“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, because 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.
Biting the inside of her lip, Ruby fumbled with the thick straps while holding on to a handrail with one hand. Her own tethers stabilized her a little, but not enough.
Eugene crackled onto the comm. “Do you think an APFR would give you better leverage?”
Articulated Portable Foot Restraint. She stopped what she was doing and stared at the ship. The handrail she was using was between two sockets built into the skin of the lunar shuttle. She’d been using the solution as just a navigation point. All she had to do was use one of those two sockets to attach a foot restraint and free both hands.
And she’d been avoiding using a foot restraint because she’d been unconsciously avoiding pain. To get her feet into the APFR, she’d have to twist her ankle in and out of the restraint. Normally the MC trusted the astronaut on decisions like that during a dev run, to figure out what worked best for them. Ruby had been screwing things up because she’d gone dancing.
“Good call.” The silver lining to the number of runs they’d done was that she knew where the nearest APFR was stored. She’d passed by it at least twice during this run, which made it all the worse that she hadn’t thought of it. “Translating back over the river and through the woods.”
“If you’re reversing course, shouldn’t that be through the woods and over the river?”
“Pretty sure there are woods on both sides of the river.” Ruby pulled herself hand over hand to the port sensor array, which was, thankfully, within reach of her safety tether. Even so, fighting the water resistance made her arms burn with effort. In the back of her head, time ticked away. “I could have collected this on my previous pass, which would buy some time.”
Jason Tsao responded. “Good note, EV2. I’ll pass that up to station.”
He didn’t say “if this works” but the question hung in the water with her. Ruby attached a Retractible Equipment Tether to the foot restraint. Once the RET was secure, she pulled the foot restraint off the WIF by turning the collar and depressing the “petals” at the base of the post. The bayonet slid out of the socket. It was a ridiculous thing to feel triumph about, but at the moment she would take even small victories.