“It is back down to background levels,” Jiro said. “But the detector would only ‘see’ sources on its side of the hull. We will have to do a more thorough survey later.”
“Get a load of this,” Markus said, and punched in a maneuver that swung New Caird around ninety degrees. They were now flying “sideways,” their nose aimed directly at Ymir, which was only about a hundred meters away from them. She more than filled the window. Her narrow end—her bow, if you wanted to think of her as a ship—was a hill of dirty ice. A few fine structures suggested that humans had been at work there: some structural netting, some cables, a glinting wire that might have been the radio aerial. But it wasn’t obvious, yet, where they were actually going to dock.
“It is really buried,” Markus observed. He didn’t have to explain that “it” was the command module—the part of Ymir that had life support systems. It ought to be reachable through a docking port. But they weren’t seeing anything. They had known—because it was part of the plan—that Sean and his crew would have buried it in the ice, to protect them from radiation and from rocks. They looked to have buried it deep.
Dinah’s tablet was running a terminal window, a simple programmer’s interface that just displayed lines of text. For the last little while, this had shown only a blinking cursor, but now it came alive and began to display cryptic, one-line messages.
“Picking up some new bot sigs,” she reported. These were the digital signatures of robots, pinging the universe to find out what, if anything, was listening. New Caird had shipped with a complement of robots of various types, but she knew all of their sigs and was filtering them out of this terminal window. Anything that showed up here was, by process of elimination, from Ymir’s complement of robots.
Like the clicks on Jiro’s Eenspektor, these came up sporadically and in bursts.
“At least twenty . . . so I am going to filter out the Nats,” she said, typing in a command. Being so numerous, Nats tended to overload the screen. “Okay, in addition to a pretty well-developed Nat swarm I have half a dozen Grabbs and at least that many Siwis.”
“Any clues in their names?” Markus asked. It was possible to give each robot a unique name, which would show up on its sig. By default these were just automatically generated serial numbers, but they could be manually changed.
“Well,” Dinah said, “here is a Grimmed Grabb whose name is ‘HELLO I AM RIGHT ON TOP OF THE DOCKING PORT,’ which seems promising.”
“Can you make it flash?”
“Hang on.” Dinah established a connection to HELLO I AM RIGHT ON TOP OF THE DOCKING PORT and, after quickly checking its status, told it to blink its LEDs until further notice. Before she even looked up from her screen she could tell, by subvocal exclamations from the others, that it had worked.
“I see it very clearly,” Markus said. Some pops and bangs sounded from the thrusters as he adjusted New Caird’s attitude. They were now flying in nearly perfect sync with Ymir, looking at the flashing Grabb from a distance of maybe five meters. It was anchored into the surface of the shard in an area that was relatively free of the black stuff.
“Aim the light down into the ice, please? And put it on continuously?” Markus requested.
The Grabb’s LEDs were mounted on snaky stalks that could be aimed. Dinah made it happen. When next she looked up through the window, she could see the silhouette of the Grabb centered in a nimbus of white light, produced by its aiming its lights directly into the ice. A sharp white disk was visible in the center of that silvery cloud. It was blurred by the ice, but they all recognized it for what it was: a docking port, buried at least a meter deep.
“Did anyone bring an ice pick?” Jiro asked. It was not like him to make a joke, but Dinah was happy to take humor from any quarter at this point.
“Slava,” Markus said, “you’re up. Dinah, maybe you can help by bringing more of the robots to the area.”