“Unresponsive,” she said, feeling momentarily overwhelmed for some reason I couldn’t quite understand. And then guilty, and angry. She stood before the unopened door of her quarters, took two breaths, and then turned and went back down the corridor toward the lift.
A new segment’s nervous system has to be more or less functional for the hookup. They’d tried it in the past with dead bodies, and failed. The same with fully sedated bodies—the connection was never made properly. Sometimes the new segment is given a tranquilizer, but sometimes the tech medic prefers to thaw the new body out and tie it down quickly, without any sedation at all. This eliminates the chancy step of sedating just the right amount, but it always makes for an uncomfortable hookup.
This particular tech medic didn’t care much about my comfort. She wasn’t obliged to care, of course.
Lieutenant Awn entered the lift that would bring her to Medical just as the tech medic triggered the release on the suspension pod that held the body. The lid swung up, and for a hundredth of a second the body lay still and icy within its pool of fluid.
The tech medic rolled the body out of the pod onto a neighboring table, the fluid sliding and sheeting off it, and in the same moment it awoke, convulsive, choking and gagging. The preserving medium slides out of throat and lungs easily on its own, but the first few times the experience is a discomfiting one. Lieutenant Awn exited the lift, strode down the corridor toward Medical with One Esk Eighteen close behind her.
The tech medic went swiftly to work, and suddenly I was on the table (I was walking behind Lieutenant Awn, I was taking up the mending Two Esk had set down on its way to the holds, I was laying myself down on my small, close bunks, I was wiping a counter in the decade room) and I could see and hear but I had no control of the new body and its terror raised the heart rates of all One Esk’s segments. The new segment’s mouth opened and it screamed and in the background it heard laughter. I flailed, the binding came loose and I rolled off the table, fell a meter and a half to the floor with a painful thud. Don’t don’t don’t, I thought at the body, but it wasn’t listening. It was sick, it was terrified, it was dying. It pushed itself up and crawled, dizzy, where it didn’t care so long as it got away.
Then hands under my arms (elsewhere One Esk was motionless) urging me up, and Lieutenant Awn. “Help,” I croaked, not in Radchaai. Damn medic pulled out a body without a decent voice. “Help me.”
“It’s all right.” Lieutenant Awn shifted her grip, put her arms around the new segment, pulled me in closer. It was shivering, still cold from suspension, and from terror. “It’s all right. It’ll be all right.” The segment gasped and sobbed for what seemed forever and I thought maybe it was going to throw up until… the connection clicked home and I had control of it. I stopped the sobbing.
“There,” said Lieutenant Awn. Horrified. Sick to her stomach. “Much better.” I saw that she was newly angry, or perhaps this was another edge of the distress I’d seen since the temple. “Don’t injure my unit,” Lieutenant Awn said curtly, and I realized that though she was still looking at me, she was talking to the tech medic.
“I didn’t, Lieutenant,” answered the tech medic, with a trace of scorn in her voice. They’d had this conversation at greater and more acrimonious length, during the annexation. The medic had said, It’s not like it’s human. It’s been in the hold a thousand years, it’s nothing but a part of the ship. Lieutenant Awn had complained to Commander Tiaund, who hadn’t understood Lieutenant Awn’s anger, and said so, but thereafter I hadn’t dealt with that particular medic. “If you’re so squeamish,” the medic continued, “maybe you’re in the wrong place.”
Lieutenant Awn turned, angry, and left the room without saying anything further. I turned and walked back to the table with some trepidation. The segment was already resisting, and I knew that this tech medic wouldn’t care if it hurt when she put in my armor, and the rest of my implants.
Things were always a bit clumsy while I got used to a new segment—it would occasionally drop things, or fire off disorienting impulses, random jolts of fear or nausea. Things always seemed off-kilter for a bit. But after a week or two it would usually settle down. Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes a segment simply would not function properly, and then it would have to be removed and replaced. They screen the bodies, of course, but it’s not perfect.
The voice wasn’t the sort I preferred, and it didn’t know any interesting songs. Not ones I didn’t already know, anyway. I still can’t shake the slight, and definitely irrational, suspicion that the tech medic chose that particular body just to annoy me.
After a quick bath, in which I assisted, and a change into a clean uniform, Lieutenant Awn presented herself to Commander Tiaund.
“Awn.” The decade commander waved Lieutenant Awn to the opposite chair. “I’m glad to have you back, of course.”