“I’m ahead of you,” Maris said. “It’s enough to run the tank’s internal heaters. Well, but it doesn’t mean that she’s alive. What do you see, Somerset?”
Somerset, hanging head down close to the tank’s sphere, his orange p-suit vivid against the stiff black sheets of the vacuum organism, was using the ultrasonic scanner. It said, “Nothing at all. It is very well insulated. Maris, you know that we have to tell Symbiosis.”
“If it is the missing passenger, she has to be crazy,” Bruno said. “Or why would she still be hiding?”
“She has to be some kind of thing,” Ty said.
“She has to be dead,” Maris said. “Let’s get her out of there.”
They set dots of plastic explosive around the almost invisible seam. They rigged the portable airlock over it. They took shelter behind another tank, and Maris blew the charges.
An aluminum disc, forced out by pressure inside the tank, shot to the top of the transparent tent of the airlock and bounced back to meet something shuddering out of the hole-another portable airlock struggling to fit inside the first. After nothing else happened for a whole minute, Maris sculled over to investigate. She pushed the visor of her helmet against the double layer of taut, transparent plastic, and shone her flashlight inside.
At the center of the tank, curled up in a nest made from the absorbent material and honeycomb vanes that had channeled the water, was the body of a little girl in a cut-down pressure suit.
They thought at first that she was dead: her p-suit’s internal temperature was just two degrees centigrade, barely above the freezing point of water, and she had no pulse or respiration signs. But a quick ultrasonic scan showed that her blood was sluggishly circulating through a cascade filter pump connected to the femoral artery of her left leg. There was also a small machine attached to the base of her skull, something coiled in her stomach, and a line in the vein of her left arm that went through the elbow joint of her p-suit and was coupled to a lash-up of tubing, pumps and bags of clear and cloudy liquids, and the three missing fuel cells.
“That’s what happened to the foodmaker,” Ty said. “She’s got some kind of continuous culture running.”
He hung just outside the hatch, watching as Maris and Somerset worked inside the tank, tying off the line into the little girl’s arm, detaching a cable trickling amps to her p-suit.
“She is hibernating,” Bruno said, his helmet jostling beside Ty’s. “I have heard of the technique. Soldiers on the other side were infected with nanotech that could shut them down if they were badly injured.”
“Then she’s a spy,” Ty said.
“I don’t know what she is,” Somerset said, looking across the little girl’s body at Maris, “but I do know that no ordinary child could have rigged this. We should leave her here. Let Symbiosis deal with her as I have already suggested.”
“I don’t think so,” Maris said. “The temperature inside her suit has risen by five degrees, and it’s still rising. I think she’s waking up.”
They waited until the Symbiosis ship was eclipsed by a freighter that was slowly rotating end over end thirty klicks beyond the shuttle, and then rode their sled to the hab-module. Halfway there, the little girl’s arms and legs spasmed; Maris held her down, saw that she was dribbling a clear liquid from her mouth and nostrils. Then her eyes opened, and she looked straight at Maris.
Her eyes were beaten gold, with silvery, pinprick pupils.
Maris touched her visor to the little girl’s. “It’s okay,” she said. “Everything’s okay, sweetheart. We’ll look after you. I promise.”
By the time they had bundled her inside the hab-module, the little girl was dazed but fully awake. Out of her p-suit, she stank like a pharm goat and was as skinny as a snake, in a liner that was two sizes too big. Even though the intravenous line had been dripping vitamins, amino acids, and complex carbohydrates from the yeast culture into her blood, she had used up all of her body fat and a good deal of muscle mass in her long sleep. She seemed to be about eight or nine, was completely hairless, and had bronze skin, and those big silver-on-gold eyes that stared boldly at the wrecking crew who hung around her.
Although she responded to her name, she wouldn’t or couldn’t talk; hardly surprising, Maris said, considering what she had been through. When Bruno tried to examine the blood pump that clung to her leg like a swollen leech, she drew her knees to her chest and carefully detached it, then reached behind her head, plucked the tiny machine from the base of her skull, and nicked it away. Bruno deftly caught it on the rebound, and after a brief examination said it was some kind of Russian Sleep gadget. “Some monster, boss,” he said. “I’m disappointed.”
“We could throw her back,” Maris said, “and try for something better.”
Ty laughed, showing for a moment the wad of green gum that lay on his tongue. He was fascinated by the little girl; his fear had transformed directly to excitement and a kind of proprietorial pride. “She’s amazing,” he said. “Could you have done what she did? I couldn’t.”
“None of us could,” Somerset said. “That’s why she can’t be a normal little girl. That’s why we have taken a very grave risk in bringing her aboard.”
“Aw, come on,” Ty said. “Look at her. She’s a kid. She’s half-starved to death. She couldn’t harm a blade of grass.”
“Appearances can be deceptive,” Somerset said.
Alice Eighteen Singh Rai watched them carefully as they spoke about her, but showed no sign that she understood what they were saying.
“She would have died if we had not found her,” Bruno said. “Whatever she is, she needs our help.”
“Of course,” Somerset said. “But we know nothing about her.”
Ty snorted air through his nose. “What are you saying, we should tie her up?”
“We should certainly take precautions,” Somerset said, ignoring Ty’s sarcasm.
Maris decided that Somerset needed something to do, and told him, “Before we can decide anything, I need you to find out everything you can about where Alice came from.”
“Somewhere on Iapetus, I should think,” Somerset said. “That was the shuttle’s point of departure, according to its manifest. It was on a straight run to Mimas when the emp mine intercepted it.”
“I’m sure you can find out exactly where on Iapetus.”
“I will try my best,” Somerset said, and swam off to its cubicle.
“And take the rod out of your ass while you’re about it,” Ty murmured.
“Somerset does have a point,” Bruno said. “We have to think very carefully about what we’re going to do.”
“I’m going to have to come up with some excuse for Barrett,” Maris said. “But first, I’m going to give this little girl her first shower in three hundred days.”
Alice Eighteen Singh Rai scrubbed up well, submitting docilely to the air-mask necessary in the freefall shower. Enveloped in one of Maris’s jumpers, she refused the bags of chow Ty patiently offered one by one, then suddenly kicked off toward the kitchen nook, quick and agile as an eel. She had ripped open a tube and was cramming black olive paste into her mouth before Ty could pull her away by an ankle.
“Let her eat,” Maris said. “I think she knows what her body needs.”
“Man,” Ty said, wonderingly, “she sure is hungry.”
Bruno said, “I have only a minimum of medical training, boss. I don’t know anything about mental illness or brain damage. The autodoc can work up her blood and urine chemistry for chemical signs of psychosis, but that’s about all. I hate to say it, but the Symbiosis ship has better facilities.”
“I don’t want to turn her over to Barrett.”
Bruno nodded. His eyes were dark and solemn under the brim of his knitted cap. “She’s one of us, isn’t she?”
“She’s no ordinary little girl. Somerset is right about that. But she’s no monster, either.”
“She sure is hungry,” Ty said again, watching with tender pride as Alice unseamed her third tube of olive paste.
Maris left her with Ty and Bruno, and, with heavy foreboding, wrote up a false report for the day log and sent it off. Barrett called back almost at once. He said, “I want to believe you, but somehow I’m having a hard time.”