9
checked the oxygen levels in the suit - less than two hours. Another job Ogdan had overlooked. If she had had time to even think about this and be angry, she would, but the immediate crisis didn’t leave any room for recriminating thoughts. She stumbled in to the VC, and cycled outside. The Copes were the nearest neighbours, only ten minutes by buggy, so she was not overly concerned about her somewhat paltry oxygen supply.
She was not very familiar with the operation of the buggy, as it was another item that came under Ogdan’s purview, but she did know how to drive it, and was consequently alarmed when nothing happened after she had clambered on in her ungainly suit and pressed the button to engage the engine. She tried again; there was still no response. She clambered off and lifted the access panel to inspect the battery. A small red diode was blinking on and off slowly. She knelt down in her suit to read the adjacent LCD, pushing her faceplate against the panel to read the tiny words:
Warning! Recharge batteries immediately to avoid damage to this vehicle.
At this point Neenah began to panic. She knew that the buggy’s batteries took ten hours to recharge from flat, so she was going to walk to the Copes’ and that would take a good hour, or suffocate where she was standing. She could feel her pulse racing and she was getting cold and clammy inside the suit. She was fortunate enough to have received some basic induction at GC about emergency situations, so she knew she had to stay relaxed or she would burn up her oxygen even more quickly. She forced herself to breathe slowly, “centring down” as it had been called in her training. Knowing she now had no option, she started the walk to the Copes’. Trying to walk both quickly and slowly at the same time to avoid excessive exercise was hard. Almost obsessively, she started glancing up at the oxygen meter in the corner of her faceplate and had to force herself to look away.
The landscape crawled by, a monotonous collection of space dust, small craters and the occasional wrecked vehicle, and other junk, broken only by the way-markers between their module and the Copes’. She tried to remember how far she was from her destination by the changing junk, but she had only been to the Copes’ twice since she had arrived. The black vacuum of space lowered overhead (or below, as she giddily noticed on one occasion, once again forcing herself to remember her basic training, and make the planetoid “down”). She focussed on carefully bouncing her way through the nightmare trek in the light gravity, trying not to fall over. In a suit like this she would