Элизабет Бир - Machine

“Yes,” I said. “And if we kill her, we’ll never find out why. I feel like I have a personal connection. Let me talk to her.”

O’Mara broke a long silence with my name. “Llyn—”

I looked at them and they looked at me. The hull under our feet vibrated

“Fine,” they sighed. “Don’t make me write a letter to your daughter.”

Be careful. Cheeirilaq darted one raptorial forelimb out and tapped me on the shoulder sharply. I glanced down, surprised the razory tip hadn’t drawn blood. Score one for the hardsuit.

Carlos stepped in front of O’Mara. “You’re going to let her go out there in a space suit to face that… fucking tank?”

“I’m a rescue specialist,” I said, because I didn’t appreciate Carlos appealing to O’Mara as if I weren’t an autonomous adult sentient. There was that atavistic nonsense. “This is my job.”

Carlos reached out to grab me, but I was better at space shit, let’s be honest here, and I eluded him easily. He didn’t elude O’Mara, and a moment later I stepped out from behind the lift arch and walked across the hull toward the walker.

“SALLY,” I SAID, “ARE YOU still there?”

Absolutely. What are you going to do about this?

“I’ve got an idea. Let me check this emergency pack—hey, would you look at that?”

I pulled out two small tubes, each about as long as my hand was wide. Each had a little flat disc at the top. I fumbled at the discs with my gloves but got them pulled out. Each unfurled into a flag on a stick, with a wire at the distal end to keep it rigid.

“Old-school,” I said, grinning behind my mask. “Semaphores. Can you look up pre-Synarche semaphore codes for me?”

I already had them, Sally said. Which is lucky for you because I can’t download anything, between the quarantine and the power failures.

She passed the codes on to my fox. They were straightforward, and I thought I could manage.

I still moved toward the walker. It ripped the hull plate up some more, forelimbs striking downward, daggerlike, while the midlimbs popped and pried. The vibrations shuddered through the hull, making the bones in my feet and ankles ache even more than they did already. Electricity arced around the walker, blue sparks bridging and crawling up its arms. The charge didn’t slow it down at all.

But it also didn’t seem to have noticed me approaching. Or if it had, it didn’t seem to care.

I realized I was anthropomorphizing the craboid. Pretending it was acting on its own, without a person inside it. That would, I thought, make it easier to cope in the event I couldn’t hold the gunship off.

Water-ice fountained briefly into snow and drifted away to space before the ruptured pipe froze and sealed itself. A hundred meters from the busily destructive machine, I unfurled my little flags and struck a pose.

Sally spoke through my fox. She said, Synarche Judiciary Vessel I Really Don’t Have Time For Your Nonsense is inbound. ETA five standard minutes. You will need to be at least twenty meters clear of the fire zone for the shipmind to guarantee your safety.

Copy. Mark the fire zone please?

Sally popped filters over our perceptions, showing a green ring and crosshairs superimposed on the hull.

What’s under that? Cheeirilaq asked.

Machine rooms, Sally replied. Environmental controls.

Ox sector? O’Mara guessed.

There was a pause. A brief one, but any pause beyond the polite ones to allow slowbrains to process is significant in an AI.

No record, Sally said.

What do you mean, no record? The machine still wasn’t responding to me. I kept walking. I’d still be outside of its immediate striking range if I stopped at the edge of the target zone.

The schematics I have on record don’t list what these environmental controls are for.

Isn’t that weird? I asked.

Drop it, O’Mara interjected. Just stop that thing.

But—

But a lot of things. But it was weird. But it could be useful to know what was under the machine in case it—or the gunship—punched through and let whatever was in there… out here. Or left it spreading through a series of projectile holes to adjacent sections.

Oxygen was poison, if you were the sort of person who breathed an atmosphere rich in chlorine gas, for example. Water was poison if your blood’s chemistry was closer to ethylene glycol. And vice versa.

One did not simply muck about in a multispecies environment without due consideration for the biological needs of everybody in the adjoining corridors. Why can’t Sally access detailed schematics on this area? What is Jones digging to?

Something here was very wrong. And not letting Calliope Jones get killed was my ticket to finding out what that was, exactly.

“Jens, stop!”

I was a half meter inside that glowing green target zone, and O’Mara’s yelling in my ear was nearly drowning out Sally’s yelling through my fox. The craboid hadn’t disassembled me yet, which was a data point in my favor. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be reading my semaphore signals, either.

Admittedly, it’s not a language system optimized for Hey, want to get a coffee? I think we need to talk.

Not that you should ever say to anybody, “I think we need to talk.” Not unless you want to spend the next fifteen standard minutes dealing with an adrenaline response.

I had made sure my hardsuit display was the full-on barrage of Terran medical symbols (Caduceus, Red Cross, Red Crescent, et cetera), and that and the flags were my only way of letting Jones know that I was a friendly—as friendly as anybody could be under the circumstances. Well, that and walking up to her war machine wearing nothing but a hardsuit and carrying no weapons. She still wasn’t paying any attention to me—which was good and bad—but she also hadn’t stopped pulling the plating off the outside of my hospital. It looked like she’d dug about a meter into the hull, which meant she had to be pretty close to the outermost pressure capsule. If she breached that, it would decompress, and more doors would come down, and more lives and limbs would doubtless be lost unless O’Mara’s orders to clear the sectors inward of us had been followed.

Nobody with a self-preservation instinct would be standing around in a doorway, but people still had to walk down corridors.

“Jens,” O’Mara said, as I continued to move forward at a steady pace, “what in the Well are you doing?”

“Gambling,” I said, but it didn’t feel like a gamble. It felt like trusting my instincts.

The iron spider towered over me as I approached. I was already much closer than was safe. Much closer than I had permission to be. The hull jumped under my feet every time the craboid drove its forelegs into the plating. An asteroid field of glittering debris surrounded it now, turning, reflecting the colors of all the Core’s weird lensing stars from edges that looked jagged and razor-sharp.

I thought about tuning back my pounding heart, the anxious pain in my throat—but adrenaline might keep me alive. It might make me that tiny bit faster.

I could deal with the discomfort. Especially when turning it off would let me remember that other things hurt more.

I waited until the machine reared back for its next blow and stepped right under the front legs. The middle and back ones gripped the savaged hull in metal claws. Ripped plating crunched as my mag boots pulled me toward the hospital’s center of spin. I raised the flags even higher and crossed them in front of me, repeating the gesture three times with a flourish between each.