The chief technician’s voice came through a small speaker in the collar of Lamont’s suit as he walked across the cargo bay to the airlock control panel beside the exit ramp. Then, a moment later, he muttered: “Holy cow.”
“Look, Rosey—” Lamont began to say, but the medic waved him away, turning to retrieve her helmet from the shelf on which it was resting.
“Oy,” She said, catching the attention of the others in the cargo bay as they did the same. “Double-check your seals.”
Sighing, Lamont pulled up the tight hood of his undersuit and placed his helmet over his head. The cowl that connected the transparent bubble to the rest of the suit contained both respiration and communication equipment, miniaturized to an alarming degree, with aesthetic qualities that were distinctly Martian. As he locked it in place, he reflected that the suits were something of an exception to the carefully maintained but nevertheless open concession under which they all lived. On Westward, familiar technologies and forms tended to mask the miraculously advanced Martian technology on which the whole mission depended—Escherspace, gravity coils, radiation screens. They had built their human trappings, computer consoles and streamlined modernism, over top these things as little more than a facade; a clumsy set of levers by which the rats could operate the experiment. Or at least feel as if they were. But the spacesuits were designed by essentialism. The basic familiarity of buttons and indicators on the cowl components did little to hide the marvelous weirdness of a garment that, with a centimeter’s thickness of material, could preserve a person in the unmoderated, radioactive vacuum of space. As with so many elements of this journey, Lamont would not have believed it possible if he had not experienced it for himself. His mind’s eye turned back to that terrifying session, a year ago now, when he had been guided on a brief spacewalk from the space lift platform over Mars; so that, in just such a situation as this, he wouldn’t panic. He wasn’t sure that it had worked. Be that as it may, the rush of cool, concentrated oxygen into his nostrils satisfied him that the helmet was properly connected.
There was an exchange of cross-glances and thumbs-up indicating that the other members of the party had secured their own suits.
“Ready?” Asked Ed, more or less rhetorically. The chief technician’s voice came through a small speaker in the collar of Lamont’s suit as he walked across the cargo bay to the airlock control panel beside the exit ramp. Then, a moment later, he muttered: “Holy cow.”
Six pairs of eyes turned to him curiously. Ed waved a gloved finger in the direction of Abigail’s mobile console at the opposite end of the bay. “Bishop, can you confirm these readings?”
Abigail nodded, her silver-hooded head bobbing inside the dome of her helmet. She crouched next to the apparatus that was plugged by a multitude of wires into the asteroid pod’s systems and tinkered with it for a few moments before turning back toward Ed and the others.
“I can confirm, chief,” She said, a note of surprise in her voice. “There’s an atmosphere out there.”