What if I simply stayed with it? My oxygen supply was down to about two hours, but I could stretch it by calming down a little. I knew for a fact that the problem, here, was in the inclination of the orbit—the angle that the nuke and I were now making with respect to the equator. Ours was a little steeper than my comrades’. Consequently, my trajectory would only coincide with Cell 317’s in two places—two points of intersection, occurring once every forty-five minutes, on opposite sides of the planet. Sort of like the proverbial stopped clock that’s right twice daily. The last time it had been right had been about fifteen minutes ago, when the nuke had almost hit my friends, and I had gone after it. Since then, we’d been getting farther apart. But starting in another few minutes, we’d begin getting closer together again. And in half an hour, we should enjoy another near collision.

“One minute to line of sight.”

The key to it all: what were my friends thinking? What were they saying right now over that wireless ret? I’d heard Arsibalt’s voice saying that the nuke was in the wrong plane. They’d probably watched me drifting away, with mounting anxiety, and debated whether to send out a rescue team.

But they hadn’t. Lio had given no such order. Not only that, they had fought off the temptation to switch on the long-range wireless.

If it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t have been able to read their minds, nor they mine. But my fraas had been raised, trained, by Orolo. They had figured out—probably sooner than I had—that in forty-five minutes the nuke would reappear on the other side of Arbre. Just as important, they were relying on me—entrusting me with their lives—to figure out the same thing and to act accordingly.

And what did “act accordingly” mean? It meant stay calm and don’t mess with the orbit that I was in. If I took no action, they’d be able to anticipate my position. If I did something, though, they’d have no way of predicting my whereabouts.

I didn’t have much in the way of emergency supplies: just a blanket of metallized poly—like the emergency blanket they’d issued to Orolo after his Anathem—taped to the chest of my suit. It was to be used to block the light of the sun, where necessary, from striking our matte black suits with full force and overheating them, which would force the chiller to work harder and use more oxygen. I peeled mine loose and unfolded it—not easy with skelehands—and used it to cover as much of the nuke as I could, then snuggled beneath it.

“Line of sight established.”

Supposing they were looking, the telescopes on the Daban Urnud could now see me, albeit as just another hunk of crud thrown up in the two-hundred-missile launch. Chaff.

Let’s put this in perspective: the Daban Urnud was something like fourteen thousand miles away. At their closest approach to Arbre, the whole planet looked as big to them as a pie held at arm’s length. At their farthest, the size of a saucer. For them to see my spread-out blanket, at this distance, was like trying to spot a gum wrapper from a hundred miles away. Worse—or, for me, better—it was like looking at a whole field covered with litter, trying to pick out a single gum wrapper from all the rest.

On the other hand, Lio—who had brought Praxic Age Exoatmospheric Weapons Systems with him to the Convox—had cautioned us not to get cocky, and Jules had added weight to this by telling us how the Urnudans, past masters of space warfare, had coupled syndevs to excellent telescopes, enabling them to sift through vast numbers of images to find things that didn’t look right. Decoys, for example, were easy to detect because they were usually nothing more than balloons, whose huge size and light weight made them feel the drag of the evanescent atmosphere much more than real payloads.

So decoy orbits behaved a little differently from non-decoy ones. Moreover, once the Urnudans had created a census of all the stuff that the two-hundred-missile-launch had flung into orbit, they would be in a position to notice if anything went missing, or changed to a new orbit. This could only happen if it had thrusters and guidance on board.

So in that sense we had already screwed up the mission. We had to fall back on safety in numbers: the hope that my blanket’s sudden disappearance from the junk-cloud would not be noticed soon enough for the Pedestal to do anything about it.

But I was getting ahead of myself. In order for this blanket to suddenly disappear, I was going to have to rendezvous with the others.

That would be easier with oxygen. I closed my eyes, tried to relax, tried to stop thinking about the Pedestal and their admirable telescopes and their syndevs. Here was that rare circumstance where worrying too much actually could kill me.

Once my pulse had dropped to a more reasonable range, I found the keyboards in my arm-stumps and typed messages to Cord and to Ala, in case I died and the suit was recovered later with its memory intact.

The suit’s syndev included an orbital theorics calculator, which one almost never had time to use in the heat of the moment, but I fired it up and used it to verify some of my hunches as to what I’d need to do when I drew within range of the others. It was infuriatingly difficult to concentrate, though. My brain had become like an old sponge that has sopped up more water than it can hold.

In zero gravity, there was almost no contact between the suit and the person wearing it. Air, at just the right temperature, circulated all around my naked body—it was like taking a bath in air. Behind my back was a small chemical plant going full tilt, but I was only aware of it as a source of gentle white noise. Other than that, I heard nothing except the beating of my own heart. Normally, I could get a jolt of excitement simply by opening my eyes and looking out the face-mask: I’m in space! But now all I could see was the back side of a crinkly blanket, as if I were poultry in a roasting pan. So it was not difficult to feel drowsy. My body and my mind had never had so many reasons to want rest; between jet lag and training, we’d slept very little at Elkhazg, and not at all in the last twenty-four hours. The last half hour had been absurdly stressful—just the kind of experience after which any sane person would want to crawl under the covers of a warm bed and cry himself to sleep.

The only thing that kept me from passing out instantly was fear of my own sleepiness. After the training we’d been through, I now knew the symptoms of carbon dioxide poisoning better than the alphabet. Nausea, check. Dizziness, check. Vomiting, check. Headache, check. But who wouldn’t have all of those symptoms after being kicked up a hundred-mile-high staircase by a monyafeek? What came next? Oh, yeah—almost forgot—drowsiness and confusion.

I checked the readouts in my screen. Checked them again. Closed my eyes, waited for my vision to clear, checked them a third time. They were fine. Oxygen tank level was yellow—which was to be expected, after all the heavy breathing—but the oxygen content of the air I was breathing was fine and the CO₂ level was zero—the scrubber was taking all of it out.

But if I were drowsy and confused, might I be reading the numbers wrong?

I drifted off, but started awake every few minutes. Enough time had passed that I’d begun to second-guess what had happened just after the launch. I’d been so focused on what I’d been doing that when I’d noticed Jad bumping into the blue payload and getting stuck to it, I’d decided not to go check it out. That had been a mistake. I should have gone for it. Instead, Arsibalt had gone after Jad—and to judge from the way Jesry had been screaming when Arsibalt had made it back, he had just barely escaped with his life, and Jad’s.

This was a bad plan. Who had come up with the idea of doing it this way?