Элизабет Бир - Machine

“Well,” O’Mara said, running a suit glove down the fresh laser bead, “I guess she’s been here.”

“And planned to stay a while,” Carlos agreed.

She would not have wasted the time to slow us down otherwise.

“It’s all right,” I said. “She’s not a very good welder.”

I stepped forward and O’Mara stepped back. There was a spot at the edge of the bead where I could catch my fingertips, and this was a Judiciary hardsuit. I popped the pry-claws out and began wedging them under the bead, into the crack in the door. A sharp snapping sound and a screeching scrape told me I was almost in.

The exo, not to mention the hardsuit, gave me strength. O’Mara braced my feet, and with a rending noise and a gasp of exchanged atmosphere, we were—abruptly—in.

We dashed through while I held one side open, in case the door’s sensors were damaged. Nobody wanted to get snipped in half. Beyond it, we reassembled. The corridor stretched on another ten meters or so, then took a curved right turn.

Friends , Cheeirilaq whispered. I hear somebody breathing on the other side.

I lifted my foot to step forward. And the shock of sudden, explosive decompression ripped me from the deck.

Things slammed against me as I tumbled: my colleagues, the walls, an equipment cart that had come unmoored. I got one sickening look at the blown-out wall after we scraped around the corridor. Pressure doors slammed behind us. At least not on us, but they weren’t going to keep us from being blown into space.

I didn’t see the net of Rashaqin silk that Cheeirilaq ballooned across the breach until we all bounced off it and then—the atmosphere having evacuated without us—rebounded and drifted slowly back inside.

“She tried to kill us!” Carlos yelped, fingers closing on a grab rail.

I used my gravity belt to orient myself. “Maybe she just wanted to get outside in a hurry.”

Carlos glared at me, then laughed in spite of himself. I could hear O’Mara’s eyes rolling in his silence. Cheeirilaq finished snipping its web free on one side with its raptorial forelimbs, stepped through, and held the flap back for the rest of us.

Sally, can you track a runner on the outside of the hospital?

Negative , she answered. I’m docked too far around the curve.

“I’ve got Starlight.” O’Mara’s voice hissed awkwardly over the suit coms. “As long as she stays near the ox sectors, they can track her by vibrations.”

“Great! Which way do we go?”

“So many terrible options.” O’Mara sighed.

I pretended I hadn’t heard him. “If I were Jones, I’d have an objective. You don’t take action as definitively hostile as blowing a hole in a hab ring until you are ready to commit to something.”

“Until the time for subtlety is past,” Carlos agreed.

Anxiety was a distraction I did not need. I tuned it down, took two deep breaths, and made myself focus. The problem with tuning the adrenaline down was that it sent the exhaustion rushing back. Human beings were not meant to operate on the edge of their capabilities like this, miracles of modern medicine or no miracles of modern medicine.

“If her cards are on the table, then why can’t I read them?” I asked.

“Because we haven’t figured out what game she’s playing, or even what the stakes are.” O’Mara kept walking forward, shifting carefully from foot to foot. Walking on magnets is a weird experience, because there’s no weight pressing your foot down against the insole of the suit. You kind of float inside it, and the boot sticks to the surface of the hab.

Well, we now know she’s not lying in wait outside. Shall we go see if she has left us a booby trap?

“When you put it that way,” I answered, “how can I resist?”

I felt bad letting Cheeirilaq go first. It was the biggest target. But it was also the active-duty Judiciary officer, and I suspected that it was much more current on its combat training than either O’Mara or me.

No matter what kind of nonsense is going on around you, the moment of stepping out of a vehicle into space is always awe-inspiring, the more so here in the Core than elsewhere. It took all my concentration not to stop and gape. Sally was there behind me, at least, adjusting my brain chemistry. I needed all the help I could get right then; exhaustion plays havoc with emotional regulation even when your world isn’t literally coming apart at the seams.

I hauled my heart out of my pants with both hands and followed it through the breached hull, and into the night.

Judiciary training hadn’t entirely deserted me. As soon as I came through the breach I flattened myself against the hull of the hospital, using the curve to protect myself from any potential incoming fire. The hospital was gigantic enough that the apparent curve was nominal, and the protection more theoretical than real—but it made me feel better. I wasn’t the only one: Goodlaw Cheeirilaq was doing the same thing on the opposite side of the breach.

It hadn’t lost hold of the energy projector in its manipulators.

O’Mara—hot on all umpteen of Cheeirilaq’s heels—flattened beside me. Carlos followed with more scramble and less Judiciary precision. He definitely moved like a pipefitter, not a soldier. At least he was being careful, though—watching O’Mara and me and trying to copy us.

It was a good thing the hab wheel wasn’t spinning, or when we used our boot magnets to hold on, the rotational forces would have tended to fling our bodies outward—and into a potential line of fire. As it was, the same curve that we lay close to because it offered homeopathic protection from incoming fire made it impossible to see where Jones had gone.

Cheeirilaq was a fantastic squad mate. Not only had it gone through the door first—and fast—but it laid safety lines of silk behind itself for us to cling to. I walked up them hand over hand, in case the hab wheel started moving again suddenly. My mag boots would probably hold, but if I had one foot off and it started up with a jerk when attitude rockets fired—well, that would suck for the people in free fall inside, but it would also suck for me. Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy. And two points of contact at all times.

Carlos paced beside me. He was comfortable in EVA and by now seemed well able to manage the boots. He, too, kept a hand on the line. “I don’t know anything about this situation. So what if we logic it out? Jones’s objectives, I mean.”

I hauled myself over a projection on the hull. “You make a good point, you know. You don’t know anything.”

“That’s easier to take when I’m the one saying it,” he grumbled.

“Right, but, my point is that Jones obviously knows where she is going. Carlos, how comfortable would you be finding your way around this station on your own? Without a guide or a map, I mean?”

“I’d curl up in a corner and wait for the men in the white coats to find me.”

“I beg your pardon—”

“Never mind,” he said. “I’d have an—an emotional breakdown. A panic attack. If I tried.”

“So she came in with more knowledge than you did. She came in primed for this. She knew the hospital plan, and—”

“What changed right before she went AMA?” O’Mara asked.

Against Medical Advice was a mild way to describe her escape, but I didn’t interject.

I suspect you of asking a leading question, friend O’Mara. The latest round of sabotage took place right before Jones fled.

Sally broke in. The pattern of sabotage started before we went out to Big Rock Candy Mountain. How can it be linked to whatever Jones is doing?

“Table that,” O’Mara said. “Maybe we ought to be asking ourselves how it’s possible that they’re not linked.”