Элизабет Бир - Machine

“Once is happenstance,” said Carlos. “Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” Then, a moment later, he did a double take and said, “Pattern of sabotage?”

We’ll explain later , Cheeirilaq said. I wondered if it would. For now suffice it to say that somebody has been trying to embarrass the hospital for some time.

I grunted. “This last attack was more than embarrassing.”

O’Mara shut us up with a wave of their hand. “Starlight says the target went that way.” They pointed across the turning wheel. “What if we use jets?”

“What if she has a weapon? A ranged weapon, I mean, not a welding torch. We’ll be sitting ducks if we come flying in.”

O’Mara rolled their eyes at me, but somebody has to be the practical one. “If Jones is linked to the sabotage rather than taking advantage of a dramatic situation, then somebody in the Synarche—somebody at Core General—must have had significant knowledge of and contact with the generation ship before Afar found it and sent out the distress signal.”

“The generation ship was significantly off course,” I said. “And much closer to the Core than it should have been, given its speed and when it left Terra. What if somebody moved it?”

O’Mara sputtered. “ Big Rock Candy Mountain has to be as big as Core General. How do you move something like that? You can’t slap a white drive around it!”

Oh, liquid stinking excrement. The missing gravity generators , Cheeirilaq said.

“The what ?!” I yelled so forcefully I got spit on the inside of my faceplate. I hate it when that happens.

I’ll explain later , Cheeirilaq said.

I was pretty sure it wouldn’t.

“How long ago did this happen?”

About… four ans?

“I’m sorry.” Carlos held up a hand in the universal gesture for I have no idea what is going on here. “What do gravity generators have to do with my ship being off course?”

Time is gravity, Cheeirilaq said. Or gravity is time. I’m not a black hole physicist. But if you had enough gravity generators, and ran enough power through them, couldn’t you bend space-time around something even as large as a generation ship, and slide it from one place to another? I witnessed Haimey Dz doing something similar aboard I Rise From Ancestral Night , and she wasn’t even using an external generator.

“Wait! You were that Rashaqin?” Suddenly, I had so many questions.

O’Mara laid a glove the size of a catcher’s mitt on the forearm of my hardsuit. “This is not the time.”

Sally said, You would burn the generators out.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “But what if you didn’t care? What if you never planned to use them again?” Then I stopped, and put my own hand on O’Mara’s enormous biceps to steady myself. “What if the, the tinkertoy machine had gravity generator technology built in? What if it replicated itself, copied the tech from the missing generators, held the ship together—and moved the whole shebang? Accelerated it and redirected it? Put it someplace it would more likely be found?”

We’ve only had the technology to do that for approximately five ans , Cheeirilaq said. The experimental gravity generators went missing approximately four ans ago. If you did use a self-replicating microbot to reinforce the entire ship and fill it with devices like this belt —it tapped its own— and you didn’t care about sacrificing the functionality of the technology in the process… If all that, then I suppose…

“It’s a theory,” Carlos said.

O’Mara sighed so deeply I felt the hardsuit shift. “This is huge.”

Huger than a conspiracy to sabotage the galaxy’s biggest interspecies hospital? But I didn’t say that. I said, “I know where she’s going.”

They all looked at me. Cheeirilaq’s head rotated an unsettling two hundred degrees.

She’s going to the walker, it agreed. It switched to broadband, addressing all the hospital’s Judiciary staff. Evacuate the sector!

Almost in unison, O’Mara snapped, “Get those people out of there!”

I thought it would probably be faster to cut back inside and move through the hospital now that we knew where Jones was going. We were already suited, and wouldn’t need to change between environments. O’Mara overruled me on the grounds that the internal corridors were still a mess of triaged, untriaged, treated, and untreated casualties. Climbing past injured people floating around in zero g was dangerous, not to mention rude.

Bleakly, I wondered what percentage of the hospital staff were on the injured list. At least as long as the recyclers stayed online, we could print as much medication and food and as many bandages as we needed. Until attrition and inevitable lossage led us to run out of materials. Then we would have to start feeding the corpses in.

I sincerely hoped it would not come to that.

The craboid walker was moored halfway around the circumference of the hospital. And if we weren’t going inside, we couldn’t cut across the hub. We were going the long way around, I guessed—and this was going to require some interesting athletics.

In my already exhausted state, I was not looking forward to it.

How worn out was I, actually? Well, there was one way to find out. I tuned back my compensation and my pain management, as a status check, and gasped out loud.

Pain of overuse cramped both my hands, the outside of my left calf below the knee, the arches of my feet where I had jammed them into loops to hold myself in place at various times when there wasn’t enough ferrous material around for the mag boots to be useful. My quadriceps shivered with the pain of pulling those mag boots loose from the hull over and over again. My eyes burned and my head throbbed and my whole body felt bruised with exhaustion.

All on top of my usual aches and pains.

Cheeirilaq’s smaller limbs sawed worriedly against the larger, but the sound of its stridulation did not carry through vacuum. The Judiciary translator rendered its concern to my fox.

Friend Llyn, are you well?

I had my mouth open to lie about that when good sense intervened. One’s colleagues need a reasoned assessment of one’s capabilities in a crisis, not bravado.

“A lot of discomfort,” I admitted, tuning it back down again. “I’ll need a moment to change my exo battery.”

“Are you capable?” O’Mara asked.

Fatigue levels exceed healthy norms, my exo told me.

“Tired. But I’ll hold it together. I have to.” The leads snapped home to the second battery. Carlos took the first and stowed it somewhere.

“Jens—”

“Oh, leave her alone,” Carlos said. “She said she could do it. Either she can, or she can’t, and riding her about it just wastes everyone’s time.”

I wondered if he knew he was talking to the head of security for the entire ox sector. If he knew, I wondered if he cared. I remembered his flare of homophobia that had so discomfited me.

People are so complicated.

Enough , said Cheeirilaq. It’s time to move.

The Goodlaw led us across the curve of the hospital at a punishing pace. Fast as we were going, high as my state of nerves and alertness remained, the enormousness of Core General left plenty of time to worry. And to feel betrayed. I hadn’t known Jones well, but I had liked her. I’d thought she liked me.

Aw, crap. I had a crush on her, didn’t I?

Sigh. Well, as long as I knew it, I could take steps to counteract it, I supposed. Romantic feelings were so tiresome. And so inappropriate, when dealing with a patient, but human beings are programmed to get attached to those we caretake, or those who take care of us.