“I have nowhere to put him. I checked out of the hotel. Where do I get suits?”
“Hmm.” Shylif grinned. “Let’s make that your first test.”
Twenty minutes to find a suit? Toby looked around, cursing under his breath. Shylif was walking briskly away, seemingly ignoring Toby now that he’d given him a task.
“How the hell are we going to get suits?” he muttered to Orpheus. “I mean, maybe I can rent one, but you…” He tried to think of similar situations he’d been in, either on Sedna or in Consensus, but couldn’t remember any. What would Shylif expect him to do?
Use the resources you’ve got. Which, right now, amounted to the his denner, the clothes on his back, and a pair of tourist glasses …
Of course! He lowered a mapping overlay onto his vision. He couldsee Portal Eighteen, about half a kilometer around the curve of the warehouse level. Toby did some queries as he ran after Shylif, and dozens of yellow flags popped up in his visual field, showing the locations of public pressure suit kiosks.
So Wallop was like Sedna: as with firefighting bots on Earth, pressure suits were one of those basic safety devices you had to have handy on a world like this. The atmosphere outside this bubble city was probably toxic, and you never knew when some accident or deliberate attack might pierce the city’s skin. Suits were everywhere. All Toby had to do was pause at one of the brightly colored pillars and drag out the collapsed suitcaselike shape. There weren’t any denner-shaped ones, of course, but he did find a bin full of survival balls. These were just sacks you could jump into and zip shut, but they had transparent windows and five or six grippies on the outside that could detach and act as hands or help you crawl.
“It’s this or you wait for me here,” he told the denner. Orpheus just blinked at him.
Portal Eighteen wasn’t the solid metal airlock Toby had been expecting. Instead, when he reached the outer wall of the tall warehouse space where it was set, he found himself facing what looked like a giant heart valve: three flimsy-looking plastic flaps overlapped one another to cover a circular opening about ten meters across. As Toby joined Shylif under it he could hear wind whistling around the flaps. “Is that air moving out, or something else coming in?” he wondered aloud.
Shylif shrugged. “If it was coming in, we’d be dead now.”
A heavy rail mounted in the ceiling ran through this insecure opening; hanging off the rail was a spindle-shaped transparent airship not much bigger than the shipping container they’d come to Wallop in. It was like some kind of deep-sea fish. He could see its internal machinery, and he could also see that there were no gasbags inside it—it was just a set of metal hoop-shaped ribs with plastic stretched over them. Maybe the whole thing was one big gasbag.
“Hey! What’re you doing?”
They turned to find a man in a half-furled pressure suit striding up to them. He was tall and sticklike, with long limbs and a ratcheting way of walking. Loops of rope and belts festooned with fasteners bounced as he stepped up to glare at the only humans on the floor.
Shylif said nothing; was this another test? “We’re here to work,” said Toby, trying not to sound defensive.
“Oh, you’re the replacements?” This from a woman who was standing about two meters above Toby’s head. She’d been adjusting something at the bow of the airship. “We’re on time, then!”
The man frowned at a point somewhere over Toby’s head—reading his virtual tags, no doubt. “I dunno. The big one’s flagged with a résumé as long as my arm, but the kid’s got no credentials at all. For all I know he’s never been outside before.”
Toby stuck out his jaw and tried to look bigger than he knew he was. “I’ve done hundreds of hours on the ice on Sedna.”
The skinny man started to say something, but the woman overhead guffawed loudly. “That mined-out hulk? What the hell were you doing there?”
Toby thought about it. “Growing up,” he said finally. Shylif was now struggling to suppress a smile.
“Aw, let’s give them a chance, Casson,” she said. “If they’ve done cold they might be okay.” She strode down the gangplank, and Toby could see she was wearing an outfit similar to Casson’s. She saw him looking and lifted her loops of climbing line and let them fall. “You need a Personal Flying Device and some cords. If you’re replacing the Segentry bot you’ll be on my team, lucky for you but bad for me if you don’t perform.”
Toby nodded. “I’m … Garren.”
“This one’s Casson. I’m Nissa. PFDs’re over there.” Up close she looked fairly ordinary, except that her eyes were a striking pale mauve. She pointed at a heap of brightly colored bins on the warehouse floor below the airship. Then she blinked. “Hey, what’s that?” She grabbed at Toby’s backpack.
Orpheus stuck out his head and hissed.
Toby tensed, but all Nissa did was shrug and say, “It’s like that, is it? He stays on board when we go in.” She shot a sidelong look at Casson, who shrugged.
“Okay.” Maybe these people had dealt with stowaways before.
“All right, now get goin’!” Casson jabbed a thumb at a line of bots that was marching up a gangplank into the open side of the airship, which apparently had nothing but ordinary air inside it. “We’re leaving in five.”
TOBY’S HEART HAD STARTED pounding when he entered the airship. The thing was so flimsy; it faced him with the reality of where they were about to go. He barely noticed the pressure suit building itself onto his body, and it wasn’t until Orpheus gently seized his ankle with his teeth that Toby snapped out of his terror.
He bent to stroke the denner’s head. “I’ll be fine.” When he straightened it was to see that they were already under way, sliding down the rail and through the city’s sphincter. This was a disturbingly biological experience. Once the ship was outside, though, it bobbed comfortably in the air. Toby didn’t know what made up Wallop’s atmosphere, but whatever it was, ordinary air at room temperature was lighter. He dragged in a couple of deep breaths to calm himself, then took his first clear look at the planet he was on.
Right then he almost begged Casson to turn around and take him back. Since he’d climbed out of the shipping container he’d known, in an intellectual sort of way, that there was no surface to Wallop. Now, looking out the transparent side of the airship and down through clouds, with clouds below those, and basements of clouds on abysses of more cloud … he had to find something else to look at.
Shylif was sitting quietly, staring at nothing. Toby’s eyes fell on Orpheus, who was also staring into the endless depths of coiling gray and black. If Orpheus had been a dog, his tail would be wagging. Toby had to laugh.
Shylif looked up, and Casson, who was up at the bow with Nissa, also heard the laugh and grunted. “Bots don’t usually do that,” he said. “Neither do first-timers.”
“It’s Orpheus,” said Toby. “I think he likes it here.”
“Orpheus? Good name. Maybe he always wished he had wings. Some of us are like that.” Casson turned back to discussing the flight plan with Nissa.
Now Shylif came to sit next to Toby. He nodded at the darkness outside. “I spent most of my life on solid ground. Took me years to get used to these worlds.”
“Plenty of them have solid ground, don’t they?”
“Yeah, but … not trees, usually. Not forests.”
“Ah.” Toby looked down. “I miss Earth. Have since we left for Sedna.”
There was a brief silence between them, then Shylif said, “You gotta know that lots of people go through what you’re going through. Except that most of them know about the locksteps in advance. But that sense of being ripped out of your world … that’s actually pretty normal.”