The hospital couldn’t afford to keep a resource as scarce as 50 percent of its ox-sector fast-rescue fleet locked away indefinitely when lives were at stake—unless the risk of sending her out outweighed any possible consequences. So O’Mara might stall for a little while, and keep Sally off the milk runs that a Judiciary ship or a more ordinary vessel could handle. But eventually lives would depend on speed, and Sally would go.
And unless I had solved the crime and shepherded Helen through treatment, I would stay behind. Gnawing on my fingers behind closed doors and trying in public to compartmentalize and do my job.
The Administree had said this duty wasn’t a punishment. They had told me I wasn’t being declawed and decommissioned. That suggested that they were telling the truth, and there was a return to my old job waiting at the end of this assignment.
But it was hard to believe I wasn’t being punished when I knew very well that “my old job” was not even remotely the same as—or any guarantee of—my old berth. I enjoyed working with Sally and her crew. They were all good people and good at their jobs. I liked them. I trusted them. Even with Loese joining us so recently, we had become a team—a real machine. I didn’t even think I drove Tsosie to any more distraction than he drove me.
And I dreaded going through the break-in and assimilation process with a new crew.
When you live with people for months on end, the relationships come to mean a lot to you. Moving from one such berth to another is not dissimilar from getting a divorce from one family and moving immediately in with the next.
One divorce was enough for this lifetime.
And thinking about divorces wasn’t helping my emotional equilibrium any. I couldn’t dwell on the pain and confusion it caused me right now. So I needed to find something else to think about.
And I couldn’t live in fear of a future that might not happen. Not during work hours, at least: I had to function. I had a job to do.
Actually, I had two jobs to do. Maybe three. All of them full-time, and all of them conflicting with one another. What I could do that would help me with at least two of the tasks in front of me was download an ayatana from one of Core General’s engineers so I at least knew my way around as well as anybody, and do the busywork assigned to me. That might also help me get a pattern on the sabotage attempts: nothing like a bat’s-eye view for getting the lay of the land.
Oh, for the love of little space fishes, another Void-spawned ayatana.
At least I found one that belonged to a syster with a biology and taste buds that were pretty close to human, although the physiology was a miss.
Back to thinking really hard about peeing.
I walked out of the Memory Department feeling like half my legs were missing and I was likely to tip over at any moment. I somewhat alleviated the sensation by trailing my fingertips along one wall and letting my exo handle holding me up, but every time I blinked I could feel the hospital spinning. To add insult to injury, I had been issued my new gravity belt, per O’Mara’s orders, and I couldn’t even risk using it because of my acquired dyspraxia.
There was a lot of Core General to cover in the orientation tour I’d been asked to conduct. Since I had to narrow it down somehow, I collected Helen from her room and started her toward the cafeteria. Helen didn’t eat. But she might enjoy the social hub. And frankly I liked my groceries as much as any sentient I’ve ever known, and the hospital has better food on offer than the ambulance ship’s limited galley.
Fortunately, the engineer in my head was an expansive, good-natured person with a possibly unhealthy fascination for strain tolerances, and I was perhaps a little tipsily ebullient as I brought my charge down to the third-tier ox caf a little before first-shift main meal. I decided to be kind and get on the intranet before we arrived so we could still have a good chance of getting a table in a corner, before the real flood began. I would have gone to get actual coffee, but the cafe that served it was most of the hospital away, the decontamination process on the way out took twenty minutes, and anyway the ayatana I was wearing made me feel vaguely nauseated when I even thought about it.
Sigh.
My gamble worked, and I reserved a four-top by a viewport, with the bustling space of the Core on one side and the bustling cafeteria on the other. We arrived, I left Helen to hold it down, and I went through the line.
I scanned the metabolic codes and consulted the food preferences of my inner engineer. It’s a terrible idea to nauseate a simulated passenger who is using your body for its physical responses. Which is how I wound up with spaghetti and fruit salad with a healthy sprinkle of freeze-dried crickets.
Simulated crickets, obviously. We’re not barbarians.
We returned to Helen. I was a little surprised that she had cheerfully plunked herself down with her back to the room. I realized I had expected her to be stereotypically paranoid, like a character in a spy story. She seemed contented, though, and I started scarfing up my lunch as fast as I could ply my chopsticks.
Helen picked up a pair of chopsticks as well, and began experimenting. It was interesting watching her practice with them. She was a fast learner, and got measurably better at it over the course of one meal, even when she was lifting squish-ripe mango, slippery as a liver, before putting it back in the bowl so I could eat it.
Helen did not consume organics, obviously.
“Any questions so far?” I asked, around a mouthful of spaghetti. My mother and my old CO would both be horrified by my table manners.
Luckily they weren’t here.
Helen turned her unsettling suggestion of a face to me. “Can I see my crew?”
I swallowed quickly. “I should have made arrangements to take you there first. I’m sorry. Give me a moment.” I tapped into senso and filed a request to visit.
It was while my attention was turned inward that my old friend Dr. Rilriltok fluttered up, with the kind of timing that makes less savvy species accuse male Rashaqins of being telepathic.
The cafeteria was in an inner portion of the wheel, so the force of its simulated gravity barely affected Rilriltok, and it could even fly on its dazzling, crystalline wings—without using the gravity belt to compensate. It did mean that those of us who were eating had to be gentle when we gestured with our utensils, lest we send a dollop of mashed potato or globroot floating into an unsuspecting colleague’s airspace. But there was enough spin to keep your orange juice in the glass. After twenty ans in and out of space, that was almost a luxury.
“Don’t be alarmed,” I said to Helen as Rilriltok approached. “A giant bug is about to land on the table.”
A moment later a giant bug landed on the table, wings buzzing to a gentle halt while their breeze stirred my hair. I balanced a cube of cricket-sprinkled melon between my chopsticks, shielding it from the wind with my other hand. Nobody wants surprise cricket in their air intakes.
Helen was staring unabashedly. Can you stare without eyes? Anyway, her focus was locked on Rilriltok.
She asked, “Is there any news of my crew?”
Greetings, friend Jens, said Dr. Rilriltok. Greetings, Helen. One moment and I will acquaint you with the status of your crew. There has been no immediate change and there is no immediate danger I see that Dr. Jens has filed a visit request for you; may I assist you in preparing psychologically?