Элизабет Бир - Machine

This gesture was the same in the Synarche’s flag code and the archaic one: HOLD. HOLD. HOLD.

The barbed legs drove toward me. I crouched—if I jumped out of the way I’d lose contact with the hull and be drifting off into nothingness, away from safety. If you could call this safety.

I had the suit jets and could probably get back to the hospital if that happened. But nobody liked to contemplate floating around in the Big Empty without a concrete and detailed plan for what you were doing while you were out there and how you were going to get back.

The legs stopped a meter above me.

HOLD, I signaled once more.

The legs twitched.

O’Mara bellowed. I could hear Carlos in the background, so loud he came seconded over O’Mara’s feed, but somebody must have killed his suit mike’s connection to my outputs.

O’Mara got his voice to come across level, if strained. “That gunship is coming in hot, Jens.”

“Well, tell it not to shoot.” I didn’t take my eyes off the machine, though I had to crane back against the support of my exo to do it.

Moving my flags slowly, I signed, FOLLOW INSIDE.

There was no response. I almost had a sense that the machine cocked its head at me. If it had a head, which it didn’t.

I tried again, and got the same lack of an answer.

Then it occurred to me that I was overcomplicating the issue. There was no reason for Calliope—or whatever the person in the machine was actually named—to know semaphores from Carlos’s dia. Because she had to be an impostor. A well-drilled one; perhaps one who actually believed the role she was playing. You could do a lot with constructed memories. But an impostor nonetheless.

An impostor might actually know the Synarche General Flag Code, if she was a modern human. It was simple, and you needed to know it to get your pilot’s license, or to work on a docking ring, or to do a job like mine. It didn’t get used every dia every place—but it got used often enough where visual communication was the most effective means. And a cheat sheet and a set of flags were part of the standard equipment in every emergency pack that met Synarche standards to be called an emergency pack.

Which was why I had these flags to work with, right now.

I’d once seen a six-armed, radially symmetrical, massively built keee’Shhk flight-deck master use similar flags to direct two tugs and a barge simultaneously into three different landing sites. Admittedly, the syster in question had a few advantages: three brains and the ability to endure hard vacuum without a suit. But it had still been an impressive display.

I didn’t need to do anything so complicated right now. Just get the walker to follow me, and not get stepped on if it did. I fixed my gaze on that hatch in the underside. It didn’t look compatible with any of our airlocks, but that was why we carried a full suite of flexible collars and kiloliters of sticky spray foam. The great thing about space is that you don’t need a lot of structural integrity under most circumstances. Gravity is the great destroyer of structures. In free fall, the worst things you have to worry about are atmospheric pressure and torque.

As a rescue specialist, I’ve seen some things that were definitely not up to code. But, finicky and rickety though those structures might have been, they still functioned adequately for people to live in them. Until, one dia, they didn’t.

At least I was already stabilized in the same attitude and plane as the presumed front of the machine. I reached out slowly, balancing my movements so I didn’t have to waste my stabilizers or strain my exo and my core muscles holding myself upright, and showed it the flags again. Gently, I moved them into Position 10: Copy?

There was a pause. Then, with the eerie silence of vacuum, the craboid began to move. Most of its limbs remained braced. But two of them—the two closest to me, the ones that had been hovering over my head—pulled in. So did the middle pair, releasing their grip on the hull plates. Which were definitely dented and scored.

This thing was built to take a pounding, all right.

It didn’t have flags, but the whole machine moved its arms into the mirror image of mine. If it had had flags, it would have been saying Acknowledge in reply.

I hadn’t been certain she wouldn’t dig right through me to continue tearing the hospital apart. But there is something psychologically different between damaging an object—even if it’s an object upon which people’s lives depend—and directly killing another sentient being.

Now I just had to keep SJV I Really Don’t Have Time For Your Nonsense from blowing us both away.

Well, I had put my body in between the machine and the hospital. Now I guessed I was going to put my body between the machine and the guns. Maybe the pathetic spectacle of my clumsy human form in its inadequate suit of armor would move the gunship’s mind or its crew to mercy.

Mercy is a nicer word than pity , don’t you think?

There’s no whoosh or whistle of incoming, in vacuum. No auditory warning.

The gunship went over so fast and low that for a moment I thought it had struck me—or struck the craboid, which obviously stretched much farther out from the hull. I ducked instinctively, hands coming up, lifting the flags as if they could somehow protect me. I didn’t consciously register the ship’s outline before it had gone, and had to pull the memory out of my senso to be sure of what I’d seen.

One of the guest surgeons in my head tried to flatten itself into some purely conceptual long grass. Another one wanted to rear up to bring its horns into play. The results were predictably comical, and only my mag boots kept me on the hull. I had to get all of them out of my head.

The gunship was white-space capable, but she’d flipped her coils horizontal to the fat teardrop of her hull, so the effect was not dissimilar to the virtual target circle I still stood in the middle of. Her gunports were open, and in that retrospective glimpse I could see the muzzles of mass drivers tracking as she sped past.

Nonesuch is going to come around again , Cheeirilaq said. Do you require fire support, friend Doctor?

I looked up at the looming machine. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t think she’ll hurt me.”

A crackle of static caught me unaware. I jumped inside my suit. “Dr. Jens? Is that you?”

Jones’s voice. A coms link? A coms link!

“You saved my life!” She sounded angry.

“I’m a doctor,” I said. “That’s what I do.”

Stand down, I told my team, and felt their assent—and how grudging it was—through the senso. They said nothing, though, and for that I was grateful.

Calliope Jones was yelling at me enough for everybody. That was fine, because she wasn’t crushing me like a bug with her giant bug machine.

Why had the volume in my helmet been cranked up so loud in the first place? I lowered it, which actually made it easier to understand what Jones was screaming at me.

“That’s a lie! You’re one of them! You want to experiment on me, like all the others!”

Did she mean that all the others wanted to experiment on her, or that there were a lot of others being experimented on? It sounded like a sophipathology either way, and I didn’t have time to worry about it now.

“Look, Jones,” I said, when she paused for breath. “Calliope. Why don’t you come out of that thing? We’ll dock it somewhere, and you and I can sit down with a drink and talk it over?”

“I want coffee,” she said, and for the first time I could hear the exhaustion in her voice.