The suit went dead instantly, an unstrung puppet. The whine of the dolly was abruptly gone, and the air flow returned with a puff. Yarrow was drifting, weapon raised, tied loosely to a corpse.
Below her the dolly glided on, unhindered by its flailing cargo. Yarrow looked to the horizon. From ground level, the duster was not yet visible. Had the clensuit gotten close enough to make visual contact with the duster’s transmitter, the Voice might have been able to reassert control.
Heart pounding, Yarrow forced herself to put away the laser. Slowly she pulled the limp clensuit toward her, watching lest it move. She pulled at the cord looped under its arms and examined the burnt end. It was strong work cord, adequate for hauling large masses; but its core was a woven crystal of conducting nanofiber, capable of carrying a substantial dataload.
Yarrow looked to the gliderail, intact and rigid in the deep chill of High Neptune Orbit. She was suddenly certain that it could serve as a superconductor.
Pulling the clensuit toward her, Yarrow took its jetpack and fired a spurt skyward. She grasped the suit’s wrist as they drifted gently to the ground, bumping against each other like tired drunks. Feeling like a ghoul, she lashed the clensuit to the ice, securing the cord with self-driving pitons she took from a storage shed nearby. A mobile bot could still come and cut the suit free, hauling it back into transmitter range, but she didn’t plan on giving it time.
Walking the Teardrop was easy if one didn’t mind the pace: Yarrow’s boots extruded barbed cleats that gripped the ice, permitting an easy if jerky gait. She strode away from the duster, looking about cautiously for transmitters. She tried to snap off her suit antenna, but couldn’t reach it.
“Clensuit: display suit functions,” she ordered. A row of green bars appeared along the bottom of her faceplate. She asked the system to report suit pressure verbally. “Point nine seven three millibars,” it replied.
Yarrow founding it mildly comforting that she could talk to something, even if only her clensuit. “Uplink,” she ventured, but the system could find no satellite in the skies above. The notion of anything orbiting this frozen globule seemed merely foolish.
Something niggled at her memory, and Yarrow looked across the horizon, wondering what it was. She glanced to her left, turning nearly in a circle to catch what had snagged her subconscious, but her helmet beam disclosed only the soft limbs of ice, eroded by the millennia’s micrometeorites.
“You out there, Mister Man?” she called. “You got something to say, I’m listening.”
Triton rose behind her, bright enough to cast shadows. When full—it was now in three-quarters phase—the moon shone like a shaded light-bulb, sometimes the same size, and nearly as bright, as the Sun. It was hard to believe that the brilliant globe was the coldest place in the solar system, reflecting back all light and keeping none for itself.
At once a wave of weariness rose and struck her. Both feet anchored, Yarrow swayed like a nodding reed. “Time?” she asked, realizing with a start that she didn’t know within hours.
“Nineteen thirty-one,” her suit told her. Five hours since Touchdown, scarcely a full day. After a few seconds she realized that her exertions were nonetheless adequate to tire her.
In microgravity one can sleep in any position. Yarrow felt her eyes close, and wondered vaguely whether her exposed position left her vulnerable. She imagined the duster lifting off the comet’s surface, coming after her… no other danger seemed credible, save the sparse but inescapable sleet of tiny particles, every grain moving fast enough to puncture her suit, perhaps punch through her body entirely, like a cosmic ray tearing through a choromosome…
“Warning: power supply low,” the suit said abruptly. Yarrow started awake, looking about wildly as a dream-threat receded rapidly from conscious recall. Her helmet beam swung across a darkened landscape (Triton was gone from the sky), disclosing nothing but still ice. Collecting her thoughts, she asked for the suit functions display.
Suit power, a squat green bar a few hours ago, now stood at 18 percent capacity, low enough that the display lined it in orange. Guiltily Yarrow realized that her present anchored position was permitting heat to leach into the ice underfoot, which would not have been possible had she thought to tie a tether and doze drifting.
Cursing softly, she pulled herself free and began to stamp across the ice as though to warm herself. She remembered passing a powerbox earlier, and retraced her steps until she saw it on the horizon, an unpolished cube atop a stalk no wider than her finger. She paused before plugging in—could the Voice have entered the powerbox and set a trap?—but could finally see no alternative. As she brought her belt close to the nearest face, a cable snaked out from her suit and attached itself to the featureless surface. “Recharge in progress,” the suit told her.
She was sitting on the cube, imagining herself still wholly awake, when her helmet trilled that it was detecting a radio signal. Yarrow came to her senses with a start as her system caught the frequency.
“…there? George, Yarrow, please rep—”
Recognizing the voice, Yarrow began to answer, but her suit queeped suddenly and flashed a reply code before her eyes. Yarrow swore.
“—can hear us. We cannot read any—” Tsujimoto stopped as she received the burst from Yarrow’s clensuit. Silence followed, as she presumably went away to tell someone.
Yarrow checked the code number against the suit’s directory, but she was pretty sure what had been sent. The clensuit had prevented her from replying because of its low energy levels, and instead had sent a three-bit burst, which signified acknowledgment of a message when the recipient was unable to respond for technical reasons. She wondered what the Lotus would make of it.
Bemusedly Yarrow searched the sky, wondering what source had hailed her. The Lotus could not communicate directly with clensuits across thousands of klicks, so used orbital comsats. Evidently one was overhead, circling the Teardrop in a high, slow orbit (this icechip could hardly retain it otherwise) that just now brought it over the horizon. One would have expected two comsats in such circumstances, one overhead at all times, but perhaps the Voice had disabled the other.
“Yarrow,” Tsujimoto said, “get back to the duster as soon as you are able. Since you didn’t signal an emergency, I assume you merely—”
Recharge Malfunction, her faceplate said in flashing red. The system chimed once, and a series of numbers began to crawl across her field of vision.
“—automatic takeoff. Please reply as soon as you are able.”
Yarrow cried “Hold!” to the systems display, but heard over her voice the trill that signaled downlink disconnection. Glowing codes hung frozen before her till she banished them.
“System, can you repeat that message?” she asked. The system, unsurprisingly, could not. “Doesn’t matter,” she said to herself. It was the other news that actually concerned her.
Grimly Yarrow recalled the codes and studied them. The fault, according to her clensuit, lay in the powerbox: something was preventing its proper discharge. Her system duly listed the various attempts it had made to overcome this, none of which Yarrow was competent to judge. At the bottom of the list appeared the results of its efforts: Suit power was now at 21.3 percent.
“At present expenditure levels, how long until suit failure?” she asked the system.