“Let me show you what happened,” Hu said, and brought up a video, shot from an external camera apparently mounted on one of the trusses.
The Human Genetic Archive and its surrounding blanket of thermal protection were not centered in the frame—they were down in the lower right corner. So the camera angle wasn’t ideal. But they could see what happened. The arklet approached, creeping in gradually from the port side with closing velocity no greater than a slow walk.
“Is this real time?” Sal asked.
“Yes. Because it was an extremely low-speed approach it was not viewed as terribly dangerous.”
“It looks like it’s going to be a near miss,” Sal said.
“It was—until this,” Hu said, and freeze-framed the video. It wasn’t easy to make out, but they could see a tiny flash on the forward halo of Arklet 214. “The thruster fires—a small course correction under automatic control.” He stepped it forward. The flash faded but expanded into a dim gray cloud. “Exhaust gases. Expanding rapidly but moving quite fast.” He stepped it forward several more frames until they could see the thermal protection blanket recoiling from the impact of the gas. A seam parted between two adjoining blankets and one of them flailed out like a rag caught in a wind gust.
Hu let the video run now, and they saw the arklet’s rear halo snag on the loose blanket and rip it away, exposing the Human Genetic Archive to the orange radiance of Earth’s atmosphere.
Ivy said, “If that thruster hadn’t fired at the wrong moment—”
Hu nodded. “Arklet 214 would have passed underneath with two meters to spare. Not a margin to be proud of. But it would have been enough.”
After a pause, Hu added, “The HGA’s thermal protection system could have been designed better.”
Another pause in which everyone else waited to see who would be the first to laugh. If it weren’t for dark humor, they’d have no humor at all.
Hu seemed to sense it. “What I mean is that it was engineered for normal thermal loads.”
“Meaning sunshine,” Dinah said.
“Yes. Not for radiant heat shining up from the atmosphere below it.”
“The same thing is true of many parts of Izzy, of course,” Markus said. “We are having thermal overloads all over the place now. Moira, what’s the damage?”
Dinah had to give Markus credit for a kind of finesse for the offhanded way he dropped the question in. Moira, who had been quiet through the whole meeting, took a moment to snap out of her reverie.
“Well,” she finally said, “as Hu said, the thermal protection system—”
“Was bad,” Markus said. “We know.”
“There was no backup system.”
Markus said, “Of course not. The cooling system for the HGA was the rest of the universe. We do not expect to have a backup system for the rest of the universe. We can rely upon it to be cold most of the time.”
“Because of the accelerated schedule, caused by the Eight Ball—”
“Stop,” Dinah said.
Everyone looked at her.