Somebody brought me soup and water. I drank the soup with my eyes closed, holding my nose so my neural passengers wouldn’t notice what was in it and potentially take offense. Later, somebody brought me tea. I ate sandwiches with my eyes averted, trying not to gag. The suit was equipped to handle bathroom breaks.
I looked up again as another patient was slid out from under me. Directly into the glittering compound eyes of a massive adult female Rashaqin.
It stridulated at me, one raptorial forelimb snapping. I recoiled so hard I almost sat down on the floor. I would have, if there had been any gravity. As it was, I rocked ridiculously on my mag boots before my exo and my core muscles stabilized me.
Then I realized from the bolero jacket and the glittering badge that it was Cheeirilaq, and swallowed against my racing heart. It felt like it was stuck in my esophagus, but I got it down on the second try.
“Oh Well,” I cursed. “What now?”
Cheeirilaq reached out, delicately draped a barbed hook around my bloody glove—I was on my fifth shade of blood already todia—and tugged me very, very gently toward the door. It was holding on to various railings and appurtenances with assorted limbs.
I realized how much my feet hurt. They were so swollen that I could feel the insides of my mag boots pressing creases in my flesh. My hands, if anything, were worse. There’s some stretch built into my exo, but the suit was less accommodating.
I looked back over my shoulder, toward the station where I’d been operating. Somebody else was already mag-stepping into the place I’d vacated.
Cheeirilaq herded me into a corner with gentle pokes of its spiky, razor-edged forelimbs.
“I need to go back to work.” I raised my hand and pointed. There was less chaos now, I realized. Fewer people bleeding and waiting their turn. Staff members bunking in their suits on tethers along the walls.
Exaggeratedly, distinctly, the Goodlaw shook its head.
I stared at it in disbelief.
It did it again.
The gesture was utterly nonhuman, a quick rotation back and forth more like a timing gear than an organic entity. But it was unmistakable, and very obviously a copy of the gesture I made all the time.
Cheeirilaq was regarding me with all its eyes, antennae trained on me like the ears of an attentive dog.
It placed a barb tip under the placket of my hardsuit and lifted gently. Not enough to tear the suit away, though I was sure that was within its capabilities. I realized how horrible the suit was when it touched me: decon was just sterilizing the ichor; it wasn’t removing it.
I stepped back, shaking my head inside the helmet.
“I know it’s bloody and disgusting, but it’s the only one I have. And what are my odds of finding another charged one under these circumstances?”
Cheeirilaq took a breath so deep that bright-colored lines appeared along the green length of its abdomen. It let the breath out again, the transparent oxygen tubes that enriched the atmospheric mix near its spiracles pulsing in time.
I had never seen Rilriltok sigh. Or maybe it was just less dramatic when it did so.
Cheeirilaq pulled its raptorial limb back, and unclipped something from the tool belt that also held its gravity nullifier. With its smaller manipulator arms, it held the object out to me.
Another hardsuit nucleus.
Oh.
I stripped out of my filthy suit even faster than I had slapped it on myself, stopping only to retrieve the auxiliary battery pack. It felt so good to get the thing off my feet I almost cheered.
The suit was so dirty it wouldn’t retract back into the actuator. And it was even grosser on the inside, though less gory. I floated above it and stabilized my weightless body against a grab rail.
Cheeirilaq pressed the hardsuit core to my chest. It was Judiciary issue, I noticed.
Not surprising. Consider the source.
It adhered. A moment before I triggered it, I looked at Cheeirilaq’s tool belt once more.
Wait a minute. Antigravity belt. Functionally, a gravity control belt. I also had one of those. It had been sealed inside my suit, along with my exo and my body.
I thought about how the grav stretchers maintained their distance and orientation from the deck. I thought about what an idiot I had been.
I took off the gravity control belt I was wearing, handed it to the Goodlaw, and triggered the hardsuit. It unfurled around me with a clatter that seemed enormously loud to ears used to hearing everything muted through a helmet.
It sealed me in, and I sighed.
Thank goodness you listened, Cheeirilaq said, and held my belt back out to me. I wound it around the suit, clipped it, and turned it on.
Effortlessly, the grav belt oriented me to the floor. I didn’t need the mag boots and the effort of pulling them free with every step. I just needed this tool right here.
“Oh, I’m an idiot,” I replied. “Of course, Judiciary translation is working.”
We’re trying to hack into the hospital system and reboot it. But Linden is still walled off, and all the back doors are her back doors. If I understand what our AIs are telling me.
“What the hell is going on?”
Terrorists, Cheeirilaq said.
I tried to look up the word. Senso still wasn’t working. “Is that a sophipathology?”
I believe you would term it an illness of thought, yes. Except… it is also a weapon of the oppressed and powerless. I believe the relevant term from human history would be… monkey-wrenching?
“This is the Synarche,” I said. “This is Core General. Who’s oppressed?”
But I thought maybe I had heard of monkey-wrenching. A form of civil protest of unfair labor practices: workers destroying machinery.
I made sure I had a channel open to Sally’s
