Jones had yanked an oxygen bottle out of a wall rack and swung it at Rilriltok. Fortunately for the Rashaqin’s fragile wings and exoskeleton, lack of gravity didn’t inhibit its ability to fly. It had zipped out of the way, and Jones had righted herself after the disastrous kinetic consequences of her missed swing and managed to lunge out the door.
Dr. Rilriltok, having nearly been squashed once, had not pursued. Instead, it had summoned Judiciary and gotten Cheeirilaq—who spoke a dialect of the same language, so they didn’t need a translator to communicate. Cheeirilaq had used Judiciary channels to summon O’Mara, and then it had decamped to find me.
We didn’t know where Jones had gone or what she planned to do when she got there. We had no idea how to find her, with Linden and all of the hospital’s internal sensors down. But we—Cheeirilaq, O’Mara, and I—were the retrieval team now. Find her, we must.
This was going to be wonderful.
I looked up from attaching the second backup battery to my hardsuit, about to signal my readiness, and realized that Master Chief Dwayne Carlos was standing beside me. In his heavily accented, archaic Spanglish, he said, “I’m coming with you.”
I still had enough English to be able to work out what he meant. The weird thing was that when I reached for that knowledge, the ayatanas I was wearing all tried to offer up bits of their languages, and my first attempt to speak came out a bubbling croak.
I cleared my throat and tried again. “Carlos—”
He held up his hand and said something that I didn’t follow at all. “Wait,” I said in English. I held out a hand to Cheeirilaq, who laid another Judicial hardsuit actuator on it. I put it against his chest—gently, so as not to send him drifting off—and pushed the button. A moment later, and the suit whicked itself into existence around him, faceplate up.
“Try now,” I said.
He touched his ear. “Translation? Good. My shipmate has vanished, hasn’t she? Who else is going to be able to talk to her?”
I let the breath I had been going to use for arguing out through my nose, and tried again with a fresh one. “You’re in no shape—”
“Neither are you,” he retorted. “Next excuse?”
I hadn’t realized before that he was a pretty big human, as humans went. Even wasted and cryoburned and floating awkwardly above the deck in a hardsuit over striped pajamas, he made me feel small.
“I know you want to look out for your friend—”
Carlos shook his head. It set him drifting. I held out a hand for him to steady himself against. “It’s not that. I don’t know her. But how is she going to understand anything you say to her without…” He pointed vaguely at his ear.
The worried pinch of his mouth made me think there might be more. “What? Carlos, please—”
The next words came out of him as if wrenched. “What if nobody else from my time makes it?”
I thought about pointing out that we weren’t even entirely sure that Jones was from his time. She’d been the one in the anomalous cryo chamber, after all—
O’Mara shifted impatiently. Time was wasting.
I said, “There were ten thousand people on your ship. Some will live. Many will. You should rest so that you can help the others. You’re my patient, and in order for me to care for you, you need to stay here.”
“I can’t!” he exploded, unrightminded emotion breaking through. “Just let me come. Please.”
Friend Jens, Cheeirilaq said in my ear. We don’t have time to argue.
I looked at Master Chief Carlos. “If you get killed before they manage to pick your brain clean, the historians are never going to forgive me.”
I reached up, and sealed his helmet down.
We moved.
The immediate crisis of weightlessness and scattered power outages was coming under control. It still provoked a complicated spiral of nostalgia and alienation in me to zip past injured people and send medical staffers dodging out of the way as we shouted, “Gangway!”
I wasn’t this anymore. I was a doctor. I rescued people; I didn’t arrest them.
Well, I had already rescued this one. Maybe it was time to arrest her.
Carlos tripped a bit at first, but rapidly got control of his suit and kept up better than I would have expected. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug, and he probably had worn mag boots before. It helped that we weren’t moving as fast as Cheeirilaq and I had on the way in. In the absence of internal sensors or a way to track the fugitive through her fox, we had to stop and ask directions a lot. Fortunately, unit coordinators don’t handle direct patient care, and they tend to notice everything.
In particular, a barefoot Terran in hospital jammies swimming down their corridors after the gravity cuts out. We were fortunate that the emergency lighting had been brought online almost everywhere that needed it by now. I winced to think of trying to track Jones through the hospital in the dark.
Cheeirilaq and O’Mara were in the first row as we went. Now that he’d gotten the hang of the new suit, Carlos was pretty good in zero g. Propelling himself alongside me, he took the opportunity to ask, “Hey, Jens. You’re from Terra?”
“Never been,” I admitted, glancing down a side corridor.
“So how come you have an Earth name?”
“Pardon?”
“Brookllyn,” he said. “That’s as old Earth as it gets.”
“Boring parents.” Was everybody going to ask me that? My hardsuit clicked when I shrugged. “Hey, there’s an open storage locker down here.”
Nobody on staff would leave a locker open, even in a crisis. Especially in a crisis, when things might come sailing out and whack some unsuspecting sapient on the head. Or head-equivalent. You’d think somebody from an older and
