Loese, the pilot, wasn’t waiting for us, because she was on a rest shift and Sally gets very cross with us if we ditch our rest for nonessential reasons—or, as she calls them, “excuses.” The rest of the crew all found reasons to wander by and greet us as we were stripping out of our newly sterilized hardsuits. It wasn’t exactly a hero’s welcome, but it was nice to see everybody.
Not that Sally was so big we could have avoided them even if we were trying.
The first to wander around the ring was Hhayazh. It was one of our flight nurses, a multi-limbed multi-eyed nightmare creature from Ykazh, its dull black exoskeleton covered in thick, bristling hairs. It was also one of the nicest sentients you’d ever care to meet, once you embraced Ykazhian culture… which, in turn, embraced sarcasm with the enthusiasm of an octopus embracing a tasty, tasty mollusk.
“Greetings, far wanderers,” it said, through the usual translation protocols. “I perceive you’ve made it back to the real hub of the action. I hope your trip wasn’t too boring.”
“About as boring as being here,” Tsosie answered. “We heard you broke the place.”
“That wasn’t me,” Hhayazh said. It pointed at Camphvis, the other flight nurse, as the Banititlan came into the cabin. As she always did, she was leading with her eyestalks. “Camphvis leaned on the dashboard.”
Camphvis responded with the bubbling sound that her species used to indicate derisive laughter—which the senso translated into derisive laughter. This produced an interesting layering effect. “Where does Sally keep her dashboard?”
“If you knew that you wouldn’t have pushed the wrong buttons.” Hhayazh rattled its exoskeleton, a sound like the hollow carved windchimes people on my homeworld made out of native plant cellulose. It was a social cue with all sorts of meanings, like human facial expressions, and I hadn’t even begun sorting them out.
“What actually happened?” I asked.
“Equipment malfunction,” Sally said. “I’ll show you later.”
When Camphvis emerged completely around the hatchway, I saw that she was carrying a tray. Nothing complicated, just the hot, calorie-dense nutritive broth that spacers called “soup.” It wasn’t soup, but was profoundly welcome nonetheless.
Tsosie picked his up at once. I was still fighting with my hardsuit. They were supposed to peel themselves back into the actuator, but exposure to grit or something was causing it to hang up on my exo.
“Seriously.” I pretzeled myself into another awkward position. “What went wrong?”
Hhayazh, with surgical expertise, got the jammed bit unhooked and snatched its manipulators out of the way as the thing clam-shelled shut with a snap. “Go to bed,” it said. “You can ask questions when you’re not too tired to understand the answers.”
I traded Camphvis my actuator for a cup of soup. Her eyestalks twitched to focus on it. I was totally creating a distraction, because I was still working on my comeback to Hhayazh. Our Nazzish flight surgeon, Dr. Rhym, saved me from humiliation by climbing down the ladder from Sally’s hub into the gravity of the rim. (If you’re bantering and it takes you more than fifteen seconds to return a serve, you definitely lost.)
Rhym resembled a feathery tree stump, but moved with surprising agility. The long woodsy toes on their four feet wrapped the rungs in a prehensile fashion, leaving the manipulatory tendrils on what a human would have considered a face to gesticulate. They seemed as if they were talking to Sally privately: it wasn’t translated for the rest of us, and the wriggling stopped when they reached the deck.
I was bent over, working my swollen feet out of my boots. They should have retracted with the rest of the hardsuit. They hadn’t, and were stiff and not shaped for easy removal. The pressure hurt, and pushing against them to try to escape the pressure hurt.
“I’ll make sure this gets serviced,” Camphvis said, eyeballing the actuator suspiciously.
“Just take it apart and reprint it,” Hhayazh said.
Dr. Rhym was about my height in my current crouched position.
“Our patient-guests are stowed, and the peripheral has been brought aboard!” Even their translated voice sounded enthusiastic. “Dr. Jens, would you like some assistance?”
“Well, yes,” I proclaimed, and straightened up to hold on to the rungs on the opposite wall while Rhym scooted over to me.
They moved fast, each leg working independently of the others in a kind of scuttle or zoom. In moments, their manipulatory tendrils uncoiled and eased inside the left boot, gently prying it loose from my exo, which had gotten snagged on the lining. I sighed in relief as the thing came off.
Rhym is a very good surgeon. What I’d been struggling with for minutes they accomplished in instants. And they didn’t even use a knife.
I went to lie down.
It was my exo moving me at that point as much as me moving it, and I could kid myself that I picked up annoyance and worry through our link. I told myself that I was anthropomorphizing, but people used to assign personalities to ships and houses long before ships and houses had them, and there was a semi-AI processing engine in my exo. A small, uncomplicated one, without curiosity or an artificial personality. There wasn’t much room in there, and anyway can you imagine how terrible it would be for a person with agency to be stuck going through life as an assistive device?
Usually, before I went to bed, I’d tune down my pain management and see how my body was doing on the other side of the fuzzy wall of endorphins and interventions. This time, I didn’t: I knew what the answer was going to be.
I lay down on a patient bed in one of Sally’s two care units. This was not the usual bunk assigned to humans. We hot-swapped, and I traded off with Loese and Tsosie. But Tsosie was as tired as I was, and Loese wasn’t off her rest shift yet. I wouldn’t fit in Rhym’s bunk, Camphvis used gel blankets to keep her membranous skin moist, and Hhayazh’s species weren’t sleepers. So I got a bed big enough for a Thunderby, and even if it was a little hard, I didn’t complain—just printed off as many sterile blankets as we had consumables for and made a nest on top. I’d recycle the molecules later.
Then I plugged my exo in to charge, piped into it, and started checking up on my aching body to see if any of it was anything serious, or merely the usual combination of inflammation and polyarthralgia, before I dialed them down or, where I could manage it, turned them off.
My exo, predictably, had a little lecture waiting for me. Todia’s exertions have exceeded this unit’s filtering capabilities. Recommend extended rest, and a maintenance cycle.
“I can’t do the extended rest right now, kid. Put me in for eight hours and authorize the maintenance cycle.”
Lack of adequate rest will likely lead to worsening discomfort and is against medical advice.
“So is everything fun.”
This unit does not understand the response.
I sighed. “Acknowledged, patient’s decision is against medical advice.” Patient is a damn internist herself, robot. Also, I could get plenty of sleep on the trip home. Right now, we still had a second space ship to recon.
And yelling at my exo wouldn’t help. I turned both the room lights and my pain response down. Nothing was busted: it was all just inflamed. Life is like that. I reached into senso to pull up a paper on Adrychrym circulatory systems. It was a boring paper: I meant to read myself to sleep. If I could get all the noisy doctors in my head to concentrate on medicine, they wouldn’t keep me awake.
I should have unloaded the ayatanas, I know. But I was too tired, and I was going to need them again tomorrow.