Which only made the question of what the hell Markus was up to more compelling. If Slava was being that creative with two robots and a sack of zip ties . . .
She finally spotted New Caird on a camera belonging to a Bucky that was attached to the stern of the shard, about halfway between its edge and the cavernous maw of the nozzle. The little ship was hanging in space maybe a hundred meters away, white jets erupting from her attitude thrusters every few moments as she tried to keep station behind the slowly rotating shard. Markus was flying her by hand, and it was some fancy flying indeed.
The geometry was difficult to visualize, but Dinah convinced herself that Vyacheslav was “walking” toward the same general location that New Caird was aimed at. In their own ways, the two men were focused on the same part of the shard: one of its outermost corners, where the widest part of the sugarloaf terminated and connected to its base, along a sharp but irregular edge. There, embedded in the ice, was a scrap of structural framework about the size of a car. It served as the anchor for a cluster of small conical rocket nozzles: one of those thruster systems that had proven so miserably underpowered for the current job. Aiming another camera at it, Dinah saw a steady jet of blue-white fire emerging from two of the nozzles. They were burning continuously, full blast. They weren’t designed to do that. But Ymir’s attitude control system had calculated that thrust, and a lot of it needed to be applied in those two directions if its programmed objective—getting the ship’s “nose” pointed forward and her nozzle aft—were to be achieved.
Dinah got it. Her thinking was confirmed by the chatter she could now hear, in a mix of English, German, and Russian, between Markus and Vyacheslav. But she could see in her mind’s eye what Ymir must look like, right now, to Markus, viewing it through the front window of New Caird: a huge drifting arrowhead of black ice, generally dark, but decorated at the nose and “corners” by twinkling white lights, and streaks of hot gas: the exhaust from the thrusters, running an automatic program controlled from within. Sometimes they flashed on and off. Occasionally, though, when a lot of thrust was called for in one place, they ran for a long time. Those long steady burns would stand out clearly against the dark of space.
Markus didn’t need to calculate Ymir’s rotation in his head. He didn’t need to know her spin rates about her three axes or the torque needed to counteract them. He didn’t even need to pull up the user interface on his tablet. All he had to do was fly around the shard and look for places where thrusters were staying on continuously. Those were the ones that were overloaded and underpowered. Those were, therefore, the ones where New Caird’s big engine could be used most effectively.
But how?
Her view of the thruster system was interrupted by a blurry gray form: Vyacheslav moving in front of the camera. He then came back into focus, groping for a carabiner along his waist and snapping it onto a structural member that protruded from the ice. Dinah could hear him breathing. Bracing himself with his left hand, he reached into the network of struts with his right. After a bit of groping he seemed to find something, then worked for a minute, his arm reciprocating slightly.
The thruster jets faltered and winked out.
“Done,” Vyacheslav said. “Apologies. Valve was sticking.”
“Get clear, tovarishch,” Markus said.
“Getting,” Slava returned. He unhooked the carabiner and bent away from the framework, trusting himself to the Grabbs zip-tied to his feet, and began to move away with the painfully slow gait of a man walking in hot caramel. “Just do it,” he said, then added a phrase in German that Dinah was pretty sure meant If it doesn’t work we are all dead anyway.
New Caird drifted out of frame. Dinah spent a few moments reacquiring her view. The smaller ship was closing on Ymir, headed directly for the thruster system that Slava had just shut down, and coming in on an angle between the two nozzles that had been burning.
The logic was clear; the method was insane. New Caird was going to do the job that the tiny thrusters couldn’t. Markus had to get her big nozzle aimed in about the right direction, namely, about halfway between the two that had been doing all the work. Fine. But he was also going to have to make a mechanical connection between New Caird and the shard, so that the thrust of the big engine could be transmitted into the mass of ice.