This time, several things cracked under the blow. One of them was my sternum. That pain got through to my nervous system, all right, albeit briefly. Then it was gone again, along with the sting of my cut hands, leaving a vague ghost like yesterdia’s bruise. But I knew what I’d felt.
It’s just pain. Pain alone cannot stop you from doing things. What stops you from doing things is injury, disability… and being tired. Because pain can make you tired, if it goes on for a long time. Because that pain is not a warning that you are being hurt. It’s just pain. All it can do is make things harder than they need to be.
This wasn’t the kind of pain that makes me tired. This was the kind of pain that makes me angry. And what I felt on the other side of it filled me with furious satisfaction.
It was the whispery sensation of the hardsuit unfolding across my exo, and my skin.
That also hurt. It had to push between me and the thing wrapped around me. I thought it probably scraped my skin off in a couple of places, and might have done worse if the exo hadn’t protected me somewhat. That was okay. Hardsuits are designed to do that. You can grow somebody new skin, fingers, noses. Feet and hands if you have to.
But even modern medicine hasn’t figured out how to bring back somebody who’s been breathing vacuum for more than about thirty seconds or so.
Funny how long it took me—how old I was when I realized that if something didn’t work, you could change it. You didn’t just have to live with the problem, work around it. You could adapt, improvise. And overcome. You could take steps to make a thing better.
Nothing about my childhood encouraged me to develop agency or a sense that I could make the galaxy a better place, repair what was broken, get out my tools. Nothing told me that things could be improved. Nothing encouraged me to effect change.
Well, I was effecting it now.
Remember what I said about the lack of pain clearing my head out? As I struggled, the systers in my head more or less went silent. In the absence of their opinions and demands, I realized that I had most of the information I needed to figure out who was behind the sabotage attempts. I could see the edge of the answer, and the little pattern-matching neurons in my brain were so happy with their success that I felt a kind of faith in the emergent idea. That belief made me doubt my realization rather than confirming it, because our brains really love to find those patterns.
But I was suddenly full of ideas regarding what the sabotage was about, and where Afar had come from, and why Big Rock Candy Mountain had been where it had been. I knew. Or I suspected, anyway. At least, I knew who to ask for proof, and where to go for more information.
The answer wasn’t really a clear shape in my head yet. More of a murky outline. But I hated what I suspected thoroughly enough to really hope that I was wrong.
It had to be somebody with access to Sally, and with access to Sally’s personality core. I’d been convinced it couldn’t have been Sally’s crew. Now I was less convinced. And it had to have been somebody who could have gotten hold of the gravity generator technology, so that Helen could integrate it into her amorphous machine—and then burn it out again.
I was very concerned, based on something he’d let slip, that that might mean the person I was looking for was Tsosie.
Maybe putting Afar and his crew into comas had been a mistake, and not more ruthlessness. I really, really hoped so. I hoped the people who had been hurt or who had died… I hoped that had been an accident.
Maybe it had been. But the saboteurs hadn’t stopped after the first attempt.
I burst through the containing fabric—whatever it was—like I was tearing myself from a chrysalis… except nothing had actually changed. It was only me, same as I had always been, battered a bit but not remade in any better form, struggling in the dark.
My suit lights came up, and I could see again as I shredded loops and swags of iridescent, oily-looking material that flowed apart into bulky particles and flowed together again. I’d seen that stuff before. The machine, like graphite powder with a malevolent will. Some of those shards were like broken glass, around the edges. I’d broken some of the bots. But I was wearing armor now.
There, there was the hatchway. It was sealed; I was inside the walker. I dragged myself toward it through the drifting particles.
My glove landed on something human.
I dragged Calliope out of the mass by her ankle. Straps restrained her; I cut them. Her suit was still sealed. She was coming with me if I had to—
Blow a hole in the shell of the walker?
Concussions in small spaces are a bad idea unless those spaces contain vacuum. I had a Judiciary emergency pack. It had a couple of demo charges in it, along with the other essentials (like the flags and the rescue hook knife). But I wasn’t sure those could penetrate the weird glassy shell of the machine, even working from the inside out.
It didn’t come to that. On the inside, the walker had a big shiny override button right beside the hatch.
Because I had Calliope in my arms by then, I smashed it with my heel. I shoved us both at the irising hatch before it was half-open, struggling through fatigue and pain as thick as sloshing tendrils of the machine.
To the door, and through the door. Drifting out the other side. Get a line on something, don’t go sailing off into space to suffocate—
I had a brief glimpse of Cheeirilaq throwing a line of silk around us as I failed to get
