The science was beautiful and she could not care less about it.

  P-TR33K and Callum had been talking for twenty minutes, or what felt like twenty minutes, time having become unreliable since the Golden Frequency. They stood at the center of the observation deck, Callum suspended in his pressure frame with the focused stillness of a man who had learned to be entirely brain, and P-TR33K cycling through slow violet light as Callum walked him through the molecular architecture of water.

  "The hydrogen bonds are what you're missing," Callum said. His voice had found its clinical register, the one that cost nothing because it came from somewhere below feeling. "Your species evolved in an anhydrous environment. Water to you is a solvent, a medium, a nuisance. To us it is structural. It is in every cell. Every signal. Every thought we have passes through water to get from one place to another."

  P-TR33K's lights shifted. "The biological complexity is... not what we modeled."

  "No," Callum said. "It never is."

  Christine stood at the observation window and looked down.

  The holding bay spread below her like a wound that couldn't close. From up here the scale of it was different, more honest. Down inside it you could only see the people immediately around you, which was its own kind of mercy. From up here you saw all of it at once. The thousands of bodies moving in slow, exhausted currents. The drones working their arcs. The places where the currents stopped, where people had simply sat down and stopped moving, the living arranged among the dead without ceremony because there was no one left to provide it.

  She watched a group of three people wrapping a body in torn fabric. Methodical. Taking turns. One of them was working one-handed, his other arm ending just below the elbow in a smooth sealed cap of skin. He was keeping up.

  She watched two men fighting over a paste packet near a distribution drone. Not violent, not yet, but getting there, the shoving escalating in that specific way she recognized from waiting rooms and triage lines when people had been scared too long and hungry too long and the body stopped asking nicely.

  She watched the hymn move through the crowd in waves she could see from here, heads lifting and dropping, mouths opening, the sound reaching her as something thin and distant through the observation glass.

  She looked for Nathan.

  She knew she wouldn't find him. The bay held thousands and she was looking through glass from above and she had no way of knowing which section he was in or whether he was sitting or standing or—

  She stopped that thought where it was.

  He was down there. That was the only version of events she was operating inside. He was down there, knee giving him trouble, looking for her the way she was looking for him, and she could not go to him right now because there were people dying between them and she was Red and Red did not get to stop.

  She pressed her hand flat against the glass for one second.

  Then she turned back to the room.

  "—the atomic disposition of the hydrogen molecule alone," Callum was saying, "creates a polarity that your sensors may have been reading as interference rather than signal. What you catalogued as noise in our biology was actually communication."

  "Inefficient communication," P-TR33K said.

  "Extraordinarily efficient," Callum said. "You just didn't have the key."

  Christine crossed the deck toward the corridor that branched off the far side. She had noticed it when they first arrived, the way she noticed all exits and adjacencies, habit from fifteen years of knowing where the crash cart was before she needed it. The sounds coming from it were wrong. Not the general sounds of the bay below. Closer. More specific.

  She stopped in the doorway.

  The room was smaller than the observation deck, lower-ceilinged, lit in the same diffuse white. The drones had been bringing people here. She could see the marks of it, the careful rows, the spacing, the systematic arrangement that had nothing human in its logic. They had been sorted and placed the way you would place objects of uncertain fragility. Alive. Present. Largely unattended.

  Thirty, maybe forty people. Some were conscious. Some were not. Some were making sounds that her nervous system catalogued automatically, before her brain caught up, the specific frequencies of pain and fear and the particular silence of someone who had stopped making noise because making noise had not helped and they had been here a long time.

  Then she saw the woman on the floor.

  Face down. Arms positioned at angles that were wrong in ways Christine's body understood before her mind named them. She had been placed that way, or had fallen that way, or the teleportation had resolved her that way, her spine curved in a configuration that locked her. She could not turn herself. Her cheek was pressed flat against the floor. She was breathing in the shallow, effortful rhythm of someone who had been breathing against compression for too long. Her eyes were open. She was looking at the wall six inches from her face.

  Christine was across the room before she decided to move.

  She got down on the floor, got her hands positioned, and turned the woman onto her side in one careful movement, supporting the neck, checking the airway, tilting the chin. The woman's eyes found hers and something in them shifted from the particular blankness of endurance into something more present and more broken.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  "I've got you," Christine said. "I've got you. Breathe."

  The woman breathed.

  Christine stayed on the floor beside her and looked at the rest of the room and started sorting in her head. Who was in immediate danger. Who could wait twenty minutes. Who needed positioning. Who needed airway. Who needed a hand to hold more than anything medical she could provide because sometimes that was the intervention, sometimes that was the only thing that stood between a person and the decision to stop trying.

  She went back to the doorway.

  "Callum." Her voice came out even. Red-even, the register she used when the situation was bad and she needed people to stay calm and do what she said. "I need you to stop for a minute."

  Callum turned. His eyes went to her face and read it immediately, the way people read her face in trauma bays, the economy of her expression telling them everything about what was in the next room.

  "How many," he said.

  "Forty. Maybe more." She looked at P-TR33K. "I need medical volunteers. People from the bay below who have enough function to assist. Nurses, paramedics, doctors, combat medics, anyone with training. Can you pull them from the sorting data?"

  P-TR33K's lights cycled. "The database contains functional assessments."

  "Then sort by medical function and bring them to me." She held the alien's gaze, or what approximated its gaze. "Please. Now."

  P-TR33K communicated something into the Hive. Lights pulsed from the walls.

  Christine went back into the room and started working.

  She began with positioning, because positioning cost nothing and prevented everything. She moved through the rows, turning people onto their sides, adjusting limbs, getting airways clear. Some people had enough function to help her, could shift their weight when she asked, could hold a position she put them in. She used them. She directed them with the same voice she used for student nurses, clear, specific, no wasted words.

  A drone entered behind her.

  It moved to the nearest patient and extended its scanner arm. Christine stepped into its path.

  "No," she said. "Not scanning. Helping. Watch."

  The drone paused.

  She demonstrated on the next patient, showing the drone how to support a shoulder, how much pressure, what angle. The drone watched. It did not move.

  She physically guided its arm into position, the way she had once guided the hands of a first-year nursing student who was all theory and no muscle memory. The drone allowed it. She placed its contact surface against the patient's shoulder and applied the correct pressure through the machine's arm.

  The drone held the position.

  "Good," she said. "Hold."

  She moved to the next patient.

  P-TR33K appeared in the doorway.

  Christine looked up. "Your drones need to learn basic patient handling. I can teach them but it will take time we don't have. Can you update them directly?"

  P-TR33K crossed to the drone she had been working with and communicated something in that layered tonal language. The lights in the drone shifted. It repositioned the patient's shoulder by three degrees, finding a better angle than Christine had shown it.

  It had not just copied. It had understood.

  "It will learn as you demonstrate," P-TR33K said. "Each demonstration updates the cluster."

  "All of them?"

  "All of them."

  Christine absorbed this. "Then watch everything I do in this room."

  She kept moving. The medical volunteers began arriving, ones and twos coming through the doorway with the slightly dazed expressions of people who had been pulled from one crisis and handed another. She assessed them as they arrived, a glance each, cataloguing function and limitation and capability, and assigned them before they had time to be overwhelmed.

  "You, positioning and airway checks, start at the far wall and work toward me."

  "You, comfort rounds. Hold hands. Talk to people. Tell them they are not alone. That is a medical intervention, not a soft option."

  "You, with me."

  The room began to change. Not fixed. Not safe. But attended. The difference between those two things was the difference between a waiting room and an abandoned lot, and Christine had learned a long time ago that attended was sometimes enough to keep a person alive until fixed became possible.

  She knelt beside a man whose breathing had the quality she recognized as the beginning of the end of adequate. Shallow. Fast. The chest working too hard for too little return. She watched his color for ten seconds. Watched his effort.

  She stood and went to the doorway.

  "Callum. I need an oxygen delivery system. Something that can interface with human airways. Nasal, mask, whatever your fabrication can produce."

  Callum turned to P-TR33K without hesitation. "Can you synthesize a low-flow oxygen delivery device? I'll describe the molecular requirements."

  What followed was three minutes of Callum translating human respiratory medicine into whatever language the Nexus used for fabrication, and P-TR33K translating that into something the ship's systems could build. Christine stood in the doorway and listened with one ear and kept the other on the room behind her.

  A panel in the wall opened.

  The device that emerged was not quite a nasal cannula. It was better than a nasal cannula. Lighter, more flexible, with a delivery mechanism that adjusted automatically to the patient's respiratory rate.

  Christine took it without comment, went back to the man, and fitted it to his face with the practiced economy of someone who had done this ten thousand times in better circumstances. She watched his chest. Watched his color. Watched the effort in his accessory muscles begin, slowly, to reduce.

  She stayed beside him for two minutes. Counted his respiratory rate. Watched it drop from thirty-two to twenty-six.

  Twenty-six was not good. Twenty-six was survivable.

  She stood.

  Behind her the room was in motion now, volunteers moving between patients, drones following demonstrated protocols, the quality of sound shifting from the flat noise of unattended suffering toward something that had direction in it.

  She looked at the man with the oxygen device. At the thirty-nine other people in this room. At the doorway through which more were still arriving.

  "I need more," she said to P-TR33K, who had followed her inside. "Not one. Dozens. Every person in this room who needs respiratory support. And when this room is stable there will be another room."

  P-TR33K's lights cycled slowly. "The fabrication capacity—"

  "I know," Christine said. "I'm not asking for them all right now. I'm telling you what the number is so you can start." She met his gaze. "There will always be another room. That is what I need you to understand."

  P-TR33K was quiet for a moment.

  "Understood," he said.

  Christine turned back to her patients.

  Across the room, a child was crying. Not in pain. In the specific register of a child who was frightened and alone and had been both for too long. One of the volunteers was already moving toward her, a woman with one functional arm and a face that knew exactly what to do with a frightened child.

  Christine watched her sit down on the floor beside the girl and start talking.

  She turned to the next patient.

  There was always another room. There was always another patient. There was always another thing that needed doing before the thing after it could be done.

  Red knew this.

  Christine felt it in her bones and kept moving.