Элизабет Бир - Machine

And so we hurried along the surface of the hab, trying to remember to stay alert for incoming fire as the minutes stretched into a quarter of a standard hour and more. I wished I believed that Jones was not enough of a monster—or enough of an idiot—to discharge a projectile weapon at somebody standing on the surface of an inhabited wheel. But I hadn’t flunked my threat assessment classes, back when I was still in the Judiciary, and the fugitive we were hunting had already decompressed a section of a habitation, and appeared to be working with accomplices who thought nothing of committing a major terrorist attack against a hospital.

Moreover, I didn’t have that much faith in humanity, and right this second I definitely didn’t have that much faith in Jones.

I had no right to feel betrayed. She hadn’t made me any promises. But here I was, feeling betrayed as hell. And also nauseated, since at least two of the systers in my head did not appreciate the sensations of moving fast in free fall.

“Starlight says she’s reached the walker,” O’Mara reported. We were still about three minutes away.

“I hope she has as hard a time getting into it as I did,” I said between gasps for air. The pain in my calf had spread up my IT band to my hip, and no amount of tuning could kill it completely.

One would hope, Cheeirilaq responded. But somehow the notorious perversity of the universe never seems to maximize in a direction convenient to ourselves.

She’s in , Sally agreed. The machine is starting to move.

“Great,” I said. “Now we get to chase her.”

“Yeah,” said O’Mara. “And she’s got a tank.”

It wasn’t much of a chase, as it happened, because Jones and the damned walker hurtled right over us and back the way we had come. We all had a moment of terror as the spiked legs slammed down on every side and the teardrop-shaped body hustled over. Cheeirilaq slung a loop of silk at it, but didn’t connect. Probably for the best, because being dragged behind that thing would be no fun at all, even for a Rashaqin.

Like characters in a comedy, we all whirled in our footsteps and went zooming back the way we had come. The craboid was a lot faster, and you can’t run in mag boots. They only work if one of your feet is in contact with the hull.

We need fire support, I heard the Goodlaw say, and felt a sinking sensation. A Judiciary gunship would be responding. It was the right choice to make… but it was a choice that could cost more lives. So I hated it.

The chase ended moments later when we came around a stanchion that supported the local segment of the currently unusable lift tube system, arriving in time to see the spidery, barb-legged walker rear back and punch both daggerlike forelimbs right into Core General’s unprotected hull.

“We need that gunship out here faster ,” O’Mara said, and I heard the crackle of response from Judiciary operators inside the hospital.

I almost squealed a protest. Projectiles could miss and hit the hospital, and I honestly didn’t want anything terrible happening to Jones. She was…

I didn’t know what she was. She wasn’t a person lost out of time, acting in panic. She wasn’t an innocent. She was, right now, an existential threat to a hospital full of sick people and innocent staffers.

And well, fuck, what were three humans and a Rashaqin—even a Rashaqin with a beam weapon—meant to do against a terrorist in a combat walker? A terrorist, I might add, whose sense of mission included the ruthlessness to have herself frozen in a dubious cryo pod on a crumbling generation ship to await a rescue that might never come.

Yes, I had pretty much abandoned the idea that Jones was a real crew member of Big Rock Candy Mountain . Helen remembered her… but Carlos didn’t. And Carlos’s memory was not reprogrammable the way Helen’s was—or mine was, for that matter.

Cheeirilaq and O’Mara were right to call for backup. As much as I hated it.

The shock wave of the impact kicked my mag boots. O’Mara gestured me behind them—funny how you fall back on the habits of silence and hand signals even when you’re operating on a closed, scrambled coms channel—and we ducked back into the visual cover of the stanchion arch. O’Mara sent a drone around to peek, and as we all rode the feed we regained visual on what Jones was doing.

You can’t evacuate a hospital. Not really—not without causing as many casualties as you are trying to prevent. So many fragile patients with extremely specialized needs. So many who simply cannot survive being moved because they need continual support.

I had devoted my professional life—which was my entire life, to be honest—to protecting and helping those people.

And there was Jones in the walker burrowing away at the skin of my home. At the physical manifestation of my vocation.

I hadn’t believed—not really believed—Jones would do that until I saw it. I still wanted to grasp at denial. This can’t be happening. How could somebody I knew—a real person, an acquaintance that I liked—do something so terrible?

O’Mara grounded the drone at once, and we all crossed our fingers that it hadn’t been seen. Well, Cheeirilaq doesn’t have fingers, and whatever your digits are, you can’t really cross them in a hardsuit anyway, but you know what I mean.

So that’s what the barbs are for, I thought, watching the craboid wedge a pair of them beneath a hull plate and lever the edge up in the eerie silence of vacuum. No puff of crystallizing atmosphere followed: At least it wasn’t a breach. Yet.

My own mental tone had the curious dissociated deadpan of crisis. I didn’t realize I’d thought it loud enough for my fox to pick up until Carlos responded, “That looks like a wrecking bar had a bastard baby with a spider crab.”

I winced, but he wasn’t wrong. Just crude and archaic.

We have to stop her. Cheeirilaq whetted its raptorial forearms together: nervous grooming or preparation for combat, I was not sure. I worried for the transparent insulskin covering its exoskeleton, but it didn’t seem concerned. Around its abdomen, the webwork of oxygen tubes that supplied its respiratory needs inside the hospital connected to the same kind of standard Judiciary ox pack I was wearing, though Cheeirilaq’s was no doubt set to a richer mix. That same fragile-seeming insulskin suit expanded and contracted with the pulse of its breathing.

I wished it were wearing a hardsuit. I suppose its own exoskeleton must suffice; most Rashaqins that left their low-gravity homeworld had ceramic reinforcing threads woven into their chitin as a sensible precaution. Surely Cheeirilaq would have done that before going into a career in military law enforcement.

“What the Well is she doing?” I asked.

O’Mara grunted. “I should think that would be obvious. She’s digging a hole in the hull.”

“Yeah. But… why?”

Cheeirilaq turned its head inside the transparent bubble that protected its sensory equipment and looked at me. The drone feed still showed no deep-space snowfall of crystallizing atmosphere… yet. Core General had a tough skin. But it was only a matter of time.

I remembered what Cheeirilaq had said about the human ayatana, and its uncanny attempts to mimic human gestures, and nodded. “I’d like to try to stop her before we have to use that deployed gunship. In addition to the danger of damage to Core General, there’s a person in there. And I want to understand… I want to understand what’s behind this action.”

Carlos’s voice stretched to hold his incredulity. “A person who’s trying to kill a whole bunch of your patients, Doctor.”