“For the journey onwards?” Robert asked. “You’ve decided to leave, then?”
Bascal looked around at his crew. “We haven’t decided anything. We haven’t had a chance to talk, or even shower. I’m just thinking ahead. We certainly don’t want to let good equipment go to waste.”
“No,” Robert agreed. Among the handful of things a fax machine couldn’t produce were neutronium, collapsium, antimatter, or any product or component bigger than itself. The list even included that most commonplace of objects: the print plate of another fax machine. In a Queendom of plenty, these were hard-currency items, not lightly cast away. “But those little plastic space suits you came in are frightful. And you didn’t use lines? Or safety clips? Dangerous.”
“We know,” Bascal said. “We lost a man on the way in.”
“You did? Jesus and the little gods. I’m sorry. Can you send your robot out?”
“This thing? This Palace Guard? It won’t leave my side. Ever, as long as I live.”
Except that it had, just this morning, to save the lives of Bascal’s remaining shipmates. Conrad’s mind kept returning to that small miracle, mulling it over, scanning it for meaning. He was not a big believer in luck, but what did that leave? The god of lightsails?
“What about Martin?” he said. “There should still be a fresh image of him in the machine, minus only the death by suffocation. We should get him out of there while we still can. From what I saw, there’s not much holding it down. If it drifts away, we’re going to lose him again.”
“Oh. Good point.” Xmary groaned. “I hate to say it—I really hate to say it—but we need to go back out there. Now.”
Gaping, Robert shook his head. “You? Jesus, no. You stay here, my fellows. Inside. Money and I—all of us here—we’re experienced in this sort of vacuum work. We’ll equip up at the inventory and mount a proper retrieval. Bring your fax machine back in one piece.”
“Well, thank you,” Bascal said. “That’s very kind.”
“No, not at all.” Robert’s grin was uneasy. “You’re the prince, yah? I ask you, truly, how’s it going to look if we get you killed?”
An hour later, five of the men and two of the women had assembled at the inventory, and were quickly surrounding themselves with an astonishing assortment of gear. Space suits and ropes and harnesses, yes, but also strap-on tool kits, emergency tents and rescue bubbles, leak patch compound, wellstone sketchplates ... Gravity was much lower here, so while the stuff drifted slowly fore, toward the neubles and the swallowed comet, it did so more slowly than the new stuff was being added. So it formed heaps and piles, right there in midair.
“How long are you planning to be out?” Karl asked them wonderingly.
“Forty minutes exactly,” Money Izolo answered. “The limit of our fine-LIDAR scan.”
“The radar scan reaches farther,” Robert explained, “but it’s not so good at spotting fine particles, not unless they’re in fairly substantial clouds. LIDAR uses a violet beam—very good resolution. By definition, we’re in a high-density band—that’s where you go to gather snow— but at two kips, the right kind of snowflake can knock a man right off the hull. Or worse.”
“Such foresight,” Bascal marveled. “Such prudence.” Conrad couldn’t tell if that was a sneer or a compliment, or maybe both.
With a flicker of self-consciousness, Robert looked around at the tangles of equipment, then back at Karl and Conrad and Bascal. “I guess it does seem excessive. But a lot can happen out there, as you’ve seen. We go prepared, with plans and fallbacks and emergency scripts. We’ve never lost anyone, and God with us we never will. That reminds me: everybody store a fresh copy, or your blue ass is going nowhere.”
What a shame, Conrad thought, if all this youthful vigor—this viridity—goes to jail and idleness instead of to industry. What “genuine” mass wrangler ever worked so hard? So enthusiastically? Their jobs consisted of day trips, or couple-of-day trips, from their cushy, ordinary Queendom homes.
Robert waved a sketchplate, a schematic diagram of the barge’s fat cylinder, with the rumpled sail and shattered cabin marked against its surface with yellow lines, and a red asterisk pinpointing the site of the fax machine itself.
“We’ll egress from the same lock you folks entered through. It’s the closest, although the wreckage of your sail presents some problems. You cut through it on your way in, yah? The images confirm this, but it looks like there might still be some difficulty bringing equipment through.”
“I’m carrying five kinds of cutters,” Money Izolo said.
“Good. We’ll assemble in the lock, and you and I will be first out. Anyone object?”
There were some shrugs and murmurs, but no commentary, no objection. These blue people liked and trusted their Robert, and would happily do his nonbidding.
He looked at Bascal. “There is room on the bridge if you’d like to observe. The suits broadcast a holie signal for safety purposes.”
“Oh, yeah,” the prince agreed at once. “This I’ve got to see.”
Robert latched his tool belt and bandoliers, and finally snapped his helmet dome into place. The space suits were thick, heavy garments of gray-white wellstone and woven nanomachinery, vaguely reminiscent of the early-Queendom battle armor His Majesty had worn during the Fall, and was still frequently pictured in. They had a certain nobility about them.
“There’s room for two,” Robert’s voice said, through wellstone speakers. “I wouldn’t recommend fitting any more than that.”
“And I wouldn’t dream,” Bascal said with a bow, “of doing anything you didn’t recommend. You look quite dashing, by the way. Conrad, will you join me? Karl, join the others at the sound baffle?”
“Um, sure,” Conrad said.
Karl grumbled less agreeably, though, and Conrad didn’t blame him for it. Helping out with the breakfast cleanup sounded a lot less interesting than watching these amateur mass wranglers in action.
With the clank of equipment and the rustle of fabrics against the corridor walls, the Refugees launched themselves foreward, toward the baffle and the hold and the airlocks. Karl trailed sullenly behind them, and turned off to one side just as they were rounding the corner out of sight.
“Interesting bunch of people,” the prince observed.
Conrad nodded. “Very.”
Together they drifted to the bridge, entered, and socketed themselves into the seats like puzzle pieces snapping into place. In front of them was a holie screen, which Bascal addressed. “Display Robert M’chunu’s video signal, please.”
Obediently, the screen showed them a corridor scene, jumping and jostling, the view apparently from a sensor in the wellstone of Robert’s helmet dome. The Refugees were at the inner airlock, and presently its door whooshed open in that too-fast way it had. At first Conrad thought there was no audio in the signal, but as the space-suited figures glided one by one into the airlock, Robert’s voice called out crisply, “Secure handholds and prepare for hatch closure.”
And then Agnes’ voice: “Atmospheric pressure nominal. The bleed valve lights are green.”
And then Robert again: “Acknowledged, bleed valves green.”
And then they were silent again, although now that he was listening for it Conrad could make out the sound of Robert’s breathing over the hum and hiss of the bridge equipment itself.
The operation was interesting to watch: everything happened slowly and with crisp precision, yet none of the spacewalkers were idle for long. Once the lock was depressurized and the outer hatch opened, they began clearing away sections of sailcloth, and setting up tripods in little depressions around the lock which appeared to exist there for exactly this purpose. And then pulleys were attached to the tripods, and cables to the pulleys, and hooks and carabiners to the cables.