BEFORE IT HAD TIME TO THAW, VYACHESLAV TOOK SEAN’S BODY down from the ceiling. Slava wasn’t a life scientist, but he was a jack-of-all-trades. Bundled up in parka and moon suit, he cut the sleep sack open as Jiro stood over him with the Eenspektor. He performed a cursory exam, then wrapped the body back into the sleep sack. He maneuvered it to the lower level, threaded it through the manhole in the middle of the floor, and then pushed it down the tunnel to the end, where Larz and the other crew member had been buried. There, he stashed Sean’s body against the ice wall.
Somewhat ruining their appetite, he reported on the findings of this impromptu autopsy as they got ready to eat a meal in the common room.
“Sean bled to death out of his asshole,” he reported. “He had an internal rupture of the bowel.”
“I picked up some beta through his belly,” Jiro added. “He was very emaciated at the end.”
“Meaning?” Markus asked.
“He swallowed a particle of fuel. Probably a fuel flea that got loose and somehow was tracked in here.”
“Fuel flea?” Jiro had used the term before. No one else knew what it meant. It had gone in one ear and out the other, just another bit of the tech jargon that was so ubiquitous on Izzy. Now that fuel fleas were killing people, it was time to learn about them.
“A tiny piece of uranium or plutonium that has gotten loose from a ruptured rod. As it throws off alpha particles, it zigs and zags around the room—conservation of momentum. So it hops around like a flea. The point is, it is small and it makes a lot of alpha. It lodged in a diverticulum in his bowel. It burned through his bowel wall and started a bleed that could not stop.”
Everyone pushed back their food.
“Okay,” Markus said. “We eat in New Caird.”
Once they had finished their meal, Markus told everyone that they needed to sleep, since they had a busy few days ahead of them. Jiro volunteered to take the first watch, and so the rest of them slept while Jiro stayed up going through logs and notebooks, assembling a picture of all that had happened on Ymir’s journey.
Suddenly they had a lot of space to spread out in. Dinah was tempted to retreat to the far end of the New Caird and get some privacy, but Markus insisted that everyone sleep down in the command module. New Caird might be free of radioactive contamination, but it was exposed to the direct hazards of space. A bolide strike would kill anyone in it. Whereas a beta-emitting particle, inhaled into the lung, would take days or weeks to incapacitate the victim—time during which they could do useful work.
So Vyacheslav ended up sleeping in one of the berths on Ymir’s crew accommodation level, while Dinah and Markus shared another. Somewhat to her surprise, they actually managed to have sex, a thing that had occurred only once since the White Sky. It was a sly surprise, not the athletic banging around that they had enjoyed the first few times they had done it, back in the good old days when the Hard Rain had seemed far in the future and the Cloud Ark had still felt like an isolated research colony. Ymir, now separated from the rest of the human race by millions of kilometers’ distance and several thousand meters per second of delta vee, now had some of that old feel to it. And despite the ghoulish scene that had greeted them on arrival, Dinah liked it here—it was the space equivalent of one of Rufus’s old mining camps—and didn’t really want to go back.
But they were supposed to be saving the human race, not enjoying an exotic holiday, so she tried to get some sleep. When Markus’s alarm went off five hours later she peeled out of the bag they’d been sleeping in and did her best to clean up and get into some fresh clothes. Ymir had long ago turned into a smelly bachelor pad, short on toiletries, and, as they discovered while rooting around in the common area, on food. Sean had definitely been killed by the fuel flea in his gut, but he had likely been weakened before then by malnutrition, and even by lack of oxygen. For the systems that the crew had been using to replenish Ymir’s air supply were not in the best condition. The new arrivals were awakened twice during their sleep cycle by alarms from the life support system, which Jiro silenced and dealt with.
When they were all awake, they ate food from the stores they had brought with them and listened to a briefing from Jiro.