As a rescue specialist, I’ve seen some things that were definitely not up to code. But, finicky and rickety though those structures might have been, they still functioned adequately for people to live in them. Until, one dia, they didn’t.
At least I was already stabilized in the same attitude and plane as the presumed front of the machine. I reached out slowly, balancing my movements so I didn’t have to waste my stabilizers or strain my exo and my core muscles holding myself upright, and showed it the flags again. Gently, I moved them into Position 10: Copy?
There was a pause. Then, with the eerie silence of vacuum, the craboid began to move. Most of its limbs remained braced. But two of them—the two closest to me, the ones that had been hovering over my head—pulled in. So did the middle pair, releasing their grip on the hull plates. Which were definitely dented and scored.
This thing was built to take a pounding, all right.
It didn’t have flags, but the whole machine moved its arms into the mirror image of mine. If it had had flags, it would have been saying Acknowledge in reply.
I hadn’t been certain she wouldn’t dig right through me to continue tearing the hospital apart. But there is something psychologically different between damaging an object—even if it’s an object upon which people’s lives depend—and directly killing another sentient being.
Now I just had to keep SJV I Really Don’t Have Time For Your Nonsense from blowing us both away.
Well, I had put my body in between the machine and the hospital. Now I guessed I was going to put my body between the machine and the guns. Maybe the pathetic spectacle of my clumsy human form in its inadequate suit of armor would move the gunship’s mind or its crew to mercy.
Mercy is a nicer word than pity, don’t you think?
There’s no whoosh or whistle of incoming, in vacuum. No auditory warning.
The gunship went over so fast and low that for a moment I thought it had struck me—or struck the craboid, which obviously stretched much farther out from the hull. I ducked instinctively, hands coming up, lifting the flags as if they could somehow protect me. I didn’t consciously register the ship’s outline before it had gone, and had to pull the memory out of my senso to be sure of what I’d seen.
One of the guest surgeons in my head tried to flatten itself into some purely conceptual long grass. Another one wanted to rear up to bring its horns into play. The results were predictably comical, and only my mag boots kept me on the hull. I had to get all of them out of my head.
The gunship was white-space capable, but she’d flipped her coils horizontal to the fat teardrop of her hull, so the effect was not dissimilar to the virtual target circle I still stood in the middle of. Her gunports were open, and in that retrospective glimpse I could see the muzzles of mass drivers tracking as she sped past.
Nonesuch is going to come around again, Cheeirilaq said. Do you require fire support, friend Doctor?
I looked up at the looming machine. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t think she’ll hurt me.”
A crackle of static caught me unaware. I jumped inside my suit. “Dr. Jens? Is that you?”
Jones’s voice. A coms link? A coms link!
“You saved my life!” She sounded angry.
“I’m a doctor,” I said. “That’s what I do.”
Stand down, I told my team, and felt their assent—and how grudging it was—through the senso. They said nothing, though, and for that I was grateful.
Calliope Jones was yelling at me enough for everybody. That was fine, because she wasn’t crushing me like a bug with her giant bug machine.
Why had the volume in my helmet been cranked up so loud in the first place? I lowered it, which actually made it easier to understand what Jones was screaming at me.
“That’s a lie! You’re one of them! You want to experiment on me, like all the others!”
Did she mean that all the others wanted to experiment on her, or that there were a lot of others being experimented on? It sounded like a sophipathology either way, and I didn’t have time to worry about it now.
“Look, Jones,” I said, when she paused for breath. “Calliope. Why don’t you come out of that thing? We’ll dock it somewhere, and you and I can sit down with a drink and talk it over?”
“I want coffee,” she said, and for the first time I could hear the exhaustion in her voice.
“Don’t we all,” I agreed. “Are you wearing a suit?”
I thought she probably had to be, to have gotten to the machine at all. But in a situation like this—essentially a hostage negotiation—you do whatever you can to keep the conversation flowing. People who are talking aren’t coming up with terrible ideas.
“Yes.” Reluctance colored her tone. “I have a suit on. Mostly. I retracted the gloves and helmet for access to the controls.”
“Does that walker have an airlock?”
Silence. Then after what felt like a long time, when I had started trying to think up another question to ask her—
“No.”
I hadn’t thought it did, but we’d never gotten a good look inside. So even if I had my rescue kit, I couldn’t force the door—that hatch I’d spotted in the machine’s belly—and extricate her without killing her unless I got her to suit up first. Not that we’d been able to penetrate the thing’s hide anyway. Nor could I go in there without getting zapped.
I wished we’d had the time to figure out how to get a drone inside the craboid without it getting electrocuted. It was all very inconvenient.
I was going to have to secure her cooperation, then.
“Did you turn off the countermeasures?” I asked her. “That walker zorched the drone we tried to send inside.”
“I had the code,” she said. “I
