“Just like a bullwhip,” she observed, unwinding the chain from her finger too late to avoid being drawn into close, cozy contact with Rhys.
“It is exactly the same physics,” he confirmed. “Kucharski called that thing—the traveling U-shaped bend—a Knickstelle. It means something like ‘kink place.’”
“Chains, whips, and now kinks. I’m learning so much about your Victorian ancestors, Rhys.”
“You probably thought this was a mere diversion,” he said.
“Oh, no. I see your point. Rather than trying to control the Siwi chain, like a tentacle, all clenching muscles, let it relax and whip around the Luk like a smart chain.”
This little digression into nineteenth-century physics turned out to be one of those “one step back, five steps forward” sorts of trades. It was the work of a few minutes to concatenate four more Siwis onto the existing chain, then turn off all the motors except a few that she used to fashion a U-shaped bend. Applying tension to one end of it caused the Knickstelle to propagate just as in Rhys’s demonstration, so that the end of the chain whipped lazily around the entire circumference of the Luk. Several attempts were required before the grappler at the end of the chain was able to snag a handhold on the far side, but then the Luk was securely captured in the chain’s embrace. Grabbs could scuttle along it carrying the ends of cables anchored to other parts of Amalthea, or Izzy, and thus the Luk was gradually ensnared in a loose web of hardware that Dinah used to draw it away from the position where it had been anchored, and pull it up snug against the module containing Dinah’s shop. As it came closer, the vague nimbus of white light thrown against the Luk by the LED in the airlock narrowed and sharpened, and was finally all but snuffed out as the big balloon enveloped the protruding stub of the airlock chamber. The airlock was now poking into the nested layers of the Luk like a finger prodding a balloon.
Even after the success of the whip-cracking gambit, this took most of a day. Rhys drifted off, as was his habit. Bo, the Mongolian cosmonaut, slipped into Dinah’s shop, observed silently for a couple of hours, and then began finding ways to make herself useful. She learned how to use the data glove and the mouse-and-keyboard interface just by watching Dinah, and by the end of the day was piloting Grabbs around, and manipulating Siwis, like an old hand.
Margie Coghlan showed up to watch the final preparations. She was an Australian physiologist who had been sent up to Izzy a few months ago to study the effects of spaceflight on human health. Dinah had always found her a little brusque, but maybe that was just an Australian thing. She brought with her a box of medical supplies and surgical equipment. All the astronauts on the ISS had medical training. Dinah and Ivy had done their time working in Houston emergency rooms stitching up trauma victims and setting bones. But Margie was the best.
“Not exactly what you signed on for,” Dinah said.
“None of us is getting what we signed on for,” Margie observed.
“With the possible exception of Tekla,” said another voice. Ivy’s. She was not in Dinah’s shop—that was full now with Dinah, Bo, and Margie—but she was in the adjacent SCRUM.
“Ivy, you ready to set another record?” Dinah asked.
“Ready to try,” Ivy said.
This was Q code for the number of women on the space station at one time. The old record had been four, set in 2010. They had tied it months ago when Margie and Lina had come up to Izzy, joining Ivy and Dinah. They had broken it when Bo had turned up in the Soyuz launch three weeks ago. Tekla would make six, if they could only get her through the airlock.
Or the number might drop back if this went wrong.
“Bo, thanks for helping. You should probably go out with Ivy.”
“Good luck,” Bo said, and, pushing off from the inner hatch of the airlock, drifted across Dinah’s shop and out through the hatch into the SCRUM, where Ivy hovered, waiting.
“Everything sealed up behind you?” Dinah asked, more out of nervousness than anything else. It was out of the question that Ivy would get that wrong. Since the breakup of the moon, they’d intensified their precautions anyway, keeping the various modules of Izzy separated by airtight hatches wherever possible so that the perforation of one module by a bolide wouldn’t lead to the destruction of the whole complex.
Ivy didn’t answer.
“You know what to do with that hatch if this all goes sideways,” Dinah went on.
“You talk a lot when you’re nervous,” Ivy said.
“I concur,” Margie said. “Are we going to do this or not? That woman might be asphyxiating out there.”