Scattered Suns - Kevin J. Anderson [203]
Still, she said, “I’ll do what I can.”
She sealed herself into the mobile exoskeleton. Robb could barely see her face through the angled outer plates. The hard-bitten woman looked terrified, but then she always did.
“Good luck, anyway,” Robb said, and he meant it.
The hydrogues had gone away, accompanying the little girl’s crystal chamber, and every creature in the citysphere seemed preoccupied with the strange visitor. Now was Anjea’s chance.
Clumsily experimenting with the fields inside her sealed shell, she found ways to make it move. It was like a remote-controlled mummy case, with all the grace and maneuverability that implied.
Robb fought back the anxiety inside his chest. This crackpot plan had virtually no chance of succeeding, yet it was their only glimmer of hope since the compy DD had spoken to them deep in the bowels of some other gas planet. DD had not found a way to free them, either.
“Even a chance in a million is one more chance than we’ve had up until now,” he said, trying to sound bright and confident. He and the other prisoners helped guide the enclosed shell toward the membrane wall. They pushed, and the shell slid through like a baby emerging from a slick birth canal. Then Anjea was on her own.
Once she reached the outside, Anjea had difficulty operating the controls, as if she were being buffeted by heavy storm winds and impossible gravity. But after a moment of disorientation, she managed to propel the chamber forward, adjusting her course. She only needed to cross a few dozen meters of atmospheric ocean to reach Robb’s empty diving bell.
“She’s going to make it!” said one of the prisoners.
Jerking forward in fits and starts, the protective shell hovered outside the hatch of the EDF vessel. Anjea struggled to get some kind of grip, to adjust the outer hatch using the coffin’s crude manipulators. The diving bell’s door was a simple mechanism designed to be foolproof and without unnecessary complexity.
When she succeeded in opening the hatch, Robb saw no venting of trapped air. Maybe the hydrogues already kept it at equilibrium pressure so they could study the interior. He prayed for Anjea’s sake that the mechanical systems had been shielded well enough to withstand the gas giant’s environment.
She managed to maneuver the stiff human-shaped shell into place and cautiously guided it into the interior of the diving bell.
The prisoners cheered. “She’s doing it!”
Robb didn’t point out that Anjea still had a full list of impossible tasks to accomplish before she got away. Even so, he was amazed she had made it this far.
First, she had to depressurize and repressurize the encounter vessel, if the tank reservoirs remained intact. The diving-bell hatch sealed again, and for an interminable moment nothing happened. Then Anjea used the crude manipulators to work the internal systems of the encounter pod. Status lights began to flash on the outside of the diving bell.
The ducts opened, and swirling jets pumped out the high-pressure atmosphere. Plumes of escaping steam sparkled upward.
“The systems are still working,” Robb said. “She’s venting their atmosphere! It’ll be like an air bubble rising to the surface of the ocean. She has a chance!”
“Not much of one,” said another prisoner in a hollow, hopeless voice.
Two Klikiss robots suddenly appeared atop a parabolic bridge. The robots moved their articulated arms, apparently signaling an alarm.
Curly metal pseudopods collected like puddles of solder and streamed upward. They gathered into larger pools, coalesced along ramps and polygonal platforms until they became individual hydrogues closing in on the encounter vessel.
Feeling sick inside, Robb gritted his teeth. “Come on, come on! Hurry, Anjea!”
A cluster of hydrogues surrounded the encounter pod, elongating into lumpy pillars much taller than their familiar copied Roamer form. Three Klikiss robots joined them.
The robots approached the diving bell. Hydrogues