I still had enough English to be able to work out what he meant. The weird thing was that when I reached for that knowledge, the ayatanas I was wearing all tried to offer up bits of their languages, and my first attempt to speak came out a bubbling croak.
I cleared my throat and tried again. “Carlos—”
He held up his hand and said something that I didn’t follow at all. “Wait,” I said in English. I held out a hand to Cheeirilaq, who laid another Judicial hardsuit actuator on it. I put it against his chest—gently, so as not to send him drifting off—and pushed the button. A moment later, and the suit whicked itself into existence around him, faceplate up.
“Try now,” I said.
He touched his ear. “Translation? Good. My shipmate has vanished, hasn’t she? Who else is going to be able to talk to her?”
I let the breath I had been going to use for arguing out through my nose, and tried again with a fresh one. “You’re in no shape—”
“Neither are you,” he retorted. “Next excuse?”
I hadn’t realized before that he was a pretty big human, as humans went. Even wasted and cryoburned and floating awkwardly above the deck in a hardsuit over striped pajamas, he made me feel small.
“I know you want to look out for your friend—”
Carlos shook his head. It set him drifting. I held out a hand for him to steady himself against. “It’s not that. I don’t know her. But how is she going to understand anything you say to her without…” He pointed vaguely at his ear.
The worried pinch of his mouth made me think there might be more. “What? Carlos, please—”
The next words came out of him as if wrenched. “What if nobody else from my time makes it?”
I thought about pointing out that we weren’t even entirely sure that Jones was from his time. She’d been the one in the anomalous cryo chamber, after all—
O’Mara shifted impatiently. Time was wasting.
I said, “There were ten thousand people on your ship. Some will live. Many will. You should rest so that you can help the others. You’re my patient, and in order for me to care for you, you need to stay here.”
“I can’t!” he exploded, unrightminded emotion breaking through. “Just let me come. Please.”
Friend Jens, Cheeirilaq said in my ear. We don’t have time to argue.
I looked at Master Chief Carlos. “If you get killed before they manage to pick your brain clean, the historians are never going to forgive me.”
I reached up, and sealed his helmet down.
We moved.
The immediate crisis of weightlessness and scattered power outages was coming under control. It still provoked a complicated spiral of nostalgia and alienation in me to zip past injured people and send medical staffers dodging out of the way as we shouted, “Gangway!”
I wasn’t this anymore. I was a doctor. I rescued people; I didn’t arrest them.
Well, I had already rescued this one. Maybe it was time to arrest her.
Carlos tripped a bit at first, but rapidly got control of his suit and kept up better than I would have expected. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug, and he probably had worn mag boots before. It helped that we weren’t moving as fast as Cheeirilaq and I had on the way in. In the absence of internal sensors or a way to track the fugitive through her fox, we had to stop and ask directions a lot. Fortunately, unit coordinators don’t handle direct patient care, and they tend to notice everything.
In particular, a barefoot Terran in hospital jammies swimming down their corridors after the gravity cuts out. We were fortunate that the emergency lighting had been brought online almost everywhere that needed it by now. I winced to think of trying to track Jones through the hospital in the dark.
Cheeirilaq and O’Mara were in the first row as we went. Now that he’d gotten the hang of the new suit, Carlos was pretty good in zero g. Propelling himself alongside me, he took the opportunity to ask, “Hey, Jens. You’re from Terra?”
“Never been,” I admitted, glancing down a side corridor.
“So how come you have an Earth name?”
“Pardon?”
“Brookllyn,” he said. “That’s as old Earth as it gets.”
“Boring parents.” Was everybody going to ask me that? My hardsuit clicked when I shrugged. “Hey, there’s an open storage locker down here.”
Nobody on staff would leave a locker open, even in a crisis. Especially in a crisis, when things might come sailing out and whack some unsuspecting sapient on the head. Or head-equivalent. You’d think somebody from an older and even more fragile habitation would be a little more careful.
Cheeirilaq turned, a little faster than O’Mara. For such a massy person, though, O’Mara was quick to orient. They said, “Good eye, Jens.”
I was in front now. The others followed me to the locker. It had been pillaged, and from the empty equipment hooks it looked like what had been taken was a humanoid ox-based hardsuit and some basic tools—a laser cutter/welder, and a good old-fashioned wrecking bar.
Stuff you could use to get through a closed pressure door, I thought, but didn’t say anything.
I looked at O’Mara, though, and they nodded. “Hope she doesn’t pop a hatch to something that uses sulfuric acid for blood.”
Incongruously, Cheeirilaq nodded, too.
I stared at it. That was the second weirdly human gesture.
Cheeirilaq started moving again. Over its shoulder, it said, I’m wearing a human ayatana. Your thoughts are as squishy as the rest of you.
“Well.” Banter was a good means of easing tension. I knew from Rilriltok that it thought so, too. Apparently it wasn’t the only member of its species to hold such an opinion. “If we had any logic in us, we wouldn’t have nearly wiped our own species out in the Before, when we didn’t have rightminding.”
We eat our mates if we can catch them. Everybody’s got some evolutionary baggage that winds up maladaptive in a sophont setting.
“Valuable protein resource.” I shrugged. “And it’s not as if your species is designed for coparenting.”
Protein is not so difficult to obtain these diar that it’s worth depriving the galaxy of an astrophysicist or a poet in order to eke out a few more eggs.
I realized Carlos was looking at us with horror. Joking, I mouthed through my faceplate.
I wasn’t sure if he believed me. Cheeirilaq wasn’t exactly exaggerating all that much: humans are not the only syster in the galaxy that benefits extensively from rightminding to control our most atavistic tendencies.
Llyn. It was Sally, in my ear. I have thermal imaging. Turn left through this door.
“Sally thinks she has eyes on Jones,” I relayed, and pointed the way.
We went down the corridor military style, leapfrogging, covering one another. O’Mara and Cheeirilaq were the only ones with weapons, so Carlos and I stayed under their cover while performing nerve-wracking tasks like opening doors.
That worked until we got to one with a fused control panel and a welded edge.
“Well,” O’Mara said, running a suit glove down the fresh laser bead, “I guess she’s been here.”
“And planned to stay a while,” Carlos agreed.
She would not have wasted the time to slow us down otherwise.
“It’s all right,” I said. “She’s not a very good welder.”
I stepped forward and O’Mara stepped back. There was a spot at the edge of the bead where I could catch my fingertips, and this was a Judiciary hardsuit. I popped the pry-claws out and began wedging them under the bead, into the crack in the door. A sharp snapping sound and a screeching scrape told me I was almost in.