Most of her work of late had been on ice crawlers. And, as of the most recent shipment, ice tunnelers. But she had resolved that she would not shut down her progress on the iron-mining robots. Even if she only spent fifteen minutes a day on them, it was better than suspending work altogether. She was afraid that if she ever did that the entire project would disappear.
To that end, she kept a window open in the lower left corner of her screen, showing video from Amalthea, mostly the point-of-view cameras of robots that were actually doing things. It was always there in her peripheral vision as she attended to email and scheduling spreadsheets and Gantt charts.
And at some point she noticed something that wasn’t quite right. A few minutes later, she noticed it again and put her other work on hold. She expanded the window and took control of the robot that was transmitting the video. She swiveled its camera around until she had a view of the thing that had been bothering her.
It was Tekla, floating in her Luk. She was bright blue, which meant that she had donned her cooling garment. That was normal. She did it every day as she got ready for her shift. The next step should have been to squirm feetfirst through the Luk’s flange into the Vestibyul. But she wasn’t doing that. She was going back and forth between the Vestibyul and the middle of the Luk. She would go through the flange headfirst (which was abnormal) and do something for a minute or two, then withdraw into the Luk and thumb away on her tablet for a while.
She was late. Every other day, she’d been in her suit and out on the truss by this time.
Dinah wasn’t the only person who had become distracted by her laptop. Fyodor — normally not a fan of email and other such modern diversions — was watching his screen too, occasionally making eye contact with the equally distracted Maxim, who kept making a gesture like tugging at an imaginary beard.
Something was wrong.
What had Fyodor said? I am very worried about door closing mechanisms.
He wasn’t just saying that in the abstract. He was referring to a specific situation. He was talking about Tekla.
Tekla could clamber from her Luk, through the Vestibyul, and into her suit, but she couldn’t close the door behind her back. She needed the mechanism for that. If it didn’t work, then she couldn’t seal the suit. And if the suit wasn’t sealed, she was trapped inside her OVL (as they had taken to calling the combination of the Orlan suit with the Vestibyul and the Luk).
It was not exactly an emergency, but it was bad. In order to get “mail” she had to detach her suit from the Vestibyul, leaving it open for the delivery to be made in her absence. “Mail” included food, water, ice, and fresh CO2 scrubber canisters.
Dinah didn’t know how long Tekla could survive without “mail,” but she doubted it was more than a day. The heat would get her first.
They had to figure out some way to get Tekla inside Izzy. And since the OVL was jury-rigged, it didn’t have a docking port like a normal spacecraft. There was no hatch, no way of mating to an airlock.
She studied Fyodor’s face through the rest of the meeting, which went on for another half hour, and began to understand something: he was getting ready to sacrifice Tekla. “Ready” in the sense of emotionally hardening himself to that reality.
Dinah understood NO EMAIL now. It was simply part of being a Scout that you would probably not survive. And if you knew you were going to be sacrificed, it wouldn’t help matters to be spamming the Scout email list with pleas for help and goodbye messages. Tekla could communicate with Fyodor, and Fyodor only, and that was for a reason. It was a reason that the defenders of Leningrad, Stalingrad, and Moscow would have understood and accepted perfectly well. But it was a little bit out of step with the modern ethos.
Correction: with the modern ethos as it had existed during the Age of the One Moon.
It was perfectly in step with how things were now.
Part of her wanted to go and plead with Fyodor to mount a dramatic and heroic rescue mission. There had to be a way to make it happen. They had all seen Apollo 13, they quoted lines of dialogue from it all the time.
But she already knew the answer. The Pioneers would begin arriving, shiploads of them, in two weeks. All of them would die on arrival if the correct preparations had not been made. No time could be spared. More Scouts were on the way to replace Tekla.
And for once she was glad that the meeting ran long, that Sparky didn’t stick to the agenda, and that Pete Starling exploited it to fill time with more buzzwords. Because an idea was slowly taking shape in her head. She would have to run it by Ivy and Rhys and perhaps Marco, she would want to have Margie Coghlan — the closest thing they had to a doctor — standing by, but she could do it with no help at all from Fyodor or any of the other suits.
Fyodor was typing something with his index fingers. She locked her eyes on his face and kept them there until he was finished. He seemed to have detected her gaze on him, because he then looked up and stared straight into her eyes, maintaining a perfect poker face.
She stared back.
Awareness crept into Fyodor’s expression. Awareness that Dinah knew about the problem. Fyodor knew the layout of Izzy better than anyone. He knew where Dinah spent her time, and that Dinah only had to look out her window to see what was going on. She could see him putting this all together in his head.
He was expecting her to make some emotional appeal. So, it was important for her to stay cool. As soon as she turned on the waterworks, she would lose his respect, and his attention, forever.
“Fyodor,” she said, “I got this.”
He blinked in surprise, then, after some hesitation, made the tiniest of nods.
“Got what?” Pete Starling asked, over the video link. “Am I missing something?”
“No,” Dinah said. “We are just proceeding adaptively to leverage our core competencies.”
BASED ON STATS FROM THE 50 HOTTEST OLYMPIANS WEBSITE, IVY WAS a fairly close match for Tekla physically. Tekla was huskier, but Ivy was an inch taller. So, the first thing they did was to stuff Ivy into the small airlock that Dinah used for her robots. With her head tucked and her knees drawn up to her chest, she fit into it with room to spare. Dinah took a picture, then appended it to an email message with detailed instructions.
Spencer Grindstaff, who, as a young CIA contractor, had cut his teeth hacking into email systems operated by foreign governments, figured out a way to send email to Tekla’s tablet by wrapping it in an envelope that made it look like it came from Fyodor.
Dinah watched Tekla read that email. She looked up from the tablet toward the window, then turned her gaze toward the airlock. Until then, Dinah had worried that Tekla might be losing consciousness, since she hadn’t moved in several hours. She guessed that Tekla was trying to conserve oxygen and reduce thermogenesis by moving as little as possible.
Dinah zip-tied a high-powered LED light to the inner hatch of the airlock, then closed it. She opened the valve that dumped its air into space, allowing it to “fill up” with vacuum, and then actuated the lever — a simple mechanical linkage — that flipped the outer hatch open. She could see the white glow of the LED reflecting against the plastic of Tekla’s Luk bubble a few meters away, and she saw Tekla’s head turn as the light got her attention.
Several robots had to act in concert to move Tekla’s Luk bubble around until it was pressed against the airlock. This was a somewhat maddening process, like trying to grab an inflated balloon with a pair of needle-nosed pliers. Dinah had been trying to do it with Siwis — Sidewinders — of which she now had a dozen in operation. A Siwi could join head-to-tail with another Siwi to double its length, and the process could be repeated indefinitely to construct a sort of smart, instrumented tentacle. By planting the tail of one Siwi against Amalthea, and bolstering the connection by holding it down with a couple of anchored Grabbs, she was able to make another Siwi slither up the first one and connect to its head, which was projecting up into space. A third Siwi climbed up the first two and concatenated itself, and so on and so forth, building a stalk that reached up from the surface of the asteroid and began to curve around the bubble in which Tekla was imprisoned.