Lio: “Do you have sufficient propellant to make the necessary burn?”

Arsibalt: “I’ll tell you in a minute.”

Lio: “I’m on my way. Don’t expend all your propellant. We don’t even know if Jad is still alive.”

“Seventeen minutes to line of sight.”

Plenty of time. I got myself oriented as before, with the payload trailing behind me, and thrust forward, undoing the damage I’d inflicted on my orbit a few moments earlier. It took more fuel—a longer burn—because I was moving double the mass now. Some nervousness here, because a long burn meant a large mistake, if I was doing it wrong. I kept an eye on the eccentricity readout at the bottom of my display. This was already about.005, but I had to make it less than.001 to stay in any kind of reasonable synch with everyone else.

In my earphones I could hear others making a similar calculation. Arsibalt, I gathered, had succeeded in grappling Jad and the payload Jad was stuck to, and was trying to do what I was doing, calling out numbers to Lio, who was maneuvering into position to rescue Arsibalt if that became necessary. Meanwhile Jesry was monitoring the traffic, calculating how much propellant was going to be needed, calling out suggestions that, as the adventure went on, hardened into commands. The distraction was severe, so I reluctantly shut off my wireless link and focused on my own situation.

Only once I’d burned my e down under.001 did I lift my hands from the controls and look around for the balloon. After a few moments’ wild anxiety when I didn’t think it was anywhere near me, I found it “above” and to my right, a thousand feet away, and slowly getting closer. A cluster of blue netting was forming up “below” it as other Cell 317ers brought in payloads. As long as I was so close, I took a look around to see if there were any others handy.

“Fifteen minutes to line of sight.”

I’d lost contact with Arsibalt and Lio, but several other ikons came up on my display as I drifted in range of the reticule. I turned the sound back on, not without intense trepidation, since I did not know what news I was about to hear.

Screaming filled my ears—overloaded the electronics. I tried to remember how to turn down the volume. The tone was not that of a horror show; more like a sporting event where someone wins a close game with an improbable score just as time expires. Lio’s ikon popped up. “Calm down! Calm down!” he insisted, appalled by the lapse of discipline. Arsibalt’s ikon came up. “Sammann, prepare to grab Fraa Jad, please. He’s unresponsive.” His voice was weighed down with a kind of unnatural calm, but I sensed that if I checked his bio readouts they would reflect near-fatal excitement.

The balloon was rapidly getting bigger. I was too high, though—too far from Arbre—so I juked northwest, killing a bit of my orbital velocity, dropping to a lower altitude. I say “juked northwest” as if it were that simple, but now that I was towing a payload on the end of a twenty-foot grapnel, such moves were much more complicated; first I had to swing around to get on the payload’s other side, then apply thrust. This slowed my convergence on the balloon.

Sammann said, “Got him. He’s alive. Bio readouts are screwy though.”

Everyone had been paying attention to Fraa Jad being towed in by Arsibalt. But suddenly all I heard was shouting. “Look out look out!” “Damn it!” “That was close!” and “Bad news—it’s a red!”

Twisting my head around, I saw what they had been reacting to: a red payload had passed within a few yards of the balloon, moving at a high relative speed—fast enough to have done damage if it had been just a little bit “higher.” It had come upon them so rapidly that no one had reacted in time to head it off, grapple it, and rein it in. It passed between me and the balloon, and I got a good look at it. “It’s the nuke,” I announced. Then I said to my suit, “Grapnel disengage.”

“Disengaged,” it returned.

I fired a little burst to pull myself free of the blue payload. “I’m on it,” I announced, “someone grab this payload.” The nuke was moving so fast that I reverted to instincts cultivated playing the video game in Elkhazg. I fired a lateral burst that—while it didn’t solve the problem—slowed the rate at which the gap between me and the nuke was widening. Ikons were falling off my display as I shot out of range, and the sound was coming through as sporadic, disjointed packets. I was pretty sure I heard Arsibalt saying “wrong plane,” which tallied with what I was thinking: this nuke’s orbit was in a plane that differed from ours by a small angle, just because of some small error that had crept in during the chaos of launch.

One voice, anyway, came through clearly: “Thirteen minutes to line of sight.”

I tried another maneuver, screwed it up desperately, and, with feelings that were close to panic, watched the nuke zoom across my field of vision. A moment later, Arbre whipped beneath me, and I realized I was spinning around. My hand must have brushed the trackball and set it spinning. I devoted a few moments to getting my attitude stabilized, then spun about carefully so that I wouldn’t lose my fix on the nuke. Once I had that in hand, I glanced back toward the balloon. It was shockingly distant.

When I looked back toward the nuke, I couldn’t see it. I’d lost it in sun-glare off the Equatorial Sea. Back-thrusting to lose altitude, I was able to find the red fuzzball again as it rose above the horizon.

No one else was anywhere near. They’d heard me saying I had the nuke, and assumed I could handle it.

“Calm down,” I said to myself. Doing this slowly and getting it right on the next try would get me back to my friends quicker than making three hasty, failed attempts. I got myself stabilized so that the nuke was low in my field of vision and dead ahead, and forced myself to spend thirty seconds doing nothing except tracking it, observing how its motion differed from mine.

Definitely an error in the slant of its orbital plane. I had to fire the thrusters to match that error. Which I did—but in the process I messed up my semimajor axis and a couple of other elements in a way that would have killed me ten minutes later. Another sixty seconds’ fussing got those squared away.

Plane change maneuvers are expensive.

I’d been forcing myself not to look for the balloon any more. Partly because I was afraid of what I’d see—my shelter, my friends, impossibly far away. But also because it simply didn’t matter. Without the nuke, whose power would split water into hydrogen and oxygen, we would all asphyxiate within a couple of hours. If I lost my nerve and retreated to the balloon without it, my empty-handed arrival would be a death sentence for the whole cell.

I came near, but got slewed sideways at the last minute. Did a little spin move. Stopped myself, where “stopped” meant that the nuke and I were stationary with respect to each other. “Three minutes to line of sight,” said the voice. I gave the controls the tiniest nudge, saw to my satisfaction that the nuke and I were converging. Just let it happen. Tried not to breathe so fast.

Rather than grappling the nuke, I spent a few moments maneuvering close enough that I could simply reach out with my skelehand and grab the netting. Then I turned, making my best guess as to where the balloon might be, and saw—nothing. Or rather, too much. Our decoy strategy had backfired. At this distance, I had no way to distinguish true from false. There were three balloons about the same distance from me—none closer than ten miles. Even if I were to guess right, I wouldn’t be able to reach it in three minutes. And if I guessed wrong, I’d use up so much thruster propellant in getting to it that I’d be marooned there.

On the other hand. The orbit that I, and the nuke, were in was a stable one. I double-checked the numbers, since all our lives depended on my judgment of this. The orbit’s shape and size were such that it would not enter the atmosphere and burn up, at least not for a day or two.