Suddenly the view spiraled as she did a full 360, a stomach-twisting shift from red canyon to orange sky to red canyon. Justine's heart rate started to rise as she finished the loop and banked into a roll, signaling how hard the trick really was.
One day the suits would record smell and taste.
But real time would never crack lightspeed. Even though the feed was hours old, it was ahead of any news. The familiar tension about whether Justine would fall to sudden death on the floor of Valles Marineris kept Kyle's eyes glued to the screen.
Most top adventurers eventually died.
The screen flickered abruptly to black. Had something happened to Justine?
“Kyle?” Suriyah's voice blasted loudly across the in-base communications.
Kyle blinked, absorbing the abrupt shift.
“Kyle? Can you hear me? There's a problem.”
The screen glowed back to life.
He was looking into the Styx. Vines intertwined, moving, a cross between seaweed and woods, deeply shadowed despite light amplification.
The view was from inside Lark's ship. Stems twisted around one of the motorized arms, a leaf flapped across the field of view, barely lit and almost translucent, visible more by how it changed the look of the stars than by itself. The perspective changed to another camera facing the dense center of the forest. Stems and leaves were close here too. Spectral white shapes so thick he could only see two stars, and a rim of icy white Charon. The view jumped again, looking down: vines converging to a point on Pluto's brighter quake-patterned white.
“She's trapped,” Suriyah said.
“Trapped?” It dawned on him that as the cameras cycled, he was seeing nothing but more forest. She wasn't up against the Styx; she was in it. “She went too far in?”
“She can tell you herself.”
“Lark?” She didn't answer. A shiver ran through him as the images registered. His daughter was stuck a hundred and sixty kilometers above him, caught between worlds in a strange forest.
“Suriyah, I'm coming.” Help would be in the communications room.
Half the twenty inhabitants of Pluto Base were already in Communications. Henry was there. He was looking at the only other child on base besides Lark, a blond ten-year-old boy named Paul. “No,” Henry was saying, “See, Paul, if we took a regular transport ship, the exhaust would kill the creepers, and we couldn't help Lark anyway. Transport ships can't dock with a research bubble.”
Kyle interrupted, “Can't she get loose herself? Her thruster works, right?”
Paul answered. “She's already tried.”
“All right, then...” Think. A research bubble was tiny. The hull was transparent, but you had to see around eight extension arms of variable size and their thick mooring points, plus a water tank and the magnetic confinement for a fleck of antimatter in a swivel-mounted motor. In the habitat bubble there was only room for Lark in her pressure suit, and the rest of Shooter wasn't much bigger. “She could use the arms to grab onto a transport and let it pull her loose.”
Suriyah noticed Kyle's arrival. “No, Kyle, she's too deep. The vines have been growing around her since she got trapped.” She stood next to him and put an arm on his shoulder. Her dark eyes were smoky with worry. “You'd better talk to Lark.” She pointed at the bank of observation screens.
Kyle stepped closer. There were images he'd seen from the galley. Another was Lark, using the video link. Her face was pinched, angry.
“Lark?”
“Dad? You're on Pluto?
“It's your sixteenth birthday.”
“Well, then, I'd better get down there,” she said dryly. “But first, I seem to have gotten the marble stuck.”
She could have sounded happy to see me here. Kyle had nicknamed the bubbles ‘marbles'—they were clear and round, and the most color was always the observer inside. They had become Shooter and Cleary when Kyle and Lark talked about them. Lark fitted into Shooter like the egg in an eggshell. Her pressure suit was painted as a gaudy Earthly sunrise, primarily bright yellow. It was plugged into Shooter's systems via a thick umbilical. Within the fishbowl helmet her black hair was pulled back so tightly her dark eyes looked asian. She'd painted yellow streaks into her hair.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
“No. Twitchy. I broke one of the big grabbers trying to get loose. One was busted already, you know. Shooter's older'n I am. Two grabbers are twisted up in creeper. The little grabbers are useless. I'll ruin this damned thing if I keep trying to power out of here.”
How did she get a round ball caught in a forest of long vines? A ball festooned with mechanical arms and sampler tubes... “Can you go a different direction?”
“I tried backwards and forwards. I'll shoot for a roll next, I guess.”
“You can ruin all the grabbers you want, honey. Just don't hurt yourself.”
“Duh.”
Henry contradicted him, “Lark, if you break off an arm, you'll breach the hull. Stop wiggling the ship randomly. And go to voice-only.”
The screen images froze. “Got it,” Lark replied, her image in the screen suddenly frozen with an angry, determined look on her face.
“Don't do anything until we tell you,” Henry said. “Think about conserving power. You can turn the video on again when we have a plan.”
“Stay calm,” Suriyah said, “Breathe deeply, slowly. Relax. Go easy on your water.”
“I was fully stocked when I left. That's power and food enough for days.”
“Ten of them, if you're careful,” Henry said. “We'll have you back in time for your party. But that's no excuse for waste.”
“A-okay. Think I should try for the roll? I can use the little adjustment jets.”
“Hang on and let us analyze for a bit.” Henry clearly had control.
“You'll be fine,” Kyle said. “We'll think of something.” His stomach was a knot and his fingernails bit into his palms. “If nothing else, you can climb down.” No, wait, those ten days worth of air and water were in Shooter! Not the suit!
“Dad, the door's jammed. I've already tried getting it open.”
“I'll be listening, Honey,” Henry said. “Just relax and stay available for questions.” He turned off the feed that sent the general conversation to Lark.
Paul edged towards the monitors and looked at the one with Lark's image still frozen on it. “Will she die?” he asked.
Henry put a hand on the boy's shoulder. “Not if we can help it.” He squatted to Paul's height. “It's a tough situation. She'll have to get herself free somehow. You and I can help Lark figure out what to do.”
“Can't we take the other marble?” Kyle interrupted. “I could use the arms to tear my way in—”
Henry shook his head. “The thruster died last week. It's not repairable. I ordered another one, more advanced. It'll be on the next ship, the one you're supposed to leave on.”