“That’s confidence-inspiring,” Dinah said.
“Hold on, it turns out my uncle John knew a few things. And later on, another chap, name of Kucharski, in Berlin, worked on this stuff too.” Rhys was untangling the chain, looking for its clasp. When he found it, he undid it, converting the chain from a loop into a segment about as long as his arm. “Unfortunately there’s gravity in Berlin too, so he had to do stuff like this on tables. Hold it right there, would you please?” And he got Dinah to pinch the middle of the chain between her fingers, keeping it fixed in space. From there, he drew the two ends back toward himself, forming the chain into a skinny, elongated U. “You can let go now, gently.”
Dinah released the chain and allowed herself to float back from it, since Rhys had taken on something of the air of a magician in performance. He let go of one of the ends, kept the other grasped between his thumb and index finger. “What happens if I pull?” he asked. “Any predictions?”
“The whole thing will move back toward you, I guess.”
“Let’s try it. Hold your finger up just there.”
Dinah pointed “up” and allowed Rhys to reach out with his free hand and grasp her gently by the wrist, arranging her hand so that the finger was several inches away from the vertex of the U-shaped bend in the chain. “Here goes nothing,” he said, and began to pull the chain toward him—away from Dinah. Contrary to what she’d expected, the bend started to propagate away from Rhys, and toward Dinah, until finally the free end hurtled around, like a whip cracking, and made several quick turns around her finger, snaring her. “Gotcha,” he said, and began pulling her toward him.
“Just like a bullwhip,” she observed, unwinding the chain from her finger too late to avoid being drawn into close, cozy contact with Rhys.
“It is exactly the same physics,” he confirmed. “Kucharski called that thing—the traveling U-shaped bend—a Knickstelle. It means something like ‘kink place.’”
“Chains, whips, and now kinks. I’m learning so much about your Victorian ancestors, Rhys.”
“You probably thought this was a mere diversion,” he said.
“Oh, no. I see your point. Rather than trying to control the Siwi chain, like a tentacle, all clenching muscles, let it relax and whip around the Luk like a smart chain.”
This little digression into nineteenth-century physics turned out to be one of those “one step back, five steps forward” sorts of trades. It was the work of a few minutes to concatenate four more Siwis onto the existing chain, then turn off all the motors except a few that she used to fashion a U-shaped bend. Applying tension to one end of it caused the Knickstelle to propagate just as in Rhys’s demonstration, so that the end of the chain whipped lazily around the entire circumference of the Luk. Several attempts were required before the grappler at the end of the chain was able to snag a handhold on the far side, but then the Luk was securely captured in the chain’s embrace. Grabbs could scuttle along it carrying the ends of cables anchored to other parts of Amalthea, or Izzy, and thus the Luk was gradually ensnared in a loose web of hardware that Dinah used to draw it away from the position where it had been anchored, and pull it up snug against the module containing Dinah’s shop. As it came closer, the vague nimbus of white light thrown against the Luk by the LED in the airlock narrowed and sharpened, and was finally all but snuffed out as the big balloon enveloped the protruding stub of the airlock chamber. The airlock was now poking into the nested layers of the Luk like a finger prodding a balloon.
Even after the success of the whip-cracking gambit, this took most of a day. Rhys drifted off, as was his habit. Bo, the Mongolian cosmonaut, slipped into Dinah’s shop, observed silently for a couple of hours, and then began finding ways to make herself useful. She learned how to use the data glove and the mouse-and-keyboard interface just by watching Dinah, and by the end of the day was piloting Grabbs around, and manipulating Siwis, like an old hand.
Margie Coghlan showed up to watch the final preparations. She was an Australian physiologist who had been sent up to Izzy a few months ago to study the effects of spaceflight on human health. Dinah had always found her a little brusque, but maybe that was just an Australian thing. She brought with her a box of medical supplies and surgical equipment. All the astronauts on the ISS had medical training. Dinah and Ivy had done their time working in Houston emergency rooms stitching up trauma victims and setting bones. But Margie was the best.
“Not exactly what you signed on for,” Dinah said.
“None of us is getting what we signed on for,” Margie observed.
“With the possible exception of Tekla,” said another voice. Ivy’s. She was not in Dinah’s shop—that was full now with Dinah, Bo, and Margie—but she was in the adjacent SCRUM.
“Ivy, you ready to set another record?” Dinah asked.
“Ready to try,” Ivy said.
This was Q code for the number of women on the space station at one time. The old record had been four, set in 2010. They had tied it months ago when Margie and Lina had come up to Izzy, joining Ivy and Dinah. They had broken it when Bo had turned up in the Soyuz launch three weeks ago. Tekla would make six, if they could only get her through the airlock.
Or the number might drop back if this went wrong.
“Bo, thanks for helping. You should probably go out with Ivy.”
“Good luck,” Bo said, and, pushing off from the inner hatch of the airlock, drifted across Dinah’s shop and out through the hatch into the SCRUM, where Ivy hovered, waiting.
“Everything sealed up behind you?” Dinah asked, more out of nervousness than anything else. It was out of the question that Ivy would get that wrong. Since the breakup of the moon, they’d intensified their precautions anyway, keeping the various modules of Izzy separated by airtight hatches wherever possible so that the perforation of one module by a bolide wouldn’t lead to the destruction of the whole complex.
Ivy didn’t answer.
“You know what to do with that hatch if this all goes sideways,” Dinah went on.
“You talk a lot when you’re nervous,” Ivy said.
“I concur,” Margie said. “Are we going to do this or not? That woman might be asphyxiating out there.”
“Okay. Giving her the signal now,” Dinah said.
In the space program that she had dreamed of when she’d been a little girl with a “Snoopy the Astronaut” poster on the ceiling of her shack in the hinterlands of South Africa, or watching live feeds from the space station on satellite TV in western Australia, the signal would have been a terse utterance into a microphone, or a message struck out on a keyboard. But what she actually did was drift over to her little window and peer through fourteen layers of milky translucent plastic at Tekla, almost close enough to reach out and touch, and give a thumbs-up.
Tekla nodded and held up a small object next to her head. It was a folding knife with a belt clip and a lanyard, which she had prudently wrapped around her wrist. Using one thumb she snapped its serrated blade open.
Dinah nodded.
Tekla nodded back, then drifted out of view, headed toward the airlock.
“Here she comes,” Dinah said.
She had already sized Margie up as a woman of some physical strength. She was stocky, but in a powerful rather than a flabby way.
Dinah got a grip on the mechanical linkage that would swing the outer hatch of the airlock closed. “Brace me,” she said.
She was worried about all that plastic. Shreds of it were certain to get caught in the hatch’s delicate seal.
The principle was simple enough. She’d run through it in her head a hundred times. If Tekla cut a slit, a few inches long, through the innermost layer of the Luk, air would rush out into the space between it and the next layer, which was at a lower pressure. If Tekla put her head and shoulder into that slit, she’d become like a cork in a champagne bottle, and the pressure would try to force her out. If she then cut a slit through the next layer, and the next, and the next, a wave of pr
essure would build up behind her and spit her out like a watermelon seed. And as long as she kept aiming for the white LED on the airlock’s inner hatch, she would be projected into that airlock.
At that point she’d be naked and unprotected in the middle of a jet of air that would be exploding away from her into the vacuum. And at that point—
There was a whoosh and a meaty thunking impact.
“Jesus Christ, I think that was it,” Margie said.
“She is out,” Bo confirmed. Bo, out in the next compartment, had a tablet on which she was watching a video feed from a nearby Grabb. “I mean she is in the airlock.”
Dinah hauled on the handle, swinging the outer hatch closed. Her body, in accordance with Newton’s Third Law, moved in the opposite direction, stealing her force, but Margie’s arms caught her in a bear hug and pushed back—Margie had found a way to brace herself.
Bo gasped. “You are smashing her foot!”
“Oh, shit.”
“Her foot is sticking out.”
“Dinah,” Ivy said, “you have to open the hatch a little, her foot’s caught.”
Dinah relaxed her arms. What if Tekla was unconscious? What if she was unable to draw herself up into the fetal position they’d shown her in that photograph?
The change in Bo’s and Ivy’s tone told her otherwise. “She’s in!” Ivy exclaimed.
“Close the hatch, close it!” Bo was shouting.
Dinah swung the handle all the way around and snapped it into its locked position. It didn’t feel quite right, but at least it was closed.
Meanwhile Margie was actuating the valve that let air into the airlock. This was supposed to be a gradual process, but she just let it go explosively, with a sudden movement of the air that tugged at their diaphragms and popped their ears.
“Blood is coming out,” Bo said dully. “Leaking out of the hatch.”
“Fuck!” Dinah said. Because that meant two bad things at once: the outer hatch wasn’t really closed, and Tekla was hurt.
“Let’s get it open,” Margie said.
In the end it took all four of them: Dinah, Margie, Bo, and Ivy, all crammed into the space with their fingers under the rim of the hatch, pushing against the wall with all the strength in their legs and their backs, to break the seal. Whereupon air whooshed out of the compartment and the hatch flew open, like when you finally break the seal on a vacuum-packed jar and the lid flies off.
Tekla was in there, drawn up into the prescribed fetal position, a solid mass of red.
They all stared at her speechless for a moment.
Her head moved. She turned her face up toward them, revealing a huge red smear where an eye ought to have been.
The only thing that kept Dinah from screaming like a little girl was her gorge rising up into her throat. Bo drew in a long breath and began muttering something.
Tekla’s hands unfolded and gripped the rim of the chamber. The lanyard of the knife was still wound around her right wrist. The handle of the knife trailed after it. Dinah supposed that its blade had been snapped off until she understood that the whole thing had become embedded in Tekla’s forearm.
Tekla pulled herself out a few inches, then stopped. Her head was now projecting into the room.
An eye opened. A bloodshot eye in a bloody face. But a normal, working eye.
Dinah’s ears began working again and she realized that she was hearing a loud hissing noise. It was the sound of air escaping from the International Space Station, not through a huge leak but through small gaps in the airlock’s outer seal. The air was flowing past Tekla’s body, creating a vacuum behind her, a vacuum she had to fight in order to advance into the room.
She felt embarrassed then, in the manner of a hostess who forgets to properly welcome a guest, and she reached down and grabbed one of Tekla’s hands. Margie got the other and with a final sucking, squelching noise they dragged Tekla’s blood-lubricated form out of the airlock chamber and into the space station.
Dinah half closed the inner hatch of the airlock. The Big Hoover, as old-school astronauts referred to the vacuum of space, took care of the rest, and slammed it closed with frightening violence.
They’d lost a measurable percentage of the atmosphere in this module. Not enough to cause oxygen deprivation but more than enough to set off alarms all over Izzy, and all the way down to Houston.
Maggie got to work on Tekla’s arm, which was bleeding quite a lot, while Ivy and Bo, now blue-gloved, cleaned off her face with towelettes. The picture was getting clearer. The basic idea had worked. Tekla’s knife work had been true and well aimed, and perhaps more effective than was really good for her. She had been spat out of the Luk’s outermost layer, and into the airlock chamber, with great force, slamming her face into a metal fitting along the way and opening up big lacerations above and below the eye. These had bled profusely. In the same moment the blade of her knife had caught on something and turned back on her and been jammed into her forearm. She had lain dazed for a moment, one leg hanging out the open hatch as Dinah had tried to close it on her, then had come to and drawn herself up as planned. For a few moments during all of this she had been exposed to vacuum, which hadn’t done her bleeding wounds any favors, but air had rushed into the lock and equalized the pressure before irreparable damage could be inflicted.
As Dinah had worried, scraps of plastic had gotten caught in the outer hatch’s gasket, accounting for those hissing air leaks. But most of them drifted off into space when she swung the hatch back open again, and the remaining bits, stuck to the gasket by Tekla’s freeze-dried blood, she was able to pick clean using a programmed swarm of Nats. She ended up leaving that project as an exercise for Bo, who was climbing the robot learning curve with remarkable speed.
She drifted down the length of Izzy to the Hub and thence out to the torus, where Maggie, getting advice from trauma surgeons down in Houston, was working on Tekla’s arm. This was a lot easier in the weak gravity of the torus—no globules of blood drifting around. Lina Ferreira and Jun Ueda, both also life scientists, were filling in as assistants.
Ivy was in her office fielding a shit storm of angry reaction from people down in Houston.
They were doing the surgery under local anesthesia, so Tekla was awake. They’d cleaned her up, and closed the lacerations around her eye socket with butterfly bandages and Krazy Glue. The silvery-blond stubble that covered her scalp was still darkened with coagulated blood along that side. The whites of her eyes were red, and she had thousands of tiny red marks all over her face. Dinah had been warned to expect those. They were called petechiae: broken capillaries just under the skin, caused by exposure to vacuum. But from the way her eyes moved in their sockets and focused on things, Dinah could see that her vision was basically intact.
“That was uncalled for,” Tekla said to her.
“True,” Dinah said.
“I shall be in trouble.”
“So are we,” Dinah said, nodding in the direction of Ivy’s office. “We are all in trouble . . . with a bunch of dead people.”
Tekla reacted very little, but among Margie and Lina and Jun there was a collective intake of breath, a momentary halt in the proceedings.
“Margie,” said a Texan voice from the ground, “this dead surgeon would like you to clamp off that arteriole before it starts bleedin’ again.”
“Those of us who are going to live,” Dinah said, “have to start living by our own lights.”
Pioneers and Prospectors
“THE ICEMAN COMETH.”
“Ah.” Rhys sighed. “I was wondering which of us would be first to go there.” He pulled out, drifted away, and did a peel-and-knot on the condom so expertly that it created dark stirrings of jealousy in Dinah’s heart. But at least he didn’t let anything get loose in Dinah’s shop.
“This may have been your last delivery,” Dinah said. “Of ice, that is.”
“You’ve got your freezer?”
“Coming up on tomorrow’s launch from Kourou.�
��
“Any chance of getting them to send up a martini shaker with it?”
“We use plastic bags for that.”
“Well, I hope that my deliveries—of ice, that is—have contributed something to whatever the hell you’ve been doing.”
“Check this out,” she said. She’d already wrapped herself in a blanket, but now she prodded the wall with a toe and drifted over to her workstation. With a bit of clicking around she brought up a video. The opening shot was stark: a cube of ice in a black chamber, lit up by bright but cold LEDs.
“From Arjuna HQ, I presume?” Rhys, still naked, came up behind her and wrapped an arm around her waist. She liked to think of it as an affectionate gesture. In part it was. But she’d been in zero gee long enough to understand that he also just didn’t want to drift away while watching the movie.
“Yes.”
A bearded strawberry-blond man entered the frame carrying a sheet of corrugated cardboard—the lid of a pizza box.
“That’s Larz Hoedemaeker, I think—one of the guys I’ve been working with a lot.”
Larz angled the pizza lid slightly toward the camera. It was mostly covered by iridescent fingernail-sized objects, like silicon beetles. Hundreds of them.
“That’s a lot of Nats,” Rhys remarked.
“Well . . . the whole point is to make a swarm.”
“I understand. But it seems they’ve found a way to ramp up production.”
Larz folded the cardboard diagonally to make it into a crude trough and then angled it down toward the block of ice. The Nats avalanched down and tumbled onto it in a heap. Quite a few of them skittered off and tumbled onto the floor. Larz exited the frame for a moment, then returned, pushing a wheeled swivel chair. He arranged this behind the block of ice, then disappeared again, then came back carrying a clock that he had apparently just taken down from the wall of an office. He balanced this on the seat of the swivel chair, leaning back against its lumbar support, so that it was clearly visible in the frame of the video. Then he departed.
A few moments later the lights got much brighter. “Simulating solar radiation,” Dinah explained. “The Nats are solar powered, so the only way to test them is to have a light source as bright as the sun.”
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