With the blood roaring in her ears, Yarrow pulled open the hatch and squeezed in. The inner door opened manually; firing the bolts had released its switches. A blast of air rushed past her as she slid it open, like the soul escaping from a violated body.
Darkness within, not even the glow of displays. Of course: before withdrawing from the duster, the Voice had pithed its Onboard. The doors could not be made to close behind her; the air system would not come on.
The spare suit. Was it her angel speaking, or merely the voice of her training? Yarrow didn’t wonder. The cabin was too small to get lost in; she felt her way across the wall, hands sliding along smooth displays. Behind the pilot’s seat, the cabinet panel snapped open when she twisted its handle. She pulled out the bunched suit, fumbling for its belt.
No air left. She activated the other suit, embracing it like a withered friend in less need of succor than she. The hiss of oxygen was very cold.
Fingers stiffening, Yarrow activated the helmet light on the spare suit. Stowed in an insulated compartment, it had been impervious to the Voice’s devastations, and its beam came on at once. Her faceplate was milky with frost, and the plume of her breath added more. With a curse she killed the light, then wrapped the limp suit round her neck, knotting its limbs like a sash.
Working by touch, she found the proper switch beneath the pilot’s seat, thinking with etched clarity that whether she lived or died turned freely upon this moment. A second after she pushed the control a faint light came on behind her.
Yarrow pushed herself backward, looking for the welcome glow of cabin displays. A string of pilot lights shone dimly through the haze of her visor, like stars through Neptune’s rings. She kicked closer, wondering why there were not more of them, and heard the joints of her skins crackle.
This decided her. Maneuvering again by touch she found the airlock, and discovered that it had slid shut with the reawakening of the system. She fumbled back to the pilot’s chair and felt for the manual controls, but could not discern their settings. As a calming languor stole over her, Yarrow found the helmet of the empty clensuit, pressed it against her own, and asked: “Can you get this ship into the air?”
If the suit’s system replied, she did not hear it. A great force pressed down upon her, crushing the chill air from her lungs. Yarrow felt her spirit being squeezed from her body, and braced at last for death. But the compression simply went on, as though some stretched sinew yet bound her to her battered frame, and she felt the contending surges of numbness and pain, knowing that the latter meant that she was alive.
It was a cold crossing. The duster’s system, shut down by the Voice, lay beyond the reach of the clensuit, and the cabin remained unpressured and unheated. The empty suit heated the air it piped into Yarrow’s helmet, but it could not restore the functioning of her own dead system, and she shivered and moaned through the hours of passage.
The spare clensuit could run just enough of the duster to set a course for the Lotus. Communication was impossible, as the antenna was melted into a single mass. The cabin shone dimly, resolved into clearer darkness as the frost in her helmet slowly melted. With every breath, however, Yarrow saw a chilly plume, and reflected that if she were warmer she would doubtless hurt more.
All that Yarrow was able to derive from the ship’s Onboard was the last order left in its registers: to deploy its limited microrepair facilities to rebuild the antenna. Puzzling over this, she realized that the Voice wished to eliminate the evidence that it had killed her. Had her body been recovered, another frozen island in High Neptune Orbit, it would have seemed to have fallen victim to a mishap when recharging from a powerbox. With the antenna replaced and control over the duster restored, the Voice could no doubt contrive to discharge one of the boxes in a catastrophic surge.
During her stronger moments she wondered what was happening on the Centaur, and once made an attempt to establish radio contact with the Lotus through the working clensuit’s system. Then her thirst would rise up, and she would hold up the clensuit helmet like a skull and yearn for a way to reach its stores of juice and water. Weakness and pain would overwhelm her, and she would weep silently, regret the death of Chow, and fear for the future until she had rocked herself into exhaustion.
No displays shone in the cabin, and Yarrow’s dead suit would not even report the passage of time. Perhaps the duster had repaired its antenna, and could be steered safely to the Lotus by remote pilot. Otherwise the clensuit’s modest system would bring the craft as close as possible and then try to kill relative velocity. Dozing in fits, Yarrow wondered how many hours had passed.
She was asleep when the engines came on, and had to snatch at the clensuit before it was torn from her grasp. “Status report!” she cried, touching helmets; but the system’s capacities were already fully occupied. Yarrow sought to ready herself as deceleration woke drowsing injuries, but excitement splintered her resolve.
A series of irregular bursts from the secondaries was bringing the craft around, but Yarrow could not calculate its orientation. It was only when the ship bumped once with a muffled clang that she knew herself docked. A mechanical whine sounded somewhere beneath her couch: emergency probes sounding the crippled ship.
A minute later the outer airlock opened, then the inner door slid roughly aside. The blast of air that broke into the cabin flapped the limbs of the clensuit, and a world of sound swirled about her again. Yarrow worked the manual seals on her helmet with trembling fingers, and tore it off with a scream of relief at the warm fresh puff in her face.
Footsteps ran outside the airlock, but Yarrow, fumbling desperately with the second helmet’s seals, was too busy to look up. Pencils of light wavered in the dirty air, bright circles sliding over the displays. When one caught Yarrow in the face she looked up blinking, a water tube trailing from the opened faceplate into her mouth.
“Sweet Jesus!” a familiar voice cried. Yarrow had not known that Tsujimoto was a Christian. The cabin lights slowly came up as the Lotus’ emergency systems took control of the damaged ship. As the torch’s glare faded into the ambient glow she looked in confusion from Tsujimoto’s intent expression—bereft of relief or concern—to the tool she held in her other hand. It took Yarrow a second to realize that she was looking at a gun.
They locked her in a small room created for that purpose, as though to put her into her own quarters would detract from the gravity of the situation. Communication with others was forbidden her, another symbolic sanction, or did they think she would seek to sway witnesses? In the hours between her long periods of sleep, Yarrow decided that some incriminating message had been fabricated by the Voice, Chow crying murder or some routine broadcast that contradicted the chronology of the account she had given. In addition (or so Yarrow guessed during her debriefing), conditions on the Centaur were still unknown, which left everyone frightened.
“Are you listening?” she once asked the featureless walls, but knew that if anyone was, it was not her captors. At regular intervals a slot appeared in one wall and a food tray peeped forth. Yarrow could not determine the intervals between meals—was it constitutional to deny a prisoner knowledge of the passage of time?—but guessed that she was being fed when everyone else was. Eight meals thus meant three days.
When they came for her she coldly requested a shower, which was granted after an uneasy exchange of glances. She was escorted down the passageway by two colleagues while Chin stuck his head into the stall, presumably to confirm that none of the fixtures could be broken off and used as a weapon. Left alone, Yarrow soaped herself extravagantly, expending three times a day’s fair water ration. She guessed that no one would bring themselves to bang on the door.