By Robert Charles Wilson
1999, 208 pages hardcover, 0-312-86857-X
Tor
Aka "bioarmor" or "isolation suit". Motive systems sandwiched between inner and outer "flexarmor": consist of primary and secondary hydraulics (blue fluid), motors. Fat gloves. Inner suit can provide tourniquets, CPR, and drugs: cardio stimulatants, analgesics, narcotics.
Zoe Fisher: 65 inches, 130 pounds, equipped with various immune enhancements, artificial organs fused to abdominal aorta, renal filter, and standard biomonitor.
Zoe was ready and waiting by the time he had sealed himself into his infinitely more cumbersome bioarmor. She appeared limber and free by comparison, with nothing riding her body but a semitransparent membrane, a pelvic sheath to recycle wastes, a breathing apparatus that hugged her mouth, and a pair of substantial boots [...] She looked, in fact, almost naked. [p.60]
The tabs of the excursion suit were three bars of fleshy material where the seams met across the small of her back. [p.95]
Her wastes were scrubbed by the suit's processors and nanobacters, but even sterilized human waste was a magnet for Isian predators. [p.100]
Excavate a cometary body, load humans into armored capsules in a payload sphere. Rig the body for "induced-field fusion", converted by the octagonal lenses of exotic matter.
[...] the payload sphere, which was suspended in turn by enormous pylons from the cored massif of rock and ice. Lenses of exotic matter surrounded the sphere like huge octagonal crystals. The lenses would be destroyed along with the rest of Phoenix, but only in the femtoseconds after they had served their purpose. [p.14]
One of the diggers stood upright in the sunlight, and [Zoe] appreciated the versatility Isis had built into it, a sort of living Swiss Army knife. Upright, the digger was a meter and a half tall. Its domed gray head projected from a sheath of flesh like a turtle's head. Its eyes, black and immensely sensitive, rolled in rotary sockets. Its upper arms, the digging arms with their spade-shaped dactyls, hung laxly from high shoulder joints. One of its smaller manipulative arms grapsed the new spear, multijointed thumbs wrapped around the wood. Its cartilaginous belly-plates expanded and contracted as it moved, giving it the look of somthing too flexible for its size, like a giant millipede. [p.53]
On any creature larger than a beetle, the eyes were the primary vehicle of expression; but the digger's eyes were simple black ovals in a bed of bony flesh. Bubbles of ink. Windows through which some dim not-quite-sentience regarded her cooly. [p.116]
1.5 m tall when standing upright. The "diggers" have long "curb-feelers" on the face; longer and white on the individual dubbed "Old Man".