Chương 22: Field-Strip

The patrol unit had been dead the better part of a week, and the System still hadn't sent anything down to carry it home. That was the whole reason I'd come back to the worst floor in the Stack: three service levels under the hold, on ground a Registered nobody had no business standing on, to crouch over a corpse I'd already robbed once.

The phase-regulator I'd torn out of it that first night sat balanced on my knee, the multitool was open across my palm, and a sweep was due through the cross-gallery in something under six minutes. Up the chain there was a correction with my number on it and a great deal of attention to spend. None of it reached down here. A dead asset on unwalked ground was the sort of thing a machine that called a body count a success got around to in its own good time.

"I want it on the record," Errata said,"that of every quiet hour you were ever going to be handed to do open-arm surgery on yourself, you have chosen to spend this one on the single floor most likely to interrupt it."

"You wanted the part in."

"I want the part in. I also want you to keep the arm it goes in. Now and then those two require a room with a door, and you've brought us to the one place down here that hasn't got one."

"It's the room with the part in it."

"That has been the entire defense of every floor you've ever made me stand on." The vent came first. I worked the dead Veyr clamp out of the seam under my forearm, where it had been fused and sulking since the night it quit on me, and it came free with a wet grind I felt in my teeth. The replacement I cut off the patrol unit's flank in one clean piece, a deeper-tier assembly built by someone who hadn't been told to shave a tenth of a credit off the part that keeps a host from cooking itself.

It seated cleaner than anything the System had ever let me buy. I tried it. It breathed when I asked and stayed shut when I stopped, and the two-night silence where my venting used to be filled back in. The upgrade I'd been refusing since the day she first complained about the old one. She didn't say it. That was what I noticed, elbow-deep in a dead machine with my own torn-out part between my teeth. She'd had the speech ready for weeks. She'd read me passages of it. She had, once, offered drawings.

The clamp had failed exactly as she'd promised it would, on the worst night it could have picked, and very nearly taken Sefa off the floor doing it. Now I was finally letting her set it right, and she didn't say one word of the speech she'd more than earned.

"I'm billing you for the restraint," was all she said.

"It is the most expensive thing I have ever not done."

"Noted."

"Seat the next one square. The mount sits a hair proud on the left. No. Your left. The one that still works." So I turned the regulator over once in the blue light, a flat dark wafer that had run a whole sanctioned patrol unit off a single clean beat and would now have to run me, who had never kept one beat in my life.

"Readout before you get romantic," Errata said. [Installation risk: 52%. Host architecture non-standard. Integration not advised.]"Fifty-two. In tier, which is the only reason it isn't a worse number. And you're seating it before the sweep, not after. You decided that on the climb down; I felt you do it. The weighing you are about to perform is for your own comfort. Don't mind me." I weighed it anyway, because the alternative was conceding she was right twice in one morning.

Then I set the wafer to the open seam and let it look at what it would have to live in. Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. It hated the place. The regulator was built to hold one clean cycle and fold everything else into line behind it. What I had on offer was a kinetic core that fired and then sulked, a vent still learning my pulse, and a heart that in thirty-one years had never once been asked to keep time.

It found all three, approved of none, and shoved to reject, a hard cold push back up the seam, the same push that had killed every looter who ever slotted one of these on hope. I had no hope. I had the read. I'd taken the thing apart coming down here, as Errata had taught me and as I'd read pumps and scrubbers before her: not for what it was, but for the one thing it could not run without. It could not hold nothing. It needed a beat to fold the rest around, and it didn't care in the least whose. So I gave it mine.

I quit forcing it to fit me and rerouted me to fit it, fed it the one rhythm in my body it could bear to trust, and held there while it made up what it had instead of a mind. That was when the sweep came through the cross-gallery.

"Hold," Errata said, clinical and unhurried, as though a half-seated part fighting my arm and a System reader sliding past the open mouth of the room were items on one checklist.

"You move, you tear the seam and we do this twice, and we have not got the minutes for twice. You flare, it reads you. So you do neither. Hold. Feed it the beat. Hold." I held. The light of the sweep walked the gallery wall, found a dead unit and a year of dust and the particular nothing the System trusts on a floor it has already counted, and went on. The wafer warmed under my fingers. The grip that hadn't shut clean since a pressure shaft picked that exact moment to bill me up the wrist, full rate. I paid it.

The push eased. The part found the beat, and folded. [INSTALL: Phase-Regulator. Host architecture non-standard. Integrating — unstable.] For a moment everything in me ran on one beat. Strangest thing the build had ever done to me. The core, the vent, the new part, three machines cut out of three dead things, stopped arguing. They'd been arguing since the night I put the first one in; I'd long since stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing a bad fan.

Now it was gone, and the size of the quiet caught me off guard, and it felt good. I made myself sit in the word, because I'd gone a long time without an honest use for it. Not relief, the plain good of a thing that had fought me for a year finally pulling one direction, and the direction being forward.

"That's coherence," Errata said, and didn't quite get the rest of it out of her voice.

"You'll feel it in the next thing you do. One beat instead of three. Faster. Surer. It costs you the freelancing, mind: while it drives, you run on its clock and not your genius-of-the-half-second. Pick your moments to let it."

"Faster and surer," I said.

"The two things a maintenance tech is paid her whole life not to be."

"Take the rest of the assembly while we're in. The coupling housing, the clean line. You'll only resent coming back down a third time."

"There won't be a third time. There's a sweep due."

"There is always a sweep due. Take the line." I took it, and went back up the route I'd come in by. Three minutes to the gallery, and I crossed it on the new beat without deciding to, quicker and quieter than I'd moved in two nights, the build doing in one motion what had always cost me three. [Anomaly profile: 28/100. Correction notice issued.] Twenty-eight. Two for the part.

The System never had to hear me to know I'd fitted another piece of itself into a shape it hadn't built and couldn't name; with me, the building is the noise. The same standing correction, two digits heavier, still leaning on the section where forty people were doing their level best impression of furniture. The vent breathed when I asked and stayed shut when I didn't. The build kept one beat now instead of three.

There'd be a bill, there was always a bill, and the meter had already named tonight's and gone back to waiting. And I'd pay it when it came asking. It wasn't asking now. Tonight I'd gone down a Registered nobody with a build that fought me at every step and come back up moving like one machine, faster and surer than I'd been in two nights, and I let that be the thing I carried up out of the dark. I'd earned the carrying of it.

"The vent will hold," Errata said.

"I checked it myself." A beat.

"I always would have." I let it stand. Some things you don't improve by answering.