Astronauts tended to think of solar and galactic radiation as career-limiting, and SPEs as life-threatening.

Discovery’s aluminum shell would shield them from the worst of the effects of GCR, reducing their cumulative six-year dose, anyhow, to maybe three hundred rem. That was high — and significantly increased the risks they all faced of cancer and leukaemia later in life — but within the four hundred rem advisory career limit.

Of course it meant they wouldn’t be able to sustain another six-year journey home again, without improved shielding.

But to shelter from an SPE they had to retreat to their storm shelters, either the hab module or the farm, with their heavy plating of aluminum and water tanks clustered around the walls.

If — just if — Siobhan was caught in the storm, she could expect a dose of a hundred rem. At least. That would give her nausea, vomiting for a day or so, fatigue. And some long-term damage to the more sensitive parts of her body — the gonads, lymphoid tissues.

If Siobhan was unlucky her dose might rise five times as high.

And anyhow, there was no safe lower limit, Benacerraf knew. However small the dose, you were at risk.

To Benacerraf, huddled in her cabin and waiting out the storm from the sun, it felt as if the metal walls of the ship, the elaborate precautions and dosimeters they had taken, counted for nothing, as if Discovery was no more protection than a canvas-walled tent, in this storm generated by huge and remote and impossibly violent events. She had never felt so far from the protective embrace of Earth.

The Discovery crew truly had stepped outside the farmhouse door.

In the access tunnel, Libet started awake.

She could see more flashes, within her eyeballs: little streaks and curves and spirals.

She knew what that meant, of course: the flashes were caused by heavy particles, lacing into the matter of her eyes. She thought she could feel the radiation sleeting through her, warm and heavy. Those heavy nuclei would be ramming into the molecules of her body, smashing away electrons in little cascades.

Hard rain, she thought.

She really ought to open the hatch to the hab module, she thought. But, as she peered up through eyes that were laced with flashes and spirals, it seemed a long way away, and an awful lot of effort. Maybe soon.

And anyhow she was starting to feel ill. Nauseous, a little giddy, tired. Maybe it was space adaptation syndrome back again.

And she thought she could smell ozone, like a beach.

She closed her eyes again, and drifted like a foetus in the air.

Poor Niki, she thought.

The flashes and spirals continued, as if a shoal of some tiny fish were swimming through her head.

Day 325

The blood trickled sluggishly out of Angel’s arm.

As he tended the donation bag, Rosenberg couldn’t tell what Angel was thinking.

Bill just didn’t seem the same guy Rosenberg had got to know down on Earth. Floating around up here in the usual semi-foetal position, so many of his gestures and postures had changed: he would never sit with his legs crossed like he used to, or stand with his hands on his hips, or cross his arms… Microgravity had even messed up their body language. Rosenberg just couldn’t read Angel any more.

It sure didn’t help them all get along, cooped up in here.

Now Rosenberg watched, irritated, as the clear plastic bag suspended from Angel’s arm slowly filled up. “Clench, God damn it, Bill.”

Angel’s fist closed harder around the little rubber grip, and the dripping flow of blood accelerated a little. “Fuck you, double-dome. You should be grateful. I got better things to do than bleed myself to death to preserve that shrivelled dyke in there.”

Paula Benacerraf came out of her quarters and joined them in the common area of the hab module. She looked as if she had been sleeping; her face was slack and baggy, and she was struggling into a grubby T-shirt. They were all wearing stinking, dirty clothes right now, because the laundry was malfunctioning again — clogging and leaking water — and none of them had had the will to fix it. “I think we’ve all heard what you have to say, Bill, a dozen times.”

“Oh, you have. Then screw you.” Angel pulled the loose bandage off his arm, and began to tug at the needle protruding from his skin.

Rosenberg said, “Hey, leave that alone. You’re not done.”

“Yes, I am.” The needle came loose, and Rosenberg hastily swabbed at the puncture wound in Angel’s flesh. Angel glared at him, his eyes wild above his tangle of floating, greyed beard. “This isn’t a goddamn nursing home. We don’t have the resources for this. I say we cut our losses.”

Rosenberg held up the half-full bag. “Paula, he didn’t complete the donation.”

Benacerraf looked at him from eyes sunk in pads of puffy flesh. “Make it up from stores, Rosenberg.”

Rosenberg kicked off the wall and caromed in front of Benacerraf, thrusting the bag in her face. “Don’t you get it? We don’t have any stores. This is all there is.”

“Make it up,” she said wearily. Without waiting to see if he complied, she pulled herself along the hab module to the waste management facility.

Angel snorted contempt, and went into his own quarters, slamming the door closed behind him.

Rosenberg was left alone in the common area, his own anger surging. He threw the bag of blood against a wall. It bounced off, soggily, and began drifting away from him, the viscous blood undergoing complex, slow-motion oscillations.

After a couple of minutes, his heart still rattling with anger, he scooted along the module to retrieve the blood.

Rosenberg’s personal theory of Angel was that he was the kind of bad-mouthing asshole who would always bitch at any leadership shown by anybody else, but would always be unwilling to take any real responsibility for himself. He reacted, not acted, and in the meantime made life a living hell for the rest of them stuck here with him.

But strictly speaking, of course, he was right about Libet.

Rosenberg was a biochemist, but he was also doubling up as the nearest thing Discovery had to a doctor. He’d done a crash basic medical training program. At the time he hadn’t taken it all that seriously: as the only crew member with any real grounding in the life sciences, he was the logical choice, but somehow he’d never thought he’d have to put any of this into practice.

But here they were — still inside the orbit of Earth, with a deep space maneuver and their second Venus flyby still to come — and not even one of the six years of the mission elapsed. Yet already one of the crew was basically hospitalized.

The purpose of the crew’s med training had been to enable them to prevent biological death. They had all rehearsed in resuscitation procedures: mouth-to-mouth, sternum compression to get the heart pumping, electroshock paddles, endotracheal intubation, cricothyroidotomy, tracheostomy. They had even — back in the remote early days of the mission when they had all still been talking to each other — tried to rehearse such procedures under microgravity conditions. It had soon become comically obvious that grappling with a limp crewmate in microgravity was physically awkward, distasteful, almost grotesque. And many of the steps in their manuals — tip the victim’s head back at forty-five degrees — no longer made any sense…

Anyhow, the theory of their training was that if they could just stabilize whatever situation came up, there would be time to wait for radio waves to crawl across the Solar System and bring advice from the medics on the ground.

But they simply weren’t geared up to nursing anyone — even one person, twenty percent of their crew — long term. This was a marginally capable interplanetary craft, not a convalescent home.