Gregory Feeley - On the Ice Islands

Something grabbed her from behind. Yarrow shrieked, releasing the grip as a second arm snaked around her helmet, blocking her view.

Yarrow snatched at the arms, unthinkingly moving to break their grip on her throat. But the hands were scrabbling down her suit chest as though seeking to paw her breasts. She grabbed a wrist as its hand closed on her display stud and pulled it away.

Shifting her center of gravity, Yarrow moved to throw the figure over her shoulder, but microgravity marred her reflexes. The exertion spun her around, and she found herself face to face with George’s clensuit. Before she could react, its interior helmet light came on, illuminating a visor splashed with blood and a pallid face beyond, eyes bulging and crusted lips agape as if horrified to be dead.

Yarrow screamed and kicked out, driving her foot against the suit’s chest even as it groped for her own. The clensuited figure flew backward and rebounded on its cord, but Yarrow found herself receding rapidly as though the gliderail, the clensuit, and the ground beneath them were a video image contracting as the POV drew smoothly back. With a start she realized that she was leaving the comet’s surface.

She flailed, but there was nothing to grasp, no purchase to gain. A dozen meters away, the clensuited figure was fumbling with its cord, waving its free arm in a wide sweep. Yarrow took an instant to wonder why it wasn’t watching her in triumph or dismay, then gave herself over to panic.

No roar of engines, no whistle of atmosphere. The horizon was visible now, an uneven but perceptible curve. Yarrow was leaving the Teardrop on an almost straight path, and the ground was falling away rapidly.

She aimed her transmitter at the icefields below, hoping that a relay dish lay within direct sight. “Onboard: Emergency,” she said. “Am leaving Teardrop at apparent escape velocity. Acknowledge.”

Response would be instantaneous if it came at all, but she waited long seconds before dejection hit her. The Voice had plainly suborned the Onboard, assuming that her message had reached the ship at all. The duster would come after her only if It chose to do so.

With a small start, Yarrow realized that her recorder was still on. “I suppose you heard all that,” she remarked. She spent a minute calming herself by describing what had happened, then switched off. Should she have to leave a farewell message, she would take some care in composing it.

Her rate of ascent, she knew, was gradually slowing (if only slightly) under the pull of the Teardrop’s gravity. This pull, however, was also weakening with increasing distance, and probably at a faster rate, which meant that she would never slow to a halt and fall back. Yarrow studied the receding comet—now fully visible—with care. It was shrinking almost imperceptibly; conceivably she would go into an elliptical orbit. Of course, this would do her little good if the rotational period proved to last days or weeks.

No training course had counseled this, but Yarrow had watched enough videos as a child to know what to do. Her clensuit held a pressurized oxygen reserve, which could allow her an hour’s breathing if her recyclers failed. A hose permitted her to feed air into another’s suit in emergencies. Yarrow fumbled out the hose, aimed it directly away from the Teardrop, and opened the valve.

The rush of escaping gas distantly reached her ears. Inertia leaned into her, compelling her to control the hose with both hands. She called up a grid on her visor and watched the outline of the Teardrop against it, willing the direction of drift to stop and reverse itself. By the time she was certain she could see this, the reserve tank was 83 percent empty.

“Don’t know my own strength,” she muttered. Wild Boys tended to have strongly developed leg muscles. She had once imagined that this could get her in trouble.

Her helmet light, playing across the dark expanse below her, found the gliderail, a thread of reflective silver. Yarrow cut off the spray and ran her beam along the rail’s length. After a moment she found it, and jumped up visor magnification to get a clearer image: George’s clensuit, moving with slow deliberation, pushing itself toward the duster. Despite moving within an illuminated circle, it did not look up.

She was drifting toward the comet with dreamlike slowness, an orbital-ballistic dance outside the frenetic pace of human time. Yarrow positioned the hose and opened the valve once again.

The results were startling: the pressure gauge spun down to 0 almost immediately, but she felt only slight acceleration. Of course, she thought with awful realization: the remaining oxygen would exert less pressure. There was a law of physics concerning that.

George was growing steadily in her beam, a long, still figure nosing against the rail like a feeding fish. She would miss him on her present course, though not by much: her work outside the Lotus had sharpened her spatial hand-eye skills.

The tip of the duster appeared over the horizon, a clean parabola breaking the irregular salience. Yarrow swore aloud. If the shambling kuei made it to the ship, she was dead.

Some part of her had been readying for this. She opened the programmer of her clensuit, overrode its safeguards, and sealed the respirer membrane of her recycler. With the CO 2awaiting catalysis into carbon and oxygen thus isolated, she pumped it into the reserve tank. It made a dismayingly low-pressure mix, so she drained off nitrogen to supplement it. Her ears popped as the air pressure in the helmet went down.

Working quickly, Yarrow drove the gas mixture through a heating coil, then shunted its thrashing molecules back into the reserve tank. Aiming the hose carefully, she overlaid a bull’s eye on her visor, sited the kuei at its center, and released the nozzle. Her lungs began to itch.

The nozzle, hissing for scant seconds, faded into silence. Yarrow used its last puff to correct her course, aiming at a point on the rail ahead of the gliding figure. She took a deep breath, but the urgency signaled by her lungs did not abate. “Watch this,” she whispered to the tape.

The clensuited legs came up at her like a docking boom. Arms extended, Yarrow struck hard, clutching them before she had a chance to register impact. A second later came a harder blow: the cord securing George to the grip yanked taut and held. She felt her teeth rattle, but had no time to react: George’s clensuit, with more than human speed, was swarming over her.

Hands clawed for her chest, as she had expected. She knocked one away, grabbed the other wrist and tried to spin the suit around. The kuei lacked George’s strength, an advantage. Another: it was tethered to the cord, while Yarrow was free. The dolly was singing down the gliderail like a runaway train, exerting a steady pull on the clensuit’s movements.

Yarrow grabbed the suit from behind, pressing her chest against it to protect her display studs. George’s suit began to wriggle about with inhuman pliancy, and she tightened her grasp. Something gave softly under her grasp, and she nearly let go with a shriek.

She didn’t dare let go to pull out her air hose, even as black spots began to bloom against her visor, but it proved unnecessary. Indicator lights on her visor display abruptly changed, and a second later she felt cool air against her face. Dizzily she realized that her clensuit, sensing the proximity of a second unit, had extruded the hose like a proboscis and fixed it upon George’s emergency tank. She drank in her first breath in wonder, willing her arms clenched.

The clensuit sensed what was happening. It writhed frantically, then leaned forward to bump helmets with her.

“Yarrow, for God’s sake! You’ll kill me if you take my air!” The voice echoed in her helmet, tinny but recognizable.