4.3
28 April
ESL1 Shade Station
Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1
Extracislunar Space
By the time Alice got to Tim Ho and Rose Ketchum, they were on their way back to the station, about a kilometer out.
Rose was still blind, and Tim had clipped himself to her and was simply pushing her back toward the double wheel of the station. Rose was lucid but had started vomiting, and Alice was telling her, “Use the purge button. Romper, you’ve got to activate your purge button.”
To which Rose replied, “I can’t find it, ma’am. I can’t feel it. I’m going to inhale this stuff.”
She was gasping for air, and definitely sounded like she was starting to panic, so as Alice approached the pair, she simply extended the pointer finger of her spacesuit glove and pressed the button for Rose.
A spray of white mist and brown liquid exited Rose’s helmet, all over Alice’s glove. Rose exclaimed, clearly startled by the noisy rush of air out of her suit. Each press of the button only released half a liter, but that was usually enough to do the job. And yeah, on the inside of a space helmet, it was loud.
There was definitely nothing wrong with Rose’s visor; Alice could see straight through it to Rose’s wide-eyed face. In fact, Alice could tell at a glance which components of Rose’s suit had been made by Renz Ventures, and which by General Spacesuit. The outer fabric layer, which should be cerulean blue, had been scorched gray on the suit’s front half. The hoses, which should be gray, had gone yellow. Rose’s own face had blisters on it that looked, to Alice’s war-trained eyes, like second-degree burns, though time would tell if it was actually worse than that.
But the visor itself, and the gloves and the boots and the rotary fittings, made right here at ESL1, looked fresh as the day they were made.
“The button is on your chin,” Alice said, “where it’s always been. Rose, I need you to slow your breathing and stop moving your arms around. TicTac’s got you. Right now, he’s actually got us both. Do you trust TicTac?”
“Yes, ma’am. With my life.”
“Then stop moving around.”
Alice was in full Pararescueman mode: a flow state of high alertness and low emotional affect. Emotions were not helpful at times like these. Later, perhaps. Not now.
“We’re about ten minutes from the airlock,” Tim reported.
To which Isaiah, over the radio, replied, “Jericho, here. At current speed you are eight minutes, fourteen seconds out from the airlock.”
Taking firm hold of the straps on the front of Rose’s spacesuit, Alice said, “You hear that? We’re practically there, so I need you to keep your breathing slow, okay? For another eight minutes.”
“What’s wrong with me, ma’am?” Rose said, her voice ringing with tightly controlled fear.
“We’re going to figure that out,” Alice said. “We think you’ve been exposed to radiation, but we don’t know how much. The good news is, you’re already loaded up with every anti-radiation drug and cell growth factor known to man.”
“What about Falcon?” Rose asked, through breaths that hadn’t slowed at all.
“We’re still figuring that one out, too.”
“Is he KIA?”
Killed in action? Yes, probably. But what Alice said was, “The explosion might have blown him clear. Jericho is looking for him on the radar.”
“I’m scared,” Rose said.
“I know, honey. Let’s get you to medlab and figure it out.”
Alice had never called Rose “honey” before, but it was what she’d called her patients back on the battlefields of Central America. Especially the ones who were going to die.
“TicTac here, ma’am. I feel fine. No ill effects that I’m aware of. Is it possible Romper’s just motion sick?”
It was Jericho who answered that one: “Negative, sir. The radiation burst should drop off rapidly with distance. Based on your position at the time, I’d say you got about a fifth of Romper’s dose.”
To which Rose said, “Falcon was a lot closer than I was. He was right on top of them. Is he dead, ma’am?”
“Probably,” Alice said, unwilling to outright lie about it. “But right now, let’s focus on you.”
Another voice came in over the radio, saying, “Nightingale here. Can I get a comms check?”
“Mockingbird confirms,” Alice said. “Nightingale on the network.”
Nightingale was Berka Feikey, the station’s replacement doctor. Alice didn’t know much about her, except that she’d been a general practitioner in a North Dakota mining town, where she’d done everything from setting broken bones to delivering babies to administering chemotherapy drugs. That was a decent résumé, but Alice had never seen her handle an emergency.
“Can I get a report on Romper’s condition?” Nightingale asked.
To which Alice replied, “Patient is lucid, with intermittent vomiting. Second-degree burns to the face.” And then, because there was no way around it, she added, “Pupils are dilated and nonreactive, with some capillary bleeding around the sclera. Vision appears to be compromised.”
Rose whimpered at that, but managed to basically keep her shit together.
“You’re doing fine,” Alice assured her. “Just breathe.”
Nightingale said, “Mockingbird, I’ve tapped your camera feed. I’d appreciate if you can please stay pointed in that direction, so I can see the patient. Romper, I am monitoring your vital signs. Are you able to report symptoms?”
“Yes, ma’am. Uh! I’m sick to my stomach, and I do not get motion sickness. My hands and feet are tingling, and my eyes hurt. I can’t see anything. That’s not my visor, is it?”
“It doesn’t appear so. Can you move your fingers and toes?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“All right, well, pulse ox looks good, but your blood pressure is dropping. It’s possible you may lose consciousness. Mockingbird, will you please switch Romper’s air mix to pure O2?”
“Roger that.”
Romper vomited again, and made no effort to activate her purge button. Alice did it for her, and after that nobody had much to say until they got to the airlock.
Alice opened the outer hatch, and Rose was cooperative as TicTac maneuvered her body inside. She seemed to be losing fine motor control, though, so Alice opted for the emergency pressurization sequence, which took thirty seconds instead of ten minutes.
Once the outer hatch was wheeled and sealed, the lights above it went from green to red, and the digital pressure gauge on the wall climbed rapidly, until Alice could feel the pressure shrinking the sleeves of her spacesuit. In the close confines of the lock, TicTac was holding Rose by the armpits now, and Alice had her hands on Rose’s helmet latch. And then she could hear the rushing air, and the lights on the inner hatch went from red to green.
Without delay, Alice slammed the twin rotary connectors—one left and one right—and popped Romper’s helmet off. She did the same with her own, and was assaulted by the puke-and-chemicals smell leaking out of Rose’s suit. Ignoring that, she cranked the wheel on the inner hatch and shouldered it open.
After that, they maneuvered her through the Cross and through the rotary coupler module and into the old zero-gee part of the station, where the medlab was still located. Alice had insisted the medlab be easily accessible from the Cross, and Doc Feikey had insisted it not be treated like a hallway for anyone passing between the two stations, so the old station had been bolted to the new one at the module that had previously been Jeannete Schultz’s apartment, with the medlab immediately across from it on the gamma corridor.
Feikey was waiting for them there—a crew-cut woman with fierce, dark eyes. Jarringly, Alice could see her own camera feed bouncing and whirling on one of the wall screens, above one of the two surgical tubes and across from the two examination tables.
“Get her out of the suit,” Feikey was saying, but of course Alice and Tim were already doing that. Rose had gone limp, which made it easier. Once the suit’s top half—the jacket—was separated from the pants, it became overwhelmingly clear that Rose Ketchum had shat herself. She reeked of it, and it was all up and down the back of her space underwear.
It was a bad sign, and it helped Alice realize that Rose had, in fact, lost consciousness.
“Never mind that,” Doc Feikey said. “Strip her and get her in the tube.”
She pantomimed these gestures, just in case there was any doubt, which there most certainly was not.
Tim and Alice pulled Rose’s shitty things off of her, setting them adrift in the air. They got diarrhea in Rose’s hair in the process, and it was all over her back and bum, and this would compromise the sterility of the tube, but yeah. They stuffed her in there and closed the clear plastic hatch down over her top half. Feikey worked some controls on her wall panel, and the tube immediately did a ten-second car wash cycle and then began shoving hoses and needles and probes into Rose’s body in full Intensive Care mode.
X-ray and ultrasound scanners came alive, and then the display screen above the tube was showing a multimodal image of Rose’s insides, and Alice (who was a medic, not a doctor) could see she was a fucking mess in there.
“We have internal bleeding,” Feikey said, while Alice gathered up Rose’s underwear and loose globs of shit. No time for disgust right now. “I’m pushing ten milligrams of vitamin K1 and a liter of plasma simulant. Also”—Feikey paused for a moment, tapping her chin—“levoflaxacin, loperamide, and some bone marrow growth factors. I need to do some research, figure out exactly which drugs to print. But her skin looks sunburnt, even where it wasn’t exposed to the flash, and that’s a bad sign. Do we have an estimate of the absorbed dose?”
“Only very approximately,” said Isaiah Pembroke through Alice’s headset, and also through a speaker on the wall. Because he was still on the network, listening to every word. “I think it must be between two thousand and fifteen thousand roentgens, minus whatever got blocked by the shielding in the suit. It won’t have done very much against fast neutrons and gamma rays.”
Doc Feikey’s frown deepened. “If that’s accurate, then there may not be much we can do. She’s already loaded full of antioxidants and DNA repair enzymes, but those are protective against chronic exposure to much lower doses. We’ll push some more of that and cross our fingers, but under normal circumstances, with immediate treatment, a lethal dose would be around six hundred roentgens, absorbed dose. So”—she met Alice’s gaze with stern compassion—“let’s not get our hopes up.”
Nobody said anything for a few seconds, until Tim Ho cleared his throat and said, calmly, “Doctor, am I going to die?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Better get that suit off.”
The surgical tube estimated Rose’s exposure at eight thousand Roentgens Absorbed Dose, and predicted, based on her dropping vital signs, a median survival time of “< 48 hrs.” Her burns were getting worse—a lot worse.
“She’s not going to regain consciousness,” Feikey said confidently. “I’m sorry. Were the two of you close?”
“No,” Alice said, because she’d been close to maybe ten people in her entire life. “But she’s a good astronaut, well liked. As was”—her throat caught for a moment—“Derek Haakens.”
In the next tube over, Tim Ho had an estimated dose of four hundred RAD, and was sedated against boredom while Feikey pumped him full of medications. He had a sunburn, too, though not much of one.
“This one is going to make it,” she said. “He’s going to need a blood transfusion—real human blood, not simulant—but he’s AB positive, so we can pull from pretty much anyone here. We’re going to need, I think, probably about four units, and it’s actually better if they come from different people. You want to roll up your sleeve?”
“Definitely,” Alice said.
Feikey touched her on the arm then and said, “Commander—Alice—you need to know, his astronaut career is over. He’d benefit from a bone marrow transplant, which we can’t do here, and he’s at massively elevated risk of developing cancers, pretty much throughout his body. With close supervision he could live a normal lifespan, but we’ve got to get him out of this high-radiation environment.”
“I see.”
Feikey turned and busied herself for a moment, tapping buttons on one of her many colorful touchscreen panels.
“I think the rest of us are going to skate on this one,” she said. “We’ve got a couple of people who were near unshaded windows, who’ve made appointments to get their eyes checked. They may have some bleaching of retinal pigments, but those effects are reversible within, at most, a few days. It’s possible there are some retinal point burns—Tim Ho has some very minor ones—but you’d really have to be looking directly at the explosion for that to happen. And even then, the burns are going to be small, maybe not particularly debilitating by themselves. You and Isaiah should think about getting your own eyes checked, by the way.”
Alice knew that she and Isaiah had not been looking directly at the explosion, so she ignored the comment and asked, “What about the radiation?”
“Here? Negligible. Isaiah has been using the dosage estimates for Rose and Tim to calibrate his own calculations. The station got about five roentgens per square meter, and with all the shielding that’s not going to amount to much, biologically. We probably got four months’ worth of normal exposure in a couple of milliseconds, or two full-body CAT scans, if you like. But the radiation drugs should handle all of that. I’ll bet we don’t even have an elevated cancer risk.”
“Hmm.”
“I’m sorry, Alice. I wish I could do more.”
Grimacing, Alice said, “I should have been out there with them.” This wasn’t actually true, and she knew it wasn’t. It was her emotions, trying to leak out.
Sternly, Feikey said, “If you did that, we’d just have one more casualty, and one less interim station commander.” She adjusted the settings on one of her screens, then turned to Alice with genuine grief on her face and said, “What exactly happened out there? Who were those people? What were they willing to die for, all the way out here?”
“I don’t know,” Alice said, “I don’t. But I intend to find out.”
When all of that was done, Alice left the medlab and its tragedies. She gently coasted her body across gamma corridor and through the old housing module, back into the Cross, and down the east spoke until centrifugal motion forced her to grab the ladder and slide the rest of the way down. Then it was through the east lab corridor and across into the other ring, through her thank-God-empty office, and into her apartment, whose hatch she closed and dogged behind her.
Positioning herself, face-down, a meter above her bed, she took a few cleansing breaths, then punched the mattress as hard as she could. Bouncing off the ceiling, she let the scream finally come out of her, rising to a shriek. And then her eyes went blurry, and she choked out a sob, and then another, and then a whole gasping string of them, and she just let it all happen. Any Air Force Pararescueman could tell you, when shit went badly, there was no substitute for tears.