“Found him,” Sally said, disrupting my reverie. “Or, rather, found where he was 9.73 light-minutes ago, and I have a very good plot of his trajectory.”
Loese had joined us on the command deck and been briefed about our strategy. I’d half hoped she would come up with something better, but here we were. Making potentially terrible decisions. Now she said, “Are you ready with the tightbeam?”
“Sending,” Sally answered. “Audio only, filtered frequencies.”
That was the safest way we could make the contact.
Actually, I was pretty sure she’d already sent our prepared burst to the ancient ship’s projected locations approximately 9.7 et cetera light-minutes from now. The longer we waited, the more the probabilities drifted on the other ship’s projected track.
I settled back to wait. The earliest possible response would come in twenty minutes, more or less. The urge to drift into self-pity was nearly irresistible, and it startled me—but the urge itself didn’t startle me as much as how comfortable it was. How inviting.
I knew what was behind it: embracing the sense of betrayal and righteousness was safe.
It wouldn’t help me work with Sally, though. And I needed to work with Sally.
Ten and a half standard minutes later, while I was losing a game of virtual checkers to Loese, a brilliant flash of light heralded the sudden dimming of our forward port. A huge mass blocked my view of every running light, every lensing star, even the vast whirl of the Saga-star’s accretion disk. They all vanished, replaced by the back-limned outline of a strangely organic-looking hull: something that looked less built and more grown.
It had fallen out of white space as if materializing, angled slightly away from Sally and the hospital both to avoid pulverizing us with its bow wave. The accelerated particles that came with a white space transition had caused that blinding flash when they met some of the local, thinly distributed matter near Core General. Now they were speeding off on a harmless trajectory.
The ship was I Rise From Ancestral Night, and I felt a spark of disbelief that it had not only risked a white space transition of so short a duration, into such a confined space—but also managed it flawlessly. The pilot and the shipmind, I concluded, were both hot dogs.
There, undocked, it maintained position seamlessly—despite the hospital’s spin. Sally sighed in my head with envy.
“Sally?” said a voice audibly over coms. “This is Singer. I got your message. It seemed I should come in a hurry.”
“Um,” I said. “I don’t want to be the one who has to explain that to O’Mara.”
The AIs got down to business. Singer seemed comfortable protecting himself, and I decided to leave the process to the experts and not worry myself. I was pretty sure I could find plenty of my own problems to concentrate on anyway. Sitting here waiting for Sally or Singer to goof up and get infected with their own virus/antivirus code wasn’t making me any happier or helping to move the situation toward a successful resolution.
Ergo, it was time for me to go find something else useful to do.
CHAPTER 27
GUESS WHO GOT TO EXPLAIN things to O’Mara? They were about to press the call button beside our hatch as I climbed out of Sally into the docking ring.
They eyed me. I eyed them.
They said, “We’re supposed to be under quarantine, you know.”
I said, “Well, you called a gunship.”
They held out their hand to assist me to my feet. I took it, feeling dwarfed. O’Mara was always good about letting you use their strength as an anchor, but sometimes you remembered how large and strong they were. “Come on,” I said. “Walk with me, and I’ll explain how we’re going to save the biggest hospital in the galaxy.”
“I like the sound of that,” they said. “How confident are you?”
I laughed. “Oh,” I said. “Thirty percent? Ten percent, if you plan to try to stop me.”
They looked at me very seriously. “I have no intentions of doing anything to stop you.”
Helen was easy to track down. Once I found her, I sent her to talk to Sally and Singer about the machine, her own programming, and how to save the world—at least the small, artificial world that was this hospital, and the small artificial world that was Big Rock Candy Mountain, and possibly many much larger worlds as well.
That accomplished, I applied myself to the next problem. I sent O’Mara ahead to Cryo, and found Dwayne Carlos in a cafeteria. The directories were still down, so I got a lot of walking in while tracking him through the hospital. I picked up Tsosie along the way, more by accident than by design, and was surprised to find his presence bulwarked me.
Carlos was at a corner table eating spaghetti. Pretty soon so were Tsosie and I, having sat down across from him. I was trying to remember the last time I ate something that wasn’t spaghetti.
My allofather used to say grace before every meal. I wasn’t sure what it was that had abruptly made me remember that, but this seemed like a good time for being thankful. So I contented myself with a moment of gratitude that there were still organics for the printers (even if what they were printing was, ironically, spaghetti) and that the reclaimers were still working to make water. Dying of thirst in space seemed even less fun than being spaghettified.
That made me wonder about the optics of eating long pasta. I suppose irony will out.
Having bowed my head over the food—I sensed Tsosie’s amusement but didn’t
