The Shattered Sphere

Sixteen The Only Way to Travel

“And here be coming numero uno,” Mudflap Shooflyer announced as the first of the Charonian things arrived.

“Thanks, Mud, but they didn’t name me for my hearing,” Eyeball growled as she stared out the porthole. “I can see it.”

“No harm in saying it,” Mud replied.

“But what the foggy blue that thing gone do?” asked Ohio Template Windbag. “Weirdest looking thing seen in some time. ’Cepting you, ’course, Mudflap.”

“Thanks for nod, hefe,” Mudflap said, clearly pleased with the compliment.

“Pipe down anytime you like, boys,” Eyeball said, struggling to concentrate on her instruments. Bad enough that Mudball smelled the way you’d expect a chap with that label would. Chatter made it worse. “Else clear out and watch from elsewheres.”

“Sorry. Will zip it,” Ohio said. At least Ohio had a reason for being here. He did, after all, run the hab. But why did he have to bring a schnorrer like Mud along? Maybe it was Be Nice to Losers Day. Eyeball knew it was sometime this week, but she’d been too busy to check her calendar.

Her hardware was all ticking along fine, recording everything. What was the thing going to do? She punched up the long-range scope and set it to auto-track the thing.

The massive Charonian sure as hell wasn’t like any SCORE or CORE Eyeball had ever heard tell of. Most of them were shaped like short, fat cigars. This thing was more or less rectilinear, and about twenty times the size of the biggest CORE on record. It had what appeared to be cantilevered swivel capture latches running along the edges of one long face. It was also dazzle-brite white in color, a definite departure for the Charonians, who usually favored a dirty grey for most of their gear. Sum up, a big white shoe-box shape with legs. There were fifteen more just like it on the way.

Now it was hanging in space, inside the Moonpoint Ring, and exactly abeam of the Ring’s interior surface, lining up with it perfectly. And then, suddenly the thing was moving, straight for the Ring, fast, like maybe it was going to ram it or some such. Oh, God damn, don’t let it be. “Were those things here to smash up dead Moonpoint Ring, clear the way for something else? The hab would get caught in debris for sure, beat to rubble.

But the big white box stopped moving as sudden as it had started, less than a hundred meters from the Ring’s inner surface. Its legs unfolded and it moved gently in, settling itself neatly into place before the legs wrapped themselves around the ring.

It sat there, quiet and peaceful, and that was that.

“Now what the hell was that ’bout?” Mudflap demanded.

“Won’t know for sure till rest of them arrive,” Eyeball said. “But my guess is the Charonian docs is paying a housecall.”

The briefing room was a dreary, windowless grey box. It was aseptic rather than antiseptic, too grey and too drenched with disinfectants for anything to grow, but a grimy, cold little spot for all that. Even without the disinfectants, it was too dispirited a place for any but the most determined of germs, and nothing around here seemed all that determined.

The air conditioning was winning out over the ferocious heat of the launch base. Maybe winning by a little too much. The spaceport was only a few hundred kilometers north of the equator, and every time Sianna stepped outside, she felt as if she were walking into a sodden wall of heat.

Sianna, Wally, and Sakalov sat on one side of a rickety, stained old table, the debris of some previous meeting still in evidence here and there—crumbled bits of paper, a dried-up spot of spilled tea. A far cry from the luxurious appointments in Bernhardt’s office only two weeks before.

Bailey, the briefing officer, sat on the other side of the table. His coveralls were rumpled, and he hadn’t shaved in quite a while. He was a slouchy, sallow-faced, rubbery-skinned little man, with what appeared to be the stub of a cigarette hanging out of the edge of his mouth. He looked as if he had not been to bed in ten years, and did not care.

“Aw right,” Bailey said, taking a noisy slurp from his coffee mug, “let’s get this thing started. You folks mind if I don’t throw ninety-four different sims up on the screen? I’d rather just use plain English.”

Wally seemed as if he were about to say something, but then he thought better of it. Bailey nodded, scratched himself, and went on.

“Good. Then here’s the short form: We’ve started the massive cargo lift to NaPurHab. We’re lifting at least fifteen major cargo craft a day, every day for the next three weeks, plus all the smaller stuff we can manage. We want to send everything we can, with lots of spares, because a lot of it won’t get there.”

“The loss rate is still close to thirty percent, isn’t it?” Sakalov asked, as if he were asking about the price of onions, rather than his own odds of survival.

“Worse than that,” Bailey said, a bit reluctantly. “The COREs have been getting more and more aggressive. We expect the loss rate to get a hell of a lot worse real soon. We have to assume that once the main body of SCOREs hits town, we will lose whatever remaining access to space we still have. The odds on a given cargo getting through will go way down. Say, to one in a hundred. We might be able to launch in radar-transparent stealthships, but that is very tough engineering.

“The good news is that we have gotten better and better at analyzing what the COREs do. Over the years, we have thrown a lot of cargoes at NaPurHab—and seen which ones get taken out. We know what sort of craft, moving in what sort of trajectories, the COREs are most likely to attack. We can send our cargoes in the lower-risk trajectories—and send you people in the lowest-risk ones of all. But there is a better-than-zero chance that the COREs will attack any given object more than two meters long within about three hundred thousand kilometers of Earth. If the COREs decide that you might impact on Earth, they will attack you.”

“Wonderful,” Sianna said. “How about if we bend over and you send us in one-meter-long ships?”

“Don’t think we haven’t thought about it,” Bailey said, “but we’d have to launch you rolled in a ball. You wouldn’t survive the boost phase. We’ve also learned that the odds don’t change much for smaller-size craft. Once you’re over that two-meter threshold, it doesn’t much matter if you’re two and a half meters or two hundred fifty.”

“Great,” Sianna said.

“I know,” Bailey said. “But the best we can do is get you up and out of here at the lowest-risk trajectories during the launch windows we’ve calculated to be lowest risk. And we want to get you up there sooner rather than later. The SCOREs are headed this way. We don’t know what they will do when they get here, but we have to assume they will join the COREs in attacking our ships.”

“So when do the SCOREs arrive?” Wally asked.

“We don’t know that, either,” Bailey admitted sourly. “One cluster of them will boost and then coast, and then another, and another, while the first drifts off course until there’s a course correction.”

“Sounds like limits on the ability of the Sphere to transmit gravity power,” Sakalov said. “It must be directing a single gravity-power beam from one cluster of SCOREs to the next, nudging each group when it can spare the power from some other need. The Sphere is spreading itself pretty thin.”

Bailey looked annoyed. “You know so much, you want to give out the info?”

“Ah, no, no. Please, forgive me.”

“Okay, we think their arrival has something to do with the Ghoul Modules—”

“The what?” Sianna interrupted.

“Oh, right, you weren’t around for that one,” Bailey said. “That’s what the Purps are calling the large Charonian devices that are docking themselves to the Moonpoint Ring. The last of them docked to the ring this morning, and they seem to be pumping power into the ring. It looks very much to us as if they are there to bring the dead ring back to life, reactivate it. Ghouls.”

“But why?” Sianna asked.

“To proceed with the Sphere’s original purpose in setting up the Moonpoint Ring,” Sakalov said. “To get through to the Solar System and start building a new Multisystem there.”

“Hey, real smart,” Bailey said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “But our team has been thinking on this for more than five seconds, and if you can prepare yourself for a shock, they see another possibility. We think it’s meant to be used as a bolt-hole. We’ve known for years the Sphere was afraid of something. Maybe that something is getting close and the Sphere wants a back door. Some hole it can open up, go through, and pull the hole in after itself.”

“The Dyson Sphere is way too big to get through the Moonpoint wormhole,” Wally objected.

“But the Lone World is the real Sphere,” Sianna reminded him. “It’s the brains of the outfit. The Lone World could go through the hole with a whole slew of smaller Charonians and set up shop someplace new, build a new Sphere.”

“What would it use for power once it was cut off from the gravity generators in the Dyson Sphere?” Wally asked.

“Who knows?” Sianna replied. “Maybe it can store power. Maybe it could absorb solar power in a pinch. If the Lone World drops itself through a wormhole, it’ll have done its homework so it can survive on the other side.

“The bigger question is—why is it setting up our Moonpoint Ring for its bolt-hole? It must have links to a zillion wormholes. Why does it want to go through ours?”

Bailey nodded, as if he were actually conceding that someone else besides himself might be capable of having an idea. “Good question. The answer is it isn’t going to go through the Moonpoint Hole. Best we can tell, the Sphere is getting dozens of old wormholes ready. At least we see a lot of things that look like Ghoul Modules headed toward a lot of other inactive rings in the Multisystem.”

“Misdirection,” Sakalov said thoughtfully. “Another little bit of evidence that the Sphere—or the Lone World—is in a war, a battle, a fight, with somebody. You don’t set up deception plans unless there is someone who needs deceiving.”

“Or if you want someone to think you’ve run when you haven’t,” Sianna cut in. “The Lone World creates a hundred places it might run, and then it hides in-system, leaving its enemy thinking it’s gone through one of the holes.”

“So where would it hide?” Bailey asked. “You’re talking about a world the size of Earth’s Moon here.”

Sianna shrugged. “Hide in plain sight. Disguise itself as a normal planet. Hide inside the Dyson Sphere. For all we know, its interior is a whole maze, designed specifically to conceal the Lone World in time of danger. Who knows?”

“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 traveling 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, rigidized 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 sanitizer 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 fiberglass 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 moisturizer, 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 color-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.

There was, quite sensibly, no way to open a personnel module from the inside. The danger of a panicky transportee popping the thing open at the wrong time was far greater than the danger of a transportee not being able to get out someplace it was safe.

She lay there, staring at the module lid, determined not to panic. The permod was really just a spacesuit shaped like a box, after all, she tried to tell herself, in the most reassuring inner voice she could. Being in a pressure suit had never bothered her. She had worn one on that trip to the Moon with her parents, a million years ago. She had worn one of those tourist suits to take a walk on the surface, and you couldn’t open up one of those without help. Yes. That hadn’t bothered her. And this shouldn’t bother her. No. It shouldn’t. It was reasonable reasonable reasonable that she could NOT GET OUT.

Sianna found that her fists were balled up and she was about to start pounding on the lid of her coffin—no, her permod. Yes. Use the ghastly, artificial word. Far better than calling the thing by its real name. But it was her coffin, or might well be, if things went wrong, and she might as well be in here, locked in here. The SCOREs were going to get her and she was going to be dead. Dead, dead, dead.

Wait a second. There was an external view control, right? She could look out. Yes. That would help a lot. She stared intently at the control panel directly over her face. Which one was it? She stabbed a nervous finger at one button, then another. There. That turned the monitor on, anyway. The flat screen came to life, about thirty centimeters in front of her face. Good. Nothing on it but a status display. Air good, temp good, clock showing the time. But what about the external view? External. There! An old-fashioned selector knob. She twisted it hard to the right and—

There! Her breath came out in gasps of relief. The outside world was still there, just outside. Granted, it was nothing but a view of the suiting room ceiling, but it was there, and it was outside this tiny box she was trapped in. Trapped. No. Don’t think about being trapped. Trapped in this box for three long, long days with no way—

Hold it. Hold it. Three deep breaths. She was going to have to spend three days in this box. No sense panicking just yet. Plenty of time for that later. The permod was all toughened padding inside, the comm and display and dispenser controls carefully recessed so you couldn’t switch them on by accident. Damn thing was a miniaturized spacegoing padded cell.

Well, that made sense. A padded cell was going to be all she was good for by the end of this.

There was a clunk and a thump and a bump on the outside of the permod, and Sianna could feel it moving. She looked up at the exterior view, and could see the ceiling moving around.

This was it, she realized. She was being moved, about to be loaded into the cargo hold of the booster that would lift her toward God only knew what.

Out into space, out toward a visit with the lunatics of the Naked Purple, there to wait for the Terra Nova and a journey toward the Lone World, and whatever awaited them all there.

Suddenly spending a few days in a nice, quiet tin can seemed like the least of her problems.

Come on, she told herself. Wally was doing this. An old man like Sakalov was doing this. She could do it.

Couldn’t she?