Jones shrugged. “If I’m squishy, I guess I need a harder shell.”
Your species is a syster species to mine. You are fine the way you evolved.
“Oh,” Jones said. “Oh! You mean that all of us are systers to one another!”
This is so, said Cheeirilaq. Cautiously, it elevated its body to a more natural position. Jones watched curiously, but to her credit did not recoil.
Admittedly, it was a giant bug—but it was also a giant bug in a tiny bolero jacket.
May I ask you some questions? it said.
I left Cheeirilaq interviewing the patient, once I’d satisfied myself that they were going to get along fine. I was hungry again, but the hospital was instituting rationing in order to weather the quarantine, and it was my shift to forgo eating.
Occasional fasting is good for my species, I told myself, and decided I could combine my initial research on the sabotage with my nap.
Multitasking always leads to excellent rest, as you know.
I took myself into an on-call room—currently empty—and claimed a bench bed. It was a little too short and wide for my species, but I made do, constructed a nest, plugged in my exo, and started scrolling through the incident reports of recent accidents at the hospital. I should probably look at the sites in person… but the lifts weren’t running, and who had the time?
O’Mara was right. I immediately identified a significant statistical upswing in “safety incidents” over the past half an or so. No surprise there, obviously, but it’s good to have confirmation. Human brains are excellent pattern makers. They’ll figure out a pattern even if all you’ve got are random data points that don’t actually mean anything, which is why we also have AIs and statisticians.
And AI statisticians, who are kind of terrifying.
There had been a chlorine leak into a water section—bad, but no fatalities—and another into an oxygen section that had been detected and contained before reaching dangerous levels. There’d been a malfunction in the newly installed artificial gravity that had buckled deck plates in an ox section and dropped atmospheric pressure enough so the decomp doors had triggered on either side. Nobody had been standing in the doorways, but the engineer handling the testing had spent an uncomfortable standard hour and a half pinned to the floor by high gravity and isolated by dropped doors.
Fortunately, he was from a fairly sturdy species and had suffered no lasting injuries.
Another staffer—a Terran—had not been so lucky, and had sustained near-fatal burns when a pressure seal in the airlock into one of the hell-planet sections that made Venus seem balmy had failed after she’d stripped out of her pressure suit—a rattling armored vehicle on treads. She’d still had her softsuit on, and that had probably saved her life. She was receiving clone grafts, some of it neural tissue.
I flinched in sympathy.
Those armored self-mobile hardsuits were designed to endure conditions beyond even what my rescue hardsuit could be adapted to. The idea of sweating up a swamp in one, caring for patients, struggling out of the foul thing only to be caught in a jet of superheated steam and half cooked alive… it was something I could relate to far too personally.
There were other incidents of equipment failure or safety protocol malfunction, an additional half dozen or so. One more had led to a serious injury. Another had resulted in a pair of fatalities.
If it was all sabotage, it couldn’t all be caused by the same person—could it? It was happening in too many different sectors, on too many different shifts. And then there was the incident on Sally, with the damaged coms. We all assumed it had been set up before we left port. But what if Sally had been damaged by a member of the crew, and she and Loese were in denial about it?
That was horrifying.
Why had O’Mara and the Administree recruited me for this job? They had access to staff logs, to the comings and goings of everybody in the hospital. They could access all sorts of information that was off-limits for a simple trauma doc.
You might even say that Starlight was the central Authoritree.
For ox and CO2, anyway.
No, the quality of my sense of humor is not improved by stress.
But couldn’t they check who had accessed each damaged sector before the damage occurred? Well, maybe. The Synarche’s privacy regulations precluded pulling bulk data, though I was confident we could get a warrant to track the movements of an individual person or persons if I could identify a suspect or two. Assuming that they hadn’t used timed devices to cause the damage, which they probably had, which in turn meant that establishing a timeline would be well-nigh impossible when one considered the sheer volume of traffic around this place.
Yes, I know, privacy is a core value and a sentient right. But right then it was a pain in my ass.
So what did my supervisors think I could do—or that I would notice—that they couldn’t?
Well, O’Mara and I had known each other for a long time. They trusted me. They knew I had a Judiciary background.
Tsosie and I had been the people most threatened by the sabotage on Sally, so perhaps O’Mara assumed that I was unlikely to be behind it. Also, I’d been away from the hospital when most of the local incidents took place.
So I was likely to be clean, from their perspective. Okay.
I wasn’t an investigator or an archinformist, but I had some investigative skills. Cheeirilaq, for example, was immediately identifiable as law enforcement, and was treated as such. Law enforcement, and also a gigantic predator.
I was little and squishy—as I had recently been reminded—and wore medical symbols, not Judiciary rank.
So I was nonthreatening, and I had a reason to be most anyplace in the hospital.…
Huh. With the exception of the chlorine bleed into water, all of the sabotage events had taken place in ox sections. Now that was interesting. It suggested that the culprit or culprits
