And then, with equal poise, it swept both arms in wide circles, slashing open a pair of flaps in the film that exposed exactly the thing they most hoped to see: beneath the flashing beacon—brighter now that the gray-black film was off it—lay a circular hatch with the word ENTER emblazoned on it in softly glowing letters. The Palace Guard tapped this word lightly, and the hatch slid open with jarring, shocking speed. And then the guard stepped sideways, pivoting forty-five degrees in the hatchway’s circle, and then stepped back, swinging up and out until it was standing on the rim again, vertical to the barge’s hull.
Poor Ho looked like a pretzel, still clinging to the robot’s leg, with his own leg firmly grasped by Karl. Nevertheless, Conrad was spellbound for a moment, astonished by the beauty and economy and swiftness of the robot’s movements. These Palace Guards would make amazing dancers.
Then its arm was moving, and Conrad was struck by the fear that it would simply tear Bascal out of the human chain, stuff him in the airlock, and let the rest of them join Martin in the Great Beyond. But instead it pointed, a fluid gesture that conveyed a sense of urgency: get in there, now. And Conrad wasn’t going to argue with it; he felt for a handrail he knew would be there, and dragged himself around and inside, hauling Xmary and Bascal and the others along behind him.
Inside, the hatch was nearly as large—well, half as large—as Viridity’s bridge. A white-walled cylindrical chamber, filled with handrails and winking lights and softly glowing paragraphs of text. “Caution.” “Warning.” “Zero Atmosphere and You: a Primer.” There was room for all five of them in here, but not the guard as well. And that was bad, very bad. But when Ho finally let go of that metal leg and bounced fully into the hatchway, the guard itself did not follow. Instead, it bent again at the waist, and tapped the rim of the hole. The hatch slid shut immediately, and the lights came up: bright white.
The Palace Guard had allowed itself to be separated from Prince Bascal. Good gods, what balance of risks and compulsions had prompted that? What sensor data was it relying on? Had the thing concluded Bascal needed his friends more than he needed armed escort? Had it suffered a moment of deviant compassion?
Almost immediately, Conrad felt the balloon of his space suit shriveling around him as the chamber filled up with air. This worried him vaguely; rapid changes in pressure weren’t supposed to be good for you, although he couldn’t remember why. He did feel his ears popping, but no other ill effects. Maybe the fax machine, realizing it was dumping them into vacuum, had compensated in some way? Made it all right?
This chain of thought was broken when the “floor” under them—really just another hatch, with the same ENTER sign on it—slid open with a whoomp! and a clang!
“Jesus!” Ho shouted down at the thing, and yeah, of course, they could hear each other now. They weren’t in vacuum.
“Guys, I’m running out of air,” Karl panted, grabbing at the plasticky material over his head and trying, with plasticky hands, to pull it off. Conrad didn’t see how that could work—even as a thin film, wellstone was tough stuff—but he understood Karl’s anxiety, and in fact couldn’t resist tugging at his own hood a little.
“Me too. Me too. How do we get these off?” Their voices were muffled by the thin barrier of space suit.
“You have to pull up the programming interface,” Bascal said. “It’ll take a few minutes.”
“I don’t have a few minutes,” Karl said, tugging harder, panting harder.
“You’re fine,” Bascal reassured him, though he sounded far from certain.
Conrad was panting as well, and looking at the world through the ever-thickening haze inside his bubble hood. The blobs of moisture there were crawling, ever so slowly, toward his left. Was there a bit of gravity here? It was a neutronium barge, loaded with supercondensed matter, so probably, yeah. But that didn’t help him breathe.
“You’re the only one,” he told Bascal, “who knows how to work these. There isn’t enough time. For everybody. Is there?”
And here, damn all the little gods, was yet another life-and-death triage operation. Bascal would take his own suit off first, and then Xmary’s, and then Ho or Conrad, and Karl—who clearly needed it the most—would have to come last. Could he live that long? Hell, he was turning blue already.
“The robot,” Conrad said, as the thought struck him. “It can open all of them. Quickly.”
“Robot isn’t here,” said Ho, not even bothering to append any sort of threat or insult. He was at the mercy of external forces—his life had just been saved by Conrad Mursk—and it was having a marked effect on his attitude.
“We’ve got to get out of the airlock chamber,” Bascal said, raising his arm up to shoo them all down, into the darkness of the barge’s interior.
Xmary was the first to go, and as she exited the cylindrical chamber, additional lights came on at the other side, revealing a sort of maintenance corridor or oversized crawl space: all waffled metal and access panels. Ho quickly followed her, and then Conrad, with Bascal trailing along behind, pulling a gasping Karl along with him.
But when they exited the chamber, the inner door didn’t automatically close, and Xmary had to hunt for the controls and then burn precious seconds reading the instructions—whatever they were—before deciding on a particular button and slapping it with her hand. Then the hatch closed, and next came a series of clanking and whooshing noises, followed by silence.
To Conrad’s surprise, Bascal set right to work on Karl, pulling up a programming interface on his back and tapping in a series of commands or menu selections.
“Shit,” he said once. And then, a few seconds later, “Come on, you.” Then he was silent for a while, working.
“Do we know the air is good?” Xmary asked.
“Do we care?” Bascal singsonged back in a snotty way.
And then, suddenly, a light flickered on Karl’s back, and seams appeared all around the garment, and it was falling open into man-shaped cutouts, the hood peeling back, the gloves splitting open. Karl gasped, and gasped again, and if there’d been any kind of real gravity here he’d’ve fallen to his knees. Instead, he relaxed into a fetal curl.
Taking the hint, Conrad tapped his arm, trying to pull up a programming interface of his own. But that sort of bottom-level interface was more Bascal’s specialty than Conrad’s. He’d opened exactly one seam before in his life—in the liner of Camp Friendly—and he realized with sudden panic that he couldn’t remember how to do it.
But then, with a whoosh! and a clang! the airlock’s inner door slammed open again, and there was the Palace Guard framed in the hatchway lights. Back with its prince again, after that shocking dereliction of duty. It seemed for the slightest fraction of a moment to consider the scene in front of it, but then, with a whoosh! of its own, it was in motion.
It threw itself at Bascal with such ferocity that it might have been attacking him, except that it missed, and in passing it dragged a finger vertically along his chest, then slashed it horizontally across his neck. The Guard’s trajectory carried it into the far wall, where it rebounded immediately on a path that carried it past Ho and Xmary. The slashing motions of its hand were almost too quick to see, and then its feet were on the ceiling and it was running or jumping or something, and it swung away on an arc heading straight for Conrad. Slash! Slash! For a moment, its arm and finger loomed large in his sight.