“I don’t know,” Markus said.
They were looking at Ymir from a distance of ten kilometers and closing. They were viewing her on their tablets, through a zoomed-in video camera. Vyacheslav Dubsky, floating closest to New Caird’s forward end, put his face to the vessel’s tiny window and searched the black sky for the black ship, but the squint on his face suggested it was still too far away for naked eyes to be of much use.
“Maybe he was doing us a favor,” Dinah said. “The black stuff has all kinds of goodies on it. Carbon, obviously. But also nitrogen, potassium—”
“Micronutrients,” Markus said, “that the Cloud Ark will be needing.”
“So maybe he used the robots to scrape some of it off Greg’s Skeleton, and loaded up on the gunk,” Dinah speculated.
“We will know soon,” Vyacheslav said. “Presumably he left a document.”
“Which we will not be alive to read, unless we stick the landing,” Markus pointed out, “so no more chatter from now on, please. Slava—” and he broke into a string of bad Russian meaning something like I trade places with you now. Vyacheslav responded in equally bad German. Both men were perfectly fluent in English. But they made a private joke of butchering each other’s languages, ostensibly as part of a project to preserve Old Earth’s linguistic heritage. Markus then added, “The rest of you, buckle up.”
With the deft movements of one who had been in space for two years, Vyacheslav glided aft. He was one of the veteran Russian spacewalkers who had come up to Izzy way back on A+0.17, in the first launch after the moon had blown up. He had been a mainstay of the Scout and Pioneer eras, racking up more time in a suit than anyone, wearing out three Orlans. He was a little worn out too, being sallow and gaunt compared to the strapping hero who had emerged two years ago from the same Soyuz that had carried Rhys and Bolor-Erdene. Markus replaced him at the forward window and buckled himself into the pilot’s seat.
Behind that was a row of three acceleration couches, mounted on a frame that spanned a diameter of the arklet’s hull. Dinah was loosely belted in on the port side. A few minutes ago she had been tightly belted in. She had not adjusted the straps. The entire couch, and its supporting truss, had been deformed by the same burst of gee forces that had left her so woozy. To starboard was Jiro Suzuki, a nuclear engineer who had been involved with the design of Ymir’s nuclear reactor core. It wasn’t clear whether he was conscious; but then it never was with Jiro. Vyacheslav, the fourth member of New Caird’s complement, settled into the middle position and pulled the top straps of the five-point harness over his shoulders.
A staccato burst sounded from the gamma spectrometer—the modern equivalent of a Geiger counter—floating in front of Jiro’s face. Then the Eenspektor, as they called this device in butchered Russian, dropped back into the normal sporadic patter.
Radiation was striking the Eenspektor—and their bodies—all the time, at random moments and in no particular pattern. Sometimes there would be a little burst, and that part of the mind that liked to see meaning in everything would identify it as an event. But then it would die away and be forgotten. That was just the way of the universe, and of the human psyche. There was a lot more radiation in space than there had been down on the ground, but all the survivors had long since come to terms with that, and Jiro had dialed down the sensitivity on his Eenspektor so that it wasn’t screaming at them all the time.
If it started screaming in the next few minutes, it wouldn’t be because of some faraway cosmic event. It would be because of a radiation leak from Ymir.
“Starting to see the exhaust trail,” Markus commented. “Can you see it on video? It’s faint. The sunlight hits it perfectly a few hundred meters aft of the nozzle bell.”