The Shipyard had been stocked with several cryogenic propellant tanks of various sizes, some designed to hold LH2 (liquid hydrogen) and others built to the somewhat different specifications needed in the case of LOX (liquid oxygen). The chosen tanks were bolted together in a stack with the rocket engine mounted “below” and thermal protection wrapped all about. New Caird proper—the arklet with the humans in it—projected forward on a scrap of scaffolding just long enough that her maneuvering thrusters wouldn’t damage any of the other parts when they came on.
While the MIV was being constructed, twenty-one thousand kilograms of water had to be split into hydrogen and oxygen, chilled to cryogenic temperatures, and stored. The Shipyard’s port side already had some LH2 and LOX premade. In general, though, they tended not to keep a lot of them on hand, because they were tiresome substances to work with. The demand was supplied by the naval reactor on the Shipyard’s long arm, which was brought up to full power for the first time since it had been launched, piece by heavy piece, from Cape Canaveral on a series of heavy-lift rockets. Pumping juice down heavy cables to the splitters, it was able to turn twenty-one tons of water into gases and chill the gases to cryogenic temperatures while the other preparations were being made.
This was a lot of water—roughly fourteen liters of it for every surviving human. The Cloud Ark recycled water, of course, and was far from running out of the stuff. Nonetheless, the idea of taking that much of it and spewing it into outer space, never to be recovered, gave many people pause: especially the Dump and Run partisans.
There was a strong counterargument, which was that New Caird’s objective was to take possession and control over a piece of frozen water that weighed as much as Izzy herself, including the giant piece of iron to which Izzy was attached (and would continue to be, if the Big Ride advocates had their way).
Once New Caird had reached her, Ymir could presumably be slowed down, and brought to a rendezvous with Izzy, by firing her engine. And that was a primitive beast, but it had a basically infinite supply of energy in the nuclear reactor, and a vast stock of propellant in the form of ice. The “steampunk” propulsion system had much lower efficiency, however, than a properly engineered rocket motor. Consequently, the mass ratio that would be needed to slow Ymir down from the high-speed elliptical orbit with which it was falling into Earth’s gravity well, to match the much slower, circular orbit of Izzy, was about thirty-four, which meant that 97 percent of the ice currently attached to Ymir was going to be melted, turned into steam, and jetted out its makeshift nozzle just to slow it down. The remaining 3 percent, however, would still weigh as much as Izzy and Amalthea put together. Split into hydrogen and oxygen, it would supply the rocket fuel needed to power the Big Ride, all the way up to Cleft.
“I DIDN’T EXPECT IT TO BE BLACK,” DINAH SAID. SHE WAS HEARING HER own voice as if down a mile-long sewer pipe. She was pretty sure she had lost consciousness a minute ago. Maybe she wasn’t all the way back yet.
Markus was slow in responding. Maybe he had blacked out too. Maybe he was just distracted. “Comet cores are covered in—”
“Stinky black stuff, yeah, I know that, Markus. Remember who I am?”
“Sorry. Not enough blood in brain.”
“But this is just a shard that Sean broke off of Grigg-Skjellerup. Why’s it all covered?”
“I don’t know,” Markus said.
They were looking at Ymir from a distance of ten kilometers and closing. They were viewing her on their tablets, through a zoomed-in video camera. Vyacheslav Dubsky, floating closest to New Caird’s forward end, put his face to the vessel’s tiny window and searched the black sky for the black ship, but the squint on his face suggested it was still too far away for naked eyes to be of much use.
“Maybe he was doing us a favor,” Dinah said. “The black stuff has all kinds of goodies on it. Carbon, obviously. But also nitrogen, potassium—”
“Micronutrients,” Markus said, “that the Cloud Ark will be needing.”
“So maybe he used the robots to scrape some of it off Greg’s Skeleton, and loaded up on the gunk,” Dinah speculated.
“We will know soon,” Vyacheslav said. “Presumably he left a document.”
“Which we will not be alive to read, unless we stick the landing,” Markus pointed out, “so no more chatter from now on, please. Slava—” and he broke into a string of bad Russian meaning something like I trade places with you now. Vyacheslav responded in equally bad German. Both men were perfectly fluent in English. But they made a private joke of butchering each other’s languages, ostensibly as part of a project to preserve Old Earth’s linguistic heritage. Markus then added, “The rest of you, buckle up.”
With the deft movements of one who had been in space for two years, Vyacheslav glided aft. He was one of the veteran Russian spacewalkers who had come up to Izzy way back on A+0.17, in the first launch after the moon had blown up. He had been a mainstay of the Scout and Pioneer eras, racking up more time in a suit than anyone, wearing out three Orlans. He was a little worn out too, being sallow and gaunt compared to the strapping hero who had emerged two years ago from the same Soyuz that had carried Rhys and Bolor-Erdene. Markus replaced him at the forward window and buckled himself into the pilot’s seat.
Behind that was a row of three acceleration couches, mounted on a frame that spanned a diameter of the arklet’s hull. Dinah was loosely belted in on the port side. A few minutes ago she had been tightly belted in. She had not adjusted the straps. The entire couch, and its supporting truss, had been deformed by the same burst of gee forces that had left her so woozy. To starboard was Jiro Suzuki, a nuclear engineer who had been involved with the design of Ymir’s nuclear reactor core. It wasn’t clear whether he was conscious; but then it never was with Jiro. Vyacheslav, the fourth member of New Caird’s complement, settled into the middle position and pulled the top straps of the five-point harness over his shoulders.
A staccato burst sounded from the gamma spectrometer—the modern equivalent of a Geiger counter—floating in front of Jiro’s face. Then the Eenspektor, as they called this device in butchered Russian, dropped back into the normal sporadic patter.
Radiation was striking the Eenspektor—and their bodies—all the time, at random moments and in no particular pattern. Sometimes there would be a little burst, and that part of the mind that liked to see meaning in everything would identify it as an event. But then it would die away and be forgotten. That was just the way of the universe, and of the human psyche. There was a lot more radiation in space than there had been down on the ground, but all the survivors had long since come to terms with that, and Jiro had dialed down the sensitivity on his Eenspektor so that it wasn’t screaming at them all the time.
If it started screaming in the next few minutes, it wouldn’t be because of some faraway cosmic event. It would be because of a radiation leak from Ymir.
“Starting to see the exhaust trail,” Markus commented. “Can you see it on video? It’s faint. The sunlight hits it perfectly a few hundred meters aft of the nozzle bell.”
He was referring to a thread of steam that emerged from Ymir all the time, even when her engine wasn’t powered up. This was how Konrad and Doob and the other astronomers aboard Izzy had been able to track the ship’s course using their optical telescopes, and to verify that the params encoded in Sean’s last transmission had been accurate. Wispy as it was, the steam trail reflected more light than did the ship itself.