She turned and glided down the corridor, never looking back.
I said nothing, half waiting for her to turn. When she didn't but disappeared into the transverse shaft, I finally shut the door, sliding back into my cube, where I floated beside my sleeping net, looking blankly beyond it at the dull composite bulkheads and the even duller deck that seldom felt the force of boots. Why had she come?
I had wanted to follow her down the corridor, but I couldn't. Not so long as I could not accept being a needle jockey. Yet my eyes burned.
How could I believe she didn't care? But why had she asked that last Dzin-like question? Because I was accepting a current reality as an eternal one?
Somewhere, deep inside, I could almost feel a mirror shattering, and I didn't know even what image had been held on the unseen glass. Even though I turned off the dim light and climbed back into the net, I did not sleep. Too many faces floated through the darkness, and the only one I did not recognize was mine.
36
The world is a mirror lit by consciousness: in the darkness it is empty.
Both Fersonne and Sanselle took me on outside orientations twice before I started joining them on outside repair tasks. First, I did simple things - like inspect the station's hull. I understood that nanite-enhanced human vision could see more than all but the best scanners and interpret what was seen better than any AI available. It seemed anachronistic in one way, and in total accord with Dzin in another. That provided me with a rare chuckle, as I considered what Manwarr would have thought to have one of his pupils standing on a dull gray hull in the middle of a field of stars studying the composite with demon-aided eyes.
After the two other techs determined that I wasn't hopeless, I was pressed into service replacing the dampers and cradles on the center cargo lock, the number two lock. That took the three of us - and Gerbriik - nearly a standard week.
I didn't know what Gerbriik had in mind when he next summoned me down to the station's number one cargo lock. Sanselle was waiting, but the maintenance officer wasn't there. Nor was Fersonne. I stepped through the open inner door.
The sandy blonde waited until I was well inside the lock before she spoke. 'Every other station objective year, we resurface the hull. This time, you get to help.' Sanselle grinned, not quite maliciously. She gestured toward the big cylinder webbed to the deck of the number one cargo lock. 'This is one of the outside bonders. We're behind schedule some because the engineers needed both bonders to finish the repairs to the Costigan!
I looked at the dull composite of the cylinder's exterior - more like a small barrel with a snout at one end and an attached seat at the other end. Mounted on the blunt end of the barrel facing the seat was a control panel.
'The skin gets scratched by every stray micrometeor. Some impacts aren't so small. Rebonding makes sure that the only way the station gets destroyed is by something large and swift' Sanselle's thin lips curled away from the even teeth.
All demons had perfect teeth. Mine were as well, though they had not been when I had been the Dzin master of Hybra.
'The outside repair bonders are like SARMs,' she continued. 'The controls are more complex; they're more massive, and you have to anchor them ...'
As she continued the explanation, I wondered why someone couldn't just put the bonders on tracks or channels and let them circle the station endlessly. Instead of asking, I searched all the knowledge, useless and otherwise, that had been poured into me since I had left Dorcha. The answer was simple enough. The bonders - undirected - would fill every crack they perceived, including lock edges and joints for exterior mounted equipment. The sensors and AI capabilities necessary to direct the bonders were too costly and too sensitive to transport by needle ships except with special handling and packing. In short, we were far cheaper.
I had to shake my head at that. I could repay my debts to demon society by working fifteen years in high-level menial labor - a repayment rate nearly three times or more the norm from what I could calculate. And I was cheaper than the transport of mid-level AI equipment and sensors, or the kind that could operate in vacuum.
'... because of the reaction force of the bonding, what we do is weld a track in place on the surface and run the bonder along the track. First, we'll weld three lines of track onto the station's hull. Then you run the bonder down the first. While you're running the bonder, I'll lay out the fourth and fifth tracks. Then I'll shift the bonder to the second track, and you weld down the fourth and fifth tracks.'
I'd read about tracks and the ancient steam-powered locomotives, but those weren't what Sanselle had in mind.
'Here's the track we'll start with.' The sandy-haired blonde pointed to the pallet webbed down on the far side of the bonder. Each section of track was a length of gray composite three meters long with the cross section of an inverted trapezoid.
I wondered how the track was welded.
The nanite-based composite spot-welder she thrust at me must have massed twenty kilograms. 'I lay out the track. You weld it.'
Instead of asking how, I called up the knowledge from the briefing spray. Theoretically, it was simple: Put the not-quite-right-angled welding head adjacent to hull and track and press the welding stud.
In practice it proved more difficult.
Sanselle tacked each rail in place with a nanite-based space glue, and each was set parallel to the first, exactly point seven-five meters between rail edges, as measured by the marking laser she employed. She moved easily along the tether line stretched between two rings, using the line as a brace.
I still didn't move that easily. The outside gauntlets were bulkier than the inside ones, and my fingers didn't feel quite where I thought they were. Then I had to line up the welding head mostly by feel, and I was a visual person. The stickpads on the outside boots didn't grip unless I set them down squarely, and I'd never walked quite squarely.
I tried to ease the welding head down in place, ever so gently, but my boot slipped, and so did the spot-welder. Cold and salty sweat ran into my eyes. Some felt like it had pooled in my boots, and I sweated and shivered simultaneously.
'Are you still on that first section, Tyndel?'
I was still on the first spot-weld of the first section. The track wanted to bend up from the hull because the glue didn't hold much once I banged the track with the welder. When I pressed the stud, the energy from the welding head wanted to push me away from the track and the hull, despite the pads of the boots and the tether line.
Just short of halfway through the shift, I had managed to weld down the first line of composite track - all of eighteen meters - six segments. I got a second line down in a third of that time.
'Let's get the bonder. You can run it while I weld.' Sanselle's orders were half amused, half disgusted. 'It's getting faster.'
'I'm freezing.'
'How do we get this up when we're done?' I pulled myself along the tether line after her and toward the number one cargo lock, one hand on the spot-welder.
'We don't. The machine fuses it into the hull. It's part of the composite feedstock.'
Sanselle guided the bonder out of the lock, and I pulled myself back along the tether, wondering why I'd bothered, feeling dwarfed by the bulk of the bonder and minimized by Sanselle's crisp expertise. After she settled the bonder in place on the ridge of composite, she took the spot-welder from me.
'Watch. You just strap in and follow the monitors. This one on the top right is for composite supplies in the bins. The track only supplies about a third of what's used. This is available power ...'