Nikki’s hands are shaking as she and Alice help each other into their EVA suits inside the bug’s cramped interior. She’s trying to conceal the tremors like a mother not wanting her kid to see she is frightened. She doesn’t know why, but now that they are on the same side she feels drawn to protect the girl. It makes no sense: Alice is the one who appears fearless.
Or maybe it’s simply that if someone else notices, it forces Nikki to acknowledge to herself just how scared she is.
That selfish voice inside her asks why she is prepared to go through this in a probably doomed attempt to rescue some crazy girl she’s barely met, and who is most likely already dead anyway. But then, that selfish voice has been running the show for too many years, and nothing got better for her listening to it.
Also, this isn’t about a rescue. If they’re rescuing anybody, they’re rescuing themselves. It’s not like Nikki can happily get on with her life if she doesn’t go through with this.
She checks the last of the seals, not at all comforted by the feel of the material. Up here it is always depicted as a virtue for things to be lightweight, but it doesn’t feel like a good thing right now. The layer that will be between her and the cold of space, of imminent death, feels like gossamer. Maybe the barrier between life and death always is.
She tries not to think about the fact that limpet-bug crews do months of training and sims before they attempt any of this stuff, and even then, it is under the supervision of highly experienced colleagues. She and Alice are doing it with zero formal instruction, under the supervision of a one-legged drunk.
DeLonge has inverted the bug once again and brings it down to rest on the wheel, where it lives up to its name by clinging to the surface via six electromagnetic feet.
For safety reasons, the maintenance hatches are not controlled by code but by manually operated dial-keys, carried as standard by limpet-bug inspection and maintenance crews. It’s so that if something goes wrong, a worker isn’t lost for the lack of a security clearance to open the nearest route back to safety.
Nikki can see their target. It is ten or twelve metres away. Landing spots are restricted by out-jutting attachments, such as aerials and dishes, and by banks of solar panels, but she is sure he could have narrowed the gap.
She double, triple, quadruple checks the tether that will be her only means of survival should she get deflected from the surface.
“Can’t you get any closer?” she asks. “I don’t see any obstacles.”
“Can’t land on top of a vent,” DeLonge replies. “If it’s obstructed, it will trigger a report, maybe even an alarm.”
“I don’t see any vent.”
“You have to know what you’re looking for.”
They need to go one at a time, so that neither of them is out there any longer than necessary, waiting for the other to clear the hatch entrance.
“I’ll go first,” Alice volunteers.
That mothering instinct gnaws Nikki again, but not enough to make her argue.
They have a final check of their comms, ensuring their lenses have an open channel to each other. Then Nikki watches Alice crawl down through the limpet-bug’s door, the safety line trailing after her as she grips one of the purpose-designed handholds, curved bumps in the otherwise smooth surface.
“It’s a bit like rock climbing,” DeLonge tells them. “Except it’s the absence of gravity that is the hazard. Instead of falling, the danger is floating off, exacerbated by the fact that the spin of the wheel is always repelling you, with the same force as it is drawing people in on the other side. Progress is by reaching the next handhold and pulling yourself along. Mostly you can reach the next one before you let go of the last, but not always.”
“And what do you do then?” Nikki asks.
Alice illustrates. She seems to instinctively know what she’s doing. She uses the spin to move, gently pushing off the surface a few centimetres and letting the wheel pass beneath her. Using this technique, she makes it to the hatch in a matter of seconds, skipping several handholds. She’s a quick study, that girl. Or maybe she already has this training in some neural database that she’s tapped into automatically.
Nah. Nikki still isn’t sold on Alice’s android hypothesis. It’s maybe down to the fact she doesn’t believe human technology has reached such an apex that it is possible to have created a machine that can be so consistently self-righteous and annoying.
Nikki won’t be trying any of that skipping-holds shit. She’s got the insurance of a line connecting her to the limpet-bug, but that only means her life is entrusted to the integrity of the cable, to the strength of the bolts attaching the anchor, to the metal in the thread around the bolts, to the material of the EVA suit where the tether is clipped on, and so on through a dozen other things that could fail.
She begins to crawl out of the bug, coaching herself as she grabs that first handle. It’s only a few metres, and it’s not a climb. She’s not hauling herself anywhere, fighting against her own weight. She can do this.
She reaches for the next hold and gets her fingers comfortably around it, grateful in this instance for the thinness of the suit. Memories of an indoor climbing wall in Santa Monica come rushing back. Same deal: always look at the rock face, never at anything else. She stretches to grab the next hold, then the next, taking it steady, but then sees that the one after is just too far. Why the blank space? Were they trying to save money on one tiny lump of metal?
There is no alternative: she will have to kick off, push clear and let the wheel pass beneath her as Alice did. She’s going to have to work up to it, though. Find her calm, centre herself, go to a happy place, whatever. Just one more second. Maybe two. Possibly twelve.
Up ahead she sees Alice’s head peek out of the hatch, looking back to check Nikki’s progress.
“Come on. Hurry up.”
“Fuck you.”
Nikki lets go and pushes off with her feet as gently as she can, eyes fixed on the hold she needs to zero. It is gliding smoothly towards her outstretched hand when something slams her from the side, spinning her out and away from the wheel.
It is a vent, a blast of escaping gas. She can see it now: one second it’s invisible, the next it’s lines of a grate, an ejecting plume of vapour.
She drifts outwards, the surface of the wheel passing beneath her. The hatch is three times the distance now, four times. Then she feels the jerk as the safety line runs out and the resultant motion tugs her back towards the wheel.
She flails for a handhold, misses in her panicky desperation. She’s hyperventilating, the sound of her own breathing claustrophobically loud inside the suit. She can hear something else too, a wheezing sound, and is terrified that it’s an escape of air, a tear in the material.
She realises it’s DeLonge laughing. This shit must happen all the time.
On the plus side, it appears she’s been flung around to within an arm’s length of another hatch.
“I’m gonna go in this way,” she tells Alice. “We’ll rendezvous on the inside.”
That may prove tricky, but it’s got to be easier than navigating all the way to the hatch Alice went down.
She fishes for the key and tries turning the dial. It doesn’t move, which prompts another moment of panic before she susses that she’s simply not tugging hard enough because she’s terrified she’ll break the goddamn thing. She gives it a solid wrench and within another few seconds she is inside with the hatch closed again behind her.
Nikki enjoys a moment of blessed relief at no longer being directly exposed to space, before having to deal with another kind of blackness. She would confess she had been picturing a well-lit vertical shaft that would take her all the way to topside, like she has seen in the shuttle bays. Should have known it wasn’t going to be so straightforward, or even straight upward. Instead she’s facing a complex journey through interlocking ducts and channels, all of it in the dark. All she’s got is a shitty little light on the suit, and this new lens isn’t tricked out for night vision.
As she worms her way around this 3D maze, she nixes the self-pity by contemplating how some poor bastard had to build everything she is climbing through, before they connected this to the next section and created a new seal. This was somebody’s job every day, only metres from instant death, working in an EVA suit for air and as protection against the cold. And he or she still probably made less for risking everything each day than some pen-pushing corporate suit-full-of-nothing who signed off on the purchasing order for the materials.
Because of constant changes of axis, Nikki has no idea how far she still has to go. Her arms are telling her she has done enough climbing, but there is still no indication whether she is nearing topside. Then she crawls into another channel and feels water running beneath her knees, maybe a centimetre deep. At the next perpendicular junction, she looks up and sees it tumble down the wall of the shaft opposite an integral ladder.
She ascends the ladder and hauls herself into a gently sloping sluice, further along which she can see water and light spilling down through a grate. Nikki crawls beneath it and looks up. She can see foliage. Greenery. Things she generally associates with the tops of buildings, in Seedee’s world of contradictions.
The grate lifts with a gentle push and she tentatively sticks her head up, knowing it could signal the end if she’s spotted. There are shrubs and bushes and ferns all around, grass underfoot. Real grass. She is in a garden: not an agricultural space, a garden.
Looking closer she can see that there is a wall screened off by a row of thickly planted bushes. It is to create the illusion of the garden continuing, or at least of its borders being a dense arbour that might extend beyond the visible.
A pleasure garden at ground level, full gravity. An expanse given over to plant life, ground that might otherwise accommodate several storeys of exploitable space.
What would justify such an extravagance?
The air is suddenly pierced by a high-pitch squeal of laughter. It is both the most natural sound in the world and one that somehow does not belong on Seedee.
Crawling behind a row of ferns and peering cautiously through the branches, Nikki sees the answer.
Children.