Captain Nicholson announced to all vessels and shuttles that the first step had been successful, and that everything was proceeding according to schedule.
The shuttles now moved to deposit two-person Outsider teams at each of the five bands along the length of the assembly, where they would cut the Alpha shaft loose. And they placed Pindar and Shira on the assembly 420 kilometers from the plate. Here they began slicing through Alpha, to separate it from the other twenty-six-hundred-odd kilometers of its length. At the plate, Tom Scolari and his people had returned to work, striving to complete the cuts they'd begun earlier. When they were finished, there would remain as a unit only the Alpha shaft, the connecting plate, and the net.
All this activity was closely watched by Drummond and his team. His principal concern at the moment was to ensure that the separations at the various points along the shaft were made simultaneously. If they failed to do that, if one end of Alpha started to drift while another section somewhere was still secured to the assembly, it might snap.
The shuttle Scolari had seen approaching carried Miles and Philip Zossimov, whose image blinked onto Drummond's screen within seconds of the release of the asteroid. "May we go in close to take a look?" Zossimov asked.
"Stand by. It'll be a few minutes." Drummond opened his link to the Star. Marcel's carefully controlled features looked back at him.
"Right on schedule," Drummond said. "Be ready to go."
At the plate, Scolari's people were three minutes away from completing their cuts. They'd stopped at that point to wait for the signal from Drummond. All along the assembly, the same kind of thing was happening: One by one, each of the five teams at the bands, and Pindar and Jane at the far end of Alpha, were reaching the three-minute mark and reporting back to Drummond, who was watching his own timepiece.
When they'd all called in, he told them to wait for his signal. He reported again to Marcel, who told him to proceed.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he told the Outsider teams, "cut us loose."
Marcel and Nicholson, on the Star bridge, listened to the reports filtering back to Drummond.
Site Two was free.
The far end was free.
Sites One and Five.
Site Three.
Drummond queried Four.
"Just a moment, John." Then: "Yes-"
Aside from the rock swarm, there were two unsettling moments during the operation. One had come when the asteroid broke free. The other occurred when they finished cutting through the fifteenth shaft and the assembly separated.
Scolari had expected that the separation would be gradual. They'd cut through most of the shafts, and were working on the final three, when they simply started to snap off one by one, in precise drill, and Alpha abruptly began to float away, taking the plate and a kilometer or so of trailing net with it.
The assembly trembled, in reaction to the loss of mass. And that was it.
"Plate's free," Drummond told Marcel.
"Everybody okay?" Janet's voice.
Scolari looked around. "We're all here," he said.
"Very fine," she replied. "Well done."
He looked down the length of the assembly. Common sense told him that once the other fourteen shafts had been separated from the plate, they would drift apart, or drift together. Or something. It seemed impossible that the tubes could remain perfectly aligned with each other as they had been. He understood that the other bands were still in place, holding them together. That only the Alpha shaft had been separated. But the nearest connector was eighty kilometers away. Yet they remained parallel.
He was still holding his cutter. He folded it and put it in his vest. A voice in his earphone said, "Here comes our taxi, Tom." It was the Academy shuttle that had brought them to the assembly two hours earlier. It came alongside, and the pilot warned them to take their time getting in. The airlock opened. They climbed inside, cycled through, and congratulated one another.
Cleo beamed at him. "Talent I didn't know I had," she said.
Marcel signaled Nichokon with an almost imperceptible gesture. Nicholson pushed the button. Lori's voice acknowledged: "Activating phase two."
The Alpha shaft, freed from the main body of the assembly, was reduced to about thirteen percetit of its former length. Lori, the controlling AI, awaited incoming results from a wide array of sensors.
When she was satisfied all was in order, and the proper moment in her internal countdown arrived, she fired maneuvering thrusters on Zwick and Wildside, orchestrated to draw Alpha clear of the assembly, to ensure that no tumble developed, and to begin the long rotation that would end with the net and plate moving toward the point out over the Misty Sea where it would, they all hoped, rendezvous in twenty hours with Hutch's lander.
She monitored progress, which was slight but satisfactory, and when conditions allowed, she fired the main engines on Wildside, and four minutes later, on Zwick. The shaft began perceptibly to rotate toward its vector.
Approximately sixteen minutes after the Wildside ignition, she shut off the vessel's engines, and several minutes later did the same with Zwick.
Now there was a quick-scramble in what everyone perceived as the tightest part of the operation save the actual dip into the atmosphere.
The Outsiders on Wildside and Zwick hurried back out and released the ships from the shaft. There wasn't time to bring them back in, so they tethered down on the hulls while everyone waited. When they reported themselves secure, Lori moved the vessels cautiously to new positions along the shaft, and realigned them, bringing their axes parallel to Alpha. When that had been done, the Outsiders reattached the ships.
Meantime, the other two vessels, the Evening Star and Wendy, snuggled up against the shaft in their assigned places. More of Janet's people poured out of airlocks and secured them to the shaft.
The problem she had been waiting for developed on Wendy. One of the volunteers, a researcher from the science team, got ill out on the hull and brought up her lunch. The force field had no provision to handle that kind of event. It was flexible and made room, but the unfortunate woman was quickly immersed in her own ejecta. Panicked, she lost contact with the hull and drifted away from the ship.
A backup quickly replaced her and a shuttle was dispatched to do a rescue.
The replacement joined the effort almost without missing a beat.
It was a difficult maneuver because everything had to be completed within a restrictive time frame, barely two hours, or they'd lose their window. As it turned out, no one need have worried. The job was completed, and everyone, including the woman with the lunch, was back inside with eleven minutes to spare. All four vessels had been aligned directly front to rear along the shaft axis.
At Lori's signal, the four superluminals engaged their main engines and gently drew the Alpha shaft forward, beginning their long run toward the Misty Sea.
There were a few places where the floor had buckled or where the ceiling had caved in. They found fragments of fibrous materials in some of the cubicles off the concourse. Clothing, apparently. Small stuff.
She took samples of everything, continued to record the locations, and made voluminous notes.
A call came in from Canyon. "Hutch," he said, "I'd love to do a program from inside the skyhook. If you'd be willing." They were already broadcasting the visuals, he hoped she didn't mind, but it was a huge story back home. And everyone would like to hear her reactions.
"Give me a break, August. I can't walk around here pointing my vest at everything."
"You don't have to. The spontaneous shots work fine. We'll use a delay, and we can reconstruct anything that we miss. You don't have to worry; we can edit out whatever might not be appropriate, whatever you want us to. It'll make a great story. And I'd be in your debt."