“I am very worried about door closing mechanisms.”
THE REMAINDER OF THE MEETING HAD TO DO WITH THE PIONEERS who would start coming up in another two weeks, and who would live, for the time being, in rigid or inflatable habitats more accommodating than Luks. These would be docked along a series of pressurized tubes, little different in principle from the big spiral-wound ventilation ducts seen in warehouses, that would ramify outward from attachment points in the truss. Little of it concerned Dinah and so her attention drifted to her laptop. She had other things she could be working on, and Ivy’s reminder about the 5 percent had not left her in a mood to woolgather during a long meeting.
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.