In space, everyone can hear you scream . . .
As long, that is, as you're equipped with a RemLok survival mask.
An instant after Alex Ryder hit the hard vacuum, a skin of plasFibre had been shot across his body
from nozzles on the face piece, keeping him warm against the cold, tightening and protecting him,
securing him against the void. The oxygen flow in his body was cut off to all but his heart and
brain. Needle-doses of adrenalin and somnokie were held ready, just within the skin area of his
mouth, ready to alert or depress his body functions according to circumstances.
And the RemLok screamed through space for help.
It was a standard survival device, an instantly recognisable distress call indicating that it was
being sent out from a small, remotely located, dying body. The alarm screeched out on forty
channels, shifting wavelength within each channel four times a second. One hundred and twenty
chances to catch attention . . .
A cumbersome Boa class cruiser, loaded down with industrial machinery, slowed its departure run
from Leesti and turned to scan space for the source of the signal . . .
Two police vipers came streaking from their patrol sector, near the sun, scanning for the body in
trouble . . .
An adapted Moray Starboat, a vast glowing yellow star on its hull—the sign of a hospital ship—
came chugging out of the darkness . . .
Messages from ships to both the planet and its ring of Coriolis stations were abruptly broken as
the split second message came screaming through. TV programmes were interrupted, the screen
dissolving into a permanently recorded display of the space-grid location of the RemLok. Every
advertising space module changed its garish display to flash, in brilliant green, the same
information.
In the orbit-space around Leesti, a million heads turned starwards. That split second of panic, that
moment's cry of distress, was a sound they knew too well to ignore, and were too frightened of to
take for granted.
Within twenty seconds, two autoremotes, tiny vessels just big enough to carry an hour's oxygen,
one dose each of forty drugs, and a variety of other stimulants, were hovering around Alex Ryder's
spinning body. one of them shot out a stabilising cable and dragged itself to his corpse. Blinking
through its solitary monitor, it hovered over his face like a squat, legless dachsund hound and
pumped adrenalin, oxygen and glucose into his bloodstream. Alex opened his eyes and panicked
slightly. The autoremote calmed him down with a quick pumpsurge of tetval.
