Fewer legs, said Tsosie. But it kind of does.
In descending order of priority, my jobs were to keep my crew safe, keep myself safe, and save as many lives as possible.
I didn’t feel unsafe. My crew weren’t at risk right now. Afar’s crew members were stable and getting some metabolic support now that I had that set up. They’d need additional care on the trip home, but that could be done while we were en route.
My senso link to my team told me everything was working out in terms of getting control of Afar and slaving his drives to our own, which meant we wouldn’t even have to risk a physical connection between the two ships. Always dicey, though salvage operators did it regularly. Tow truck drivers are a crazy lot of starfuckers, and as somebody who jumps out of perfectly good starships I feel like I’m qualified to comment: I have been involved in the retrieval and rescue operation on more than one salvage op gone bad in my time.
It would be embarrassing to have to be rescued ourselves. And of course my concern was all about professional pride.
As if she had been party to my thoughts, Sally said, We’re ready to start turning Afar. Please make sure you are braced for a change in vector and velocity, Llyn.
I braced against the handholds. Once the v is stable, would you foam up Tsosie and Hhayazh and send them over? I want to start treatment on the crew.
Absolutely. I’m checking to see if Afar has a way to talk to the… arachrab?
Walker thing?
Let’s stick with craboid, Loese said. What’s an arachrab, anyway?
She could have looked it up. But I guess she was flying the ship or something, so I told her. Or started to, anyway: Sally interrupted as I was getting to the part about the music.
Maneuver concluded.
I nudged myself away from the bulkhead and drifted back from the craboid. It didn’t move. I oriented to the same attitude and plane as (what I had arbitrarily decided was) the front of the walker. It did have an odd aesthetic. I couldn’t figure out if all those weird, rose-prick barbs were functional or decorative. Maybe if I knew what syster had built it, I would have a better idea what their function was. Or at least I would know who to ask.
Maybe whatever built this thing thought rose prickles were pretty.
Sally, can you get these cargo bay doors open?
Working, she answered. Also figuring out how to fab a few hundred thousand liters of packing foam, given the materials at hand.
Big air spaces? I suggested.
You’re very funny.
CHAPTER 8
SINCE I HAD DECLARED AFAR safe for operations, Tsosie and Hhayazh suited up, insulated themselves, and crossed over to Afar to begin treating the patients while I was heading back to Sally to get warm, and cool, and basically regulate my body temperature and get a sandwich and a nap. Once they were safely aboard and setting up life support for the crew, Sally finished asserting her control of Afar’s systems.
While she worked, I wrote a letter to my daughter.
The relief vessels arrived while we were still filling Afar’s hold with foam. We gave them all the data we’d collected on Afar, on the generation ship, and on the precarious balance of the lives inside her. The newcomers included Sally’s sister ship, Ruth (Synarche Medical Vessel I Salve Harsh Wounds With Mercy, which I felt was one of the more awkward efforts of the poetical ship-naming corps). The ships and their crews got busy exploring and mapping the rest of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and—to Helen’s relief and agitation—setting up a kind of bucket brigade to get another load of cryo chambers shifted.
As for us, as soon as we finished muffling the craboid in packing peanuts, we turned back toward Core General.
We punched it, flying home as fast as a data packet and an ambulance ship could go. Which was fast: the only speedier ships in the Synarche were Judiciary Interceptor-class vessels.
Despite our rate of travel, that return trip would take a while. Not because we’d come very far, in terms of stitching through white space. I mean, sure, we were somewhere way out in the Sagittarius Arm, rather farther than we usually ventured from the hospital, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that we were moving extremely fast in the real universe, having had to match v with Big Rock Candy Mountain to catch up with her in the first place.
Zooming along as we were, a good chunk of the non-white-space return journey would be spent in dumping v: slowing down so that we didn’t streak through the Core in a relativistic blur before passing out the other side, still smoking. I mean, inasmuch as anything can streak through a structure tens of light-ans across.
Nobody really likes it when you tear through their pleasant residential neighborhood at a rate of several astronomical units per hour.
We’d have to dump v around gravity wells again, the same way we’d gained it outbound. Also, we could make up for a lot of it by coming up on the Core from the right direction. If we looped around and chased the Core’s direction of travel through the larger universe, it would be easier to match relative velocities.
We were actually—in real terms—quite close to Terra right now. I felt a pang of melancholy at how long it had taken Big Rock Candy Mountain to travel such a little distance. That poignancy was replaced with unease when I remembered that even that little distance was two or three times as far as it should have come.
There were entirely too many mysteries surrounding this little rescue mission.
Nevertheless, I regretted the missed opportunity to visit the human homeworld while we were in the neighborhood. I had never been there.
Spacers don’t feel a lot of nostalgia for places, usually. But I wasn’t born in space.
It wasn’t going to happen: we needed to get home—to our real home, not my ancestral one. And work didn’t offer a lot of time to mourn, because Helen was having a hard enough time leaving her ship behind that I wished there were a way to sedate androids. Peripherals. Whatever.
There wasn’t, though, short of a computer virus.
One thing about space traveclass="underline" even when you’re in a hurry, it takes a long time to get where you’re going, because everything is extremely far away. And ships are mostly self-maintaining, though the shipminds do get bored if you don’t give them people to talk to. Or at least they say they do. We’re unpredictable compared to AIs, or so I’m told, and therefore amusing. We make great pets.
I understood. I missed having cats on Sally. Most human ships have some kind of pet—cats, or domesticated rats, or something similar: small and adaptable. But, for all the obvious reasons, pets were a liability on an ambulance.
Still, organic and inorganic sentiences both required some environmental enrichment to make space travel tolerable.
Hobbies, I mean. I’m talking about hobbies.
I imagine that a lot of novels get written by long-haul pilots. And games programmed. And songs and scripts developed. I knew a guy back in the Judiciary who knitted and did cross-stitch, but mostly people stick to more digital forms, or ones requiring only a limited number of supplies rather than an elaborate stash on a limited consumable budget. Trust my insider knowledge when I tell you that the only thing more frustrating than running out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran is being the shipmate of somebody who has run out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran.