“Keep trying!” Lance pushed past Decker.
Decker grabbed for him. “Lance, stop! You don’t want to see this.”
But Lance was quicker. He jerked aside the curtain that shielded Patty’s body from their view—and froze. “Jesus.”
Samantha gasped.
Patty lay there, unmoving and shirtless, her skin pallid, her eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling, a tube protruding from her mouth.
Kristi Chang, the station RN, stood beside her, tears streaming down her cheeks as she removed an IV from Patty’s arm. “I’m sorry. We did everything we could.”
Lance coughed as if choking back tears, took Patty’s lifeless hand. “Patty.”
Samantha stood, took a step toward the bed. “If I had found her earlier… If I had gone to check on her the moment she was late for breakfast…”
Lance rubbed his thumb over the back of Patty’s hand. “I should’ve been there.”
Decker put a hand on Lance’s shoulder, looked over at Samantha. “Don’t do this to yourselves—either of you. This isn’t your fault. She must have had some hidden condition, some undiagnosed pulmonary or cardiac problem. Until there’s an autopsy, we won’t know for sure what killed her.”
Lance stroked Patty’s cheek. “You’re doing an autopsy?”
“Me?” Decker shook his head. “No. That won’t happen until we get her body back to the US in November.”
Lance wiped tears from his face. “That’s seven months from now.”
There were no flights in or out of the station during austral winter. The risk of a plane’s fuel freezing was too high.
Decker nodded. “We have no choice but to bag her body and keep it on ice.”
“Oh, God.” Samantha’s heart constricted at the thought of Patty spending seven months, frozen solid, in a body bag in the subzero service arches below the station.
Steve Hardin, the winter site manager, walked in. “I heard that Patty… Oh, no! Son of a bitch! What the hell happened?”
But Samantha needed to get out of here.
She hurried past Steve and stepped into the hallway, where the others had begun to gather, worry on their faces.
Kazem Hamidi, a friend who worked with the BICEP2 telescope, was the first to speak. “Is Patty okay?”
Samantha pushed the words past the lump in her throat. “She’s …dead.”
“I’m so sorry.” Ryan McClain, one of the firefighters and an EMT, rested a hand on Samantha’s shoulder. “How? Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“First, the satellite crash, and now this.” Bai Zhang Wei, who studied neutrinos, raised his hands to his face in disbelief. “What is going on?”
“How can she be dead?” Charli Ortega, the coms manager, had tears in her eyes. “I didn’t see this in the cards during her last Tarot reading.”
Jason Huger, the breakfast cook, held up his smartphone. “How did she die?”
Shock and grief became rage.
Samantha knocked the phone out of his hand. “You’re not putting this online, Jason. Patty didn’t die to amuse your YouTube audience.”
“Hey!” He bent down, reached for his phone.
But Ryan was faster. He picked it up, deleted the footage, and handed the phone back to Jason. “Show some respect, man, or I’ll put your phone through the shredder.”