“And then?” she insisted.
“And then, assuming they could not get us moving again, they’d send a rescue and repair craft, a Stanley, down the line to attend to whatever’s wrong. Those are high-speed ascenders and descenders, faster by far than anything we clear for civilian traffic. We’d have help here in no more than ninety minutes, on the outside.”
“And what if we don’t have that long?” Dina demanded.
I said, “That happens to be a good question, sir. This car has already been evacuated once, today. Do we still have that option?”
His urge to strangulate seemed to have risen to a low boil. “This car can be evacuated when it’s docked at Layabout and has one airlock linked to an orbital shuttle. Those connections have been terminated, so we’re not attached to anything right now but the cable. You want to go outside and climb up and down the maintenance ladders on the side of this thing, go ahead; we have the suits on board, and it’s perfectly safe as long as we’re not moving. But it won’t get you anywhere worth going, and might get you killed if there’s more damage or if we start moving again.”
Dina insisted, “But why do we need to wait for that, what did you call it, the Stanley thing? Why can’t they just send a shuttle and fly us out?”
“Because it’s not worth trying. As long as the line’s intact, we’d rather not have any spacecraft zipping around during an emergency, when high-speed climbers and descenders are always available and can manuever into safe docking positions almost as quickly.”
She persisted, “But if it can’t get to us in time—”
“Mrs. Pearlman, this is not some struggling Confederate world, where all the infrastructure was put together by low-bid contractors and falls apart the second somebody breathes on it. This is Xana, the headquarters world of the Bettelhine Corporation. The people dealing with this will all be at the very top of their respective professions. Whatever the challenges, they’ll deal with it.”
“Of course,” Jason Bettelhine murmured, in words meant only for my ears, “that only leads to a new worst-case scenario. Maybe the same thing that stopped us also took out Layabout…”
That was a cheery thought. I’d never pictured the kind of terrible things that could happen to an elevator in transit, if the cable was cut at either the orbital or dirtside termini. I supposed we’d all know if we initiated free-fall reentry, and it started getting hot in here. Or, worse, if debris opened us to space, leaving us staring through protruded eyes at a world we would not reach except as cinders and scattered particulates of bone.
Something around here smelled like an overflowing toilet. Maybe a line had ruptured. Maybe one of the systems was leaking ammonia or some other waste gas. Maybe somebody had just plain shit his pants.
“That’s good,” the Porrinyards said, leaving me with the impression that they’d gone insane. With their next words, I realized they were referring to Jason’s condition, though only Oscin was working on him. “Keep your head back. It’s just a surface wound, but forehead injuries always bleed a lot. You’d best keep it out of your eyes, to avoid burning—Mr. Bettelhine, is there more than one first aid kit on board?”
“Yes,” Philip and Jason said in unison. “Downstairs.”
There was a moment’s sheepish silence, which Jason and Jelaine broke by also speaking in unison: “So that’s what that feels like.”
“I feel left out,” Dejah said.
“So do I,” the Porrinyards said. “I’m beginning to see why everybody always complains when I do it…”
The smell got worse. Jelaine went to the bar to fetch Dina Pearlman a cup of water. The Khaajiir sat by himself, his staff resting across the armrests of his chair, his exhaustion more palpable with every moment. Philip Bettelhine stopped by his chair to ask him if he needed any emergency medical assistance, and received a weak chuckle in response.
There remained no word from Layabout.
My link to the AIsource remained silent as well.
Arturo Mendez and the two remaining members of the crew came upstairs, carrying the promised pair of first aid kits. There was a dark-eyed, smooth-faced, character-deprived young man who introduced himself as Loyal Jeck, and a petite, raven-haired, almond-eyed young woman who bowed before identifying herself as the one with the strange name, Paakth-Doy. Paakth-Doy gave first priority to Jason Bettelhine’s head wound, the tip of her nanite pen falling out of focus as each individual member of the microscopic fleet received its programming.
I watched for a few seconds as the bloodstains on Jason’s forehead dissipated, ransacked for the supplemental mass the machines needed to repair his gash. Paakth-Doy handled the pen with the casual efficiency of a woman trained in its use, neither lingering too long at any one spot nor rushing past the less damaged places in her haste to assault the more severe. “You’re good.”
Her voice was whisper-soft. Her accent stressed r’s and added a trilling nasal vibrato to her vowels. She seemed to filter almost every word through a nose that had no room for it. “Thank you.”
“Are you qualified for genuine medical emergencies?”
She frowned. But, then, that seemed to be her default facial expression, much like the whisper was her default volume. She hadn’t smiled, or shown any other emotion since introducing herself. “I am not qualified for internal medicine. But we have cryofoam tanks downstairs. If it comes to life-or-death emergency we can put anybody still living in stasis long enough to get the body to the AIsource Medical crèche at Anchor Point.”
AIsource Medical was the most lucrative of the many services my true employers contributed to interspecies economy, automated health care of such effectiveness and efficiency that they enjoyed a near monopoly on all such services, among those who could afford it. Even before I went to work for them, they’d saved my life more than once. It was no surprise that the Bettelhines had them on retainer. “What kind of coverage does Xana have? Is it for everybody, or does anybody have to make do with human doctors?”
“No. Mr. Bettelhine has made AIsource Medical available to all residents and visitors on Xana.”
That must have cost a fortune all by itself. “Have you stabilized patients before?”
The gash on Jason’s forehead was now no more than a white line, hard to discern even against his pale skin. Paakth-Doy said, “Once, when I lived in another system, I served as chief steward on a commuter car that suffered a blowout due to collision with a fragment of orbital debris. One passenger suffered a head wound too serious to be treated on-site. We had to gel her for later treatment dirtside. She survived with no loss of cognitive function.”
“And you were trained in first aid before this or after this?”
“After,” Paakth-Doy said, her eyes still impassive. “I was determined to prepare myself, if ever faced with an emergency again.”
“What’s your official classification?”
“Medic, First Grade.”
That represented two solid years of intense training all by itself. She wasn’t as qualified as a genuine human doctor, but then you only found that dying breed in substantial numbers in places that, unlike Xana, couldn’t afford AIsource Medical fees.
Still, something about Paakth-Doy bothered me, some kind of fundamental disconnect between our situation and her demeanor.
Her presence should have made me feel safer. I’d been hoping for a way to circumvent the prophecy of imminent murder, if I was lucky enough to get to any victim with life still left in her, and a qualified Medic with cryofoam on hand was exactly what I needed to accomplish that. But the hour deadline had passed, I still hadn’t spotted anything resembling a murder victim, and the chances of the AIsource lying about an imminent murder, or simply being wrong about it, were not within the realm of possibility. So somebody here had been murdered, even if they were still walking and talking and not yet, actually, dead.