Why hadn’t we simply launched to a higher orbit? Because our patched-together launch system wasn’t capable of dumping that much energy into a payload.
In a few minutes, when the Daban Urnud got line of sight to the cloud of stuff that had just been flung into orbit by those two hundred missiles, they’d see a few dozen balloons salted through a nebula of radar-jamming chaff-strips of metallized poly—hundreds of miles across, and rapidly getting bigger as orbits diverged. The chaff would make long-wavelength surveillance (radar) useless. They’d have to look at us in shorter wavelengths (light) which would necessarily mean sorting through a very large number of phototypes, looking for anything that wasn’t a balloon or a strip of chaff. If we did this right, then even if they did manage to collect all of those pictures and inspect them in a reasonable span of time, they’d still see nothing—because we and all of our stuff would be hiding behind one of the balloons.
But this implied that a lot would have to happen in the next twenty minutes. I became so preoccupied that I almost forgot Jesry’s first piece of advice: don’t miss the scupper. The first spasms in my throat seized my attention, though, and I was able to lunge forward and bite down on the rubber orifice just in time. My breakfast was vacuumed away and freeze-dried into a waste bag somewhere. I returned to the task at hand. Fortunately—and a bit surprisingly—the Big Pill didn’t come up. It must still be down in my gut somewhere, sending temperature and other biomedical data to the suit’s processors.
After that, anyway, I felt better, and didn’t throw up again for almost ten seconds.
By getting there first, Sammann had appointed himself Glommer, which meant that his job was to keep station under the balloon and secure the incoming payloads into a single, haphazardly connected mass. Payload number one was Jules Verne Durand. Esma towed him in and hit the brakes. Her monyafeek stopped, but Jules kept going, like a trailer jackknifing on an icy road. She had to back-thrust once more as the Laterran’s rig tried to jerk her forward. As Gratho hovered watchfully, wondering whether this was an emergence, Sammann maneuvered closer, then spun in place. A long slender probe snapped out from his monyafeek, stretched across twenty feet of space in an eye-blink, and buried itself in the mass of red fuzz surrounding Jules’s rig. “Nailed it!” Jules was now stretched between him and Esma. “Feel free to detach.”
“De-grappling,” Esma reported. “I’ll try to find additional payloads.” Her jets flared and the probe connecting her to Jules’s fuzz-ball slid free.
Thus did Sammann begin his work as Glommer. The rest of us were Getters, meaning we’d move around using the maneuvering thrusters, latch on to payloads that drifted near, and bring them to the Glommer. I spun my rig around to look for any incoming payloads. Humans—of whom there ought to have been eleven—were color-coded red. The tender and its little nuke plant were also red, since we’d soon die without them. In addition, there were fifty monyafeeks carrying cargo. Their fuzzballs were blue. Their contents were interchangeable—each contained some water, some food, some fuel, and some other stuff we’d need. That’s because we didn’t expect to recover all of them. When I looked around, I saw what seemed like an impossibly huge number of red and blue fuzzballs, all drifting in the general vicinity. My brain told me, flat-out, that rounding them all up was impossible. It was a disaster. But the very least I could do was head for the nearest red one and make sure that whoever it was had survived the launch and was conscious. I began to line up for a rendezvous, but I’d barely begun to move before I saw maneuvering jets flash. Jesry’s ikon came up on my display. “I’m good,” he announced impatiently, “go look for something that can’t take care of itself.”
Beyond him, a blue payload was coming in. It was in the correct plane but its orbit was a little too eccentric, so it was losing altitude—probably doomed to re-enter and burn up in a few minutes. I got myself spun around facing “forward,” i.e., in the direction that I, and all of this other stuff, were moving in our orbits around Arbre, and then made myself “vertical,” so that the soles of my feet were pointed at Arbre and its horizon was parallel to a certain line projected across my face mask. The payload was slowly “falling” through my visual field. I used the stick to thrust backwards, slowing myself down. The payload stopped “falling,” which meant I was now in the same doomed orbit that it was. A little more maneuvering took me to within twenty feet of the thing.
I was distracted for a moment by more visual clutter: a red payload, tumbling across my visual field from left to right, sideswiped a blue one. My eye was drawn to it. The red and the blue had stuck together. I reckoned it was one of the other cell members doing what I was doing. But if so, they weren’t using a grapnel—just holding on to the net with a skelehand, or something. The red and the blue payload had merged into a slowly rotating binary star. I saw no sign of thrusters being fired—no evidence that the person was even conscious. “I think we might have someone in trouble here—an inadvertent collision,” I reported.
“I see what you see and am coming to investigate,” said Arsibalt.
“I’m a little closer,” I offered, turning my head around and seeing Arsibalt on his way in. “I could—”
“No,” he said, “go ahead and take the payload you’ve got.”
So, to grips. But before I went to the next step, I couldn’t help looking over toward the balloon. My pursuit of this payload had taken me well away from it, but I was heartened to see a number of blues and reds converging there. Suur Vay and Fraa Osa had linked half a dozen payloads into a big lazily spinning molecule of fuzz-balls and were hauling it in, getting ready to link it to a growing complex in the shelter of the balloon.
Arsibalt reported: “I’m closing on Fraa Jad. He has become entangled with a blue payload and he seems to be unconscious.”
“What kind of orbital elements are you seeing?” Lio asked.
“His e is dangerously high,” Arsibalt said, referring to the eccentricity of Jad’s orbit. “He’ll be in the soup in a few minutes.”
“Be careful you don’t get entangled, then!” Lio warned him.
“Rear grapnel camera on,” I said, and the view out my face-mask was obscured by a virtual display in jewel-like laser colors: a green grid with red crosshairs in the middle. This was a feed from a speelycaptor aimed out the back of my monyafeek. I checked my pitch angle and then rotated the trackball until it had incremented by a hundred and eighty degrees. The payload swung into view. It was now directly behind me. “Grapnel One fire,” I said, and felt a little kick in the tail as a small cylinder of compressed gas ruptured. The grapnel system was a long skinny tube of fabric, all telescoped in on itself like a stocking. When the gas exploded into it, the tube shot out straight and became a long rigid balloon. At its end was a warhead, rounded smooth on its tip so that it would plunge through the cloud of netting surrounding a payload, but spring-loaded with spines that sprang out when the tube reached the end of its travel, or when it smacked into something.
Based on my imperfect view through the rear camera, I was pretty certain it had all worked. But there was only one way to be sure. “Rear grapnel camera off,” I said, and thrust forward. For a couple of seconds I don’t think my heart beat at all. Then a jerk backwards told me my grapnel had engaged the netting. I allowed myself a shout of joy, then checked the balloon again.
Arsibalt reported, “Jad is welded to the payload. I’ll never get them apart.”
Lio: “What do you mean, welded?”
Arsibalt: “When he drifted into it, the blue plastic netting contacted the hot nozzle skirt on his monyafeek and melted—stuck fast. I’m attempting to grapple the two payloads as a unit.”