“The scalpel is in as far as it will go, halfway up the handle,” Anni says, holding herself in place with the foot loop. “Maybe four inches, and I might be feeling something.”
“Switch to forceps. Hopefully, there are ones long enough to go in deeper,” I reply. “I don’t want you or Chip digging in with a finger and being cut through your gloves.”
We don’t know how sharp the frag might be or its composition, I’m going to keep warning them. We wouldn’t want them injured. Nor do I want them exposed to some unknown hazard in the remote chance we’re dealing with space debris or material from an extraterrestrial vehicle or weapon.
CHAPTER 24
OKAY, I GOT SOMETHING.” She slowly withdraws the plastic forceps, pulling out a jagged bit of copper shrapnel as bright as rose gold.
Clinging to it are fibers from the spacesuit material and cooling garment, and she digs deeper. Guided by the saved ultrasound images, she finds more copper shards and fibers, also bits of deformed lead. She places them inside sterile plastic containers, digging some more.
“Not sure what this is, something bigger,” she says, pulling out the forceps.
Clamped in the tip is a deformed small bloody silver sphere. Showing it to us in her double-gloved palm, she wipes it off with a towel, and it’s about the size of a pea.
“I have no idea what that is,” Chip says.
Nobody inside the Situation Room does, either. But I’m pretty sure I do.
“Is it hollow and similar to plastic?” My mood sinks through the floor even as I get furious.
“Affirmative,” Anni replies, and I have a good idea what must have happened last night around the time of the scheduled spacewalk.
I’m not going to say anything until I have a chance to verify what I suspect, but what a piece of garbage. I’d owe a lot of money to Janet’s swear jar right about now if anyone could hear what I’m thinking about Jared Horton. Keeping my feelings to myself, I ask Chip about examining the EMUs, the spacesuits, a little while ago.
“I’m wondering if you noticed an odor they might have carried back into the airlock with them,” I say to him on the data walls.
“No, ma’am,” he replies, and with his face mask and shield on, he likely can’t smell much of anything. “But I wasn’t checking for odors. I didn’t actually put my nose in the fabric.”
“Maybe if you have a chance.” I emphasize that I don’t want him getting a lungful of the ambient air and everything in it, please.
But it’s conceivable that an odor could still cling to the outside of the suits after only twelve hours.
“That’s approximately how much time has passed since the spacewalk was scheduled,” I explain, and they know what I’m implying. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” I add, not wishing to keep them there longer, to further burden them.
But if there might be a residual telltale scent on the EMUs, I’d like to know it for a fact while we can. If it’s still there, it won’t last a lot longer. Most assuredly it would be gone by the time the next crew arrives to clean up the bloody disaster Horton left.
“Wilco, doing it now,” Chip says, and we follow his progress as he returns to the airlock.
Hovering close to the floating disarticulated spacesuits, he grabs a glove. Lifting his face shield, he pulls down the mask, holding the white fire-retardant fabric close to his nose. Then he covers himself just as quickly with his PPE, looking up at the cameras, shaking his head no.
He didn’t smell anything, and he returns to the lab area, moving as easily through the air as an eel through water.
“What does that mean?” The vice president directs this at me.
“Most likely it means that the two victims weren’t hit by debris, and their spacewalk never happened,” is my answer plain and simple. “They never left the airlock, were fatally injured inside it after suiting up.”
“Are we sure?” General Gunner asks.
“We’ll verify when the evidence is examined in the labs,” I reply.
“That can’t happen immediately,” NASA says.
The fragments removed from the victims’ bodies can’t be returned to Earth until the next crew capsule does. One is scheduled to depart from the International Space Station the end of December, and I don’t want to wait that long.
“I’ll see what I can find out in the meantime,” I reply as Anni and Chip begin their struggle with the dead.
Spreading open a body pouch, they try to coax the female victim inside it. The job is made all the more difficult by microgravity, people alive and dead ducking, dodging, knocking into each other or the walls, the floor, the ceiling.