Rynn Haney drifted in the infinite blackness. Pinpoints of light moved slowly across her vision. Adrenaline rushed through her body, and a thought floated across her mind: Did it explode?
Her momentum rotated her, and Atlantis’s nose cap moved into view mere feet away.
Outside, she thought. What am I doing out here?
“Rynn?” a voice said. The voice seemed to be coming from inside her head. “Kathrynn, can you hear me?”
Jeff’s voice in her helmet speakers.
“I think I’m outside.” I think? Well, that’s stupid. Of course I’m outside.
Suddenly she spun. She felt a tug at her waist as the tether reached the limit of its length, and she began to drift back toward the nose of the shuttle.
And there was the scar, the small gouge that yesterday had made Rynn’s EVA necessary. The small gouge that yesterday she had repaired by smearing NOAX with a spatula. The small gouge that had somehow reappeared.
A voice in her speakers, a different voice, said, “Atlantis, stand by, we have a situation down here.”
Jeff, the captain of shuttle mission STS-125, said, “Standing by, Houston. And we have a situation up here, too.”
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