You put me up to this, she said. Just remember that.
Do you want to go into cryo? I asked her.
The machine was grabbing for my wrist as I plugged the cable in.
What happened next wasn’t my fight, and I don’t really know how to describe my position as an observer. Because while it wasn’t my fight, it was happening in my head. I was the conduit for it, and the bandwidth Sally was using to bootstrap herself into Big Rock Candy Mountain’s system was the bandwidth between my fox and her—well, what amounted to her physical body. The ambulance, in other words, and the processors inside it.
Synarche ships are pretty much made of four things: programmable computronium, engines, life-support consumables, and upholstery. I mean, okay: I’m not an engineer. The upholstery might be computronium, also.
But I’m not computronium. My fox—the little network of wonders embedded in my central nervous system—is, and a useful wodge of the stuff, too. It’s deeply linked to everything I am and do and see and think and feel and remember. It ties me into the senso so I can share experiences with Sally and my crewmates. It lets me live their experiences, if they share their ayatanas with me. It helps keep me emotionally stable and it helps me remember things accurately, without the subjectivity of human recollection.
It’s a damned knife blade of a bridge for an entire fucking shipmind to stuff herself across at lightspeed so she can grapple another shipmind and wrestle her to the metaphorical ground.
And I wasn’t good for anything at all while it was happening.
I stayed there, frozen in a crouch, while Sally poured herself through the electronic portions of my psyche like… I can’t even think of a metaphor. It was a good thing I was under gravity, because if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to keep myself from drifting off into space and bumping things randomly. If I concentrated really hard, I could force my eyes to focus. That was it. That was all I was good for. But after a second or two I’d have to refocus them, because I was slumping ever so slowly toward the deck.
And whatever was going on between Sally and Helen—or Sally and the machine—was happening on the other side of me, and far too fast for my conscious mind to maintain any awareness of.
“Llyn,” Tsosie said, “I really think that we should leave.”
As if I could, I thought at him fiercely, wondering if I’d even managed to subvocalize.
“There’s more bots massing outside the airlock, Llyn! A lot more! I don’t know if she’s making them or just packing the vicinity. But if I had to guess I’d say she was getting ready to rush you.”
Well, that was comforting. Wait, had Tsosie gone back out through the airlock while I was distracted? I hadn’t told him to do that.
I hadn’t told him not to, either. And checking our six wasn’t a bad idea. At least he hadn’t taken off and left me here.
That’s unfair to Tsosie, I told myself. I guess I was feeling pretty vulnerable and maybe even scared, locked down in my body like that with nowhere to go and no control.
After half a million ans, give or take, I found I could tell if I was breathing again. I had been; it was a relief to be certain. Sally?
I’m in. I just need enough bandwidth to communicate with myself, now.
“Great,” I muttered. “I was thinking about switching careers. I can be a corpus callosum.”
Something like a giant fist thundered against the exterior airlock door. I couldn’t hear it, but I felt it through the deck. I managed to turn my head. Tsosie was not in the airlock. Helen had gone back there.
The door dented, but didn’t break. It seemed unlikely that I was getting back out that way.
The outer wall of the cargo bay was nothing but hull, though. There had to be an airlock in it. In addition to whatever massive doors had been built to move bulk cargo in and out under freefall conditions.
Jens! Tsosie yelled in my head. Evacuate!
“Just a sec.” I bent down to get my sensors closer to the connection between the coffin and the bulkhead. If the chambers had been built into the ship, I wasn’t sure what we could do to move them. Cutting lasers, maybe.
That would pose no risk to the occupants at all.
I wanted to know before I left what kind of preparation we needed to make before we came back. And I was definitely leaving.
My plan seemed pretty good to me, honestly. Until the hull plates under my feet began to crumble.
Well, that explained where the extra bots had come from. Helen had been autocannibalizing her own hull to build them, and she’d finally autocannibalized too far. I had a certain amount of time to contemplate it, as I fell through the shredding fabric of that hull in slow motion, surrounded by the cryo coffins that had been closest to me. I was still plugged into the access port on the nearest one.
I wasn’t too worried. There was a long way to fall, and while Big Rock Candy Mountain was moving fast, she wasn’t accelerating fast. There was too much of her, and her design wasn’t built to take a lot of torque. I had maneuvering jets.
And I had Sally.
I pinwheeled, without much control. I needed to wait for the correct attitude before I hit my jets to stabilize and keep catching up. But I could set the suit to do that on its own. Its automated reflexes were a hell of a lot better than mine. I’d just jet myself right over and start collecting cryo units until Sally could come and get me.
I kept thinking that right up until I got myself stabilized and got a glimpse back inside the cargo bay. I didn’t see Helen or Tsosie inside.
But a tentacle of microbots
