Machine: A White Space Novel by Elizabeth Bear (English) Paperback Book

Description: Machine by Elizabeth Bear In this "spectacularly smart space opera" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) set in the same universe as the critically acclaimed White Space series and perfect for fans of Karen Traviss and Ada Hoffman, a space station begins to unravel when a routine search and rescue mission returns after going dangerously awry. Meet Doctor Jens. She hasnt had a decent cup of coffee in fifteen years. Her workday begins when she jumps out of perfectly good space ships and continues with developing treatments for sick alien species shes never seen before. She loves her life. Even without the coffee. But Dr. Jens is about to discover an astonishing mystery: two ships, once ancient and one new, locked in a deadly embrace. The crew is suffering from an unknown ailment and the shipmind is trapped in an inadequate body, much of her memory pared away. Unfortunately, Dr. Jens cant resist a mystery and she begins doing some digging. She has no idea that shes about to discover horrifying and life-changing truths. Written in Elizabeth Bears signature "rollicking, suspenseful, and sentimental" (Publishers Weekly) style, Machine is a fresh and electrifying space opera that you wont be able to put down. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography Elizabeth Bear won the John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer in 2005 and has since published fifteen novels and numerous short stories. She writes in both the science fiction and fantasy genres and has won critical acclaim in both. She has won the Hugo Award more than once. She lives in Massachusetts. Visit her on X @Matociquala. Review "Spectacularly smart space opera... Bear proves her mastery of the space opera genre yet again."--Publishers Weekly "A page-turning fusion of science fiction and mystery."--Kirkus "A fascinating space opera future set in a hospital environment, deeply engaged with questions of culture and ethics. Its also full of action, and just plain fun."--Locus "Awesome aliens, explosions, and lots of drama."--Amanda McGee, author of Extraordinary "Intelligently plotted and executed with flair, Machine is a taut sci-fi mystery thriller that eschews popcorn movie theatrics for immersive environments and memorable characters."--Scott Whitmore, author of The Carpathia Timeline series "Elizabeth Bear tells a fun tale set in a Woke utopia filled with strange aliens and moral problems relating to a special ward that helps fund the hospital."--University City Review "Elizabeth Bear has simply learned from the best and added her own spin to create a unique universe."--Amazing Stories Review Quote "Spectacularly smart space opera... Bear proves her mastery of the space opera genre yet again."-- Publishers Weekly "A page-turning fusion of science fiction and mystery."--Kirkus "A fascinating space opera future set in a hospital environment, deeply engaged with questions of culture and ethics. Its also full of action, and just plain fun."-- Locus "Awesome aliens, explosions, and lots of drama."--Amanda McGee, author of Extraordinary "Intelligently plotted and executed with flair, Machine is a taut sci-fi mystery thriller that eschews popcorn movie theatrics for immersive environments and memorable characters."--Scott Whitmore, author of The Carpathia Timeline series "Elizabeth Bear tells a fun tale set in a Woke utopia filled with strange aliens and moral problems relating to a special ward that helps fund the hospital."--University City Review "Elizabeth Bear has simply learned from the best and added her own spin to create a unique universe."--Amazing Stories Excerpt from Book Chapter 1 CHAPTER 1 I STOOD IN THE DOOR AND looked down. Down wasnt the right word, exactly. But it also wasnt exactly the wrong word. All directions were down from the airlock where I stood, and almost all of them were an infinitely long fall. I wasnt only staring into bottomless space. I was aiming: aiming at a target that wheeled sickeningly less than a klick away. My own perch was also revolving around a central core, simulating a half a g or so, just to keep things interesting. I was standing in the airlock door because I was going to jump. Just as soon as I got my bearings and my timing. I dont get to be afraid now. I get to be afraid before and I get to be afraid after. But I dont get to be afraid during. Theres no room during for being afraid. So I have to fold the fear up. Tuck it out of sight and get on with all the important things I am doing. In this case, saving lives and making history. In that order of priority and the reverse order of chronology. I hoped to be saving lives, anyway, if I got lucky and there were still some lives on the other side of my jump to save. Across that gulf of vacuum lay the ancient ship we pursued. It wasnt far, by space travel standards. A few hundred meters, and it seemed like less, because Big Rock Candy Mountain was thousands of meters in diameter. I say "ship." But what I was looking at was an enormous wheel whipping around its hub as if rolling through space. It was a station orbiting no primary; an endless scroll of hull unreeling--subjectively speaking, because on my own ship I felt like I was standing still--in a spring-curl spiral twisting around us. Not a smooth hull, but a rocky and pockmarked one. One punctured by micrometeors and crumpled by sheer stresses. With bits of structure projecting from the surface at varied angles and its cerulean and gold paint frayed by unfiltered ultraviolet and abraded by space dust. Big Rock Candy Mountain was old. About six hundred ans old, to be as precise as I could without running a lot of fussy conversions in my head. Shed come from Terra in the pre-white-drive era, and over the centians she had built up tremendous velocity. She was zipping along at a solid fraction of the speed of light, out here in the dark places between the stars, much farther from home than she could have possibly been, her course no longer anything like the original plot retrieved by Core archinformists. Maybe shed gotten lost, or an impact that had caused some of the damage to her hull had knocked her off course. Or maybe the people who had outfitted her had lied about where they planned to go. The era of Terras history that had spawned sublight interstellar exploration and the generation ships had not been one of trust and peaceful cooperation between peoples. More one of desperate gambles and bloody-nailed survival. Only one generation ship had ever reached a destination as far as history was aware, and that hadnt ended well. We were here because this one had sent out a distress signal, and a Synarche ship, tracing it, had found her. And sent out a data packet requesting assistance on Big Rock Candy Mountain s behalf. The Synarche ship had not been in contact since, which was disconcerting. And its locator beacon, and Big Rock Candy Mountain s distress signal, were still beeping away down there. And so we were here: to see if we could rescue anybody. If there was anybody left to rescue. It didnt look promising. The ship behind us was another ambulance, but the one after that contained a team of archaeologists and archinformists, and I had an unsettling premonition that there was going to be a lot more useful work for them to do than for us. I wasnt sure exactly how far behind us they were, but I expected we were on our own for at least five to ten diar. The rescue could not afford to wait for backup. There could be people alive in there. We had to proceed as if there were, until we had proven otherwise. But theyd done nothing to acknowledge our approach, and they had not responded to hails on the same frequencies as their distress beacon. I couldnt have preconceptions, because I couldnt afford to miss anyone who might be alive. Nevertheless, contemplating the vast ruin before me made me feel sad. Worse, it was that creeping, satisfying sadness you get when you look on a ruin: at something long destroyed, something lost that isnt your problem. My own ship, Synarche Medical Vessel I Race To Seek the Living , was an ambulance associated with Core General. She had spent nearly a standard month with her modern engines burning fuel recklessly to match velocity with Big Rock Candy Mountain . Sally--as we called her--was fast, maneuverable, and had outsize sublight engines for her mass. She also had an Alcubierre-White drive for FTL travel, though since it didnt impart any actual velocity to the ship, it couldnt be used to chase down quarry in normal space. Wed had to slingshot the big gravity well at our origin point in the Core to accelerate, then conserve momentum through the transition in order to catch the speeding generation ship. I say "slingshot" like it was a routine maneuver. In reality, theres nothing quite like staring into the most enormous black hole in the galaxy, then flying right down its gullet like a gnat with attitude. (Inasmuch as anybody can stare into an actual black hole with their actual eyes unless they belong to one of the exotic species that can visualize X-rays or radio waves.) So wed already had one adventure leaving the Core, and now here we were. We werent docking with Big Rock Candy Mountain . We had no information about the structural integrity of this antique hulk, but common sense suggested it would be fragile. Unbalancing it, subjecting it to the stresses of docking--both were terrible ideas. Wed have to use one of our adaptable docking collars anyway, because the idea that our hardware and theirs would be compatible was laughable. Thats why I was jumping. It was not as dangerous as it probably seems. Im Sallys rescue specialist: getting people out of dangerous situations is my job, and I do this sort of thing frequently. The insertion can be dicey, though. My hardsuit had jets, so I had maneuverability. And everything in space is moving incredibly fast anyway, so what matters is the relative velocity. If you and I are moving at the same speed in the same direction and theres nothing else around us, were functionally not moving. Space has a whole lot of nothing. If I jumped at the right time, and corrected for Sallys rotation, all I had to do was match velocity with the wheel and snug down onto it. It was still breathtaking to stand inside that open airlock and look down . Sally had the processing power to hold a position over, or rather outside, Big Rock Candy Mountain basically forever. But Big Rock Candy Mountain was spinning, and one or two of her enormous central cables had snapped over the centians, so her spin had developed a wobble. She was also wobbling for a more disturbing reason. There was a ship docked to the outside of her ring. One with white drives--a modern ship. A fast packet crewed by methane breathers: the one that had relayed the distress signal. Its--his, I checked my fox--name was Synarche Packet Vessel I Bring Tidings From Afar . Why in the Well he had docked with an ox ship, what he was still doing coupled to it, and why he wasnt answering hails was a series of mysteries for which there was no answer in Sallys databases. And Sally, being a rescue vessel, has extremely comprehensive databases. "Sally," I asked my faceplate, "hows our telemetry?" "Pretty good, Llyn," the shipmind answered. "Weve matched velocity and vector, and were stable. Cant do much about that spin." Good to know I wasnt the only one worried about it. "Im in the door," I said, which she already knew. But youre supposed to maintain a verbal narrative. For the flight recorders and in case anything goes wrong and your crewmates dont notice what youre doing. It also lets them keep an eye on your checklists so nothing gets forgotten. Safety first. "Wheres Tsosie?" His voice came through. "At the other door. Ready to go on your word, Llyn." He was the ambulances commander and senior trauma specialist, but I was the rescue specialist and this was my op. Rhym, our flight surgeon, outranked both of us as far as Core General seniority was concerned, but right now I was in charge of them, too. If we had to go to surgery, Rhym would become the authority figure. It wouldnt have made sense in a military outfit, so it had taken a while for me to get used to the way command shifted between team members. But it made sense for Sally. "In three," I said, and that many moments later we were sailing across the space between Sally and Big Rock Candy Mountain . As I stabilized, the apparent spiral of the generation ship smoothed out into a wheel so unnervingly that I wanted to slap a topologist. Tsosie and I would have been a matched set, but Tsosie was trailing the sled that contained rescue supplies, portable airlocks, a laser cutting torch, and autostretchers. I had four drones limpeted onto my back beside the air tanks. You can send back for stuff. But that takes time. Time is Details ISBN1534403027 Author Elizabeth Bear Pages 496 Series White Space Language English Year 2021 ISBN-10 1534403027 ISBN-13 9781534403024 Format Paperback Publication Date 2021-07-06 Short Title Machine Subtitle A White Space Novel UK Release Date 2021-07-06 Publisher S&s/Saga Press Imprint S&s/Saga Press DEWEY 813.6 Audience General Series Number 2 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:132683767;

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