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his, and they kind of gravitated together. She was relieved when he didn’t treat her like some bratty
kid. He called her ‘Kalinski’, like she was a cadet herself.
    They would play dumb games and make up athletic competitions in the domes; he was good at figuring out rules so he was handicapped and she had at least a chance of winning. One of her favourites
was the roof run, where you ran at a curving dome wall and
up
it, overcoming the low gravity, sticking to the wall by sheer centrifugal force until you fell back, and then (in theory)
executed a slow one-third-G somersault to land on your feet on the cushioned floor. A space cadet’s training regime was pretty intense, and she suspected there was still enough of the kid in
Lex to relish the chance to blow off some steam, even to bend the rules a little.
    Which was probably why it was Lex who introduced her to her father’s starship.

 
     
     
     
CHAPTER 5
     
     
     
     
    I t was a dome-morning, only a few days before the launch of the
I-One
. The
Angelia
’s launch was scheduled a couple of
dome-days after that. Paradoxically Lex had more free time just now, as the ISF controllers were trying to get their crew to relax before the stress of the mission.
    So Lex invited Stef to ‘take an EVA’, by which he meant go for a walk on Mercury’s surface.
    He met her at a suit locker built into the dome wall. He grinned when she showed up. ‘Thought you weren’t coming, Kalinski. You didn’t seem keen.’
    ‘I’ve been out on the moon. What’s so special about a bunch of rocks?’
    He winked at her. ‘This is different. Take a look at your suit.’ He palmed a control.
    A section of the wall swept back, to reveal a row of suits that looked like nothing so much as discarded insect carcasses. Each had a hard silvered shell to cover torso, legs and arms, a
featureless helmet with a gold-tinted visor, and wings, extraordinary filmy affairs that sprouted from joints behind the shoulders. All the suits had markings of various kinds, coloured stripes and
hoops, no doubt to identify who was wearing them.
    Lex asked, ‘What do you think?’
    ‘Ugly.’
    ‘It’s not so bad. Believe me, you won’t even notice it once you’re out there on the surface. I bet you can’t guess what the wings are for.’
    ‘It’s obvious. To radiate heat.’
    ‘Very good,’ he said, sounding genuinely impressed. ‘Most of the folk in this dome say, “For flying.” Then they catch themselves and say, “But there’s
no air here so . . .” ’
    ‘I know.’ Stef sighed the way her father did. ‘It gets so wearying.’
    He laughed. ‘OK, Kalinski, quit showing off. Look, putting it on is easy, the suit will seal itself up around you and adapt to fit. Just slip your shoes off . . .’
    The astonishing thing was, once she was in the suit and out through a heavy-duty airlock, she really
didn’t
notice the suit, not visually anyhow. The suit contained some kind of
immersive VR system, so when she looked down it was as if she was standing beside Lex, in their everyday clothes, on a ground of pitted rock, under Mercury’s black sky. The sun, more than
twice the size it was as seen from Earth, cast long shadows across a moonlike plain. Experimentally she bent down; she felt a little stiff, and couldn’t fold quite as she was used to. She
touched her toes, though, and picked up a loose bit of rock.
    ‘How’s the suit?’
    ‘Fine.’ She explored the rock; her fingers, in her vision, didn’t quite close around it. ‘It feels kind of . . . soapy.’ She threw the rock with a skimming motion.
The rock whizzed away, falling, not as fast as it would on Earth, faster than on the moon. It made no sound when it fell; that wasn’t part of the sim.
    ‘Let’s walk.’ Lex strode easily across the surface of Mercury, his shadow long beside him. His voice sounded as if it was coming from
him
, not from plugs in her ears.
‘The suit will stop you from coming to any