“I can feel the warmth on my face,” Ivy said.
Dinah couldn’t think of anything useful to say to that. During their passage from her shop to the Flivver she had forgotten about the fact that the Earth was burning, and she didn’t enjoy being reminded of it. Instead she tried to focus on the red light emanating coolly from the screen of her tablet, which was running Parambulator. Flivver 3 had been picked up on the swarm’s collective sensorium and identified as a bogey that might potentially collide with as many as a hundred different arklets if it stayed on its current course. Rather than controlling its thrusters directly, which would lead at best to confusion and at worse to a chain-reaction disaster, Ivy was negotiating a solution with the rest of the Cloud Ark, telling it where she wanted to go and finding a way of getting there that would minimize the amount of maneuvering demanded of all the others.
It was not a speedy way of getting around, and indeed ran at right angles to the fighter-jockey ethos of many of the ex-military types who had come up here in the astronaut and cosmonaut corps. But as they got farther away from Izzy they were able to move into orbits that caused minimal consternation to the rest of the cloud, and move in a more direct way to rendezvous with the wayward X-37.
This had been placed, by whoever the hell had launched it, in an orbit with the same period and plane as the Cloud Ark, but with somewhat greater eccentricity. The orbit of Izzy, and hence of the Cloud Ark, was almost perfectly circular. The X-37’s was more oval, meaning that about half of the time it was “beneath” the Cloud Ark and the rest of the time it was “above,” but twice during each ninety-three-minute orbit it crossed through, each time touching off the havoc that was wasting so much propellant and causing so much annoyance to Markus. Right now it was “above” and due to cross over in another twenty minutes.
“Any bolides we need to worry about before I focus on this?” Ivy asked her.
“Nothing in particular,” Dinah said, meaning that there was nothing so big as to force the entire Cloud Ark to make a course change.
“Let’s make this fast then,” Ivy said, and went over to manual control. For they were now far enough away from the Cloud Ark that she could execute solo maneuvers without making Parambulator screens turn solid red. “Can you scope it?”
Dinah spent a minute refamiliarizing herself with the user interface for the optical telescope mounted to the Flivver’s nose; this was an electronic eyeball about the size of an orange. The controls were intuitive, but getting it to aim at a particular bogey took a bit of doing. Soon enough, though, she was able to see something white and bright. She locked on to it and zoomed in.
From longer zoom it was clearly a winged craft with a black nose, like the Shuttle of old, but it seemed to have taken on added parts. Zooming in further she was able to see that the cargo bay doors that constituted most of the X-37’s “back” had been opened at some point after it had reached orbit. Its payload had then been lifted out of the bay using the built-in robotic arm, which was still holding it, frozen in position. The payload was almost as big as the X-37 itself; it was yet another dome-ended cylinder. But unlike a Flivver or an arklet, it lacked thrusters or any sort of visible power source. It was just a burnished aluminum capsule, gleaming white on one side from sunshine, red below where it reflected the planetary firestorm.
Ivy was looking at it too, dividing her attention between the Flivver’s status displays and the window running this optical feed. “Can you get more detail on the forward end? There’s a fitting there that might be a—”
“Yeah,” Dinah said, zooming in and panning to center it. “That’s a docking port all right.”
“Well, I guess we’re being invited to dock with it,” Ivy said.
“It’s weird. I don’t like it.”
“I agree,” Ivy said, “but we can’t come back later. That thing is tiny. Less than four feet in diameter. If there’s humans in there, they are running out of stuff to breathe.”
“Why would they send a human up in something like that?”
“It’s some plan that went awry. An email didn’t get answered, a transmission got garbled, now these people are marooned and probably waiting to die.” Ivy spoke brusquely, a little irked by Dinah’s questions.
Dinah heard thrusters pop and felt them nudging her around as Ivy maneuvered. She knew better than to distract her friend when her brain had gone into orbital mechanics mode. She unbuckled herself from the jump seat and moved to the docking port on the Flivver’s “top” surface, steadying herself by reaching out to grab the adjacent handles whenever Ivy effected a little course adjustment.