Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  “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.

  The suit tech on her right glanced at her. “Everything okay?”

  This was going to hurt, but once she was in, the simulated spacewalk wouldn’t use her feet. Much. She just had to get into the suit.

  “Yep. Just getting my toes lined up.” Gritting her teeth, Ruby tried to keep her face placid as she worked her foot through the leg of the suit. The swelling in her ankle made it feel as if the rubber bladder was grabbing her deliberately. Flares shot up from the protesting muscles as if warning her to back away. She tried to breathe through the pain, and kept wriggling past the folds of fabric and rubber while the two techs braced the legs.

  A fishhook seemed to embed itself in between the talus and tibia bones of her ankle and dug in deeper as she worked her foot down through the leg. The moment when her foot popped into the boot at the end made her gasp with relief.

  She couldn’t speak so she gave a thumbs-up and held out her hands for the men to help hoist her to her feet. Thank God standard procedure meant that they braced her because she wasn’t putting any weight on her right foot until she had to. All she needed to do now was walk five feet, wiggle into the hard torso of the EVA suit where it hung suspended on the donning stand, and that would be the last time she’d have to put significant weight on her ankle until the run was finished.

  At least that was one good thing about her lindy-hop training—she knew how to smile through pain. Under the best of conditions, you were sore at the end of an NBL run. This was just different pain.

  It also helped that everyone expected astronauts to grimace as they forced themselves into the hard upper torso assembly. But once inside the HUT assembly, she could let the donning stand support her weight and lean against the frame while the suit techs put the rest of the suit on. It wasn’t that it was comfortable, because the o-ring joints at the shoulders of the suit pushed her arms forward a little and dug into her armpits, but at least the donning stand took her weight.

  As much as she wanted to tell everyone to hurry, the old aphorism “slow is fast” applied here, too. They wouldn’t help the crew on the station who would have to do the actual spacewalk if they started making mistakes by rushing.

  They’d done things right this morning, taking the time to do the pre-run briefing so everyone knew what their jobs were. Broadly, their job was to work out safe procedures in the relatively benign environment of a 6.3-million-gallon pool of water so that when her colleagues in orbit went into the lethal environment of space, they didn’t have to take any unnecessary chances.

  Specifically, she and Eugene were going to see if a life raft was possible while EV3 and 4 attempted a maneuver to see if it was possible to run air and power to the lunar rocket. To buy time. Ultimately, if they couldn’t get the hatch open, the rocket’s crew would still need a life raft to transfer safely inside the station.

  So Ruby forced herself to relax, conserving energy for the run itself, while the techs checked the cooling system and slid her “Snoopy” cap on so she would have comms in her suit. The helmet followed after that and slid a barrier between her and the world.

  This was what things would sound like for the folks trapped in the ship. Even without a breach, they’d have their emergency pressure suits on, which would protect them from a vacuum but not the temperature extremes outside the sh
ip. All their communication would be filtered by comms, which were distancing and intimate all at the same time.

  In her ears, the comforting litany of mission control almost made it sound like people weren’t in danger.

  And then the litany broke. “We can’t get a good seal on EV1.”

  Eugene’s voice followed from where he stood behind her on the donning stand. “It’s probably just a gauge.”

  “You know we can’t risk that.”

  Ruby opened her eyes. There was nothing she could do, strapped to the donning stand, but if they couldn’t seal Eugene’s suit it would take on water in the pool. Myrtle was up there. “Eugene— There will be three of us in the pool. They can add you as soon as they get a good seal.”

  His breath hissed in her ears, but she could hear his fighter pilot training. He was heartbreakingly calm when he spoke. “Copy.”

  Jason’s voice joined the mix. “We’ll start the run with EV2, 3, and 4 and add him as soon as you get a good seal.”

  With Myrtle up there, it had to be killing him to be pulled at this point.

  “Eugene?”

  “Yeah, Ruby.”

  “I’ve got this.”

  His breath caught for just a second. “Copy. I’ll be with you on comm until they get me in the pool.”

  As she glanced at the clock on the wall, her stomach twisted. Fourteen hours remaining for the crew on the lunar rocket.

  * * *

  Underwater, everything was blue. The big cylinders that made up the mockup Lunetta were punctured with even round holes to allow water to flow through. Cables snarled in ungainly swirls around the outside of the mock space station and the water pushed against Ruby’s suit, creating a resistance that she didn’t experience in space. Around her, support divers floated with bubbles drifting up from them, ready to help her compensate for the drag of water.

  And she needed help. This was her third attempt to attach a spare expansion module of Lunetta to the aft end of the lunar rocket. In theory, with an oxygen pack and a CO2 scrubber, it would serve as a sort of “life raft” for the crew inside the ship. Assuming she could find a path to get it there without getting snarled in cables.

  “All right, EV2…” Eugene’s voice was steady on the comm, as if he were in the pool with her. “Look for handrail 1175.”

  She had no idea where handrail 1175 was on the lunar rocket. If she’d stayed in last night, instead of going to the rehearsal, then she would have gotten Jason Tsao’s phone call and been able to prep for the change of plans. Or to at least familiarize herself with the lunar rocket in more detail. Grimacing, Ruby peered around the ship.

  “Can you give me a big picture of where that is?” She hated to ask for help navigating but the distortions from her helmet and the water made reading numbers a little dicey. Myrtle was not going to die because Ruby had gone to a dance practice last night.

  “Oh sorry. We’d need you to go to just aft of the starboard external payload facility.” Eugene’s voice was steady as he guided her in, because he’d done his homework. “Past the grapple fixture, down the gap-spanner … It should be sandwiched between two WIFs.”

  When she’d started with the IAC, the jargon had been daunting. Now it wasn’t much different from “over the river and through the woods.” She hauled herself forward, looking through the distortion that her helmet caused in the water. Behind her, the tether for the “life raft” trailed through the water.

  A pair of support divers steadied it to compensate for Eugene’s absence. In the real spacewalk, another astronaut would be back there with tethers to hold it steady while she moved forward. If EV3 and 4 weren’t tied up trying to simulate running air and power to the rocket, they might have helped. But it was on her and a faux EV1.

  Finally, she found the handrail label sandwiched, as advertised, between two of the sockets that peppered the rocket’s skin. “Got it.” Ruby secured her safety tether, making sure that the black lines on the latch lined up. “EV2’s anchor tether hook is on handrail 1175. Slider locked, black on black.”

  She secured a local tether as well, trying to stabilize herself in relation to the rocket. Once she was steady, she snapped the crewlock bag onto the handrail so that it was ready for her.

  The final tether was the long one that trailed back to the life raft. “Transferring life raft tether to handrail 1175.”

  “Suggestion.” Eugene’s voice cut in. “Use the aft starboard stanchion. Otherwise, the tether might trap your safety line when you pull the life raft forward.”

  “Good note.” Ruby kept her voice relaxed as his. She should have spotted that. Carefully, she unhooked the life raft tether from her suit and transferred it to the stanchion. Turning carefully, she worked back along the length of the ship to face the life raft. Pretending that Eugene was in the pool, she said, “Life raft tether secured. New path looks good. Ready to leapfrog the life raft forward.”

  “Copy, EV2. Releasing RET and moving toward you.” He wasn’t. A diver was mimicking his actions in ways that they would never do in a real dev run. But this was the best they could do. The suit techs still couldn’t get a good seal on his suit.

  Hand over hand, she pulled the bulky rubber toward her, just as if Eugene were really on the other side of it to guide it down the length of the rocket. The action caused her to drift a little away from the handrail, until her tethers stopped her, just as they were designed to do. In space it would be more pronounced. “They might consider two local tethers to control drift.”

  “Good note.” Jason’s voice was calm and cool in her ears. “Thank you, EV2.”

  As the life raft drifted to her, Ruby felt a flush of triumph. With one stiff glove, she reached out to stop it next to her. “I have the life raft.” With her free hand, she secured a retractable equipment tether to the bracket on the side of the life raft’s grapple mechanism and unspooled the tether to snap it into place on the space ship. On the other side, the diver mimicked her.

  “EV2 … We’ll need you to place all the tethers to make sure that the positions are achievable in a suit.” Jason sounded almost apologetic.

  “Copy.” The plan was to place four tethers to stabilize the life raft and then cinch it down to contact the side of the lunar rocket and engage the grapple mechanism. It made sense that they would need someone in an EVA suit, with its limited range of movement, to place all four. Looking down, she couldn’t even see the bottom tether. All things considered, she’d start with the hard one first while she still had some energy. “Working on the nadir tether attachment first.”

  Ruby released the local tether, leaving her safety tether in place, and worked her way down to the bottom of the handrail. At the bottom end, she tried to snag the tether hook but the body position was bad. She had to twist her arm in ways that the suit really wouldn’t let her. The suits really didn’t want you to raise your arms over your head. Being upside down might work though … Grabbing the handrail, she rotated so that she hung head-down in the water. Better.

  Kind of. The suits were neutrally buoyant, but inside them, she was dealing with 1-G. As blood pooled in Ruby’s head, she figured that at least her ankle was elevated.

  Over the comm, Jason said, “Looks like you’re heads-down, we’ll do a check at five minutes and pull you at ten.”

  “Copy.”

  The life raft had drifted down in the pool so the grapple mechanism was masking the anchor point on the lunar rocket. Maybe she should have done the top tether first. Ruby tried pushing the life raft up in the pool, but the water resistance and gravity pushed down on it. In space, this would be easy, but in the NBL her muscles burned.

  “Five minutes, EV2.”

  “I’m fine.” Standard procedure be damned. Her sinuses were full and her head pounded from being upside down, but she could manage the discomfort. The body position was better for placing the tether, but the tube itself was fighting her in ways that it wouldn’t in space.

  Ruby was so used to not complaining, becau
se she was short. Because she was a woman. Anything she said would be seen as a failure on her part. But the resistance was an NBLism and not a problem the actual spacewalker would face, and people’s lives were on the line. Ruby sighed as quietly as she could on a live mic. “I could use a diver assist to support the tube.”

  Like magic, one of the three support divers following her floated up and guided the end of the bag so that it floated in the water more or less the way it would in space. She stretched her arm toward the newly revealed anchor point, fingers aching as she fought the pressurized suit.

  “That’s ten minutes, EV2.”

  “Almost there.” The motion made her rotate a little. Damn it. She should have put the additional local tether in place to control her own motion. Grimacing, she tried to snap the tether hook in place and just missed. It slipped out of her clumsy grasp and floated away from her in the water. She held her curses inside.

  “Divers, set EV2 upright.”

  Biting down on the inside of her cheek, Ruby tried to relax when the divers gently pulled her back and rotated her upright so the blood could drain from her head. As they did, she slipped inside her suit and suddenly all of her weight was on her feet. Ruby closed her eyes, breathing through her teeth.

  “Anything wrong, Ruby?” Jason Tsao’s voice snapped her eyes open.

  “Nope.” In front of her, the support diver in charge of filming had his camera aimed at her face. Ruby smiled at him, so that everyone in the mission control room would be able to see that she was fine. They wouldn’t pull her out of the pool, not with lives on the line, but they would sure as heck note any struggles for future missions. “Just thinking through next steps. I’m ready to start up again when you are.”

  * * *

  On attempt number four, Ruby had figured out a process that got the tube lined up, but still wrestled with snugging the life raft up against the ship enough to get a good seal. The grapple mechanism had been designed to be activated by pressure from docking. Attempting to exert that pressure manually was … challenging.