“Most of this equipment isn’t going to make it to the Daban Urnud,” Lio pointed out. He added, perfectly deadpan, “Those of you who’ve reviewed the Terminal Rendezvous Maneuver Plan will know as much.”
“Just us, and our suits,” Jesry said. “That’s all that will make it to the ship—if we’re lucky. And they—the ones who planned this—can’t predict the fate of our suits. What if we get captured by the Pedestal? They might ditch our suits in space, or dismantle them.”
“Your point is becoming clear,” said Fraa Osa, “but it is important that you make it.”
“Fine. We are the weapons. The Everything Killers have been planted inside our bodies. We all know how it was done.”
“The giant pills,” said Jules.
“Exactly: the core temperature transponders that we swallowed before takeoff,” Jesry said. “Anyone pass theirs yet?”
“Come to think of it, no,” said Arsibalt. “It seems to have taken up residence in my gut.”
“There you have it,” said Jesry. “Until those things are surgically removed, we are all living, breathing nuclear weapons.”
“All,” said Suur Vay, “except for Fraa Jad, and Jules Verne Durand.”
This left all of us nonplussed, so she explained, “I believe you will find their core temperature transponders rattling around loose, somewhere inside their space suits.”
“I threw mine up,” explained Jules.
“I declined to swallow mine,” said Jad.
“And as the cell physician, you knew this, Suur Vay, because their core temp readings have been obviously wrong?” asked Lio.
“Yes. And the incorrect readings caused their suits to respond in inappropriate ways, which is why both of them required medical attention following the launch.”
“Why didn’t you swallow your pill, Fraa Jad?” asked Arsibalt. “Did you know what it was?”
“I judged it wiser not to,” was all that Fraa Jad was willing to supply in the way of an answer.
“This idea—that we’ve all been turned into nuclear weapons—is an amazing theory,” I said, “but I simply don’t believe that Ala would ever do such a thing.”
“I’m guessing she didn’t know,” Lio said. “This must have been added onto the plan without her knowledge.”
Fraa Osa said, “If I were the strategist in charge, I would go to Ala and say ‘please assemble the team you deem most capable of getting aboard the Daban Urnud.’ And her answer would come back: ‘I will do it by making friends with those among the Geometers who are opposed to the Pedestal; they’ll take our people in and offer them assistance.’”
“That is monstrous,” I said.
“Monstrous: probably another trigger word,” Jesry mused. I wanted to slug him. But he was making an excellent point.
Two days later we stripped off our white coveralls, then drew down the retractable shields to conceal the lights and displays on our suit-fronts. We were all matte black now. Like mountaineers, we roped ourselves together with a braided line that doubled as safety rope and communications wire. Jad, Jesry, and I had spent much of the last shift working with the sextant and making calculations. These culminated with Fraa Jad hanging off the underside of the nuke with a knife in one hand, sighting down the length of the tether as if it were a gun barrel, watching the constellations wheel behind it. At the instant when a particular star came into alignment with the tether, he slashed through it with a knife. The tether and the counterweight at its end flew off into space—and so did we, picking up a final momentum adjustment that would, we hoped, synch our orbit with that of the Daban Urnud.
Half an hour later, we all braced our feet against the underside of the Mirror and, at a signal from Lio, pushed it away—or jumped off, depending on your frame of reference. The Mirror glided out of the way to give us our first direct look at the Daban Urnud. It was so close to us, now, that we could hardly see anything: just a single triangular facet of the icosahedron, filling most of our visual field.
Essentially all of the Geometers’ surveillance and remote sensing systems had been designed to look at things that were thousands of miles away. As Jesry and the others had learned when they had brought the Warden of Heaven here, the Daban Urnud did have short-range radars for illuminating things that were nearby, but there was no reason to keep them switched on unless visitors were expected. And we had not emerged from behind the Cold Black Mirror until we had approached too close even for those radars to work very well. This was partly luck. If our trajectory had been a little less precise, we’d have been forced to ditch the Mirror farther out, and thereby exposed ourselves to the scrutiny of those systems. But Fraa Jad had wielded his knife at just the right instant. If he did nothing else for the rest of the mission he would still have earned his place.
In order to see us, they’d have to literally see us. Someone would have to look out a window, or (more likely) at a speelycaptor feed, and just happen to notice eleven matte-black humanoids gliding in against the background of space.
Its surface was like a shingle beach: flat, assembled from countless pieces of asteroids that had been scavenged from four different cosmi. Light glinted among the stones: the wire mesh that held them together. It seemed as though we were going to collide with a shock piston, which cut straight across our path like a horizon. But we cleared it by a few yards and found ourselves gliding along “above” a new face of the icosahedron, currently in shadow. Each of us was armed with a spring-loaded gun, and so at a signal from Lio, eleven grappling hooks shot out toward the rubble shield, trailing lines behind them. I’d estimate that half of them snagged in the mesh holding the rocks together. One by one the grapnel-lines went taut and began to pull back on those who’d fired them. This caused the ropes that joined us to go tight in a complex and unpredictable train of events, and so there were a few moments of bashing into one another and gratuitous entanglement as the whole cell came to the end of this improvised web of tethers. Our momentum caused us to swing forward and down toward the rubble, a scary development that was somewhat mitigated by the four Valers, who’d been issued cold gas thrusters that they held out before them like pistols and fired in the direction we didn’t want to go. This led to further collisions and entanglements that bordered on the ridiculous, but did have the net effect of slowing us down some. As we got closer, we tried to get legs and/or arms out in front of ourselves to serve as shock absorbers. I was able to plant my right foot on a boulder. The impact torqued me around. I spun and punched another 4.5-billion-year-old rock with the stumpy end of my suit-arm just in time to avoid planting my face on it. Then various ropes jerked on me from multiple vectors and dragged me along for a short ways. But soon everyone stopped bouncing and dragging and managed to grip the wire mesh with their fingers, giving Cell 317 a secure purchase on the Daban Urnud.