She finally spotted New Caird on a camera belonging to a Bucky that was attached to the stern of the shard, about halfway between its edge and the cavernous maw of the nozzle. The little ship was hanging in space maybe a hundred meters away, white jets erupting from her attitude thrusters every few moments as she tried to keep station behind the slowly rotating shard. Markus was flying her by hand, and it was some fancy flying indeed.
The geometry was difficult to visualize, but Dinah convinced herself that Vyacheslav was “walking” toward the same general location that New Caird was aimed at. In their own ways, the two men were focused on the same part of the shard: one of its outermost corners, where the widest part of the sugarloaf terminated and connected to its base, along a sharp but irregular edge. There, embedded in the ice, was a scrap of structural framework about the size of a car. It served as the anchor for a cluster of small conical rocket nozzles: one of those thruster systems that had proven so miserably underpowered for the current job. Aiming another camera at it, Dinah saw a steady jet of blue-white fire emerging from two of the nozzles. They were burning continuously, full blast. They weren’t designed to do that. But Ymir’s attitude control system had calculated that thrust, and a lot of it needed to be applied in those two directions if its programmed objective—getting the ship’s “nose” pointed forward and her nozzle aft—were to be achieved.
Dinah got it. Her thinking was confirmed by the chatter she could now hear, in a mix of English, German, and Russian, between Markus and Vyacheslav. But she could see in her mind’s eye what Ymir must look like, right now, to Markus, viewing it through the front window of New Caird: a huge drifting arrowhead of black ice, generally dark, but decorated at the nose and “corners” by twinkling white lights, and streaks of hot gas: the exhaust from the thrusters, running an automatic program controlled from within. Sometimes they flashed on and off. Occasionally, though, when a lot of thrust was called for in one place, they ran for a long time. Those long steady burns would stand out clearly against the dark of space.
Markus didn’t need to calculate Ymir’s rotation in his head. He didn’t need to know her spin rates about her three axes or the torque needed to counteract them. He didn’t even need to pull up the user interface on his tablet. All he had to do was fly around the shard and look for places where thrusters were staying on continuously. Those were the ones that were overloaded and underpowered. Those were, therefore, the ones where New Caird’s big engine could be used most effectively.
But how?
Her view of the thruster system was interrupted by a blurry gray form: Vyacheslav moving in front of the camera. He then came back into focus, groping for a carabiner along his waist and snapping it onto a structural member that protruded from the ice. Dinah could hear him breathing. Bracing himself with his left hand, he reached into the network of struts with his right. After a bit of groping he seemed to find something, then worked for a minute, his arm reciprocating slightly.
The thruster jets faltered and winked out.
“Done,” Vyacheslav said. “Apologies. Valve was sticking.”
“Get clear, tovarishch,” Markus said.
“Getting,” Slava returned. He unhooked the carabiner and bent away from the framework, trusting himself to the Grabbs zip-tied to his feet, and began to move away with the painfully slow gait of a man walking in hot caramel. “Just do it,” he said, then added a phrase in German that Dinah was pretty sure meant If it doesn’t work we are all dead anyway.
New Caird drifted out of frame. Dinah spent a few moments reacquiring her view. The smaller ship was closing on Ymir, headed directly for the thruster system that Slava had just shut down, and coming in on an angle between the two nozzles that had been burning.
The logic was clear; the method was insane. New Caird was going to do the job that the tiny thrusters couldn’t. Markus had to get her big nozzle aimed in about the right direction, namely, about halfway between the two that had been doing all the work. Fine. But he was also going to have to make a mechanical connection between New Caird and the shard, so that the thrust of the big engine could be transmitted into the mass of ice.
And it looked like he was going to achieve this by ramming the little ship into the big one. It was a slow ramming, like a tugboat shoving its nose against the side of an oil tanker to nudge it into a berth. But it was ramming nonetheless: not a thing for which spacecraft were generally designed.
She relaxed her painfully tight grip on the edge of the table just a bit when, moments before the collision, Markus fired the retro-thrusters, slowing New Caird at the moment of impact. But still she felt and heard the crunch resounding through the walls of the ice palace. She’d heard it before over the last couple of hours and wondered what it was; apparently Markus had done this several times already.
He had aimed for the place where the structural framework emerged from the ice, forming a sort of angle into which New Caird’s nose could trap itself, as long as the thrust stayed on. Right now that force was being delivered by her aft thrusters. But Dinah, watching Markus’s face through the front window, saw him working at the touch screen that served as New Caird’s control panel, and had a pretty good idea of what was coming next.
She pulled up the interface for Ymir’s attitude control system and saw craziness: thrusters firing all over the shard, lit up by angry icons warning of too little propellant, not enough time, overheated nozzles. The thing that Markus had just rammed was flashing red, indicating that it wasn’t even connected to the system anymore. Graphs at the bottom of the screen, and a three-dimensional rendering of the shard in space, showed just how far off they were from where they wanted to be.
She heard a little symphony of grinding, groaning, and popping, and felt the ship rotating around her.
The video feed showing New Caird was awash in white light as her main propulsion came on full blast. A quick glance at the attitude control plots showed good things happening.
“It is good,” Jiro said, “but we are going to over-rotate now.”
“Not if I got the timing right,” Markus said. “We should rotate through the correct attitude just at the time of the apogee burn. Afterward, yes, we’ll over-rotate. But we’ll have plenty of time to fix it.”
Then his transmission was cut off by an exclamation and a thud. He cursed in German, and then the audio went dead.
Dinah looked at the video feed to see New Caird canted over at the wrong angle. The flame from the engine flickered out.
The framework against which New Caird had been pushing had given way under the thrust of the big engine and crumpled, causing her to slew around. She now lay almost sideways against the ice, the crushed remains of the thruster system sandwiched between her hull and the stern of Ymir.
“Some kind of gas escaping,” Jiro observed quietly. “Or smoke.”
He was right. The eye didn’t pick it up right away because smoke behaved differently in space than in an atmosphere, under gravity. But something was burning, or at least smoldering, along the side of New Caird’s hull, no more than an arm’s length from where Markus sat.
Vyacheslav said, “The hot nozzle of the thruster is melting through the hull.”
Markus came back on the air. “Jiro and Dinah, you must be ready to fire the main propulsion at apogee—” The word was cut off by a constriction of his throat, and he coughed several times. When he resumed speaking, his voice had a strangled timbre. “About two minutes from now. Focus on that—initiate the startup procedures. Vyacheslav can help me with this little problem.” He was coughing convulsively. “Switching off,” he said.