It was much too large a volume to be pressurized. What little air it had scooped up during its dip into the atmosphere rapidly leaked out. So Kath Two was effectively in outer space now. Knowing this, the fabric of the suit had contracted against her skin to supply the back pressure that was no longer provided by the atmosphere. It was porous, and so the only thing really between her skin and the void was Space Grease. The combined effects of that and the nat mesh fooled her skin and muscles into believing that they were under a nice thick blanket of air — the way humans were meant to live. The only part of the outfit that was pressurized like an old-fashioned space suit was the helmet.
Dangling above the middle of the hanger’s landing deck were four flivvers of various sizes and designs — the latest iterations of a vehicle type that had been in existence since before the onset of the Hard Rain. During the series of landings just completed, these had been kept up and out of the way. As soon as the door of the hanger closed, one of them — a medium-sized, four-passenger model — was lowered to the ramp by winches. It came to rest about ten meters away. Incongruously for a space vehicle, it seemed to have wheels. It was, in fact, resting on a low, wheeled sled that was designed to roll up and down the ramp.
Green lights beside the flivver’s airlock door told her that all was well on the other side. Kath Two had about ten minutes to reach it. That would be plenty of time if she didn’t pass out. She issued a command that allowed the glider’s body to deflate. She felt rather than heard the air escaping and the water draining. The soft top of the fuselage parted over her shoulders, back, butt, and thighs. Meanwhile she was wriggling her arms in from the insulated sleeves where they had been spread like a pair of wings. This was good exercise, given that they weighed three times as much as normal.
By the time that was all done, the glider was just a wrinkled cross of fabric, flat on the deck. Kath Two disconnected herself from its air scrubber and its urine collection system, then unplugged the power and data from her collar. She gathered her arms under her and began to belly-crawl toward the flivver, sliding one knee, then the other forward along the deck plates, like a lizard. A big siwi corkscrewed out and kept pace with her, tracking her vital signs, ready to supply extra air or other forms of assistance if needed. But Kath Two made adequate progress. She probably could have crawled on hands and knees, as one of the other human pilots was doing, but she saw no need.
Something strange caught her eye, and she went to the effort of rotating her head slightly just to verify it was reaclass="underline" the third pilot was actually walking upright. He was trudging along with short deliberate strides, carefully judging his balance and the loads he was placing on his joints, while somehow managing to keep enough blood in his brain to remain conscious.
Kath Two could never have stood up, let alone walked, under three gees. The same was true of most of her race. This man, however, was a Teklan. That was obvious from his size, as well as his coloration and the shape of his head, which were visible through his helmet. It was hinted at by his musculature and by the style of the suit he was wearing — heavier, partly armored, slung about with load-bearing straps made to support various burdens. His scabbards, holsters, and bandoliers were vacant. Even without any of those clues, however, she could have guessed his race from the fact that he had chosen to perform the feat of walking when he could have more safely and more easily crawled.
Had it not been for the racial bond that joined Moirans and Teklans, Kath Two might have rolled her eyes and muttered a joke about it. Teklans didn’t need blood in their brains to keep dutifully trudging forward. Something along those lines. But that kind of stereotyping could just as well have been turned back on her. The Teklan had piloted his vehicle into the hanger under power. The thing had engines. Why not use engines if you belonged to a civilization that knew how to make them? Kath Two, on the other hand, had reached the same destination in an unpowered glider, using skill and wit to draw energy from the atmosphere. She could have turned pilot’s duties over to an algorithm anytime she wanted. Instead, she had chosen to do most of it herself. In its own way, this was no less an act of pointless bravado than what the Teklan pilot was doing right now. She had been testing and sharpening a set of skills that was important to her. Mutatis mutandis, this Teklan was doing the same.
Kath Two got to the airlock with time to spare. Its floor was padded as a courtesy to people who, like her, were experiencing it through all the body’s boniest parts. She rolled heavily onto her back, slightly bumping the pilot who had reached it on hands and knees, and connected her air tube to a socket on the airlock wall. New air flooded her helmet. The Teklan entered and allowed himself to collapse onto a bench. The outer hatch closed and locked. The air pressure rose and the nat mesh reduced its fierce clutch on her body. It became no tighter than an athletic jersey as the pressure approached one standard habitat atmosphere — a thinnish concoction of gases similar to what humans of Old Earth had breathed in places like Aspen, Colorado.
The inner hatch opened. Crawling now on hands and knees, Kath Two followed the others into the main cabin, where four acceleration couches were waiting. They climbed into three of them, strapped in, and made themselves comfortable. They were now lying on their backs, legs elevated. At some point their suits’ systems had found their way onto the flivver’s voice network — she knew as much from the fact that she could hear the other two breathing as heavily as she was. But no one said anything. Talking would become a lot easier in a few minutes. True to form, the Teklan, with a controlled exhalation, heaved his meaty arms up off the rests, grabbed his helmet, and pulled it off. He let its weight rest on his stomach and allowed his arms to thud back onto the couch. Kath Two got a vague peripheral glimpse of platinum hair and cheekbones, as expected, but didn’t feel like turning her head. Instead she looked at a display screen mounted above her face, focusing as well as she could with her eyeballs flattened into their sockets by gees.
They had entered the hanger in level flight, traveling at a hundred kilometers per hour. In the minutes since then, the centripetal force that had obliged her to crawl on the floor like a lizard had been accelerating them upward and forward, steadily pumping kinetic energy into them and everything around them, whirling them up to the immense velocities more typical of space travel. Compared to the baroque, fire-breathing systems that their ancestors had used to the same purpose, there was nothing to it. The bolo was mechanically identical to the sling used by David to slay Goliath. The flivver was the stone nestled in its pocket.
The bolo had made about a quarter of a revolution, so they were now traveling directly away from the surface of the Earth — aimed toward the distant ring of habitats that they and the three billion other members of the human races called home.
Seen on a video window in the display above, the hanger’s tailgate dilated, showing a disk of black sky. A tattoo of metallic clunks let them know that the brakes on the sled had been released. Driven down the ramp by centripetal force, it built speed all the way to the lip of the hanger deck and then stopped short with a sneeze from its shock absorbers. The flivver jerked free of the sled. From its occupants’ point of view, it seemed to fall off the edge of the deck and into space. En route it picked up a bit of a tumble, which was killed by quick firings of its thrusters.
They became weightless. Kath Two took her helmet off but kept her head nestled in the couch’s rest for a minute while her inner ear adjusted. Meanwhile she was groping in a compartment in her armrest for a varp, which was what people normally used in place of flat-panel display screens when they wanted to interact with some kind of app. It was an old enough word that most people had forgotten it was an acronym for something like Vision Augmentation Retro-Projector. Styles varied, but the baseline model looked like a heavy-framed pair of glasses. Mounted in that frame were cameras that could see the way her hands were moving, a microphone that could hear her speech, and other cameras that could track her gaze. A number of glowing figments appeared in her peripheral vision as she slipped them on, and she was able to reach out and activate one of them to launch Parambulator. This gave her a schema of the flivver’s situation in the universe: in the center, a blue disk representing New Earth, under a gray film of atmosphere. Well outside of that, the orbital track of the bolo’s center, the twin trajectories of its two hangers snaking around it. This was what they had just left behind. A blinking green dot showed their current location on their new orbit, a fat ellipse whose apogee coincided with the circle of habitats that hung above the planet at geosynchronous altitude. Over the next twelve hours they would coast up to that height, then strap back into the couches and use other means to effect a delta vee that would sync them up with whichever habitat they decided upon.