Moira and Doob looked at him sharply.
“The health situation has been not so good, for a long time,” Markus explained. “Sean was the last member of the expedition to die.”
“Are you saying that Ymir is a ghost ship?!” Doob asked.
“Yes.”
“And there’s no way to remote-control her,” Moira guessed.
“Unfortunately Dinah’s Morse code cannot help us in that regard,” Markus agreed.
“So someone has to go and—”
“Someone has to go and land on that fucking big piece of ice,” Markus said, “and get inside of Ymir and restart the nuclear reactor and commit the final burns that will bring her into sync with Izzy.”
“Who the hell—” Doob began, but Markus cut him off by pointing to himself. He did this in a somewhat awkward fashion that, deliberately or not, looked like a pantomime of suicide by handgun. He said, “I am placing Ivy in command of Izzy and the Cloud Ark tomorrow. I am assembling a crew that will depart in a MIV and make a rendezvous with Ymir. We will board her and manually execute the procedures needed to bring her under control and get her payload to Izzy. We will then use what is left of the ice to raise Izzy’s orbit—and we will bring Amalthea with us on the Big Ride.”
“That’s . . . major,” Moira said. “Who knows? When were you going to announce it?”
“I just decided it now.” Markus sighed. “Listen, it is the only way. In my heart I always considered Dump and Run and Pure Swarm both to be too risky. What happened with the HGA just makes this more obvious. The only wise course is the Big Ride. It will take a long time—two years or something. But during all that time the most important resources can be sheltered within Amalthea. And by that I mean you and your equipment, Moira. You can have whatever resources you need from the Mining Colony to create a safe location for the genetics lab.”
“Okay,” Moira said, “I’ll talk to Dinah.”
“Talk to whomever she delegates,” Markus said. “Dinah is going to have to come with me on the expedition. I need her to deal with all of those verdammt robots.”
“How can I help?” Doob asked. He wondered if Markus might dragoon him as well, and was torn between being afraid of that and tremendously excited.
“Figure out how we are going to do it,” Markus said, after considering it for a few moments. “Lay in a course for Cleft.”
“Yes,” Doob said. “I’ll do that.” The little boy in him was crestfallen that he wasn’t going on the adventure. Then he reminded himself that he was already part of the biggest adventure ever, and that, so far, it had been altogether miserable.
ALL CONVERSATIONS WORTH HAVING ABOUT SPACE VOYAGES WERE couched in terms of “delta vee,” meaning the increase or decrease in velocity that had to be imparted to a vehicle en route. For, in a common bit of mathematical shorthand, the Greek letter delta (Δ) was used to mean “the amount of change in . . .” and V was the obvious abbreviation for velocity. The words “delta vee,” then, were what you heard when engineers read those symbols aloud.
Since velocity was measured in meters per second, so was delta vee. The delta vees bandied about in spaceflight discussions tended to be large by the standards of what Markus was now calling Old Earth. The speed of sound, for example—a.k.a. Mach 1—was three hundred and some meters per second, and most earthbound people would consider it awfully damned fast. But it hardly rose to the notice of most people who talked about space missions.
A common delta vee benchmark had been the amount needed to get something from an Old Earth launch pad to an orbit like Izzy’s. This was some 7,660 meters per second, or more than twenty-two times the speed of sound: an impossible figure for any object that had to fight its way through an atmosphere. Once a vehicle had reached the vacuum of space, though, things became simpler: rocket engines worked more efficiently, drag and aerodynamic buffeting were absent, and the consequences of failure weren’t invariably catastrophic. Getting it from point A to point B was a matter of hitting it with the right delta vee at the right time.