A moment passed. I might have worried, but then the belly hatch irised open and atmosphere puffed away. I made myself stay still: I wouldn’t make her come out any faster by pacing in circles.
Jens? O’Mara asked.
Stand by. Call off the gunship; she’s unsealing.
She wasn’t coming out fast at all.
“Dr. Jens?” The fear was back in her voice.
“Calliope?”
“I can’t get loose. I’m stuck.”
Instantly I was on my feet. “Stay calm. I’m coming.”
“Jens, this is a terrible idea.”
O’Mara, on a different channel. Out loud, as if to be sure I heard them.
I made sure my channel to Jones was closed before I answered. “I do rescues. This is business as usual.”
“If you go in there we’re going to have to put you into quarantine, too.”
That made me pause. “I was already in Afar. And Big Rock Candy Mountain.”
They continued, “We don’t know how long it will be before we’ve got control of the meme, Llyn.”
“And if the quarantine isn’t lifted?”
“You can’t move around freely until it is.” I heard their shrug in their voice, and contained anger. Anger at me, I realized. “Look, I know that rushing into dangerous situations is what you do, and how you feel alive, and you’ve chosen good careers to put that tendency to use. And some people are going to tell you that’s heroic. But this person chose her own path and tried to kill a lot of people, and if she’s stuck in there, oh well.”
They still weren’t wrong. But they weren’t right, either. “I don’t think she got a lot of choice—”
“Ignoring your own needs constantly is selfish and makes a lot of work for other people.”
“This is not your everydia sort of situation.” I wondered how the gritting of my teeth came through the link. “Are you going to order me not to, Master Chief?”
It was a low blow. I knew O’Mara didn’t love having a desk job. But this was my hospital, and we didn’t just let people die here even if they pissed us off, and—
—and if Calliope had been trying to kill people she would have busted through an observation wall in one of the cafeterias, not spent a bunch of time digging up a well-protected section of hull with nothing but machinery underneath.
“No,” O’Mara said, after a long pause. “I’m not going to order you not to treat your patient, Doctor.”
I de-magged, kicked off from the hull, and let myself drift upward. My aim was pretty good, and this hab ring was no longer rotating, so I didn’t need to touch my jets or the edges of the hatch as I drifted through.
The door was just a door.
I don’t know exactly what I expected inside the machine—Calliope asphyxiated with her suit unsealed, maybe. Alien technology like twisted metal brambles impaling her.
Not a perfectly normal command chair in a perfectly normal cabin, and a suited woman struggling with restraints that wouldn’t have seemed out of place on any pilot’s seat.
“Hey there, Specialist.” I moved up next to her. She pulled against the straps. I moved her hands away and tried the latch; it seemed to be jammed.
There were cutters in my emergency kit. I got them out at the same time I stowed the semaphore flags. “Just hold still for a few seconds. I’ll pop you right out of there.”
Her face and her panicked expression were plain to see through the plate on her suit. I kept talking as I felt around the harness and aligned the cutters. I wasn’t really concentrating on what I was saying or if it made any sense. What was important was the tone.
She yanked against the straps, which meant she yanked against me. I put my free hand on her shoulder. “I need you to hold still, Calliope. I’m going to cut the restraints now, and I don’t want to hole your suit.”
To her credit, she held still. In a small voice, she said, “Okay.”
I watched while she unclenched her hands. Dealing with that level of adrenaline couldn’t be easy without a fox.
I reached out extra carefully, watching my hands so I wouldn’t get confused about how long my arms were. I snipped one restraint, close to the buckle.
She jerked back so sharply I was afraid I’d holed her. But she was staring over my shoulder. “Look out, Llyn!”
I ducked and started to turn, pulling the cutter up and away—the only safe direction. I wasn’t fast enough. A glimpse of a multicolored tendril snaking toward me—familiar from my experience on Big Rock Candy Mountain—was my only warning besides Calliope’s cry.
An impact. The hiss of venting atmosphere. A wild flail with the cutter—
Shit.
I fell.
CHAPTER 21
I REMEMBER WAKING UP INSIDE THE machine. Inside my exo, when it was first fitted to me.
I remember what it felt like: On my skin. Against me. A part of me.
I remember the incredible floating sensation of not being in pain for the first time I could recall.
No. That’s not quite precisely right. The pain still existed. It wasn’t gone.
It just didn’t saturate my awareness the way it had before. It was a sensation, not a prison.
It’s even in the words, isn’t it? We talk about being hungry, being thirsty, being distracted, being tired. But we are in pain. Pain is a trap. It surrounds us. It’s a cage: a thing we can’t get out of.
So maybe it is accurate to say I wasn’t in pain anymore, there inside the machine. Somebody had left the door open, and I could get out if I wanted. Walk around, look at the pain from the outside.
I was in the machine. But that meant the machine was there between me and the pain. Insulating. A protective barrier. Not something I could ignore or neglect to maintain, because I could never forget the machine.
But when I was in the machine I wasn’t in the pain. And the cognitive load of servicing the machine was so much less than that of servicing the pain that I got
