Admittedly, it’s not a language system optimized for Hey, want to get a coffee? I think we need to talk.
Not that you should ever say to anybody, “I think we need to talk.” Not unless you want to spend the next fifteen standard minutes dealing with an adrenaline response.
I had made sure my hardsuit display was the full-on barrage of Terran medical symbols (Caduceus, Red Cross, Red Crescent, et cetera), and that and the flags were my only way of letting Jones know that I was a friendly—as friendly as anybody could be under the circumstances. Well, that and walking up to her war machine wearing nothing but a hardsuit and carrying no weapons. She still wasn’t paying any attention to me—which was good and bad—but she also hadn’t stopped pulling the plating off the outside of my hospital. It looked like she’d dug about a meter into the hull, which meant she had to be pretty close to the outermost pressure capsule. If she breached that, it would decompress, and more doors would come down, and more lives and limbs would doubtless be lost unless O’Mara’s orders to clear the sectors inward of us had been followed.
Nobody with a self-preservation instinct would be standing around in a doorway, but people still had to walk down corridors.
“Jens,” O’Mara said, as I continued to move forward at a steady pace, “what in the Well are you doing?”
“Gambling,” I said, but it didn’t feel like a gamble. It felt like trusting my instincts.
The iron spider towered over me as I approached. I was already much closer than was safe. Much closer than I had permission to be. The hull jumped under my feet every time the craboid drove its forelegs into the plating. An asteroid field of glittering debris surrounded it now, turning, reflecting the colors of all the Core’s weird lensing stars from edges that looked jagged and razor-sharp.
I thought about tuning back my pounding heart, the anxious pain in my throat—but adrenaline might keep me alive. It might make me that tiny bit faster.
I could deal with the discomfort. Especially when turning it off would let me remember that other things hurt more.
I waited until the machine reared back for its next blow and stepped right under the front legs. The middle and back ones gripped the savaged hull in metal claws. Ripped plating crunched as my mag boots pulled me toward the hospital’s center of spin. I raised the flags even higher and crossed them in front of me, repeating the gesture three times with a flourish between each.
This gesture was the same in the Synarche’s flag code and the archaic one: HOLD. HOLD. HOLD.
The barbed legs drove toward me. I crouched—if I jumped out of the way I’d lose contact with the hull and be drifting off into nothingness, away from safety. If you could call this safety.
I had the suit jets and could probably get back to the hospital if that happened. But nobody liked to contemplate floating around in the Big Empty without a concrete and detailed plan for what you were doing while you were out there and how you were going to get back.
The legs stopped a meter above me.
HOLD, I signaled once more.
The legs twitched.
O’Mara bellowed. I could hear Carlos in the background, so loud he came seconded over O’Mara’s feed, but somebody must have killed his suit mike’s connection to my outputs.
O’Mara got his voice to come across level, if strained. “That gunship is coming in hot, Jens.”
“Well, tell it not to shoot.” I didn’t take my eyes off the machine, though I had to crane back against the support of my exo to do it.
Moving my flags slowly, I signed, FOLLOW INSIDE.
There was no response. I almost had a sense that the machine cocked its head at me. If it had a head, which it didn’t.
I tried again, and got the same lack of an answer.
Then it occurred to me that I was overcomplicating the issue. There was no reason for Calliope—or whatever the person in the machine was actually named—to know semaphores from Carlos’s dia. Because she had to be an impostor. A well-drilled one; perhaps one who actually believed the role she was playing. You could do a lot with constructed memories. But an impostor nonetheless.
An impostor might actually know the Synarche General Flag Code, if she was a modern human. It was simple, and you needed to know it to get your pilot’s license, or to work on a docking ring, or to do a job like mine. It didn’t get used every dia every place—but it got used often enough where visual communication was the most effective means. And a cheat sheet and a set of flags were part of the standard equipment in every emergency pack that met Synarche standards to be called an emergency pack.
Which was why I had these flags to work with, right now.
I’d once seen a six-armed, radially symmetrical, massively built keee’Shhk flight-deck master use similar flags to direct two tugs and a barge simultaneously into three different landing sites. Admittedly, the syster in question had a few advantages: three brains and the ability to endure hard vacuum without a suit. But it had still been an impressive display.
I didn’t need to do anything so complicated right now. Just get the walker to follow me, and not get stepped on if it did. I fixed my gaze on that hatch in the underside. It didn’t look compatible with any of our airlocks, but that was why we carried a full suite of flexible collars and kiloliters of sticky spray foam. The great thing about space is that you don’t need a lot of structural integrity under most circumstances. Gravity is the great destroyer of structures. In
