here, she thought. Not now. Not when I am so close.
“The queen is not feeling well,” Eponine said. “We may be leaving early. If not, we’ll find you when we come back inside.”
“I’m a doctor,” Robin Hood interrupted, moving closer to Nicole. “Maybe I can help.”
Nicole could feel the tension in her heart. Again her breath was short and labored. She coughed again and turned away from the two men.
“That’s a terrible cough, Your Majesty,” she heard a familiar voice say. “We’d better take you home.”
Nicole glanced up at another man dressed in green. Max, a.k.a. King Neptune, was smiling broadly at her. Behind him Nicole could see the buggy parked no more than ten meters away. Nicole was joyful and relieved. She gave Max a huge hug and almost forgot the danger all around her. “Max,” she said, before he put his finger to her lips.
“I know both you ladies are just delighted that King Neptune has finished his business for the evening,” he then said with a flourish, “and can now squire you away to his castle, away from outlaws and other unsavory elements.”
Max looked at the other two men, who were enjoying his performance even though he had foiled their plans for the evening. “Thank you, Robin. Thank you, Friar Tuck,” Max said as he helped the ladies into the buggy seat. “Your kind attention to my friends is most appreciated.”
Friar Tuck approached the buggy, obviously to ask one more question, but Max pedaled away. “It is a night of costumes and mystery,” he said, waving at the man. “But we cannot tarry, for the sea is calling us.”
“You were fantastic,” Eponine said, giving Max another kiss.
Nicole nodded her head. “You may have missed your calling,” she said. “Maybe you should have been an actor instead of a farmer.”
“I played Marc Antony in our high school play in Arkansas,” Max said, handing Nicole the diving mask for a final adjustment. “The pigs loved my rehearsals… Friends, Romans, Countrymen. Lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.”
The three of them laughed. They were standing in a small clearing about five meters from the shore of Lake Shakespeare. The trees and tall underbrush concealed them from the nearby road and bicycle path. Max lifted up the air tank and helped Nicole adjust it on her back.
“Is everything ready, then?” he asked. Nicole nodded.
“The robots will meet you at the cache,” Max said. “They told me to remind you not to descend too rapidly. You have not done any diving in a long time.”
Nicole stood in silence for several seconds. “I don’t know how to thank you two,” she said awkwardly. “Nothing I can think of to say seems adequate.”
Eponine walked over to Nicole and gave her a hug. “Be safe, my friend,” she said. “We love you very much.”
“Me too,” Max said a moment later, choking slightly as he embraced her. They both waved to Nicole as she backed into the lake.
Tears were running out of Nicole’s eyes and collecting on the bottom of her mask. She waved one last time when the water was up to her waist.
The water was colder than Nicole had expected. She knew that the temperature variations in New Eden had been much greater since the colonists had taken over management of their own weather, but she had not considered that the changes in weather patterns would have altered the temperature of the lake.
Nicole changed the amount of air in her vest to slow her descent. Don’t hurry, she counseled herself. And stay relaxed. You have a long swim ahead of you.
Joan and Eleanor had drilled Nicole repeatedly on the procedure she should follow to locate the long tunnel that ran under the habitat wall. She switched on her flashlight and studied the aquaculture farm off to her left. Three hundred meters toward the center of the lake, directly perpendicular to the back wall of the salmon-feeding area, she remembered. Stay at a depth of twenty meters until you see the concrete platform below you.
Nicole swam easily, but she was tiring quickly nevertheless. She found the concrete platform, descended another fifteen meters while carefully watching all her gauges, and eventually located one of the eight large pumping stations that were scattered on the bottom of the lake to keep the water continuously circulating. Now, the tunnel entrance is supposed to be hidden just under one of these big motors. Nicole did not find it easily. She kept swimming past it because of all the new growth around the pumping complex.
The tunnel was a four-meter-diameter circular pipe,? completely full of water. It had been included as an emergency escape route in the original habitat design at the insistence of Richard, whose engineering background had taught him always to allow for unforeseen contingencies. From the entrance in Lake Shakespeare to the exit, out in the Central Plain beyond the walls of the habitat, was a swim of slightly over one kilometer. It had taken Nicole ten minutes longer than planned to find the entrance. She was already a very tired woman as she began her final swim.
During her two years in prison, Nicole’s only exercise had been the walking, sit-ups, and push-ups that she had done at irregular intervals. Her aging muscles were no longer able to endure extreme fatigue without cramping. Three times during her swim through the tunnel, Nicole’s leg muscles cramped. Each time she struggled, treading water, and forced herself to relax until the cramp completely dissipated. Her forward progress was very slow. Toward the end of her swim Nicole became frightened that she would run out of air before she reached the tunnel exit.
In the last hundred meters Nicole’s body ached all over. Her arms did not want to push through the water and her legs had no strength left to kick. It was then that the ache began in her chest. The dull, disconcerting pain stayed with her even after her depth gauge indicated that the tunnel had turned slightly upward.
When she finally reached the end of the passage and stood up in a small underground room with only half a meter of water on the floor, Nicole almost collapsed. For several minutes she tried unsuccessfully to regain an equilibrium level in her breathing and pulse rate. Nicole did not even have enough strength left to lift off the metal exit cover above her head. Worried that she had pushed herself beyond safe physical limits, Nicole decided to remain in the tunnel and take a short nap.
She awakened two hours later when she heard a bizarre pitter-patter above her. Nicole stood directly under me cover and listened carefully. She could hear voices, but could not isolate what was being said. What’s going on? she asked herself, her heart rate suddenly accelerating. If I’ve been discovered by the police, why don’t they just open the cover?
Nicole moved quietly in the darkness over to her diving gear, which was sitting against the wall on the opposite side of the tunnel. Suddenly there was a sharp knock on the cover. “Are you down there, Nicole?” the robot Joan asked. “If so, identify yourself immediately. We have some warm clothes up here for you, but we are not strong enough to remove the cover.”
“Yes, it’s me,” Nicole cried with relief. “I’ll climb out as soon as I can.”
In her wet suit Nicole became quickly chilled in the bracing outside air of Rama, where the temperature was only a few degrees above freezing. Her teeth chattered during the eighty-meter walk in the dark to where her food and dry clothing were cached.
When the trio reached the supplies, Joan and Eleanor instructed Nicole to put on the army uniform that Ellie and Eponine had left for her. When Nicole asked why, the robots explained that to reach New York, it was necessary for them to pass through the second habitat. “In case we are discovered,” Eleanor said when she was safely sitting in Nicole’s shirt pocket, “it will be easier to talk our way out of trouble if you are wearing a soldier’s uniform.”
Nicole put on the long underwear and the uniform.
When she was no longer cold, she realized that she was extremely hungry. While she was eating the food Eponine had packed in the cache, Nicole placed all the other items that had been wrapped in the sheet into the backpack she had been carrying under her diving vest.
There was a problem entering the second habitat. Nicole and the two robots in her pocket had not encountered any humans at all in the Central Plain, but the entrance to what had once been the home of the avians and sessiles was guarded by a sentry. Eleanor had gone forward to scout and had reported the difficulty. The trio stopped three to four hundred meters away from the main traffic route between the two habitats.
“This must be a new security precaution, added since your escape,” Joan said to Nicole. “We’ve never had
