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.