Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [64]
Matthew sighed. The cavity was, he supposed, loosely describable as a couch, but the loose festoons of silky material that almost filled the available space seemed ominous. The captain’s briefing had referred to the flight-preparation process as “cocooning,” but Matthew couldn’t help thinking about what happened to flies entangled and entrapped in spiderwebs.
“Reminds me of a body bag,” Solari murmured. He obviously came equipped with his own repertoire of disturbing analogies.
“There are more than a thousand people on the surface,” Milyukov put in. “They all went through this. Admittedly, you’re the first two to travel as a pair rather than a foursome, but that should make it even safer. The cargo’s perfectly secure.”
There was no reason to doubt the last assurance. Before it had been packed the cargo must have been an awkward jumble of irregular shapes, but now that it was in place it had all the compactness of an ingenious three-dimensional jigsaw. Everything that the people at Base Three needed to put the finishing touches to their riverboat was in there somewhere, along with scientific equipment, foodstuffs, biocontainment apparatus, specialized sursuits, and numerous unlabeled parcels whose content Matthew could not guess.
“Well,” Matthew muttered, in a voice so low that no one but Solari could hear him, “if Bernal was killed because someone has it in for ecological genomicists, I hope the killer didn’t have an opportunity to sabotage this thing.”
“Me too,” Solari echoed, presumably hoping that no one had it in for detectives either.
Matthew put procrastination aside and climbed in. Solari waited for him to wriggle into his slot and make himself comfortable before following. Matthew placed the personal possessions that he had brought with him across the gulf of time on his chest, but he made no effort to position them upon his beating heart. There was such a thing as taking symbolism too far.
As soon as Matthew had wedged himself into the crevice and stretched himself out at an angle of thirty degrees the smart spidersilk got to work, weaving itself into an elastic chrysalis. Matthew knew that he ought to be grateful for the protection, which was intended to keep him safe from impact effects even if the dandelion seed did come down a little too precipitately, but it was difficult. It was like being embraced by an amorous blanket of intelligent cotton wool.
He did feel a flicker of momentary panic as his sight was obscured, but nothing actually touched his eyes and he was able to open them again after a moment’s uncertainty.
He kept them open, even though there was nothing to see but a silvery mist. He wanted to remain in control, to keep his adrenaline in check by the authority of his will. To be blanked out by his protective IT, he thought, would be an undue humiliation.
“Matthew?” said Solari’s voice, coming from a point not much more than a meter away now that the detective was ensconced in his own cocoon.
“I’m here,” Matthew replied. “I guess it’s not so bad. How long did the captain say the drop is scheduled to take?”
“We should be down within an hour,” Solari said. “Some fall.”
Matthew already felt virtually weightless, and wondered if he would be able to tell when Hope expelled the landing craft. The moment would have to be very carefully picked, to minimize the amount of maneuvering that the craft would have to do on its own behalf once it was adrift in the atmosphere.
When the expulsion eventually took place, though, he felt the shift distinctly, and was almost immediately seized by dizzying vertigo. He knew that the reaction was psychosomatic, produced by his imagination rather than any rude agitation of the statocysts in his inner ear, but he couldn’t help gasping. He knew that his adrenaline level must have taken a jolt, but he fought to suppress the flow, to keep it below the threshold at which his internal guardians would take fright. Subjectively, the biofeedback training he had undergone at school was less than forty years behind him. It should still