I couldn’t blame it.
I wondered if the Goodlaw had been waiting for us, or if this was a chance encounter. I guessed this was my opportunity to find out.
Greetings, the enormous predator stridulated. I am Goodlaw Cheeirilaq. You must be Dr. Brookllyn Jens. And… Helen Alloy?
Politely, it pretended not to notice Rilriltok, who huddled closer to my spine. Rilriltok’s coverts clicked tightly closed, protecting its delicate wings. The barbs on its fine manipulators tangled so thoroughly in the dense springs of my hair that I worried it would take surgery to get us disengaged.
Rashaqin reproduction is harrowing. Their entire social order is built to keep adults well-separated, with lots of private space, so they don’t accidentally eat one another. The spawn are aquatic and generally not considered to be sentient until they pass through the nymph stage and emerge on land in their penultimate instar as miniature adults. At this point, they are taken into crèches and educated by carefully organized, regimented communities of adults.
This is probably for the best, as the spawn are both numerous and cannibalistic. On Rashaq, they’re left to fend for themselves until they molt out into that educable stage.
Swimming is not encouraged for tourists on Rashaq. Rashaqins, as responsible sentients, do their best to avoid reproducing elsewhere. It’s hard on the local ecosystem. Also on their colleagues, as the egg-laying sex generally eats the other during the reproductive interlude, unless they’re already extremely well-fed. I understand that in modern society, the—we’ll call them females, though it’s not entirely accurate—generally bloat themselves with food before intercourse or resort to technological intervention for fertilization. And the males—like Rilriltok—tend to feed everybody they meet.
When I was still Judiciary and visited Rashaq a couple of decans ago, they were in the midst of a natural child-rearing fad. There had been a lot of articles about how the egg-layer eating the progenitor was much healthier for the young and rendered them more competitive in the wild. As there are, demographically, significantly more of Rilriltok’s sex, competition for mates is pretty extreme, and a surprising-to-me number of males volunteered.
Things might have gotten even uglier than they did, but Core General and the Judiciary both sent crisis intervention teams, and eventually the fad blew over with only a few dozen casualties who hadn’t signed up to be eaten. We managed to catch all the perpetrators and remand them for rightminding.
Anyway, my interaction with the Core General medical team there was how I got interested in working here.
“You’ve identified me correctly,” I said. “We’re here to check on our patients.”
Well, the patients were mine and Rilriltok’s. They were Helen’s crew.
Close enough.
I stepped past Cheeirilaq toward the window, raising the arm on the far side of my body so Rilriltok could use it as a bridge to scuttle around to the front if it felt it necessary. My colleague seemed to be at the mercy of its freeze reflex, however.
Cheeirilaq kept a respectful distance, and I assumed if Rilriltok needed to leave it would let me know.
Beyond the windows, the familiar coffins lay side by side, raised on racks that brought them up to a convenient height for most species to work at. Doctors and technicians of several species moved calmly around them, reading instruments and peering at whatever lay behind open panel covers. All the coffins we had brought back appeared to be here, and appeared to be intact.
Helen’s relief was palpable even before she said, “None of the systems have failed.”
It was still too early to be certain of that, but it seemed like a terrible time to point it out, so I didn’t.
CHAPTER 13
RILRILTOK’S WEIGHT SHIFTED AS IT raised its eyes to peer over my shoulder. I turned slightly to give it a better view and more cover behind my torso.
Helen walked up to the glass and pressed both hands and what passed for her face against it. The body parts she pushed against the glass squished and flattened.
I guessed that left it up to me to carry the conversation.
I said, “What brings you here, Goodlaw?”
And almost jumped out of my scrubs when Rilriltok stridulated instead. The vibrations of its speech shivered up my spine and left my teeth aching in the bones of my skull.
Huh, it said. Well, that’s peculiar.
“Peculiar?” I echoed, grateful that the vagaries of senso translation hadn’t choked up an ambiguous word such as “funny.”
Rilriltok didn’t answer. It swarmed up my shoulder and stood balanced against the intervening window, giving me an unusual view of its feathery feet-hooks splayed on the transparent wall and the smooth, interlocking plates that made up the underside of its abdominal carapace. Its instinctive camouflage failed, and excited rills of blue and orange ran along its body from head to tail.
Pardon me, friend doctor, the Goodlaw said, in very careful tones. I apologize for addressing you directly, and if you find the situation too stressful I will withdraw the question. But, if you will pardon my rudeness, what is it that you have observed?
The scientist on my shoulder didn’t even flinch away from the predator it had been petrified of moments before. It shook itself with an excited buzz and flipped its wings as if ordering its thoughts.
These cryo units are not all identical, it said. They look similar, but let me draw your attention to these impedance readouts.
It tapped the glass, bringing up a display that my senso translated into good old human symbols after a couple of annoying flickers. They would have meant nothing to me—I am not a cryo specialist—but they meant something to the ayatana of the engineer that I was wearing.
One of the pods was significantly more efficient than the others, and running at significantly safer tolerances.
“Can we go inside?”
Rilriltok turned its head to me with one of the sharp, unsettling gestures that used to make me jerk back in surprise, before I became accustomed to my friend. I don’t see why
