Tsosie was shaking his head at me before I gave up. I didn’t cut the connection. There was no reason to, and if somebody over on Afar woke up, made it to a com, and sent a signal we’d know immediately. Anyway, being a rescue vessel, we had the override codes for their drives. And now that Sally had formalized her link to him, she could start turning Afar in a more useful direction. For example, back toward Core Gen. This would take us away from Big Rock Candy Mountain, but we weren’t going back to her anyway, and other ships were inbound to continue her evacuation.
We wouldn’t want to brake Afar unless we had to. That v was useful, and if we had to dump it, it would take us a while to get it back.
But since we couldn’t raise him, I was going to have to go over there and make sure that the crew had what they needed to stay alive until we got them back to Core General. That meant I needed to don not just my standard hardsuit, but a heavy-duty, thermally protective suit that did not radiate any heat whatsoever. My goal was to avoid melting my hosts in addition to keeping myself from freezing into a curiously complex rock.
“Ceasing rotation,” Sally said. “We’re nearly in range for your jump.”
We weren’t accelerating anymore. As Sally’s rotation slowed, I felt myself drifting up against the acceleration couch straps.
“Sally.” I unbuckled and propelled myself toward the gangway down to Medical. “Line me up… oh, make it three cold-zone drones. The ones that are safe to use around methane breathers. And the cold-zone hardsuit.”
“The drones are still over there,” she said. “We’ll be matched in about six minutes.”
It wasn’t a very long gangway. A meter at most; more of a narrow spot to make space for storage lockers and a decompression door. My ayatana passengers flinched from the soft surfaces of the walls, the glow of the corridor lights. The squishy bodies of Loese and Tsosie.
I tried not to look at my own aching hands. Instead, I directed my attention toward the cold, clean white surfaces of the operating theater. It was the least revolting thing I could see, even though to the human side of my current blend of personalities it looked like a torture chamber. There’s a lot of plexiglass shielding it from the rest of Medical, because blood—or ichor, or whatever—splatter in microgravity or under maneuvers is nobody’s idea of a good time. And the operating frame has a lot of weird-looking restraints on it, because not everybody’s limbs are the same size, shape, or arranged in the same order.
I was studying it so closely that I almost missed Hhayazh waiting for me by the airlock. Hhayazh looked fine to Darboof sensibilities—black and jointed and hairy, alien, but at least not like a hagfish in trousers.
I was almost as offended by that image as I was amused.
I sailed up to it. It slapped the hardsuit core against the center of my chest, and the suit began unfolding itself around my body. I sighed in relief. The hardsuit didn’t look too bad to the Darboof part of my mind.
Hhayazh said, “Affix your appendages in whatever gesture your superstitions demand, and petition those supernatural beings to which your race subscribes.”
“I’m an atheist,” I retorted, while Sally’s servos, the suit’s own functions, and my exo assembled the hardsuit around me. “Faith is just your neurochemistry deluding you.”
“In that case, twist your siphon around and kiss your ass goodbye.”
It handed me my helmet.
“You should probably come up with a less physiologically unlikely blessing, Flight Nurse.”
“Then you might take me seriously.”
“You put ants in this, didn’t you?” I inspected the inside of the helmet. My voice echoed back from the inside.
“Ants?”
I could tell it was checking senso. This was confirmed when it went on, “Oh, a Terran insect. They’re very attractive, although the body design looks a little unsophisticated.”
“They bite,” I said, and put the helmet on.
Hhayazh made sure I was anchored to a grip, then thumped me on the shoulder of the hardsuit with its hairy, carapaced limb, something it never would have done if I’d been wearing just my uniform and exo. The spikes glanced off the hardsuit, though. It was really a very considerate bugbear from the deepest recesses of the human id. And carrying the ayatanas I was, I found its physical form less horrible than my own.
It lifted a spray nozzle from a hook on the wall, drew out loops of hose, and began to coat me with quick-dry insulating foam. We could peel it off when I got back to Sally, and between now and then it would cut down on those dangerous heat leaks—out and in.
I was going alone, because if I brought Tsosie or one of the others, we doubled the chance that a suit might leak warmth and fry our patients.
Hhayazh was meticulous. It made two passes before it was satisfied, and touched several places up. Then it stepped back, waved an IR scanner over me, and did a couple more spots again while I sighed and tried not to fidget. It was only doing its job, and if our roles had been reversed, I would have double-checked everything, too.
It doesn’t pay to be an asshole to people who are being careful to do their job well.
When it was finished, I thumped it back—gently, because between the hardsuit and my exo, I could have done it some damage—and stepped into the lock.
The inner door hissed shut behind me.
CHAPTER 6
I FLOATED, SUPPORTED BY THE HARDSUIT and my exo, hardly feeling any pain at all now that the acceleration had dropped off. You get so used to hurting that when it goes away not being in pain doesn’t even feel normal, exactly. It feels like having superpowers. I had so much energy and everything was so easy all of a sudden.
So weird to think that a lot of people have superpowers all the time and don’t even know it.
I’m not blind to the irony that I work at the best hospital in the universe, amid the most advanced medical technology of I-don’t-even-know-how-many systers and systems, and they can’t fix my pain syndrome. They can’t even figure out what is causing it, exactly.
I’m something of a medical mystery.
One part autoimmune, one part neurological, one part we aren’t sure. One hundred percent frustrating.
At least I’ve got the exo, and together my machine and I keep each other productive. I give it a purpose and it gives me function. We make a good team, and even though it’s just a prosthesis, I have a lot of affection for it.
And sometimes, like now, nothing hurt too much—and those times were amazing.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’m not actually all that eager for the Synarche to get around to installing the new artificial gravity everywhere. One of the reasons I came to space was to get away from being heavy and sore all the time. When we’re home at Core General, I’ve requisitioned quarters as close to the hub as possible, and I use the therapy tanks about every dia. They’re farther from where I work than would be optimal, but it’s worth it for the lower gs.
So floating in the airlock while it cycled wasn’t bad at all. Especially as I’d taken the anti-inflammatories earlier, and tuned my system to lessen pain. I had a little cushion between me and the universe.
The outer door irised, and I found myself face-to-face with infinity.
There was pain, but it wasn’t real. It was just the expectation that something would hurt and my system’s response to it as the borrowed personalities and memories in my fox flinched from sudden light. The expectation of an injury can hurt nearly as much as the injury itself. My human eyes could handle unfiltered starlight fine, without suffering radiation burns or dazzle. What I knew and what the ayatanas knew were different, and because the memories and expectations of three different Darboof colleagues were currently wired directly into my nervous system, sometimes their reflexes won. Their atmosphere was opaque to a lot of what my species considered visible light, so they weren’t any better adapted to enduring it than I was to gamma rays.