Maelstrom by Paul Preuss Read Free Book Online Page A

tight and wait for the HDVMs.”
“I think we have a coolant leak. The temperature in here has gone up a couple of degrees in the last ten minutes.” Only Yoshimitsu’s husky voice indicated his appreciation of their fix.
     
It reminded her of her own discomfort. “give me a moment.” She opened her helmet and sniffed the air inside the pressure bell. Ozone. If she hadn’t been wearing the sealed suit she would have smelled it earlier.
     
“I’m going to reset the couples.” Sparta deliberately disengaged the acoustic couplers, breaking the sound and video links. From her point of view and Yoshimitsu’s, both pressure spheres became opaque again.
    Ozone accounted for her extra body heat, but what accounted for the ozone? She peeled the orthotactic glove from her right hand. From beneath her close-trimmed fingernails, chitinous polymerinsert spines emerged. She slid them into the auxiliary I/O port of her rover’s master computer.
PIN spines were not standard among Space Board inspectors. Hers were another of her secrets, like the name she called herself that no one else knew.
    Her data search of the rover’s internal sensor net took a fraction of a second, much less than the rover’s own outdated diagnostics. She pulled her spines from the console and retracted them, then replaced her orthotactic glove. With her rover’s good titanium foreleg she refastened the acoustic links: Rover Two’s bell became transparent again.
    “I can see you better now,” she said; it was a white lie. “Seems I’ve got a problem too–sparking in a compressor, and for some reason the scrubbers aren’t handling the ozone. At this rate I’m going to poison myself in twenty minutes. I think I’d better pull you out of there and make a run for it.”
    “Rover Two, please hear this.” The shuttle controller’s voice sounded urgently in both rovers. Port Hesperus was now directly overhead to the south, passing through the same longitude as the Lakshmi Plateau. “Your vehicle is handicapped. We urge you to leave the scene immediately and get back to the shuttle. HDVMs will arrive in an estimated ten minutes to assist Rover One.”
“Your passengers are dripping sweat,” Sparta said to Yoshimitsu.
     
“Right,” he said. “HDVMs are good for eating rocks, and that’s about all.”
     
“We’d better start now,” she said.
     
“You would make life easier on everybody if you’d play by the rules,” Azure Dragon’s radio voice said petulantly.
     
“Lend me a hand, Yoshi,” Sparta said.
     
“How about a whole arm?”
    Rover One’s second passenger, the tall man with the fine blond hair and bushy brows, had listened patiently to the exchange without comment until now. “Perhaps this is not a good time,” he suggested diffidently, “but if someone could kindly–”
“Don’t interfere, Merck,” Forster snapped at him. “They’re replacing her rover’s handicapped limb with one of our own.”
    Forster’s guess was accurate. Sparta and Yoshimitsu were inserting the good right foreleg from his crushed Rover into her empty socket. It was a dry socket incorporating only control connections and requiring no lubrication, designed for just such emergency limb transplants as this, in dessicating temperatures and the driest imaginable atmosphere.
    The two pilots had an excellent view of each other, as clear as if they had been a couple of surgeons standing across an operating table. But an outside observer would have seen the two rovers squatting head to head like a pair of blind mantises. One glowing bug was half crushed, nervously offering the other a jointed foreleg, perhaps hoping its vital parts would be spared–
“Okay, the leg’s in and Working. Pull your locking pin and I’ll lift you out.”
     
“Pin’s clear.”
     
–but the sacrifice was in vain, for the mantis that now had two good forelegs suddenly reached out and grasped the head of the other bug and tugged upward. The second bug’s round