Environment suit
Environment suits are the sealed suits that let people and spiders work where there is no air. Humans aboard the Gilgamesh wear heavy armoured versions. The spiders of Kern’s World build their own, first to reach the edge of the sky and later to work in orbit.
Human suits
In chapter 4.5 Guyen takes Holsten deeper into the station and tells him to get into an environment suit and keep his helmet on, because the further rings do not always have air or gravity. Everyone they pass is suited the same way. Holsten sees that the pace of opening new sections is held back by the number of suits the Gilgamesh carries or can make.
Wearing one is miserable work. The magnetic boots, which Holsten had accepted as a child watching films about space explorers, turn out to be frustrating and exhausting. Moving in free fall is harder than he expects, and Guyen has to run a lanyard from belt to belt to haul him back when he drifts away. Engineers in the suits look faceless. They talk over helmet radios, and Lain hijacks the camera on Holsten’s suit to see what Guyen is after. Holsten pulls a data pad from his suit with fumbling gloves, and a toolbelt hangs from the suit harness.
The heavy suits in 7.7 are military kit. Karst’s squad of twenty two wears them, and that takes every working suit left aboard. The joints are reinforced and the rest is armoured, with servos to help the wearer move, an extended air supply, recycled waste and a controlled temperature. Torso and each limb bulk out to twice their real size. Some suits have jet packs, and Karst orders the fuel saved for emergencies. A gun is built into the glove, and camera feeds from the squad’s suits go to Lain in comms.
The suits have limits. A suit seals around a puncture, but that does not protect against the injection a spider drives between its plates. Karst’s team also find the spiders hard to kill, because they wear a close woven armour of their own.
In 7.9 the engineers going into the holds wear lightweight work suits, with none of the armour or systems that Karst had.
Spider suits
The first spider suits appear in the Sky Nest’s robing chamber in 6.6. They are not the insulating covering the sailors have worn but a bulky outfit, thick at the joints and bloated over the abdomen where the air tanks sit. Depressurised it hangs flaccid and heavy, interferes with movement and muffles speech, so the crew fall back on palp signals and radio.
Out in the thin air the suit inflates at once, its own air supply expanding about the abdomen, mouth, eyes and joints, and Portia is left with a crippled shuffle. With so little air around her, the heat she makes has nowhere to go and she starts to overheat. When she jumps, the suit tears at one rear leg. Fabian tears both suits open with his fangs once the cabin is sealed.
By 7.2 the suits have shrunk. Portia’s squad carries most of its suit about the abdomen: book lungs fed by air that is generated by chemistry as needed rather than stored in tanks, which keeps a spider outside for days. Each suit has a chemical heating pack beneath the body, a compact radio and a lensed mask over the eyes and mouth. The spinnerets connect to a silk factory at the tip of the abdomen. Propellant packs with adjustable nozzles steer the wearer in the void. A transparent film one molecule thick coats the exoskeleton against decompression and moisture loss, and the leg tips sit in insulated sleeves. The chapter calls them complete astronaut soldiers.
Aboard the Gilgamesh in 7.7 and 7.9 the spiders wear clear masks, with the curve of their fangs visible inside.
Unanswered questions
- How many suits the Gilgamesh could make, and whether any were built after the battle.
- What the human suits looked like from the outside, beyond the note that they double the wearer’s thickness.
- How the spiders first worked out the design, and what the robing chamber did.
Trivia
- Lain’s voice arrives over the com while three suited figures stand in front of Holsten. He guesses that she is elsewhere on the station, watching through the internal surveillance.