“Sure.” However blasé he tried to sound, the reality of being out in open space within an alien star system was making his heart judder. The telemetry would be available to Mac. Dudley looked around to find the reassuring bright star that was Second Chance. Seeing it shining against the starfield made his breathing a little easier. He searched farther, trying to find familiar star patterns amid the strange constellations.
Team C began jetting over to the Watchtower a hundred meters away. Dudley held Emmanuelle’s maneuvering pack as she shrugged her way into it, receiving a thumbs-up in gratitude. He enjoyed that, it made him feel like a fully paid-up member of the team.
“Right, that’s everybody out,” said Francis Rawlins, the leader of team C. “Make sure you’ve secured your equipment bag before you leave the shuttle. You can freeflight in your own time. Head for the beacon they’ve put up on the alien station. We’ll regroup there, and move on in.”
Dudley made sure the cylindrical bag was fastened to his belt. The others were slowly lifting off the fuselage grid. Tiny squirts of white gas puffed out of their maneuvering pack nozzles, just visible in the dusky light of the distant star. His virtual hand gripped the pack’s joystick, and he tilted it forward. The gas produced a dull rushing sound, vibrating against his back. But his boots left the grid, and he was floating away from the shuttle. Once again his heart went yammering as adrenaline cut loose into his bloodstream. He couldn’t believe he was actually doing this. There was a holiday he’d taken in his first life when he’d signed up to go paragliding; trusting himself to a sheet of fabric and praying the straps held as he and the instructor jumped off the top of a mountain. The rush of tension and exhilaration that hit him simultaneously when he saw treetops below his feet was like nothing he’d ever known. Now here it was again, far more intense than the first time.
As before, he forced himself to relax into the inevitable. It just took a while to convince his body there was actually nothing wrong, that the suit and the maneuvering pack were working fine and taking care of him. Inside the helmet he was grinning like a madman. His free virtual hand tapped a microphone icon, then keyed in a privacy code.
“I’m approaching the strange alien station we’ve called the Watchtower. All of us agree now that it was misnamed. This is no guard outpost, simply the sad remnants of an industrial facility that was damaged during a conflict that went nuclear. I can’t help but feel regret that all the effort and cost which went into establishing such an enterprise should fall victim to this primitive lack of emotional control. Although the Dyson aliens have accomplished so much, and I concede some of their technological accomplishments exceed ours, I hope they can still learn from the way our society resolves conflicts and disagreements.” That would go down well back home. Always make the audience feel slightly superior.
The course graphic inside his virtual vision showed him heading off to one side of the beacon. He corrected. Overcorrected. Then had to tip the joystick firmly the other way. This was exactly what his skill training memory instinctively warned him against. He just couldn’t integrate that knowledge at an autonomic reflex level. So he wobbled his way forward, gas burping from every nozzle of his maneuvering pack in a seemingly random pattern, and keeping a cautious eye on his relative velocity.
Francis Rawlins was easing her way in through the gap beside the beacon as he finally came to rest just above her. The other members of team C followed. Dudley looked around eagerly once he was inside, but the compartment was something of an anticlimax: a simple box of blue-gray metal, flooded with vibrant pools of light by the suit beams. Nothing to hint at alien-ness.
“Now we’re inside I can’t emphasize enough to use caution,” Francis said. “The Ops office is watching out for us individually, but they can’t compensate for every mistake. The only solution is, don’t make any. We’re not in a race, we’ll keep searching around until we’ve acquired the data which the captain needs, so don’t rush anything. Now, teams B, D, and E have already explored down to level five, and radially they went as far as sections A3 and A8 on your charts. They’ve placed comrelays to cover that area, but when you go beyond them you need to set up your own, these walls are an effective block to our signals. Do not allow any communications dead zones, especially in the connecting tunnels. We stay in contact the whole time, understood? Okay, you’ve got your assignments. Move out.”
Dudley studied the topography of the 3D chart in his virtual vision, matching it to the big tunnel entrance on the compartment’s wall. An orange line snaked through it, detailing his route. He brought the inertial guidance on-line, aligning it with the beacon.
“You ready?” Emmanuelle asked.
