The satellite’s various antennae and solar arrays were strewn across the snow in a thousand shattered pieces, the main body lying there like a battered corpse. The clean-up crew had a big job to do next summer.
She lowered her head against the wind and walked over to the mangled remains of the satellite. It was badly damaged, looking nothing like the images she’d memorized. She tried to orient herself, their headlamps the only source of light. “That must be where the thirty gigahertz antenna connected. This held a solar array. That must have been where the dual subreflectors attached to the module.”
Thor walked beside her. “Where do you want to set up?”
She pointed. “Over there.”
Thor motioned to the others. “Let’s get that tent set up!”
The men struggled to complete their task in the wind, while Samantha opened the tool bag, the wind chill already penetrating her layers. A blow torch would have made this easier, but they were unreliable in this cold. She took out a hammer and chisel, which she used to punch through the aluminum alloy paneling until she’d made a big enough opening for a close-quarter hacksaw.
“Like this,” she heard Thor say.
He seemed to be in his element here, more so than the others.
“I think you’ve done this before,” Malik said.
“A thousand times. Tighten that down. There. We’re good.”
The tentdidmake a difference, sheltering her from the worst of the wind.
Thor told Malik and Lev to shelter inside. “Do what you can to stay warm, so you’re good to go when that plane arrives.”
She kept sawing, the blade slicing through metal. But she needed to go faster. She couldn’t spend ten of their twenty minutes just getting into the module. Unfortunately, aluminum was one metal that gained strength in extreme cold.
The saw blade snapped, unable to take it.
“Damn.” She bent down, rummaged through the tools for a replacement blade.
“What can I do?”
“The blade broke. I need a new one.”
“All you’re doing is cutting open this paneling, right?”
“Yes.”
Thor gave her something—hand warmers. “Get inside the tent. Activate those if you need them. We’ll handle this part of it. We’re good at wrecking shit. Come on, boys, let’s rip this open.”
She stepped inside the tent as Malik and Lev stepped out, her breath turning to ice crystals that danced in the light of her headlamp. Through a crack in the tent flap, she saw the men using the hammer and chisel to punch out a large opening in the panel.
A few minutes later, Thor ducked his head inside the tent. “You’re on.”
She stepped out and peered into the module, adjusting her headlamp. The GPS unit was there behind wires and internal supports. She reached into the bag for the wire-cutters and a battery-operated drill. But in these heavy gloves, her fingers weren’t nimble enough to do the job. “I have to take off my gloves.”
Thor stood beside her. “Activate those hand warmers. You’ll be able to work for only a minute or two at a time.”
She shook the hand warmers to start the chemical reaction, slipped them inside the pocket of her parka, and pulled off her gloves.
The air was so frigid it felt like plunging her hands into hot steam.
She bit back a gasp at the pain and did her best to focus, only too aware that the clock was ticking.
“Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” Thor’s voice was calming.
She cut through one set of wires and searched for the screws that held the GPS unit to the supports, her fingers already growing stiff.
Thor took the drill. “Take a rest. Tell me what to do.”