“If it comes down to me and Tekla,” Julia said, “I’m not going to miss.”
ALL DINAH WANTED TO DO WAS SLEEP. SINCE NEW CAIRD HAD DEPARTED from Izzy she had never gotten more than four consecutive hours, and the numbers for the last day or so were even more dismal. In a weird way, she wanted to sleep so that she would be able to grieve properly. She knew Markus was dead, but it hadn’t really sunk in. Nor would it, as long as she was running from one crisis to the next.
The burn had worked. Ymir’s perigee altitude had been raised to the point where it would never again be troubled by the atmosphere. But the ship was still tumbling, albeit slowly. And Vyacheslav was still trudging around on its outer surface with his feet zip-tied to Grabbs.
At the start of this extravehicular activity, Slava had exited through the airlock on the side of New Caird—a ship that was no longer with them. His supplies were running low. He had to get inside the command module before he ran out of air. This could be achieved using an airlock built in for that purpose. It was located adjacent to the docking port in the “nose” of the ice-buried command module. Passing through it, he would enter the uppermost level of the module, where he could breathe the same air as everyone else. But he had taken the precaution of checking himself out with an Eenspektor, and found powerful radiation coming from several locations on his suit—basically, wherever he had come into contact with the surface of the shard.
“I was worried about this,” Jiro said, “but there was nothing to be done.”
“Worried about what?” Dinah asked. “I thought the surface was reasonably clean.”
“It was,” Jiro said, “until we did the perigee burn. The nozzle was pointed forward. Some of the steam was blown back over us by the wind—by the atmosphere we were passing through. It condensed and stuck to the surface of the shard. So, now there are little pieces of fallout all over the outside of Ymir. And some of them have gotten stuck to Slava’s space suit.”
“He’s got to get out of that thing.”
Jiro shrugged. “The suit will block most of the beta.”
“I mean, he’s got to get out of it before he runs out of oxygen.”
“That is true.”
“Which means he has to come in here.”
“Also true.”
“He’s going to bring that radiation inside with him.”
“It will take weeks to kill us. By that time we will have accomplished our mission. Or not.”
In the end, though, they came up with a workaround that did not involve dying, which was that they taped some plastic over the companionway that joined the command module’s top level to the one below it. Before doing so, they moved a generous supply of food and water to that level, along with toiletries, a sleep sack, and other items Vyacheslav would be needing. Slava passed through the airlock with some minutes to spare, doffed his suit, and closed it up in the chamber of the airlock, which would block most of the beta radiation coming off it. He then stripped off his clothes and went through several repetitions of decontaminating himself with premoistened towelettes, throwing all of it into the airlock chamber before slamming its hatch shut.
Then he threw up.
The upper level of the command module, along with Slava himself, now had to be treated as contaminated, but they didn’t need it anymore. Jiro and Dinah would be confined to the lower levels, separated from Vyacheslav and the possible contamination by a sheet of plastic, until they reached Izzy or died. A common air supply circulated through all the levels in ducts, but it had a filter system, which they hoped would catch any floating motes of fallout.