Expendable - James Alan Gardner [33]
The sterilization bombardment was another reason why we always let the robots seal us into our tightsuits. If you touched the exterior of a suit with your bare hands, the resulting fingerprints turned a burnt-looking brown under the onslaught of the sterilization energy. You ended up looking like some smear-handed child had wiped chocolate on your crisp white outfit.
Fellow Explorers didn’t tease you about that, but the Vacuum personnel always snickered.
Limbo
When the sterilization was complete, a bell chimed and a blue sign flashed PLEASE EXERCISE. For five minutes, we were supposed to get used to moving in the suit, by stretching, picking up small objects, doing deep knee bends, and so on. The Admiralty called this the “Limbering-Up Period.” Explorers shortened the name to “Limbo.”
It was a point of pride that Explorers never limbered up as specified. The prescribed exercises were invented by an Admiralty consultant who tried on a tightsuit and found (to her surprise) she couldn’t get the hang of it right away. Never mind that Explorers spent much of their four years at the Academy lumbering around in tightsuits. Never mind that by the time we graduated, we felt more at home in a suit than in street clothes. A consultant came in for a day and found she was clumsy; therefore, the Admiralty immediately agreed that her ideas about tightsuits should become official Fleet policy.
The de facto Fleet policy was more mundane: instead of exercising, Explorers used their five minutes of Limbo to empty their bladders. Tightsuits had extensive facilities for handling waste, recycling the liquids into coolant water and compressing solids into cubes that could later fertilize mushrooms; but actually using these facilities required painstaking attention to the alignment of valves, tubes, and bodily orifices. It was better to relieve yourself in the quiet safety of the ship than to try it under more stressful conditions planet-down.
Besides, thinking about the mechanics of pissing took your mind off the Landing. And if you let yourself get sloppy, your suit would stink of urine for the whole mission. An Explorer could pay a severe penalty for inattention; it didn’t hurt to have that kind of reminder in your nostrils for a few hours.
One Minute Warning
The PLEASE EXERCISE light went off. That meant we had one minute left. One more minute of Limbo.
During this minute, some Explorers prayed. Some sang. Some discussed final details of the Landing over their radios. Some talked to themselves about the great or mundane regrets of their lives.
Some screamed.
I don’t know what Yarrun did. He never told me. I never asked.
If he had asked me the same question, I couldn’t have told him what I did. I just waited. I just waited the full minute.
The Admiral’s Worth
But this time, I somehow couldn’t bring myself to wait in silence. Instead, I tapped a button on my throat to turn my transceiver implant to “local.”
“Admiral,” I said.
“Hey! What?”
“Admiral, tell me something you’ve done that you’re proud of.”
“Christ, Ramos, you should know better than to distract a man at a time like this.”
“Tell me something you’re proud of. I want to know what you’ve done with your life. I’m going to the for you; I want to know who you are. If there were a point to any of this, would you be worth dying for?”
Chee didn’t answer immediately. I could hear Yarrun’s breathing over the headset in my helmet. It was a little like snoring; his lip fluttered slightly when he inhaled.
I wondered why Yarrun had his transceiver turned on. Had he intended to say something too? And would he have spoken to me or to Chee?
Something to be Proud Of
“The thing I’m proudest of,” Chee said at last, “is my spy network.”
“Spy network?” I repeated. “What’s the point? The League of Peoples enforces peace throughout the galaxy. We have no wars. We have no enemies.”
“We have incompetents, Ramos,” the Admiral answered. “On every