“You need something done, is that it? And you don’t trust me, so you want to use my suit hke a bodyglove? I don’t think you have the dexterity.”
It came to her instantly, with a pang like a jab in the stomach. No sooner did she wonder what in the cabin her oppressor might want her to do than she knew: nothing. Any device in the duster’s interior could be controlled electronically. Yarrow was being readied for a trip outside.
“Forget it,” she cried, alarmed. “You’re not walking this suit out there. Tell me what you want, and I’ll do it. But trying to manhandle this thing on the ice will get me killed.”
No response, but the clensuit paused in its exertions. Perhaps someone was thinking it over.
Thinking quickly, Yarrow said, “My scope for sabotage would be limited anyway, would it not? And you could kill me if I didn’t cooperate. Even if you couldn’t open my helmet, you could simply lock up the ship. That might be worth it to me, assuming I am a saboteur, if I could wreck something major, but how could I? Think about it.”
She continued to think herself, reasoning outracing words. “Hold it— George doesn’t need help, does he? He’s in trouble—otherwise you could assist him by driving the tools out there. You could probably even do so without his realizing it.”
And at this the entity spoke. “You can divest yourself of the suit.”
Yarrow was so startled that she merely gaped. Then she understood. “You mean let the suit waltz outside and leave me here naked? No chance. It hasn’t the strength to do real work—don’t you know that?— and you’d fail at whatever you want. And then where would I be? You think I’d fly back like that, returning alone and without my clensuit?”
The pause that followed lasted so long that Yarrow wondered if her controller had given up whatever its plan was. Then the clensuit jerked once, as limbs do in sleep, and she realized that control of it was hers again. Immediately she whirled about, confirming—though the size of the cabin left little doubt—that she was alone.
“Hello?” No voice replied from either her helmet speaker or the cabin system. Yarrow put a call through to George. “Chow, you treacherous shitbag, are you okay? It would serve you well if you weren’t.”
No reply. Yarrow checked his suit diagnostic, which should send back a signal of either Okay or Emergency, but got no response at all.
She glanced at the com system, which could send a message to the Lotus, or even the Centaur; then shrugged. Nothing to tell either party, and she suspected that an idle status query to the Centaur would provoke the intercession of the Voice, who was (she was sure) still monitoring her.
“I’m going out,” she said. “If you know something that would help me, now’s the time.”
She ran an integrity check on her suit, glanced at the screen, then moved toward the airlock. Abruptly her helmet seal popped open, causing her to jump convulsively.
Yarrow looked down at the flaring seal. Had this happened in vacuum, her helmet would have blown off.
“I get it,” she said. She resealed her helmet and palmed open the airlock.
The airlock was no bigger than a coffin, a pair of doors that closed upon the cabin and opened onto space. Looking down, Yarrow saw a field of dim ice, Neptune-blue in its reflected light.
“Base lights on,” she said. A dozen white eyes winked open below her, ringed by smudges of surrounding ice that glowed like fluorescing minerals. The duster rested on a platform two meters above the rugged surface, which was darkened in turn by unlit boxes and modules pitoned to its surface. The utter vacuum gave the illuminated planes and shadows a crystalline clarity.
Thinking that the ship’s antenna might be damaged, Yarrow hailed George through her suit transmitter. No answer. She began to clamber down the rungs stitching the hull, mindful that an incautious leap could send her sailing free of the Teardrop’s negligible gravity.
“Care to share what you know?” she asked the surrounding landscape. “Such as what has befallen George, or where he was when it happened? I can’t believe you don’t know that.”
She might have been alone on this world, the only living creature within ten thousand kilometers. Quite possibly she was.
Activating her helmet light, Yarrow slowly turned through 360 degrees. A dozen steps away from the craft, she already stood on a slightly different plane from it. The horizon was closer in some directions than in others, and sloped away after a few dozen meters. Standing on the Teardrop was like (someone had told her) looking out from the top of an icy peak at Earth’s nighttime sky. Aside from suggesting that some mountaintops were the size of comets, this didn’t tell her much.
Crates; roped perimeters of pitons for future projects; platforms of reinforced wallboard like the floors of unbuilt houses. Yarrow had to aim her beam low, else it shone straight into the sky, returning nothing. No footprints on the hard rippled ice, no scrap of fabric clinging to a corner. He could be just outside her sight lines, or on the comet’s far side.
Yarrow was studying the middle distance when her visor went black. She exclaimed in alarm, and had begun to raise her hands to her face when control was wrested from her. The clensuit turned smartly and strode forward, surefooted in Yarrow’s blindness. Several panicked seconds passed before she realized what was happening; then she howled her outrage.
“Stop this! You can’t use someone this way! I—” She hurled her strength against the suit, straining against its resistance as if pulling herself up a wall. The clensuit, which was working its hands rapidly, abruptly began to go cold at the extremities, underarms, and groin. Yarrow gasped, unreasoning terror flooding her. The chill, like liquid nitrogen spilling through the suit seams, was spreading rapidly.
She went limp, fighting a powerful urge to try to wrap her arms around herself. The spread of cold ceased, but the cold remained, dissipating through her limbs and torso. Yarrow began shivering, and felt with astonishment her teeth begin to chatter.
Minutes later—the passage of time lost in the black welling of terror— her visor abruptly cleared. She was standing back where she had been, facing the rippled horizon. Yarrow began to sag, then caught herself. She pushed up her suit temperature (though it was by now warm enough), and turned to look behind her. There was no indication of what it was the suit had done.
“I’ll remember this,” she whispered. Too softly for the mike to pick up; but that was just exhaustion.
The glideline began near her right arm, a slim pyloned ribbon like a handrail that ran across the ice field and vanished over the horizon. Yarrow took one of the grips dangling from it and clipped it to her suit. She braced a foot against the kickplate and launched herself, skittering out along the line like an upside-down gondola.
The grip squealed merrily, a startling effect in silent vacuum. Yarrow swept her beam about the horizon, seeing nothing that might be a clensuited figure. Something was niggling at her hindbrain, but she didn’t have time to coax it forth.
George had courted danger in venturing out alone, and now Yarrow was doing the same. Most of their duties could be accomplished by a pair of advanced mechs, but the intelligent ones that could match the manipulative capacity of two people were in constant demand on the Triton project, and semi-skilled labor was cheap. What modest dangers attended the mission jeopardized only the workers themselves.
The glideline circled the comet like a meridian, allowing workers to circumnavigate its long axis without having to use ice boots or their jetpacks. The whine of the grip oscillated as Yarrow bounced lightly against its elasticity, her path tracing a sine wave above the ribbon’s precise curve.