“In that case, twist your siphon around and kiss your ass goodbye.”
It handed me my helmet.
“You should probably come up with a less physiologically unlikely blessing, Flight Nurse.”
“Then you might take me seriously.”
“You put ants in this, didn’t you?” I inspected the inside of the helmet. My voice echoed back from the inside.
“Ants?”
I could tell it was checking senso. This was confirmed when it went on, “Oh, a Terran insect. They’re very attractive, although the body design looks a little unsophisticated.”
“They bite,” I said, and put the helmet on.
Hhayazh made sure I was anchored to a grip, then thumped me on the shoulder of the hardsuit with its hairy, carapaced limb, something it never would have done if I’d been wearing just my uniform and exo. The spikes glanced off the hardsuit, though. It was really a very considerate bugbear from the deepest recesses of the human id. And carrying the ayatanas I was, I found its physical form less horrible than my own.
It lifted a spray nozzle from a hook on the wall, drew out loops of hose, and began to coat me with quick-dry insulating foam. We could peel it off when I got back to Sally, and between now and then it would cut down on those dangerous heat leaks—out and in.
I was going alone, because if I brought Tsosie or one of the others, we doubled the chance that a suit might leak warmth and fry our patients.
Hhayazh was meticulous. It made two passes before it was satisfied, and touched several places up. Then it stepped back, waved an IR scanner over me, and did a couple more spots again while I sighed and tried not to fidget. It was only doing its job, and if our roles had been reversed, I would have double-checked everything, too.
It doesn’t pay to be an asshole to people who are being careful to do their job well.
When it was finished, I thumped it back—gently, because between the hardsuit and my exo, I could have done it some damage—and stepped into the lock.
The inner door hissed shut behind me.
CHAPTER 6
I FLOATED, SUPPORTED BY THE HARDSUIT and my exo, hardly feeling any pain at all now that the acceleration had dropped off. You get so used to hurting that when it goes away not being in pain doesn’t even feel normal, exactly. It feels like having superpowers. I had so much energy and everything was so easy all of a sudden.
So weird to think that a lot of people have superpowers all the time and don’t even know it.
I’m not blind to the irony that I work at the best hospital in the universe, amid the most advanced medical technology of I-don’t-even-know-how-many systers and systems, and they can’t fix my pain syndrome. They can’t even figure out what is causing it, exactly.
I’m something of a medical mystery.
One part autoimmune, one part neurological, one part we aren’t sure. One hundred percent frustrating.
At least I’ve got the exo, and together my machine and I keep each other productive. I give it a purpose and it gives me function. We make a good team, and even though it’s just a prosthesis, I have a lot of affection for it.
And sometimes, like now, nothing hurt too much—and those times were amazing.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’m not actually all that eager for the Synarche to get around to installing the new artificial gravity everywhere. One of the reasons I came to space was to get away from being heavy and sore all the time. When we’re home at Core General, I’ve requisitioned quarters as close to the hub as possible, and I use the therapy tanks about every dia. They’re farther from where I work than would be optimal, but it’s worth it for the lower gs.
So floating in the airlock while it cycled wasn’t bad at all. Especially as I’d taken the anti-inflammatories earlier, and tuned my system to lessen pain. I had a little cushion between me and the universe.
The outer door irised, and I found myself face-to-face with infinity.
There was pain, but it wasn’t real. It was just the expectation that something would hurt and my system’s response to it as the borrowed personalities and memories in my fox flinched from sudden light. The expectation of an injury can hurt nearly as much as the injury itself. My human eyes could handle unfiltered starlight fine, without suffering radiation burns or dazzle. What I knew and what the ayatanas knew were different, and because the memories and expectations of three different Darboof colleagues were currently wired directly into my nervous system, sometimes their reflexes won. Their atmosphere was opaque to a lot of what my species considered visible light, so they weren’t any better adapted to enduring it than I was to gamma rays.
I—or my methanogen memory-passengers—had been braced in anticipation, so I got the wincing and blinking over quickly and reasserted control.
The universe was very beautiful. I looked out through the lock into the darkless night, and the hugeness of the galaxy took my breath away.
We flew abeam of Afar, a little in advance of him in order to avoid his coils, and his hull seemed to gather and scatter all the brilliant starlight. The ship was windowless and reflective in deference to the radiation sensitivity of his crew. He bore no markings that fell into my visual spectrum. I spotted the closest airlock anyway, or rather Sally picked it out for me in senso.
It wasn’t that bad a jump. Sally and Afar were functionally motionless—their speeds and trajectories matched—and I had my navigation jets, so even if I miscalculated slightly, I could do a burn and fix it. Not that Sally would ever let me miscalculate. Our artificially intelligent friends are good at math.
So, I aimed myself at SPV I Bring Tidings From Afar—and I launched.
My trajectory was good. I nailed the v, despite having
