28: Suit Five
It wasn’t like waking. It was a sudden emergence, a clash of cymbals. Her eyes gaped wide open, and were filled with dazzling light.
She dragged deep breaths into her lungs, and gasped with the shock of selfhood.
She was lying on her back. Her breath was straining, her chest hurting. When she tried to move, her arms and legs were heavy.
Encased. She was trapped, somehow.
Her eyes were open, but she could see nothing.
Her breathing grew more rapid. Panicky. She could hear it, loud in an enclosed space. She was locked up inside something.
She forced herself to calm. She tried to speak, found her mouth crusted and dry, her voice a croak. “Myra?”
“I’m afraid Myra can’t hear you, Bisesa.” The voice was soft, male, but very quiet, a whisper.
Memories flooded back. “Suit Five?” The Pit on Mars. The Eye that had inverted. Her pulse thudded in her ears. “Is Myra okay?”
“I don’t know. I can’t contact her. I can’t contact anybody.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know,” the suit said miserably. “My primary power has failed. I am in minimum-functionality mode, operating on backup cells. Their expected operating life is—”
“Never mind.”
“I am broadcasting distress signals, of course.”
She heard something now, a kind of scratching at the carapace of the suit. Something was out there — or somebody. She was helpless, blind, locked in the inert suit, while something explored the exterior. Panic bubbled under the surface of her mind.
“Can I stand? I mean, can you?”
“I’m afraid not. I’ve let you down, haven’t I, Bisesa?”
“Can you let me see? Can you de-opaque my visor?”
“That is acceptable.”
Light washed into her field of view, dazzling her.
Looking up, she saw an Eye, a fat silvered sphere, swollen with mystery. And she saw her own reflection pasted on its face, a Mars suit on its back, a helplessly upended green bug.
But was this the same Eye? Was she still on Mars?
She lifted her head within the helmet, trying to see past the Eye.
Her head felt heavy, a football full of sloshing fluids. It was like pulling Gs in a chopper. Heavy gravity: not Mars, then.
She saw a brick wall beyond the Eye. Bits of electronic equipment studded the wall, fixed crudely, linked up with cable. She knew that wall, that gear. She had assembled it herself, scavenged from the crashed Little Bird, when she had set up this chamber as a laboratory to study an Eye.
This was the Temple of Marduk. She was back in Babylon. She was on Mir. “Here I am again,” she whispered.
A face loomed over her, sudden, unexpected. She flinched back, strapped in her lobster suit. It was a man, young, dark, good-looking, his eyes clear. She knew who it was. But it couldn’t be him.
“Abdi?” The last time she saw Abdikadir, her crewmate from the Little Bird, he had been worn out from the Mongol War, his face and body bearing the scars of that conflict. This smooth-faced man was too young, too untouched.
Now another face hovered in her view, illuminated by flickering lamplight. Another familiar face, a tremendous mustache, but this time
Grove said something she couldn’t hear.
Her chest hurt even more. “Suit. I can’t breathe. Open up and let me out.”
“It isn’t advisable, Bisesa. We aren’t in a controlled environment. And these people are not the crew of Wells Station,” the suit said primly. “If they exist at all.”
“Open up,” she said as severely as she could. “I’m overriding any other standing orders you have. Your function is to protect me.
So let me out before I suffocate.”
The suit said, “I’m afraid other protocols override your instructions, Bisesa.”
“What other protocols?”
“Planetary protection.”
The suit was designed to protect Mars from Bisesa as much as Bisesa from Mars. So if she were to die the suit would seal itself up, to keep the remains of her body from contaminating Mars’s fragile ecology. In extremis, Suit Five was programmed to become her coffin.
“Yes, but — oh, this is — we aren’t even on Mars! Can’t you see that? There’s nothing to protect!” She strained, but her limbs were encased. Her lungs dragged at stale air. “Suit Five — for God’s sake—”
Something slammed into her helmet, rattling her head like a walnut kernel in its shell. Her visor just popped off, and air washed over her face. The air smelled of burned oil and ozone, but it was rich in oxygen and she dragged at it gratefully.
Grove hovered over her. He held up a hammer and chisel.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “Needs must, eh? But I rather fear I’ve damaged your suit of armor.” Though he had aged, he had the same clipped Noel Coward accent she remembered from her last time on Mir, more than thirty years in the past.
She felt inordinately glad to see him. “Be my guest,” she said.
“All right, Suit, you’ve had your fun. You’ve been breached, so planetary protection is out the window, wherever we are. Now will you let me go?”
The suit didn’t speak. It hesitated for a few seconds, silent, as if sulking. Then with a popping of seals it opened up, along her torso, legs and arms. She lay in the suit, in her tight thermal underwear, and the colder air washed over her. “I feel like a lobster in a cracked shell.”
“Let us help you.” It was the boy who looked like Abdikadir.
He and Grove reached down, got their arms under Bisesa, and lifted her out of the suit.
29: Alexei
It was an hour since Bisesa had vanished into the Eye.
Myra, bereft and confused, sought out Alexei in his storeroom cabin. He was curled up on his bunk, facing the plastic-coated ice wall.
“So tell me about Athena.”
Without turning, he said, “Well, Athena singled you out. She seems to think you’re worth preserving.”
Myra pursed her lips. “She’s the real leader of this conspiracy of yours, isn’t she? This underground group of Boy Scouts, trying to figure out the Martian Eye.”
He shrugged, his back still turned. “We Spacers are a divided lot. The Martians don’t think of themselves as Spacers at all.
Athena is different from all of us, and she’s a lot smarter. She’s someone we can unite around, at least.”
“Let me get it straight,” she said. “Athena is the shield AI.”
