“Not enough to hurt us. Maintain thrust,” Markus ordered.
“I am running out of ice,” Jiro said, and glanced over his monitor at Dinah.
Dinah had already warned them that supplying enough propellant to do all of this in one huge burn would be a close-run thing, assuming everything went perfectly. Everything hadn’t. She met Jiro’s eyes, shook her head, and went back to work.
“Get ready to shut it down, Jiro,” Markus said. “We are descending into thick air and I don’t know what is going to happen.”
Their inner ears told them that something was happening. The powerful thrust was still driving them into their seats, but some force had taken Ymir by the nose and was torquing it around.
“We hit nose first,” Markus said, “and we are spinning back. Main engine shutdown in three. Two. One. Now.”
A nuclear steam engine didn’t shut off quickly. The thrust faltered and tapered off in response to whatever commands Jiro had entered. It was the better part of a minute, though, before they were back in zero gravity—meaning in a free orbit with no thrust pushing them around.
“I’ll give you our new orbital parameters in a minute,” Markus said. “It is complicated because we are tumbling.”
In the sudden silence that followed the engine’s shutoff, Dinah could hear distant, tinny shouting. She realized it was an open audio channel from Izzy, coming from a pair of headphones she had ripped off her head during the maneuver. It was the sound of people in the Tank. When she pulled the phones back onto her head she could tell that they were celebrating.
“THAT WAS A BIG-ASS DELTA VEE YOU GUYS JUST RIPPED OFF!” DOOB said when he heard Dinah’s voice on the other end of the link. “You deserve congratulations.”
Dinah’s response, after a few seconds’ delay, was guarded. “But not big-ass enough?”
It was strange hearing the voice of one you knew well modulated through this old-school audio tech. Like hearing Dinah doing a Buzz Aldrin impression at a party. The emotional nuance came through more clearly than the actual words.
“Konrad is still calculating your params,” Doob said, “but just on visual inspection we can see how much you slowed down. Fantastic.”
“Sounds like we’ll be needing another pass then,” she said. Meaning that they would have to wait for Ymir to loop once more around the Earth, and do another burn at her next perigee, in order to slow down enough to rendezvous with Izzy.
“This time you can work with a higher perigee,” he pointed out, “so you don’t have to fly that damn piece of ice through the pea soup again.”
“Flying this damn piece of ice kind of stresses me out,” Dinah allowed.
“The glass is half full, baby,” Doob said. “The glass is half full. You lit that candle. It worked. You bounced off the atmosphere. You’re a hell of a lot closer to us—Konrad is saying your apogee is definitely sublunar.” Meaning that Ymir would turn around and start falling back toward the Earth before reaching the orbit of the former moon. “This is huge,” he added. “It is going to change the picture politically.”
After a lengthy pause, Dinah asked, “Politically?” as if she couldn’t quite believe what she had heard.
“I’M AWARE OF THE FACT THAT IVY HAS TURNED A DEAF EAR TO ALL of your ideas,” Julia began, just as soon as Spencer had typed in the commands that disconnected Arklet 453 from the Situational Awareness Network. “I presume she also went out of her way to place obstacles in the path of your coming here for this meeting.”