spinnerets in its abdomen and dropped the loop around my waist, above the gravity belt.

Now it bundles me up and eats me, I thought. Very politely.

Actually, the Goodlaw started running again, all its legs scuttling across available surfaces, not seeming appreciably slowed by having to tow me along in its wake.

I bounced behind it like a planetside water skier skipping off waves and managed not to fall over and be dragged. It sounds impressive, but the grav belt and the exo did a lot of the work of stabilizing for me. Which was good, because I was very confused about how many legs I had, or if I had any legs at all, and I was really sure I shouldn’t be moving this way in any of my remembered bodies.

Sentients ducked willy-nilly out of our path as we careered along corridors and through junctions. Hospital people get used to dodging running emergency staff, but I won’t pretend that one of us being a Rashaqin in a Judiciary uniform didn’t expedite matters.

We arrived back at Cryo faster than I would have imagined possible without the lifts running. A little giddily, I leaned against the bulkhead while Cheeirilaq unlassoed me.

Friend Llyn , it said, are you injured?

“All systems functioning within parameters,” I assured it, without actually checking my fox. “Just a little discombobulated. Oh good, the lights are on.”

That meant Cryo still had power, which meant that the surviving unrewarmed patients still had a chance of being alive. Three cheers for backup generators.

The pressure doors were tightly closed, and my already-hammering heart squeezed painfully when I noticed. They weren’t sealed, though, and opened readily to a pass of Cheeirilaq’s manipulator. O’Mara and Rilriltok were waiting for us inside.

Rilriltok hovered nervously near the ceiling, buzzing in agitation and—once it saw us—relief. My poor bug friend’s emotional state must have been really unpleasant if it was experiencing Cheeirilaq’s presence as reassuring. It zipped toward us, circling wide to approach me first. Wings come in handy in zero g.

O’Mara was magnetized to the deck. There’s not a lot of ferrous metal in Core General’s construction: just enough to serve as a precaution.

I was glad we had it, now.

O’Mara gave us the overview while Rilriltok cut me loose of the silk and I flash-charged my exo. Flash-charging wasn’t good for its long-term durability, but running out of juice during a pursuit would be worse. Rilriltok saw what I was doing and brought me two more external battery packs. It wasn’t on the Judicial frequencies, but we’d known each other and worked together for ans. It could anticipate what I needed as readily as a good surgical nurse could anticipate when you were going to ask for a laser pen.

Calliope Jones had apparently gotten out of bed shortly before what would have been shift change, if the hospital were currently running shifts. She had unplugged her various tubes and wires and walked out into the Cryo ward as if she’d belonged there, and nobody had managed to bring to bear the executive function to stop her. Until Rilriltok had looked up from the patient it was treating, and flown down to interpose itself between Jones and the door.

Jones had yanked an oxygen bottle out of a wall rack and swung it at Rilriltok. Fortunately for the Rashaqin’s fragile wings and exoskeleton, lack of gravity didn’t inhibit its ability to fly. It had zipped out of the way, and Jones had righted herself after the disastrous kinetic consequences of her missed swing and managed to lunge out the door.

Dr. Rilriltok, having nearly been squashed once, had not pursued. Instead, it had summoned Judiciary and gotten Cheeirilaq—who spoke a dialect of the same language, so they didn’t need a translator to communicate. Cheeirilaq had used Judiciary channels to summon O’Mara, and then it had decamped to find me.