I sent them a message requesting an urgent appointment and got an immediate confirmation. My door is open.
As I walked, I thought about the patient who shared O’Mara’s title—Dwayne Carlos, the master pipefitter. I sent a note to Rilriltok while I was thinking about it, asking that—if Sally was in port—I be allowed to be present when he rewarmed Helen’s crew members. I felt like I owed them that, having brought them in from the cold. If they lived, and considering where they came from, it would probably be comforting if the first face they saw on wakening was a human one.
O’Mara’s office was centrally located in the ox-sector Emergency Department, and Sally had come in on one end, so I had some traveling to do. It wasn’t quite far enough away to catch a lift, but it did take almost fifteen standard minutes of weaving through my fellow professionals and their patients in corridors to arrive. When I did, the door was standing open, though there was a sound-dampening privacy field in place.
I ducked through quickly—nobody lingers under a decompression door—and was surprised to find that two members of my crew had beaten me here. And additionally surprised that neither one of them was Loese. I’d come here without discussing it with any of them, O’Mara hadn’t mentioned their presence, and if anybody was consulting with the master chief, I’d expect it to be the person who had been most involved in investigating the sabotage.
Tsosie nodded in greeting as I entered, and Dr. Rhym wriggled their tendrils. O’Mara waved me to a seat. They were a blocky medium-complected human with cropped graying red hair. A pair of positively prehensile eyebrows were the only thing at odds with the general squareness of their face, features, and their massive squareness of frame.
They looked like a retired prizefighter. They were a retired prizefighter—Judiciary zero-G boxing subchampion three years running, before I’d worked with them. They were also the person who kept the ox-sector Emergency Department of the largest hospital in the galaxy purring like an only slightly dyspeptic cat.
“Are you here to report the sabotage, Dr. Jens?” they asked, when I’d settled.
The faint hum of the privacy barrier reassured me. What did not reassure me was Tsosie’s expression of shock. I assumed the sudden retraction of Rhym’s tendrils also indicated surprise, but I wasn’t certain.
I looked at Tsosie. “I assume from the look on your face that you hadn’t gotten around to telling them yet?”
Tsosie looked over at O’Mara. “We’d barely sat down when you walked in. Loese got here first?”
I rubbed my hands until I caught myself. O’Mara’s brain was as sharp as their physique was lumpish. I was too late: I saw their eyebrows flicker as they looked down. They didn’t say anything about it.
O’Mara shook their head.
I said, “That’s not like you. You’re not surprised. And you’re not angry.”
O’Mara rumbled, “Well, there’s no point in trying to hide any of this from you. The grapevine will fill you in before you get the first scuff on your station shoes. We’ve had some… odd occurrences in your absence. So when all three of you showed up needing to talk urgently…”
“Odd.” Tsosie wasn’t really asking a question. He wasn’t really not asking one, either.
“Environmental leaks. Contaminated medication. Nobody’s been harmed yet, but if it keeps up it’s only a matter of time.”
“And you think this is intentional.”
“I do,” O’Mara said. “Unfortunately. What happened on Sally?”
“Coms failed.” I looked at Tsosie.
“Coms failed while Llyn and I were on the generation ship.”
“Basically the worst possible moment,” I agreed. “If Sally and Loese hadn’t managed a patch job, Tsosie and I might not be here, because the situation over there got dicey very quickly.”
“Tell them about falling through the hull,” Rhym suggested.
“What?”
I held up my hand. Knuckles swollen. I put it down again quickly. “It’s all in my afteraction,” I said. “Which is already filed, and I bet Tsosie’s is, too.”
Tsosie studiously examined his fingernails, hiding a smile. Nobody wants to be the bad kid when O’Mara’s at the head of the classroom.
“How are the Darboof patients doing?” I asked. As a section chief, O’Mara would have access to that information. And I wasn’t changing the subject or being nosy. They were my patients, too, and I cared.
O’Mara unfocused, refocused, frowned. “Stable,” they said. “A team’s working on them, and the AI team is running a core-out diagnostic on Afar. Did any of the ancient humans make it?”
“We don’t know yet,” I answered. “Dr. Rilriltok is the physician in charge. It’s scanning DNA so we can have spare parts ready before we thaw them out. The peripheral is being treated by Zhiruo. Master Chief, I have some… social concerns.”
“Your patients are nasty atavistic humans full of nasty atavistic ideas?”
I nodded. “The AI is also kind of nasty and atavistic.”
“Is that going to interfere with treating them? Or hypothetically doing a turn-and-burn to get another batch, if we need you to?”
“Master Chief,” I said, wounded. “I’m a professional. And I care about their well-being. They’re sentient creatures, after all.”
O’Mara sparkled with humor, a disconcerting expression on such a solid lump of a human form. “Perhaps even sapient?”
I laughed. It eased the tension. “Given time. So, about the sabotage—”
“Ours or yours?” O’Mara asked.
“Ours, for the moment.” Even my forearms ached. It was unfair: I’d been getting enough rest and eating carefully, dammit. Well, I’d have a dia or two off before the next run, per regulations. I could spend it floating in a nice warm neutral buoyancy saline tank. “You’re going to investigate?”
“We’ve got a Judiciary security team on the way to Sally now. I want to look at it before I put her back to work on
