Мэри Коваль: Articulated Restraint [Lady Astronaut #1.5]

Sep. 26, 1960 (AP) — The International Aerospace Coalition announced today that the lunar colony, established last year, is ready to expand to hold 100 colonists. This is the next step in preparing to colonize Mars, although many still question the necessity of such an endeavor…

Six thirty in the morning was a brutal time to start work even without a sprained ankle. Ruby Donaldson tried to tell herself that being sore and exhausted was good practice as an astronaut. Limping up to the third floor of the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, she gave thanks that no one else was in the stairwell so she could lean against the metal rail. It was hard enough balancing work and life without people questioning her choices.

All she wanted was to do the NBL training run and then collapse in bed, but somehow she’d agreed to another lindy-hop dance rehearsal tonight. It was just hard to disappoint a friend that you’d been dancing in competitions with since before the Meteor struck, and she didn’t have that many pieces of Before left in her life.

At least, the benefit of being a doctor was that she could diagnose and treat her own injuries. She didn’t have to risk getting grounded if she admitted to a flight surgeon that she’d twisted her ankle practicing a Charleston Flip. All they would have done was exactly what she did. Ice. Wrap. Analgesic.

As she came out on the pool level, the smell of chlorine met Ruby at the door. The massive football field–sized pool hummed with activity as dozens of divers and suit techs prepped for the run.

Wait— There were too many people here.

And there were four EVA suits on the bright yellow donning stands by the pool. There should only be two, because her run had been scheduled with just one other astronaut. All she and Eugene were supposed to be doing was a simulated spacewalk to work out the procedure for attaching cameras to the outside of the station.

Across the pool, Jason Tsao turned from where he was talking with one of the astronauts who had done a run yesterday and shouldn’t even be at the NBL today. His tie was undone and his cuffs were rolled up past his elbows. She had never seen the test conductor look even marginally rumpled.

What the hell was wrong?

He beckoned her over with his sheaf of papers. “Ruby, morning. Change of plans, as I’m sure you probably expected.”

She had missed something—a message left with her roommate, a briefing update, something—and whatever it was did not look good. She snapped into the sort of focus she felt in the operating room. “What sort of change?”

Jason’s shoulders tightened. “Sorry. I assumed you had seen the news.”

“I— I was out last night.” She had been dancing as if Before still existed.

He took a slow breath. “No one is dead. A ship returning from the moon had a retrorocket misfire while docking with Lunetta yesterday evening.”

“Oh God.” Scores of people worked on the Lunetta orbiting platform. People she knew. And Eugene Lindholm, her partner for today’s run—his wife would have been on the lunar rocket. Ruby played bridge with Myrtle and Eugene. She turned, looking for the tall black man among the people working by the pool. He was at the stainless steel bench, running through his checklist with tight, controlled motions. No one was dead, but if the Meteor had taught the world anything, death wasn’t the worst thing that could happen to someone. “How bad?”

Jason glanced up as if he could see past the tall roof of the NBL to the space station. “The pilot of the lunar rocket could see coming in that they had a problem, so Lunetta ’s hangar crew evacuated and the rocket’s hull is intact. We’re incredibly lucky.”

Ruby wiped her hand over her face, still stunned. They needed the station as a transfer point to get people off Earth. Damage to it would throw the space program back years. At least the four EVA suits made sense now. “And so we’re working on coming up with a repair procedure today?”

Shaking his head, Jason handed her the paperwork for the day’s run, which was the only thing that seemed normal. “We’re using the NBL to figure out the rescue and recovery plan. The impact warped the airlock and coupling mechanism, so the rocket is locked to the station and the airlock is jammed. We’ve got a team up on the station working on getting it open but want all possible solutions, because the people on the lunar rocket don’t have EVA suits.”

Ruby sucked in a breath that suddenly felt like a luxury. She knew the margins on consumables for the moon run. They’d been trapped since yesterday evening, so had already been on the ship longer than the IAC budgeted for, even with redundancies. “How much air and—”

“We have sixteen hours to figure out how to get them out.”

The Lower Torso Assembly, aka space pants, lay on a cloth pad, ready for her. Astronauts did not, in fact, put their pants on like everyone else. It took two trained professionals and an astronaut wiggling across the floor to squirm into the LTA’s tight legs. Around the pool, three other astronauts were getting ready to do the same awkward floor dance. Eugene sat on the other side of the donning stand from her, his brown skin ashen above the white mesh of his Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment, but he’d insisted that he was okay to do the run.

She’d do right by him and Myrtle. Ruby sat on her rump in her own mesh LCVG, with its lines of tubing wrapping around her body and no modesty. She grabbed the hard aluminum ring at the waist and slid her feet into the top of the legs.

And knew she had a problem.

A different problem than the fact that a score of her friends and colleagues were trapped in a tin can 254 miles above her. The tacky rubber that lined the suit grabbed hold of the fabric of her cooling garment. Ruby’s ankle twinged with a warning. She evaluated it. A mild sprain. She could work through that. It was swollen, but not enough to make the suit not fit. It would just be… uncomfortable. Ruby shoved her feet into the tight layers of rubber, and pain radiated white lines to her knee, sending flashes across her vision.

Ruby stopped, holding the suit and her breath for a moment. All right. The sprain was worse than she thought.

At best, it would eat twelve of the sixteen hours to swap her out for another crew member. Almost everything about the EVA suits was customizable and swapped around to fit the crew members who were using them. The tech suit staff must have worked all night to reset the two other suits for this development run. Dev runs were hard enough when mission control had enough time to build a procedure. Today there would be more winging it than anyone would like.

And if she couldn’t suit up? Since she was the shortest member of the astronaut corps, they couldn’t just plunk someone else into her suit. If they could have, they would have put in someone other than “the pint-sized Astronette” for this run. She’d been an astronaut for two years, with only one moon trip under her belt. Sure, she’d been top of her class, because at her height being the best had been her only option, but if they could have gotten a real astronaut like Elma York in here, they would have.

Heck, the only astronauts they could add on this short a notice had just finished a run yesterday so their suits were already customized. Those two had to be exhausted after six hours fighting suits pressurized to 4.3 psi under thirty feet of water, but Paul Charvet and Serge Broom had shown up with faces as grim and determined as everyone else’s.