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.”
“Okay. Giving her the signal now,” Dinah said.
In the space program that she had dreamed of when she’d been a little girl with a “Snoopy the Astronaut” poster on the ceiling of her shack in the hinterlands of South Africa, or watching live feeds from the space station on satellite TV in western Australia, the signal would have been a terse utterance into a microphone, or a message struck out on a keyboard. But what she actually did was drift over to her little window and peer through fourteen layers of milky translucent plastic at Tekla, almost close enough to reach out and touch, and give a thumbs-up.
Tekla nodded and held up a small object next to her head. It was a folding knife with a belt clip and a lanyard, which she had prudently wrapped around her wrist. Using one thumb she snapped its serrated blade open.
Dinah nodded.
Tekla nodded back, then drifted out of view, headed toward the airlock.
“Here she comes,” Dinah said.
She had already sized Margie up as a woman of some physical strength. She was stocky, but in a powerful rather than a flabby way.
Dinah got a grip on the mechanical linkage that would swing the outer hatch of the airlock closed. “Brace me,” she said.
She was worried about all that plastic. Shreds of it were certain to get caught in the hatch’s delicate seal.
The principle was simple enough. She’d run through it in her head a hundred times. If Tekla cut a slit, a few inches long, through the innermost layer of the Luk, air would rush out into the space between it and the next layer, which was at a lower pressure. If Tekla put her head and shoulder into that slit, she’d become like a cork in a champagne bottle, and the pressure would try to force her out. If she then cut a slit through the next layer, and the next, and the next, a wave of pressure would build up behind her and spit her out like a watermelon seed. And as long as she kept aiming for the white LED on the airlock’s inner hatch, she would be projected into that airlock.
At that point she’d be naked and unprotected in the middle of a jet of air that would be exploding away from her into the vacuum. And at that point—
There was a whoosh and a meaty thunking impact.
“Jesus Christ, I think that was it,” Margie said.
“She is out,” Bo confirmed. Bo, out in the next compartment, had a tablet on which she was watching a video feed from a nearby Grabb. “I mean she is in the airlock.”
Dinah hauled on the handle, swinging the outer hatch closed. Her body, in accordance with Newton’s Third Law, moved in the opposite direction, stealing her force, but Margie’s arms caught her in a bear hug and pushed back—Margie had found a way to brace herself.
Bo gasped. “You are smashing her foot!”
“Oh, shit.”
“Her foot is sticking out.”
“Dinah,” Ivy said, “you have to open the hatch a little, her foot’s caught.”
Dinah relaxed her arms. What if Tekla was unconscious? What if she was unable to draw herself up into the fetal position they’d shown her in that photograph?
The change in Bo’s and Ivy’s tone told her otherwise. “She’s in!” Ivy exclaimed.
“Close the hatch, close it!” Bo was shouting.
Dinah swung the handle all the way around and snapped it into its locked position. It didn’t feel quite right, but at least it was closed.
Meanwhile Margie was actuating the valve that let air into the airlock. This was supposed to be a gradual process, but she just let it go explosively, with a sudden movement of the air that tugged at their diaphragms and popped their ears.
“Blood is coming out,” Bo said dully. “Leaking out of the hatch.”
“Fuck!” Dinah said. Because that meant two bad things at once: the outer hatch wasn’t really closed, and Tekla was hurt.
“Let’s get it open,” Margie said.
In the end it took all four of them: Dinah, Margie, Bo, and Ivy, all crammed into the space with their fingers under the rim of the hatch, pushing against the wall with all the strength in their legs and their backs, to break the seal. Whereupon air whooshed out of the compartment and the hatch flew open, like when you finally break the seal on a vacuum-packed jar and the lid flies off.
Tekla was in there, drawn up into the prescribed fetal position, a solid mass of red.
They all stared at her speechless for a moment.
Her head moved. She turned her face up toward them, revealing a huge red smear where an eye ought to have been.
The only thing that kept Dinah from screaming like a little girl was her gorge rising up into her throat. Bo drew in a long breath and began muttering something.
Tekla’s hands unfolded and gripped the rim of the chamber. The lanyard of the knife was still wound around her right wrist. The handle of the knife trailed after it. Dinah supposed that its blade had been snapped off until she understood that the whole thing had become embedded in Tekla’s forearm.
Tekla pulled herself out a few inches, then stopped. Her head was now projecting into the room.
An eye opened. A bloodshot eye in a bloody face. But a normal, working eye.
Dinah’s ears began working again and she realized that she was hearing a loud hissing noise. It was the sound of air escaping from the International
