Silver ropes descended like a net across her point of view now, tangling up the Bruno, until the view was crisscrossedwith silver threads. The threads seemed to tauten. To cries of alarm from the insect voices at Bootstrap’s mission control, the probe was hauled backward, and its gentle grip on the asteroid was loosened, tethers and pitons flying free in a slow flurry of sparkling dust.

The brief glimpse of the Gaijin ship was lost. Stars and diamond-sharp Sun wheeled, occluded by dust specks and silver ropes.

Maura felt her heart beat fast, as if she herself were in danger. She longed for the Bruno to burst free of its restraints and flee from these grasping Gaijin, running all the way back to Earth. But that was impossible. In fact, she knew, the Bruno was designed to be captured, even dissected; it contained cultural artifacts, samples of technology, attempts to communicate based on simple diagrams and prime-number codes. Hello. We are your new neighbors. Come over for a drink, let’s get to know each other…

But this did not feel like a welcoming embrace, a contact of equals. It felt like capture. Maura made a stern effort to sit still, not to struggle against silver ropes that were hundreds of millions of kilometers away.

Chapter 5

Saddle Point

The Commodore Perry was assembled in lunar orbit.

The fuel pellets were constructed at Edo, on the Moon, by Nishizaki Heavy Industries, and hauled up to orbit by a fleet of tugs. Major components like the pusher plate and the fuel magazine frame were manufactured on Earth, by Boeing. The components were lifted off Earth by European and Japanese boosters, Ariane 12s and H-VIIIs.

After decades in orbit the old International Space Station module had a scuffed, lived-in look. When the salvage crew had moved in the air had been foul and the walls covered with a scummy algae, and it had taken a lot of renovation to render it habitable again.

The various components of the Perry were plastered with sponsors’ logos. That didn’t matter a damn to Malenfant; he knew most of his paintwork would be scoured off in a few months anyhow. But he made sure that the Stars and Stripes was large, and visible.

Malenfant prepared himself for the trip.

In her cramped office at JSC, Brind challenged him, one last time. She felt, obscurely, that it was her duty.

“Malenfant, this is ridiculous. We know a lot more about the Gaijin now. We have the results returned by the probe—”

“The Bruno.”

“Yes. The glimpses of the beautiful flower-ship. Fascinating.”

“But that was two years ago,” Malenfant growled. “Two years! The Gaijin still won’t respond to our signals. And we aren’t even going back. The government shut down Frank Paulis’s operation after that one shot. National security, international protocols…”

She shrugged.

“Exactly,” he snapped. “You shrug. People have lost interest. We’ve got the attention span of mayflies. Just because the Gaijin haven’t come storming into the inner system in flying saucers—”

“Don’t you think that’s a good point? The Gaijin aren’t doing us any harm. We’re over the shock of learning that we aren’t alone. What’s the big deal? We can deal with them in the future, when we’re ready. When they are ready.”

“No. Colonizing the Solar System is going to take centuries, minimum. The Gaijin are playing a long game. And we have to get into the game before it’s too late. Before we’re cut out, forever.”

“What do you think their ultimate intentions are?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they want to dismantle the rocky planets. Maybe take apart the Sun. What would you do?”

Oddly, in her mundane, cluttered office, her security badge dangling at her neck, she found herself shivering.

The Perry looped through an elliptical two-hour orbit around the Moon. On the lunar surface, the lights of the spreading Japanese colonies and helium-3 mines glittered.

The completed ship was a stack of components fifty meters long. At its base was a massive, reinforced pusher plate, mounted on a shock-absorbing mechanism of springs and crushable aluminum posts. The main body of the craft was a cluster of fuel magazines. Big superconducting hoops encircled the whole stack.

Now pellets of helium-3 and deuterium were fired out of the back of the craft, behind the pusher plate. They formed a target the size of a full stop. A bank of carbon dioxide lasers fired converging beams at the target.

There was a fusion pulse, lasting 250 nanoseconds. And then another, and another.

Three hundred microexplosions each second hurled energy against the pusher plate. Slowly, ponderously, the craft was driven forward.

From Earth, the new Moon was made brilliant by fusion fire.

The acceleration of the craft was low, just a few percent of gravity. But it was able to sustain that thrust for a long time — years, in fact — and once the Perry had escaped lunar orbit, its velocity mounted inexorably.

Within, Reid Malenfant settled down to the routines of long-duration spaceflight.

His hab module was a shoebox, big enough for him to stand up straight. He drenched it with light from metal halide lamps, hot white light like sunlight, to keep the blues away. The walls were racks that held recovery units, designed for easy replacement. There were wires and cables and ducts running along the corners of the hab module and across the walls. A robot spider called Charlotte ran along the wires, cleaning and sucking dust out of the air. Despite his best efforts, the whole place was soon messy and cluttered, like an overused utility room. Gear was scattered everywhere, stuck to the floor and walls and ceiling with straps and Velcro. If he brushed against a wall he could cause an eruption of gear, of pens and softscreens and clipboards and data discs and equipment components, and food cans and toothpaste and socks.

Much of the key equipment was of Russian design — the recycling systems, for instance. He had big generators called Elektrons that could produce oxygen from water distilled from his urine. Drinking water was recovered from humidity in the air. There was a system of scrubbers called Vozdukh that removed carbon dioxide from the air. He had a backup oxygen generator system based on the use of “candles” — big cylinders containing a chemical called lithium perchlorate that, when heated, gave off oxygen. He had emergency oxygen masks that worked on the same principle. And so on.

It was all crude and clunky, but — unlike the fancier systems American engineers had developed for the space station — it had been proven, over decades, actually to work in space, and to be capable of being repaired when it broke down. Still, Malenfant had brought along two of most things, and an extensive tool kit.

Malenfant’s first task, every day, was to swab down the walls of his hab module with disinfected wipes. In zero gravity microorganisms tended to flourish, surviving on free-floating water droplets in the air. It took long, dull hours.

When he was done with his swabbing, it was exercise time. Malenfant pounded at a treadmill bolted to a bracket in the middle of the habitation module. After an hour Malenfant would find pools of sweat clinging to his chest. Malenfant had to put in at least two hours of hard physical exercise every day.

On it went. Boring a hole in the sky, the old astronauts had called it, the dogged cosmonauts on Salyut and Mir. Looking at stars, pissing in jars. To hell with that. At least he was going someplace, unlike those guys.

He communicated with his controllers on Earth and Moon using a ten-watt optical laser, which gave him a data rate of twenty kilobits a second. He followed the newscasts that were sent up to him, which he picked up with his big, semitransparent main antenna.