Cheeirilaq turned, a little faster than O’Mara. For such a massy person, though, O’Mara was quick to orient. They said, “Good eye, Jens.”
I was in front now. The others followed me to the locker. It had been pillaged, and from the empty equipment hooks it looked like what had been taken was a humanoid ox-based hardsuit and some basic tools—a laser cutter/welder, and a good old-fashioned wrecking bar.
Stuff you could use to get through a closed pressure door, I thought, but didn’t say anything.
I looked at O’Mara, though, and they nodded. “Hope she doesn’t pop a hatch to something that uses sulfuric acid for blood.”
Incongruously, Cheeirilaq nodded, too.
I stared at it. That was the second weirdly human gesture.
Cheeirilaq started moving again. Over its shoulder, it said, I’m wearing a human ayatana. Your thoughts are as squishy as the rest of you.
“Well.” Banter was a good means of easing tension. I knew from Rilriltok that it thought so, too. Apparently it wasn’t the only member of its species to hold such an opinion. “If we had any logic in us, we wouldn’t have nearly wiped our own species out in the Before, when we didn’t have rightminding.”
We eat our mates if we can catch them. Everybody’s got some evolutionary baggage that winds up maladaptive in a sophont setting.
“Valuable protein resource.” I shrugged. “And it’s not as if your species is designed for coparenting.”
Protein is not so difficult to obtain these diar that it’s worth depriving the galaxy of an astrophysicist or a poet in order to eke out a few more eggs.
I realized Carlos was looking at us with horror. Joking, I mouthed through my faceplate.
I wasn’t sure if he believed me. Cheeirilaq wasn’t exactly exaggerating all that much: humans are not the only syster in the galaxy that benefits extensively from rightminding to control our most atavistic tendencies.
Llyn. It was Sally, in my ear. I have thermal imaging. Turn left through this door.
“Sally thinks she has eyes on Jones,” I relayed, and pointed the way.
We went down the corridor military style, leapfrogging, covering one another. O’Mara and Cheeirilaq were the only ones with weapons, so Carlos and I stayed under their cover while performing nerve-wracking tasks like opening doors.
That worked until we got to one with a fused control panel and a welded edge.
“Well,” O’Mara said, running a suit glove down the fresh laser bead, “I guess she’s been here.”
“And planned to stay a while,” Carlos agreed.
She would not have wasted the time to slow us down otherwise.
“It’s all right,” I said. “She’s not a very good welder.”
I stepped forward and O’Mara stepped back. There was a spot at the edge of the bead where I could catch my fingertips, and this was a Judiciary hardsuit. I popped the pry-claws out and began wedging them under the bead, into the crack in the door. A sharp snapping sound and a screeching scrape told me I was almost in.
The exo, not to mention the hardsuit, gave me strength. O’Mara braced my feet, and with a rending noise and a gasp of exchanged atmosphere, we were—abruptly—in.
We dashed through while I held one side open, in case the door’s sensors were damaged. Nobody wanted to get snipped in half. Beyond it, we reassembled. The corridor stretched on another ten meters or so, then took a curved right turn.
Friends, Cheeirilaq whispered. I hear somebody breathing on the other side.
I lifted my foot to step forward. And the shock of sudden, explosive decompression ripped me from the deck.
Things slammed against me as I tumbled: my colleagues, the walls, an equipment cart that had come unmoored. I got one sickening look at the blown-out wall after we scraped around the corridor. Pressure doors slammed behind us. At least not on us, but they weren’t going to keep us from being blown into space.
I didn’t see the net of Rashaqin silk that Cheeirilaq ballooned across the breach until we all bounced off it and then—the atmosphere having evacuated without us—rebounded and drifted slowly back inside.
“She tried to kill us!” Carlos yelped, fingers closing on a grab rail.
I used my gravity belt to orient myself. “Maybe she just wanted to get outside in a hurry.”
Carlos glared at me, then laughed in spite of himself. I could hear O’Mara’s eyes rolling in his silence. Cheeirilaq finished snipping its web free on one side with its raptorial forelimbs, stepped through, and held the flap back for the rest of us.
Sally, can you track a runner on the outside of the hospital?
Negative, she answered. I’m docked too far around the curve.
“I’ve got Starlight.” O’Mara’s voice hissed awkwardly over the suit coms. “As long as she stays near the ox sectors, they can track her by vibrations.”
“Great! Which way do we go?”
“So many terrible options.” O’Mara sighed.
I pretended I hadn’t heard him. “If I were Jones, I’d have an objective. You don’t take action as definitively hostile as blowing a hole in a hab ring until you are ready to commit to something.”
“Until the time for subtlety is past,” Carlos agreed.
Anxiety was a distraction I did not need. I tuned it down, took two deep breaths, and made myself focus. The problem with tuning the adrenaline down was that it sent the exhaustion rushing back. Human beings were not meant to operate on the edge of their capabilities like this, miracles of modern medicine or no miracles of modern medicine.
“If her cards are on the table, then why can’t I read them?” I asked.
“Because we haven’t figured out what game she’s playing, or even what the stakes are.” O’Mara kept walking forward, shifting carefully from foot to foot. Walking on magnets is a weird experience, because there’s no weight pressing your foot down against the insole of the suit. You kind of float inside it, and the boot sticks to the surface of the hab.
Well, we now know she’s not lying in wait outside. Shall we go see if she has left us
