I wished it were wearing a hardsuit. I suppose its own exoskeleton must suffice; most Rashaqins that left their low-gravity homeworld had ceramic reinforcing threads woven into their chitin as a sensible precaution. Surely Cheeirilaq would have done that before going into a career in military law enforcement.
“What the Well is she doing?” I asked.
O’Mara grunted. “I should think that would be obvious. She’s digging a hole in the hull.”
“Yeah. But… why?”
Cheeirilaq turned its head inside the transparent bubble that protected its sensory equipment and looked at me. The drone feed still showed no deep-space snowfall of crystallizing atmosphere… yet. Core General had a tough skin. But it was only a matter of time.
I remembered what Cheeirilaq had said about the human ayatana, and its uncanny attempts to mimic human gestures, and nodded. “I’d like to try to stop her before we have to use that deployed gunship. In addition to the danger of damage to Core General, there’s a person in there. And I want to understand… I want to understand what’s behind this action.”
Carlos’s voice stretched to hold his incredulity. “A person who’s trying to kill a whole bunch of your patients, Doctor.”
“Yes,” I said. “And if we kill her, we’ll never find out why. I feel like I have a personal connection. Let me talk to her.”
O’Mara broke a long silence with my name. “Llyn—”
I looked at them and they looked at me. The hull under our feet vibrated
“Fine,” they sighed. “Don’t make me write a letter to your daughter.”
Be careful. Cheeirilaq darted one raptorial forelimb out and tapped me on the shoulder sharply. I glanced down, surprised the razory tip hadn’t drawn blood. Score one for the hardsuit.
Carlos stepped in front of O’Mara. “You’re going to let her go out there in a space suit to face that… fucking tank?”
“I’m a rescue specialist,” I said, because I didn’t appreciate Carlos appealing to O’Mara as if I weren’t an autonomous adult sentient. There was that atavistic nonsense. “This is my job.”
Carlos reached out to grab me, but I was better at space shit, let’s be honest here, and I eluded him easily. He didn’t elude O’Mara, and a moment later I stepped out from behind the lift arch and walked across the hull toward the walker.
CHAPTER 20
SALLY,” I SAID, “ARE YOU still there?”
Absolutely. What are you going to do about this?
“I’ve got an idea. Let me check this emergency pack—hey, would you look at that?”
I pulled out two small tubes, each about as long as my hand was wide. Each had a little flat disc at the top. I fumbled at the discs with my gloves but got them pulled out. Each unfurled into a flag on a stick, with a wire at the distal end to keep it rigid.
“Old-school,” I said, grinning behind my mask. “Semaphores. Can you look up pre-Synarche semaphore codes for me?”
I already had them, Sally said. Which is lucky for you because I can’t download anything, between the quarantine and the power failures.
She passed the codes on to my fox. They were straightforward, and I thought I could manage.
I still moved toward the walker. It ripped the hull plate up some more, forelimbs striking downward, daggerlike, while the midlimbs popped and pried. The vibrations shuddered through the hull, making the bones in my feet and ankles ache even more than they did already. Electricity arced around the walker, blue sparks bridging and crawling up its arms. The charge didn’t slow it down at all.
But it also didn’t seem to have noticed me approaching. Or if it had, it didn’t seem to care.
I realized I was anthropomorphizing the craboid. Pretending it was acting on its own, without a person inside it. That would, I thought, make it easier to cope in the event I couldn’t hold the gunship off.
Water-ice fountained briefly into snow and drifted away to space before the ruptured pipe froze and sealed itself. A hundred meters from the busily destructive machine, I unfurled my little flags and struck a pose.
Sally spoke through my fox. She said, Synarche Judiciary Vessel I Really Don’t Have Time For Your Nonsense is inbound. ETA five standard minutes. You will need to be at least twenty meters clear of the fire zone for the shipmind to guarantee your safety.
Copy. Mark the fire zone please?
Sally popped filters over our perceptions, showing a green ring and crosshairs superimposed on the hull.
What’s under that? Cheeirilaq asked.
Machine rooms, Sally replied. Environmental controls.
Ox sector? O’Mara guessed.
There was a pause. A brief one, but any pause beyond the polite ones to allow slowbrains to process is significant in an AI.
No record, Sally said.
What do you mean, no record? The machine still wasn’t responding to me. I kept walking. I’d still be outside of its immediate striking range if I stopped at the edge of the target zone.
The schematics I have on record don’t list what these environmental controls are for.
Isn’t that weird? I asked.
Drop it, O’Mara interjected. Just stop that thing.
But—
But a lot of things. But it was weird. But it could be useful to know what was under the machine in case it—or the gunship—punched through and let whatever was in there… out here. Or left it spreading through a series of projectile holes to adjacent sections.
Oxygen was poison, if you were the sort of person who breathed an atmosphere rich in chlorine gas, for example. Water was poison if your blood’s chemistry was closer to ethylene glycol. And vice versa.
One did not simply muck about in a multispecies environment without due consideration for the biological needs of everybody in the adjoining corridors. Why can’t Sally access detailed schematics on this area? What is Jones digging to?
Something here was very wrong. And not letting Calliope Jones get killed was my ticket to finding out what that was, exactly.
“Jens, stop!”
I was a half meter inside that glowing green target zone, and O’Mara’s yelling
