“We’ll talk about it when you’re not so busy.”
But— Tsosie began.
I knew what he was about to say, and I was totally with him. What, exactly, had been damaged? He was the mission commander, and I was the rescue coordinator—
But Sally was the shipmind. She shushed him with the electronic equivalent of a squelching stare, and we both subsided.
“We’re not going to salvage the whole ship,” she said, as if she’d been a part of the conversation all along. “The engineering is intractable. We don’t have the facilities to grapple it, and even if we did it’s been accelerating in the wrong direction since Earth was all humans knew, and it’s fragile. It’s too big for a salvage tug to pull through white space. The best approach is to take the people off, if they’re alive, then turn it around and send it back to Terra. It should only take it another six hundred subjective ans of constant braking to get there. If the Synarche lasts that long, we can park it in orbit and turn it into a museum.”
“If not, it will serve as a nice surprise for whoever comes after.” Tsosie sounded… bitter. As if something about this was hitting him personally.
“Well, somebody is going to have to come get it,” I said. Out loud, but with my speakers turned off. Then I turned them on again, before realizing that if Helen was linked to Big Rock Candy Mountain, it and she were probably monitoring our radio transmissions and nothing we were saying was encrypted. The evidence supported me, because she seemed to have taught herself Standard by listening to us before we met her. Our coms channel wasn’t translated, but I had to assume that any AI worth its salt—even a primitive one—could handle unpacking mere centians of linguistic progress.
Screw it, I thought, and spoke so Helen could hear me. “Let’s inspect those cryo chambers, shall we? We probably won’t be able to tell if the ones that are still working contain people who can be brought back. That will have to wait for the hospital. But we should be able to tell if any of them have failed.”
“None have failed,” Helen said. “I’ve done my job. I have maintained the machines.”
I wondered, pityingly, how long Helen had been alone. I wondered if being alone bothered her. Certainly the tinkertoy constructions had an aspect of neuroticism to them, if she was responsible for those. AIs left for too long without input could become fragmented and compulsive. Especially if they’d suffered damage to their hardware.
But Core General cared for artificial intelligences as well as biological ones. We didn’t make a distinction regarding the kind of life we treated, though the doctors for those patients had different specialties. The hospital had several excellent cybersurgeons.
(I was told they were excellent, anyway. Their CVs were certainly impressive, though I didn’t have the expertise to judge. Sally did, and I’d never heard her say anything derogatory.
And believe me, if there is anything centian-long space flights are good for, it’s gossip.)
Digressions aside, I thought our best strategy was to bring Helen back with us, along with a full load of cryo chambers—if we could manage to keep them powered while transporting them. That would be the tricky part. As soon as we got close enough to a beacon, we’d send out a request for cargo haulers to meet another rescue team, and some salvage experts, and let them sort out what to do with—conservatively estimating—ten thousand or so only provisionally not-dead people.
As for us, we might even get back to Core General with our quota before our message did, if we legged it, and we could warn the hospital that it needed to gear up isolation wards and massive amounts of powered cargo storage to be ready for a slow-motion mass casualty situation.
You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. It’s been a truism of emergency response for close to a millennian, and it’s no less true now than it was when they were hauling people out of frozen lakes on the homeworld. It applies doubly to cryo accidents. And we’re a lot better at fixing brain damage these diar than we had been then.
“I’m going to go look,” I told Tsosie, Helen, and Sally.
“None have failed,” Helen insisted. Behind us, the tinkertoys that had followed us into the airlock rustled as if in response to her emotion. Tsosie’s head turned. I felt his shock of unease through the senso, felt him tune to calm himself and refocus on the task at hand.
If the peripheral—if that’s what Helen was—freaked out, how were we going to restrain her, exactly? She obviously was linked to her microbots, and she was probably linked to the ship as well. I foresaw problems if she decided that she needed to personally escort all the cryo chambers. Especially as we’d need to divide them into groups in order to move the people in them to safety. Or, I should say, to move those people to the potential of safety, if any could be saved.
Maybe Helen could split herself into multiple parts. But I suspected that wouldn’t be good for her, in her already-fragile state.
I called on all my victim-soothing skills and hoped Helen’s homebrew language-learning was up to the challenge of following what I needed to say. “I believe you. But I need to assess the technical challenges of moving your crew. We need to know what kind of power we need to supply, at the minimum.”
The tinkertoys clattered. Yes, there was definitely a link there. If I didn’t want to be the first paramedic beaten to death by building blocks, I was going to have to come up with a way to calm Helen. Fortunately, defusing difficult situations with distraught and sometimes panicky people is part of my job.
“Move my crew? You can’t move my crew! It’s contrary to protocols. I have to protect them!”
“We are responding to
