Fassin stepped into the esuit and pulled it up, letting it connect with the collar, adjusting to his body, huffing and settling. Very comfortable, really. “That what you want to do, Herv? Sit in a huddle with everybody else like mice in a hole hoping the cat goes away?”
“Standing orders.”
“I know. Want to guess what I want to do?” There was a pause. Another more violent tremor shook the cabin. The main door popped open, wobbling inwards, revealing the companionway outside. The pause went on. “Herv?” he asked. He looked round for anything he might want to take with him. Nothing. “Herv?”
“I’ll see you there.”
Something blazed hard and blue-white against Nasqueron’s side-lit face, turning the hangar into a harsh jagged jumble of fiercely shining surfaces and intensely black shadows. Fassin flinched. The light faded quickly, turning to yellow and orange; a small fading sun shone between the moon and Nasqueron.
Herv Apsile had got there ahead of him. He gave a quick wave and easily jumped the eight metres to the open nose-blister of the carrier craft, disappearing inside. The nose-blister closed.
“Herv?” Fassin said, trying the suit’s emergency comms. No answer. He made slow bounds for the open hold. Colonel Hatherence was already there, the tall discus of her esuit floating a fraction above the floor directly beneath the place she’d filled earlier.
“Seer Taak! I rather thought you might adopt this course!” she shouted.
Shit, Fassin thought. He’d kind of hoped the colonel would have made her way to the emergency shelter in the moon’s core, ten kilometres down, along with everybody else, like they’d all been told to. There was one drop shaft big enough, wasn’t there? Oh well. He came to a stop beneath the little arrowhead gascraft hanging in its cradle directly above. “Colonel,” he said, nodding.
Would she try to stop him? No idea. Could she? No doubt about that.
“Not sure whether to be relieved or terrified,” the colonel yelled. A manipulator arm creased out from the side of the oerileithe esuit, unfolding towards Fassin. Oh, fuck, he thought. Here we go.
“After you!” the colonel said, her arm indicating the space above.
Fassin smiled and jumped. She rose with a whirr beside him. Stopped and then braced by the ceiling of the hold, he flipped open the cockpit of the little gascraft, revealing a vaguely coffin-shaped space. He shucked the suit and unclipped the helmet.
“Out of uniform, major,” the colonel said jovially, voice echoing in the enclosed space of the upper hold. Fassin let the suit fall slowly to the floor beneath and stepped into the foot of the little arrowhead’s cockpit. “Gracious!” Hatherence said. “Are all human males of this form?”
“Just the handsome ones, colonel,” he assured her. He lowered himself carefully into the cool gel. The cockpit cover closed over him. He wriggled in the darkness, getting his neck positioned over the scanner collar. A soft light and a gentle chime confirmed all was well. He reached for the double nozzle of the gillfluid root, took a deep breath, let it out, then placed the nozzles at his nostrils.
Fassin lay back, zoning out as best he could, fighting the urge to panic, the gag response of fear as the gillfluid poured into his nose, throat and lungs like the coldest drink anybody had ever taken.
A moment of confusion, disorientation. Then the collar nestling closer against his neck and the warming gel closing over his body, tendrils seeking out ears, mouth, penis and anus. Twin stings of pain on his forearms, then another pair, one under each ear, as the blood slides went in.
“Set?” said the voice of Herv Apsile, gurgling through the still calibrating gel in his ears.
— Thoroughly, he sent back just by thinking. — And the colonel?
“I am set, also!” Even over comms, it seemed, Colonel Hatherence tended to shout.
Fassin had been wondering if they could leave her behind somehow. Probably not, then.
“Hold doors closing. Ready to go,” Apsile said.
Fassin started to become his little gascraft. It covered him, embraced him, multiply penetrated him, and in those acts offered itself up to him completely. The light from below disappeared as the hold doors closed. He could see Colonel Hatherence’s esuit hanging beside him, sense its cold and read its electromagnetic signature, just as he could feel the systems of the drop ship readying, flexing, preparing, changing as the ship nudged itself off the floor. Other senses registered an unusual wash of radiations, a faint gravity well set in a much greater, deeper one, a slather of meaningless comms shards, confused transmissions and EM signals from the Shared Facility base itself — and a sudden jolt, a transmitted faint but massive thud followed by a strange sideways, upwards-sucking movement.
He waited for Apsile to talk to them, meanwhile trying to work it out himself. Distant whirr and hiss of the carrier tanking the air in its hold.
“Sorry about that,” Apsile said mildly. “Back in control. Unconventional method of opening the hangar to vacuum there. No idea who to thank.”
— We okay? Fassin asked.
“NSD,” Apsile said, sounding mildly distracted. “No Significant Damage.”
— Let you get on with it, Fassin sent.
“Thanks.”
“Cancel relief, emphasise terror,” the colonel said.
Fassin hoped she was talking only to him. He checked through all the little gascraft’s settings and systems, settling into it as its life-support tendrils settled into him. Something like a wide array of lights seen from the bottom corner of the eye swung into focus in front of him. He called up a few read-outs and started a couple of subroutines to check that everything was working. Seemed to be.
He felt the carrier accelerate away from the moon. Patch-through to the larger ship’s senses suddenly appeared as an option on his controls and he took it.
Now he could experience pretty much what Apsile could.
Nasqueron filling the sky ahead and up, the grey-brown surface of Third Fury disappearing fast below and behind. Debris clouds. Comms shards. More than there ought to be in a properly organised fleetlet like the one that had brought them here and that had been guarding the moon. No sign of illuminating radar or other targeting give-away. Not that a civilian ship like the carrier would be able to spot any but the most glaringly obvious. No current damage flags, just records of a few small hull impacts, little more than pitting. Ship drive traces.
A sudden flare of radiation as a ship turned hard a couple of hundred klicks away, dying away. Outgoing signal loop, broadcasting their unarmed condition, claiming lifeboat status. Flash! From right behind. A near-semicircular debris cloud rising glittering from a new glowing crater maybe half a klick across on the surface of Third Fury. Three smaller craters coming into view, recent but cooled down to orange and red heat. The view twisted, overlays of lines and grids and drive symbols flickering into being.
Apsile pointed the carrier’s nose straight at Nasqueron and started a long, purposefully irregular corkscrew towards the gas-giant, accelerating the drop ship as hard as its engines would allow.
The drop ship was no sort of high-performance military unit; all it was supposed to do was take the gascraft from the Facility to the gas-giant and pick them up later. It was rugged, able to take the strain of operating inside Nasqueron’s gravity well and its various pressure environments down to the liquid-hydrogen level, and it had the power to lift itself and its charges easily enough out of Nasqueron’s grip. But it was not especially manoeuvrable, carried no armament or defensive systems and far from being stealthed had been designed from its invitation-to-tender spec, onwards to be as easy to see with as many different senses as it was possible to imagine, just so that no mischievous Dweller could crash something into it and then claim, sorry, they hadn’t seen it.