“Hmmph. Maybe so. You people are supposed to be the experts on all that stuff. But maybe we should get back to what you three will be doing.”
“And what will we be doing?” Sakalov asked. “How will we be getting to the Terra Nova?”
“That part I don’t know,” Bailey said with an evil grin. “We’re just getting you as far as the hab. The Nova will come and get you herself, I guess.”
“Yes, yes, we know that,” Sakalov said. “But how are we to get to NaPurHab?”
Bailey laughed unpleasantly, and Sianna disliked him even more.
“Permods,” Bailey said.
“Oh, dear me,” Sakalov said. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
“What are permods?” Wally asked.
“There’s no way a regular passenger ship would make it past the COREs,” Bailey said, ignoring Wally’s question. “Not the way they’re behaving recently. Too big, too good a target. We’re going to stuff you in personnel modules and put your mods in with a bunch of cargo containers on three different ships on three different days.
“And we’re going to have our own little deception plan, by the way. We’re going to throw all sorts of decoys and chaff and electronic countermeasures into the mix. Saturate the COREs’ patrol zones with so many targets they won’t be able to handle them all.”
“What do you estimate as the loss rate for cargo while your countermeasures are running?” Sianna asked.
“Twenty percent,” Bailey said. “But we think your odds are going to be a lot better than that in the permods. Tougher targets.”
“How much better?”
Bailey put the cigarette up to his mouth and took a good hard pull on it. He shifted his gaze away from Sianna and looked down at his coffee cup. “We figure the odds on any one of you getting hit by a CORE are eighty-five percent against. You’ll be sent during the period of maximum countermeasures. Besides that, your permods will be carried in small, fast cargo carriers. You ought to make it.”
Dr. Sakalov sighed and shook his head. “The odds are about what I expected them to be. But I have been dreading the idea of travelling by permod.”
Wally frowned and looked at Sakalov. “Permod? Personnel modules? What’s wrong with them?”
Bailey smiled unhappily, pulled the butt of his cigarette out of his mouth and dropped it in his coffee cup, where it went out with a phut and a hiss. “Oh, you’ll find out,” he said. “You’ll find out soon enough.”
◊ ◊ ◊
Sianna Colette, dressed only in the flimsiest of hospital gowns, having had the last proper shower she was going to have for a long time, steeled herself to enter the suiting room. Come on. She could do this. Wally had done this. Sakalov had done this.
Suiting room. There was a laugh. A nice, non-threatening name borrowed from other facilities where they really did put you in pressure suits.
Sianna stepped out into the suiting room, wearing nothing but the paper-thin robe she was going to have to lose in a minute, feeling far colder than could be explained by the slight chill in the room. The suit technician, a rather grim-faced middle-aged woman in a rumpled blue jumper, was waiting for her.
Sianna wanted to look anywhere but at the suit tech, but she forced herself to stare the rather bored, surly-looking woman in the eye. No, she was only imagining all that. There was nothing at all unpleasant about the woman’s expression. Sianna just could not shake the idea that she was being punished, and therefore the suit tech ought to look angry with her. Try as she might, though, she could only keep eye contact for a few seconds or so. The tech scared her.
Something about the woman’s face put Sianna in mind of Madame Bermley, the chief warder at the first boarding school Sianna had been sent to after her parents died.
That school, as a consequence, had also been the first school Sianna had been kicked out of—and Bermley had been the one to do the kicking. Bermley had always had it in for Sianna, always seemed to be able to brush past her young girl’s brashness and bring all the frailties and fears underneath to the surface.
Sianna looked away, pretending to be deeply interested in the blank wall behind the tech, but she could see, out of the corner of her eye, that the tech was looking her up and down, just the way Bermley had, and Sianna’s skin came out in blushes and goose bumps all at once.
No, not the way Bermley had. Bermley had been searching for weaknesses. The tech was sizing her up the way a butcher might examine a side of beef, or a mortician might cast a professional eye over the corpse of a stranger.
The tech had no interest in her, other than as a payload that was rather awkward to load, and a tricky one to maintain once in place. No doubt the tech bore no meaningful resemblance at all to Bermley, and the whole thing was in Sianna’s mind. But none of that mattered: Sianna could not help what she felt. Still, she had more than half expected to be kicked out of MRI for causing trouble—and if launching her clear off the Earth wasn’t kicking her out, then what was?
“All right, dearie. Ready to get on in?” the tech asked, her voice far gentler than Sianna had expected.
“Ah, um, almost,” Sianna said. “Just—just a second.” Sianna looked down at the personnel module, a box for transporting a person to space at absolutely minimum cost in the smallest space possible. The permod was lightweight, and could be loaded and boosted in any number of launch systems. This one was to be stacked in with a hold full of cargo modules and boosted direct to NaPurHab.
The personnel module was completely self-contained, and could keep a human being alive for perhaps weeks at a time in a pinch—if the human didn’t mind losing all semblance of dignity, and, perhaps, any shred of sanity. The permod treated a human being like a slab of meat that had to be kept at a certain temperature, in a certain atmosphere, with nutrient going in one end and waste products coming out the other. It was, in effect, a storage locker designed to hold a person.
Sianna did not like it, to put it mildly. The fact that the permod was almost precisely the size and shape of a coffin did not do much to make her feel better.
The permod was a banged-up rectangular slab of a box, formerly a gleaming jet-black but now scuffed up and banged around to a gunmetal grey.
The suit tech stepped down on a treadle switch set into one corner of the module, and the safety catches released with a disconcertingly loud clunk. The tech pulled open a small access panel and yanked on the lever inside it. The top of the module swung open in exactly the manner of a coffin. Whoever had designed this thing had not given much thought to the psychology of the occupant.
Sianna stepped forward and peered inside. She had gotten a quick training session the day before, but reality was rarely in conformity with training or expectations. The interior was an off-white rubber sort of material, all smooth, rounded contours. The outlines of a human body were molded into the bottom to create a form-fitting shape that was dished-out a bit wider than it ought to be at the base of the torso. Naturally. There was the issue of sanitation, after all.
“All right, time for the plumbing,” the tech said. “Off with the robe now.”
Sianna swallowed hard and undid the knot. She hated getting naked in front of other people. That had been part of what had done her in at Bermley’s school. They were very big on physical education there, with the concomitant communal showers. Sianna had earned plenty of demerits in her sometimes devious battles to avoid those.
The robe dropped to the floor, and Sianna stared straight ahead at the tiled wall, determined that the suit tech be utterly invisible. A hand Sianna was determined not to see presented her with the waste control unit, an ungainly white object shaped roughly like an oversized, rigidised diaper that opened up with a hinge between the legs. Tube couplings whose purposes she did not wish to consider came out of it here and there.
Sianna took the thing in her two hands with as much enthusiasm as she would have felt in accepting a dead rat. She opened the clamshell hinge and looked inside. The interior was coated
with a clear lubricant gel intended to keep the parts of it that touched her skin from chafing. The parts of the interior that wouldn’t touch her were all odd-shaped recesses and discreet bits of valving and tubing.
It didn’t do to examine certain things too closely. Best to get on with it. She got ready to step into the thing.
“All right, now,” the tech said. “Could you spread your legs just a bit there?” Sianna forced herself to think of the cool, impersonal training session the day before, and the fact that she had had no trouble at all getting the waste control unit onto the mannequin.
All right, then, she would be a mannequin. It wouldn’t be her she was putting it on, but an inanimate object. Spread the legs. Swing the unit around and hold it between the legs. Use her right hand to push the rear half up against the buttocks—good, clinical, impersonal word, buttocks—stoop down just a bit to open up her—no, the—legs, reach down with the left hand and pull the front half up and closed. Snap the six latches shut, and the mannequin had the unit on.
It hung loosely on Sianna’s body. She switched on the inflator, and felt the unit snug up to her body in a most disturbing way. It felt cold, and stiff, and sterile. The lubricant was unpleasantly cool and slick again her skin.
All right, she had it on. The suit tech could now be allowed to exist, at least somewhat. The tech nodded her approval. “Good. Fine. Nice fit. But wait until we get you launched and you’re in zero gee before you try the thing out. The suction system will pull off the waste products while you’re in zero gee, but you’ll get one hell of a mess if you try using it on the ground. Okay?”
“Okay, yes, sure, fine,” Sianna said, her mind an utter blank.
“Good. All right.” The tech stepped around in front of her and started to point out the controls. Sianna forced herself to look down. “Suction is that green switch on the left front. Post-use sanitiser is the red switch on the right front. And make sure the suction system is on and running before you try anything unless you want big problems. But once it’s powered up, you can urinate and defecate normally.”
Normally? How the hell was she supposed to do anything normally when she was wearing a fibreglass diaper and stuffed into a coffin?
Coffin. Damnation. She had been trying to avoid thinking about that part of it. Coffins. Death. Sealed in. Closed spaces. Tiny space, no space, lost in deep space, out of control sealed in a black death box blasted into the sky—
No. Stop. Calm. Calm.
But there was no calm. There was only raging fear and the pounding of her heart, and the thought of the fast-coming moment when the tech would close the lid on her and—
God, no. Not that. She wanted to grab the suit tech by the collar and shake her and scream that this was all madness, that she was far too sane and sensible to stuff herself into that box and be blasted into space. But she said nothing, did nothing. “That’s it,” the suit tech said, completely oblivious to Sianna’s rising sense of panic—or perhaps determinedly ignoring it. “All set.” The tech seemed to have a limitless supply of meaningless little phrases of encouragement. “We need to spray you down next.”
Sianna nodded, not quite willing to speak. The spray was a combination of a skin moisturiser, to combat chafing, and an antiseptic-antifungal agent, to keep her from molding over in the confines of the module as she became increasingly ripe over the next few days.
“Okay, dear. Stand with your arms and legs apart.”
Sianna stood there with her eyes closed, legs spread, arms out straight, feeling naked and skinny and foolish and young and scared. There was a sort of gurgling hiss, and she cringed as the cool mist struck her back. She felt the spray working over her back, her legs, her sides, her stomach, her breasts, her neck. A bit of it spattered onto her face.
“Oops. Okay, keep your eyes shut. This stuff can’t hurt you, but you don’t want an eyeful of it, either. Hold on just a second.” There was the bump of the sprayer being set down, and the sound of footsteps, then the tech’s voice again, gentle and close, right in front of her face. “Easy now. Coming in with a towel.”
Sianna felt the tech cradling the back of her head in one hand, and the soft terry cloth of the towel against her face. For a fraction of a moment, she was back in the safety of her childhood, in the bathtub, her mother using a towel to get the soap out of her eyes.
“Good. Open up now.”
Sianna did so, reluctantly, and found herself back in the relentless present, the harsh lights of the suiting room—and the waiting personnel module.
“All set now, dearie. Now let’s get the shirt and leggings on and we’ll be all squared away.”
Maybe you’ll be squared away, Sianna thought. I’ll be climbing into that box.
The tech stepped back to her workbench and came back with what looked like long limp boots. “All right, left leg up first.”
Sianna did as she was told. She stood on one leg, then the other, as the tech slipped the leggings on and did up the fabric-clasps that held them on. The shirt went on in something more like the normal manner, buttoning up the front. Both leggings and shirt were made of a very warm, soft, absorbent flannel cotton—the one concession to comfort in the whole operation. They felt good next to her skin.
“How… how long?” Sianna asked.
“How long until launch, or how long a ride it’s going to be?” the tech asked.
“Both,” Sianna said. She was having a little trouble speaking.
“Two hours until boost, and it’s going to be just about a three-day ride. Long time to be in a box, but you won’t be anywhere near the record. And you should be asleep most of that time, anyway.”
“Suppose I, ah, can’t sleep?”
“Then you take a pill, and sleep until it wears off and then take another pill. Keeping you zonked out saves on life support—and boredom. All right then, let’s get you in there.” And, maybe, if we keep you asleep enough of the time, you won’t go insane quite so fast. Even if the tech didn’t say the words, Sianna knew they were there. Thrown off balance by the bulk of the waste control unit, Sianna tottered most unwillingly toward the module.
After all the briefing and preparation, getting in seemed almost too simple. Sianna simply sat down on the edge of the module, and then put first one leg and then the other over the edge, bracing herself with a hand on either side of the box as she eased herself down into the module, as if she were getting into a bathtub full of slightly over-hot water. Except getting into a tub didn’t put her on the ragged edge of terror. She sat up in the module, and found that her waste control unit wasn’t quite fitting into the recess intended for it. She wiggled herself down a bit, and it dropped into place rather neatly and a bit abruptly, like one of those puzzle games where you roll a ball into a hole.
“Lie down, dear,” the tech said. Sianna did as she was told. She found herself lying very still, staring at the ceiling. The tech leaned over her for a minute, checking this and that, attaching hoses to the waste control unit and to the interior of the module.
“All set there. Now, I want you to try the sanitation system. Red switch on the left first, then the green on the right.”
What point in colour-coding the switches if she has to lie on her back and can’t see them? But Sianna reached down and found them after some fumbling. She flipped the left switch. There was a sudden, high whirring noise, and the feel of cold air blowing past her skin. She threw the right switch, and jumped a bit as warm water jetted through the unit. She shut down the water jet and let the suction system run a bit longer to help dry her off. She shut off the left switch and listened as the purifier kicked in, reclaiming the water for its next use in cleaning—or as drinking water. Even the lunatic optimist who had run yesterday’s training session and had told her how great the system was allowed as how the water wasn’t likely to taste real good after the fourth or fifth time.
“Real good. That’s working fine,” the tech said.
Wonderful. Just first-rate. What could be better. All
set. Here we go. Couldn’t the woman say anything else?
“Okay, now,” the tech said. “I’m going to close up now, and this hatch isn’t going to open until you’re safe at NaPurHab. You’ll have the use of your arms and hands for an hour or so, but once you get loaded into the launcher, the restraint system is going to come on. The airbags will inflate and hold you in place. You have got to get your arms down into the recesses molded into the padding before that happens.
“You’re going to be boosted at about ten gees. More if they change the flight plan. If your arm is lying against your stomach or something when the restraints inflate, it will be pinned in place. If that happens, you’ll be lucky to get away with a broken arm and crushed ribs. Internal injuries and bleeding, more likely.” The tech pointed to a small panel light that read “prepare for restraint” set into the inner lid of the module. “When that light goes off, arms and legs in the restraint recesses, and no excuses. You ought to have three minutes warning, but people who count on ‘ought’ get dead. If your nose itches after that light goes on, don’t scratch. Do you understand?”
“Ah, yes ma’am.”
The tech smiled, reached down and patted her on the shoulder. “Good. Have a good trip, and say hi to the Purps for me.”
“Okay,” Sianna said, and waved good-bye.
The tech stood up, reached up for the lid, and pushed it down on top of Sianna. The lid slammed shut with a resounding boom, and Sianna could hear the capture latches snapping shut.
She was in this box, sealed in it, with absolutely no way out, almost before she even knew she was in it. Probably the tech had done that on purpose. No sense giving a silly, panicky girl a chance to start screaming or scrambling out.
And no way out. No way out. No way out. Sianna calmed herself. No sense pounding on the lid, or screaming. The permod’s interior was well-padded, and quite soundproof. If the engineers who had designed these things showed little interest in the psychology of the passengers, at least they had seen to it that panicked passengers weren’t going to be any bother.
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