Nikki’s stomach lurched the first moment the limpet-bug started to move freely, and it’s lurching a shitload more now that she can see the outside of the wheel, spinning only a few metres beneath them. There are barely the words to express how much she is hating this.
She is close enough to see the joins between sections, and within the sections the tessellated pattern of interlocking plates. All she can think about is how this whole thing is being held together. She knows it has passed the greatest safety standards the human race has ever exacted, but she also knows that the motivator behind every increase in safety standards has always been that the previous attempt didn’t quite cut it. It’s still merely a man-made object, a human structure spinning in space. If it comes apart, everybody dies. In the history of human exploration, it is thus no different to any vessel that ever set to sea, and the fate of many of them was to sink.
However, it’s not the sight of the wheel’s exterior that is truly disturbing her, or of the massive structures she can see beneath the canopy on Wheel Two in the middle distance. It’s the endless nothing everywhere else.
Nikki has seldom been on a shuttle the whole time she’s been on CdC. If there was ever a way of avoiding it, then she took that option, no matter the inconvenience. She only contemplated it when she was on the lam for the same reason she’s prepared to tolerate it now: because there is no alternative.
Since she first arrived here, Nikki has taken great comfort in where she is not—that being the place she left behind—but she doesn’t enjoy being reminded of where she actually is. Some people love looking up through the canopy and glimpsing the Earth, the Sun and the Moon. Nikki prefers to keep her head down. She likes being on Mullane, a place of permanent night where the neon and the looming closeness of the buildings reveal nothing of what lies above.
It’s bad enough being on an ion shuttle, but the limpet-bug is like flying through space in a four-door compact. Okay, a little bigger than that, but what the hell, it’s as tiny as it is flimsy, so if confronting the very physicality of the outside of the wheel makes her uneasy, then the fragility of this flying tin can amplifies that tenfold.
It’s only one step up from being out here in an EVA suit, which to Nikki is the single scariest prospect on Seedee. She’d even go as far as to say they are the three most frightening letters in space, given what they stand for: extravehicular activity.
She has always been terrified that some emergency or some procedural eventuality would require it of her. At Seguridad, she has occasionally sat in seminars as Quadriga and FNG execs war-gamed mass-evac scenarios. If there was some uncontainable disaster on one of the wheels, and everyone had to make it to the other without recourse to the bottlenecks that would form in the spokes and the Axle, the planned response always involved EVA suits and massive human daisy chains. Nikki remains unsure whether she would rather head towards the conflagration than climb inside a flimsy piece of material and hurl herself into the void hoping she could be towed to safety before the oxygen runs out.
DeLonge, by contrast, lives for this shit. He was jumpy and apprehensive as they made their way to the hangar, as befits someone so besieged by terror that he had to be physically stopped from committing suicide less than an hour before. Now she would say he is quite literally in his element, except that this makes her queasy too. A pilot’s element would ordinarily be described as “air,” but that element has constituent parts you can actually breathe. They say nature abhors a vacuum, but DeLonge clearly digs it. From the moment they helped him into the cockpit, he has undergone a liberating transformation.
Strictly speaking, he shouldn’t be in control of any machinery, far less a space vehicle, due to the pain medication he is on, though it’s probably less of a consideration than the volume of single malt he consumed before boarding. Nikki is trying to take some consolation from the fact that at least he doesn’t need his legs to fly.
There doesn’t seem to be too much of a trick to it once they are clear of the structures, flying half a klick parallel to the Axle through three hundred and sixty degrees of emptiness. It’s only as they draw closer to Wheel Two that Nikki remembers it’s a lot easier being fired out from the bottom of the elevator shaft than executing the manoeuvres necessary at the other end.
DeLonge inverts the limpet-bug and brings them in close to their destination, matching vector and velocity in preparation for locking onto the rectifier that will guide them inside the elevator shaft. It makes Nikki feel sick, even though there is little sense of motion. It’s the visual effect of the speed corrections as he tries to match the spin, the view through the window making it look as though they are shunting forwards and backwards.
DeLonge looks frustrated. Nikki doesn’t know how long this usually takes, but it feels wrong. Alice senses it too.
“Maybe if you hadn’t drunk all that whisky,” G2S chides, helpfully.
“When I drank it I didn’t know I was going to be doing any space flying.”
“Yeah,” Nikki says. “And if I’d known we were gonna be doing any space flying, I’d have demanded you share the fucking bottle.”
“That’s what’s on your mind right now?” Alice asks, tense and surprised. “Ever consider you might have a drink problem, Sergeant Freeman?”
“No, ma’am, what I got right now is a fucking sobriety problem.”
The limpet-bug keeps accelerating and decelerating clumsily, failing to home in in on the rectifier.
“Why aren’t we locking on?” Alice demands.
“It’s not letting me. Looks like they’ve changed the codes. Maybe you shouldn’t have seeded those reports telling them how we got into this place last time,” he adds in a tone of counter-accusation.
“Are we screwed?” Nikki asks.
“No. I can still get you in there. This is a limpet-bug, after all.”
“Meaning what?”
“We’ve got clearance to open all maintenance traps and hatches on the wheel exteriors. Can’t guarantee where the shafts will take you, but you’ll be able to get underneath the Neurosophy compound at least.”
“Better than nothing,” Nikki admits. “So you just clamp over one of these hatches, form an airlock and we go down through the belly of the bug?”
DeLonge arches his eyebrows.
“Not exactly.”