Sealing the lock? I suppose they had to in order to keep from losing too much air, but that didn't reassure me much.
Gerbriik made it sound matter-of-fact. Sealing the Costigan wasn't quite that easy.
Clouds of swirling ice crystals rained around me from everywhere. Frost coated every surface, and my boots slipped off everything - bulkheads, decks, overheads. The sealer unit was more massive than a SARM, and the reaction from the nanites streaming from the nozzle kept pushing me back from where I needed to go.
It was cold. Before I managed the ten meters from lock to cockpit, I was shivering, despite the heating elements in the heavy gray coveralls. Frost began to fringe the breather hood's faceplate, and gusts of departing atmosphere tugged at me. The coveralls began to bulge, and that meant the air pressure in the Costigan was continuing to drop.
Then the pressure from the nozzle wasn't pushing me back. I looked down and could see a red light flashing. Empty - unit is empty. Back to the lock for a second sealer. I couldn't feel much in the way of air currents in the passenger section. So I gave the place a quick treatment and headed down to the cargo area.
Cold! The cargo hold made the upper level feel like Deep Lake in full summer, and the coveralls stiffened so much it was hard to move, even in null gee. My gauntlets were freezing and stiff, too, as though they had turned to the cold-hammered bronze of a statue to be set on a pedestal along the riverway in Henvor.
Fersonne was already in the cargo hold, had been all along. She was using the bonding unit to weld and fill a stress fracture that had to have been more than twenty meters long when she started. She was working on the last few meters. Back from the five centimeter-wide fracture itself, a line of frost had built up. The area closest to the fracture was clean, sucked clean by escaping atmosphere.
I started spraying where it felt coldest and kept spraying until that unit was done. I went for another, and finished it. I was working on the fourth unit when Gerbriik's voice broke through my shivers. My fingers and hands trembled inside the gauntlets.
'You've got the Costigan sealed. Get back to the ship's forward passenger lock, but stand back. We're going to open it and get you out.'
'Yes, ser.' We bolted up from the hold and waited by the Costigan'?, inner lock door. I stamped my feet to keep them from freezing.
More cold mist and ice crystals erupted once the cargo lock opened, but the gusting winds that had been there before were absent.
'Get back into the corridor,' ordered the maintenance officer.
We did, taking off the damp and frigid breather hoods -coated with frost and ice. Then Fersonne and I hung in midair outside the cargo lock, somehow sweating and shivering at the same time.
Gerbriik's image appeared between us. 'Good job. Commander Maestros wasn't sure you could seal that much damage, but you did. You two take off the rest of the shift. Get some rest. Sanselle and I will unload the cargo before the seals go.'
'Yes, ser.'
Yes, ser.' Fersonne's voice was as ragged as mine.
I wanted to grin - for a moment. If Gerbriik and Sanselle were unloading cargo, then we had to have done a good job.
'This cargo had some unique biologicals,' the maintenance officer added. 'Could have taken years to get them replaced. Commander Ferstil on Alaric will be very pleased. Your telltales say you need to get warm and eat. Do it.' Gerbriik's image vanished.
Neither Fersonne nor I said much as we pulled ourselves back through the shaft to mid-deck three. We found ourselves outside our quarters and canteen, still shivering.
The heaters in the gauntlets had begun to warm my hands, if slowly, too slowly.
'Tyndel?' Fersonne's voice was gentle, as gentle as I had ever heard it.
'Yes?'
'Know there must be someone else ... out there. Seen your face at times.' She swallowed, then moistened her lips. 'I won't ask.'
I waited.
You see something like that. The Costigan, I mean. You do something like that... gets you cold all over.'
'I know.' I thought I understood. I was cold all over inside, as well. I eased toward the brown-eyed woman and put my arms around her, just held her, and let her hold me, taking comfort in being close to another soul, and being alive.
That closeness, so welcome, led to a greater joining in her sleeping net, more of a full-body bare-skinned embrace than mere relief or carnality - lust limited partly by physics and weightlessness and by the need to comfort and be comforted ... and by old and hidden memories of a darker-haired woman who had also loved me and given to me.
In time ... we eased apart.
Fersonne looked at me, the brown eyes deep, not asking for more, not rejecting - just there. 'Thank you.'
I embraced her again, clinging to her, to her acceptance of the now, to the moment she represented, for both that moment and the understanding that, while the past could not be changed, or eliminated ... I had to take another step forward into the present.
In a sense, she was almost Dzin-like, while I had been required to learn Dzin.
After another long interval, she brushed back my hair. A gentle but warm smile preceded her words. 'We'd better eat'
We did. More than I would have thought possible.
32
To see what is, make your mind like a mirror, to reflect what is as it is, not as your heart or mind would see it.
On another slow day, after we'd serviced an inbound needle ship the day before, I had just refilled the linen storage closet on the uppermost level when the man and the woman in shimmering blue singlesuits glided and floated awkwardly toward the guest quarters. Blue usually meant senior controllers -those who made the decisions that guided Rykashan society. I had never met anyone in blue, only those in green - like Cerrelle - or silver, like Gerbriik. Or the medical types, in red.
I slipped to one side of the corridor as they neared, paying no attention to me.
'I hate null gee, Ermien.' The woman was short-haired and dark-skinned, and her voice was firm but not loud. 'You'd think someday we could master artificial gravity.'
'Not in our time, I think. Not while the physicists still come up with inconsistent and anomalous measurements for gravitons.'
'That's only in the engee fields.'
'Where else would you better measure them?'
'Engee doesn't follow the rules for anything else. Why would graviton measurements conform there? Or bosunic condensate density?'
My internal demons informed me about gravitons - particles defined as the quantum of a gravitational field with a postulated, if unmeasured, rest mass and charge of zero and a spin of two. I understood every individual word of the definition, and the definition not at all. I had no idea what bosunic condensate density might be, and even my nanite-provided knowledge base was silent or empty on that definition or set of definitions. Again, I wondered about engee ... the mysterious ... something ... that wasn't in the databases, or not the ones I could access.
'Like it or not, we're here,' the man replied. 'Someone has to oversee and evaluate the project's results.'
'Should we really have expended all the resources necessary to reach the stars? Do we need all these planets? Have you ever thought that some other intelligent organic life might evolve there? Ever?'