Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

No, not the way Bermley had. Bermley had been searching for weaknesses. The tech was sizing her up the way a butcher might examine a side of beef, or a mortician might cast a professional eye over the corpse of a stranger.

The tech had no interest in her, other than as a payload that was rather awkward to load, and a tricky one to maintain once in place. No doubt the tech bore no meaningful resemblance at all to Bermley, and the whole thing was in Sianna’s mind. But none of that mattered: Sianna could not help what she felt. Still, she had more than half expected to be kicked out of MRI for causing trouble—and if launching her clear off the Earth wasn’t kicking her out, then what was?

“All right, dearie. Ready to get on in?” the tech asked, her voice far gentler than Sianna had expected.

“Ah, um, almost,” Sianna said. “Just—just a second.” Sianna looked down at the personnel module, a box for transporting a person to space at absolutely minimum cost in the smallest space possible. The permod was lightweight, and could be loaded and boosted in any number of launch systems. This one was to be stacked in with a hold full of cargo modules and boosted direct to NaPurHab.

The personnel module was completely self-contained, and could keep a human being alive for perhaps weeks at a time in a pinch—if the human didn’t mind losing all semblance of dignity, and, perhaps, any shred of sanity. The permod treated a human being like a slab of meat that had to be kept at a certain temperature, in a certain atmosphere, with nutrient going in one end and waste products coming out the other. It was, in effect, a storage locker designed to hold a person.

Sianna did not like it, to put it mildly. The fact that the permod was almost precisely the size and shape of a coffin did not do much to make her feel better.

The permod was a banged-up rectangular slab of a box, formerly a gleaming jet-black but now scuffed up and banged around to a gunmetal grey.

The suit tech stepped down on a treadle switch set into one corner of the module, and the safety catches released with a disconcertingly loud clunk. The tech pulled open a small access panel and yanked on the lever inside it. The top of the module swung open in exactly the manner of a coffin. Whoever had designed this thing had not given much thought to the psychology of the occupant.

Sianna stepped forward and peered inside. She had gotten a quick training session the day before, but reality was rarely in conformity with training or expectations. The interior was an off-white rubber sort of material, all smooth, rounded contours. The outlines of a human body were molded into the bottom to create a form-fitting shape that was dished-out a bit wider than it ought to be at the base of the torso. Naturally. There was the issue of sanitation, after all.

“All right, time for the plumbing,” the tech said. “Off with the robe now.”

Sianna swallowed hard and undid the knot. She hated getting naked in front of other people. That had been part of what had done her in at Bermley’s school. They were very big on physical education there, with the concomitant communal showers. Sianna had earned plenty of demerits in her sometimes devious battles to avoid those.

The robe dropped to the floor, and Sianna stared straight ahead at the tiled wall, determined that the suit tech be utterly invisible. A hand Sianna was determined not to see presented her with the waste control unit, an ungainly white object shaped roughly like an oversized, rigidized diaper that opened up with a hinge between the legs. Tube couplings whose purposes she did not wish to consider came out of it here and there.

Sianna took the thing in her two hands with as much enthusiasm as she would have felt in accepting a dead rat. She opened the clamshell hinge and looked inside. The interior was coated with a clear lubricant gel intended to keep the parts of it that touched her skin from chafing. The parts of the interior that wouldn’t touch her were all odd-shaped recesses and discreet bits of valving and tubing.

It didn’t do to examine certain things too closely. Best to get on with it. She got ready to step into the thing.

“All right, now,” the tech said. “Could you spread your legs just a bit there?” Sianna forced herself to think of the cool, impersonal training session the day before, and the fact that she had had no trouble at all getting the waste control unit onto the mannequin.

All right, then, she would be a mannequin. It wouldn’t be her she was putting it on, but an inanimate object. Spread the legs. Swing the unit around and hold it between the legs. Use her right hand to push the rear half up against the buttocks—good, clinical, impersonal word, buttocks —stoop down just a bit to open up her—no, the —legs, reach down with the left hand and pull the front half up and closed. Snap the six latches shut, and the mannequin had the unit on.

It hung loosely on Sianna’s body. She switched on the inflator, and felt the unit snug up to her body in a most disturbing way. It felt cold, and stiff, and sterile. The lubricant was unpleasantly cool and slick again her skin.

All right, she had it on. The suit tech could now be allowed to exist, at least somewhat. The tech nodded her approval. “Good. Fine. Nice fit. But wait until we get you launched and you’re in zero gee before you try the thing out. The suction system will pull off the waste products while you’re in zero gee, but you’ll get one hell of a mess if you try using it on the ground. Okay?”

“Okay, yes, sure, fine,” Sianna said, her mind an utter blank.

“Good. All right.” The tech stepped around in front of her and started to point out the controls. Sianna forced herself to look down. “Suction is that green switch on the left front. Post-use sanitizer is the red switch on the right front. And make sure the suction system is on and running before you try anything unless you want big problems. But once it’s powered up, you can urinate and defecate normally.”

Normally? How the hell was she supposed to do anything normally when she was wearing a fiberglass diaper and stuffed into a coffin?

Coffin . Damnation. She had been trying to avoid thinking about that part of it. Coffins. Death. Sealed in. Closed spaces. Tiny space, no space, lost in deep space, out of control sealed in a black death box blasted into the sky —

No. Stop. Calm. Calm.

But there was no calm. There was only raging fear and the pounding of her heart, and the thought of the fast-coming moment when the tech would close the lid on her and—

God, no. Not that. She wanted to grab the suit tech by the collar and shake her and scream that this was all madness, that she was far too sane and sensible to stuff herself into that box and be blasted into space. But she said nothing, did nothing. “That’s it,” the suit tech said, completely oblivious to Sianna’s rising sense of panic—or perhaps determinedly ignoring it. “All set.” The tech seemed to have a limitless supply of meaningless little phrases of encouragement. “We need to spray you down next.”

Sianna nodded, not quite willing to speak. The spray was a combination of a skin moisturizer, to combat chafing, and an antiseptic-antifungal agent, to keep her from molding over in the confines of the module as she became increasingly ripe over the next few days.

“Okay, dear. Stand with your arms and legs apart.”

Sianna stood there with her eyes closed, legs spread, arms out straight, feeling naked and skinny and foolish and young and scared. There was a sort of gurgling hiss, and she cringed as the cool mist struck her back. She felt the spray working over her back, her legs, her sides, her stomach, her breasts, her neck. A bit of it spattered onto her face.