None of this even accounted for mishaps that occurred while the Scouts were actually working. A damaged umbilical nearly killed a Scout on A+0.35, and he was obliged to disconnect himself from his Zavod and execute a heroic and perilous move to the nearest airlock, where they got him inside the space station with less than a minute to spare.
Two days later a Scout simply disappeared without explanation, possibly the victim of a micrometeoroid, or even of suicide.
So, of the first crew of six Scouts, two were dead on arrival and one was killed in the Luk failure the next day. Of the second crew, one was dead on arrival. All six of the third crew made it to Izzy alive. Of the fourteen total survivors, four died from Zavod failures, one disappeared, and one was forced to “retire” from being a Scout and confine his activities to Izzy because of equipment failure.
Ivy, being at the top of the org chart, was responsible for all strange and extraordinary decisions: the problems that no one else knew how, or was willing, to handle. It became her problem to decide what they were going to do with dead people.
Oh, there was a procedure. NASA had a procedure for everything. They had long ago anticipated that an astronaut might die of a heart attack or some mishap during a mission. Since two hundred pounds of rotting flesh could not be accommodated inside of the space station where people lived and worked, the general idea was to let them freeze-dry in space, and then place them aboard the next earthbound Soyuz capsule. Only the middle section of the Soyuz, the reentry module, ever made it back to Earth. The spheroidal orbital module, perched on top of it, was jettisoned before reentry. Eventually it burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere. The customary procedure, therefore, was to pack the orbital module with trash so that it would be burned up as well.
Bodies were not trash, of course, but burning them up in the atmosphere seemed as good a way as any to dispose of them—the space-age equivalent of a Viking funeral.
The normal up/down cycle of launch and reentry had, of course, been suspended. Things were supposed to go up, but not come down. Those orbital modules could be preserved and used as habitats, or for storing supplies. The “trash” could be picked over and used again. Bags of fecal material could become fertilizer in hydroponic farms.
Ivy made a unilateral decision that they would carve out an exception to that new policy. The deceased were moved into an empty orbital module docked at the truss. This was left open to space, so that freeze-drying of the bodies could happen out of sight and out of mind. When it filled up with dead people, they would have some kind of ceremony, the thing would be deorbited, and they would watch in silence as it drew a white-hot streak across the atmosphere below.
But it wasn’t full quite yet.
They had eight working Scouts until such time as another heavy-lift rocket could be prepared and sent up with a fresh half dozen. These worked in fifteen-, sometimes eighteen-hour shifts divided into three-hour phases. Each of those phases consisted of two hours’ actual work followed by an hour of resting in situ, or, using the obvious anagram, in suit.
Dinah, working in her robot shop, didn’t have a direct view of what they were doing, since her window faced away from the truss where they spent all of their time. She could watch their activities on video feeds if she wanted, but she had other things she needed to be doing.
After the micrometeoroid/Luk incident, Dinah had scored a small victory for robotdom by putting her flock to work getting the surviving Luks squared away. Amalthea was attached to the forward end of Izzy, which, because of its orbital direction, was most exposed to impacts from space junk. In effect the asteroid had been put there as a sort of battering ram, protecting everything aft of it from collisions. There was enough space on its aft side that several Luks could nestle there, improving their odds of long-term survival as well as cutting down on cosmic ray exposure.
Dinah’s crew of iron-mining robots had been made obsolete, at least for the time being, by her boss’s pivot toward frozen water. So, when not making tiny critters scurry around on slabs of contraband ice, she had made the older robots useful by getting them to drill holes and anchor some connection points—eye bolts, basically—into Amalthea’s back side and then moor the Luks to them using cables. This was not a hard-and-fast mooring system, so at first they tended to drift around and lazily bump into each other like a string of balloons. But after a day or two they settled into a stable configuration that just happened to block Dinah’s view out her window. All she could see now was plastic. She didn’t mind. After seeing the risks that the Scouts were taking, she didn’t mind anything at all.
Individual layers of the Luk were fairly transparent, but the view was gauzy because the layers were so many. She could make out the form of her neighbor’s body but not see the face. It was definitely a woman.
The Scouts’ shifts overlapped around the clock. The woman outside Dinah’s window came back in from her shift every day around what for Dinah was the middle of the morning. Dinah could see her clambering laboriously along the surface of Amalthea, using the mooring points, planning each move, avoiding the cables and the umbilicals. She must have been exhausted beyond words. Dinah had once done a two-hour stint in a space suit and been wiped out for a day. Sometimes Dinah would send a Grabb or a Siwi out to afford the woman an extra handhold when it looked like she needed one. The woman would turn her head and look at Dinah through the glass dome of her helmet and blink her eyes in what Dinah took to be an expression of gratitude. Eventually she would reach the open portal of her Vestibyul and go back into it, whereupon (unseen by Dinah) the automatic mechanism would do its thing, locking her suit into its socket, equalizing the pressure, opening the door, and enabling her to extract her head, arms, and body. Finding the ratchet wrench floating at the end of its chain of plastic zip ties, the woman would reach “above” her head and remove the twenty-four bolts securing the Luk diaphragm onto its flange, carefully rethreading each bolt into its hole so that it wouldn’t drift around loose, and then she would finally pull herself through the forty-centimeter portal into the comparatively spacious environment of the Luk. Along the way she would collect her “mail,” which was deposited in each Vestibyul during the occupant’s shift. This consisted of food; drink; toiletries; a bag of ice that would turn into water, providing a simple temperature-control scheme; bags for disposal of feces; and, in her case, tampons.
Because of the roundabout and improvised manner in which things were working now, Dinah did not have a way to communicate with this woman directly, or even to learn her name. This seemed ridiculous, but it was the same general phenomenon that had made it impossible for the firemen to talk to the police officers on 9/11. The Scouts were just using different radios with different frequencies, and Dinah didn’t have one.
By checking biographies on the NASA website, and by the process of elimination, she determined that this was Tekla Alekseyevna Ilyushina. She was a test pilot. She had competed in the most recent Olympics as a heptathlete and taken a bronze medal. As such she might have had glorious career options as a propaganda idol during the old Soviet days. But the recent conservative drift of Russian culture had left few slots available for women in male-dominated professions such as the military or the space program. Consequently much of her work experience had been outside of Russia, working for privately funded aerospace companies. She had returned a few years ago to become one of two active female cosmonauts. Dinah was cynical enough to see politics as the basis of that; in order for Roskosmos to remain on speaking terms with NASA and the European Space Agency, they had to have at least one or two females qualified to go into space.
Tekla was thirty-one. She had been somewhat glammed up for her official cosmonaut photograph, with a stiff, outmoded Princess Di hairdo that didn’t suit her at all. During the most recent Olympics she had been rated one of the fifty hottest female athletes by a click-bait website, but she was buried in the back of the rankings. Dinah thought her comely, with the high cheekbones, the green eyes, the blond hair, and
all the other attributes one would expect of a Slavic superwoman. But she understood why Tekla had been rated number forty-eight out of fifty, for she had a kind of chilly, strong-jawed look about her that forced the makers of the website to be selective about camera angles, and, Dinah suspected, to make some use of Photoshop. The sort of men who would browse that kind of website would find Tekla off-putting in a way they couldn’t quite put their finger on. They would be intimidated by the taut cords of her deltoids during the shot put competition. Dinah made a point of not reading any of the comment threads. She already knew what those would say.
Tekla had been sent up here to die, and she probably knew it.
At the end of each shift when she squirted through the flange to float free in the milky plastic bubble of the Luk, she would peel off the fluid cooling garment that she wore against her skin all day long. This was made of stretchy blue mesh with plastic tubing stitched between its layers. It had no effect until it was plugged into a pump that circulated cool water through the tubes. Tekla must have hated it after sixteen hours, and so it came off first. Then, peeling her underwear down to her knees, she would deflate and remove the foley catheter that had been draining her bladder while she’d been at work. She would wipe herself down with premoistened towelettes that had been provided in her “mail,” and stuff those into a refuse bag. It appeared that she had shaved her head, or simply given herself a buzz cut, prior to leaving Earth, so she didn’t have to mess with hair. Only then would Tekla open up her packet of emergency rations and begin to eat. This often led to defecation, which she had to handle in the crudest way possible, with a plastic bag and another series of premoistened towelettes. All of it went into her refuse bag, which she deposited in her Vestibyul for collection during her next shift. Then Tekla would turn off the white LED strip that provided the Luk’s only illumination, and sometimes spend a little while gazing at the screen of a tablet computer before sliding a blindfold over her eyes and falling asleep.
Izzy circled the Earth every ninety-two minutes, passing through a complete day/night cycle each time, and so half the time that Tekla was asleep Dinah could look right out her window and see her suspended there, all but naked, floating in the Luk like a fetus in its bubble of amniotic fluid.
Dinah watched Tekla go through this routine for about a week, and found it all inordinately distracting. She brought Ivy, and later Rhys, into the chop shop to behold the sleeping Tekla through the window. They talked of Tekla and emailed each other pictures of Tekla that they had dug up on the Internet.
“That could be you or me, honey,” Dinah said to Ivy.
“It is us,” Ivy said, “it’s just a matter of degree.”
“Do you think we’re going to end up like that?”
Ivy thought about it, shook her head. “Look, the way she’s living isn’t sustainable.”
“You think it’s a suicide mission?”
“I think it’s a gulag,” Ivy said, “a little gulag right outside your window.”
“You think she’s in some kind of trouble?”
“I think we’re all in some kind of trouble,” Ivy reminded her.
“Oh yeah, I forgot.”
“She’s lucky, remember?” Meaning that Tekla had at least found a way off the planet.
“She doesn’t look lucky,” Dinah said. “I’ve never seen anyone so isolated. Does she talk to someone on that tablet? Or is she just surfing?”
“I can ask Spencer, if you want,” Ivy said. “I’m sure he’s logging all the packets.”
Dinah knew that Ivy was only kidding, but she answered, “Nah. She deserves that much privacy at least.”
Rhys’s reaction was to become aroused. He was reasonably discreet about it. But the elapsed time between his seeing Tekla and having sex with Dinah was, generously estimating, perhaps half an hour. Not that Rhys really needed a lot of help to start his motor. And not that Dinah did either. She had always known they were going to do it.
She had known this based on the way he smelled, at least when he was not in the middle of being sick. In other times and places, the way he smelled would not have been enough. They’d have dated first, or something. There’d have been complications having to do with existing relationships, incompatible lifestyles, fraternization policies. But here it was just automatic. And it was tremendous.
Based on what she was hearing from Internet buzz from the ground, it was also pretty universal. The human race might be about to disappear, but not before putting on a two-year frenzy of recreational sex.
Actually sleeping together was another matter. Rhys didn’t seem to mind it in principle. But it was difficult logistically. Astronauts generally slept in bags that kept them from floating about at random while they were unconscious. The bags were designed for one person. NASA hadn’t gotten around to manufacturing two-person bags yet, so if they felt drowsy afterward, they would improvise, swaddling themselves together with whatever they could cobble up. But it never lasted more than a few minutes. Then he would go back to his duties, and if she felt like a nap, she would climb into a bag that she kept in her shop, sometimes peeking out the window, guiltily, at poor Tekla.
One day, after Tekla had left for work, Dinah took one of the chocolate bars she had brought up from Earth, wrote her email address on the wrapper, and handed it off to a Grabb, which she then put out the airlock. She piloted the Grabb across Amalthea’s surface to the mooring point where Tekla’s Vestibyul was cabled in place, then made it climb along the cable (which was easy, it had an algorithm for that) and clamber into the Vestibyul, where it took up position and waited, holding the chocolate bar out in a free claw.
When Tekla came back at the end of her shift, Dinah got the satisfaction of watching her unwrap the bar and eat the chocolate. She held up one hand and sort of waved through the plastic. Dinah couldn’t resolve her facial expression.
The Grabb was still in the Vestibyul, and would remain trapped there until Tekla’s next departure. Seeing Tekla float over in that direction, Dinah turned to her computer and switched on the video feed from the Grabb. She was fascinated to see Tekla’s face, clearly resolved, float into the frame.
She didn’t look that bad. Dinah had been expecting someone who looked like a concentration camp survivor. But she appeared to be getting enough food.
Of course, she could not see Dinah. And there was no audio hookup. Since there was no sound in a vacuum, space robots didn’t come with microphones or speakers.
Tekla was just staring at the Grabb, impassive, perhaps wondering whether it could see her.
Dinah slipped her hand into the data glove, did the thing that made it connect to the Grabb’s free claw, and waved.
Tekla’s green eyes flicked down in their sockets as she observed this. Still no emotion.
Dinah was mildly offended. Was the Grabb not adorably cute, in its ugly mechanical way? Was the wave not an amusing gesture?
Tekla held up the candy bar wrapper. On it, beneath Dinah’s email address, she had written NO EMAIL.
What did that mean? That she lacked an email address? That her tablet couldn’t receive it?
Or was she imploring Dinah not to communicate with her that way?
The Grabb had a headlamp, a high-powered white LED that she could switch on by hitting a key on her keyboard. Dinah turned it on, saw the glow on Tekla’s face, the highlights on the lenses of her eyes.
Did the Russians even use the same Morse code as Americans?
Tekla had to know it. She was a pilot.
Dinah made the light flash with the dots and dashes for M O R S E.
Tekla nodded, and Dinah could see her mouth making the word “Da.”
Dinah signaled:
DO YOU NEED ANYTHING?
The faintest trace of a smile came over Tekla’s lips. It was not a warm kind of smile. More bemused.
She held up what was left of the chocolate bar, and pointed to it.
Dinah returned:
TOMORROW
Te
kla nodded. Then she turned away, her buzz-cut blond hair glinting in the light of the LEDs, and drifted back into the middle of her onion.
“FIVE PERCENT” WAS HOW IVY BEGAN THE NEXT MEETING IN THE Banana.
It was full to capacity: the original twelve-person crew of Izzy, the five who had come up on the Soyuz on A+0.17, and Igor, the Scout who had come in from the cold when his suit had failed. He, Marco, and Jibran had prepped for the meeting by jury-rigging some fans to blow more air through the space, so it wouldn’t fill up with carbon dioxide. This had prompted Dinah to joke that perhaps all meetings should take place in hermetically sealed rooms, so that they could only go on for so long. No one, with the possible exception of Rhys, had seen it as funny. Anyway, the roar of ventilation was even louder than it usually was in space, and so Ivy had to speak up and use her Big Boss Voice.