And it looked like he was going to achieve this by ramming the little ship into the big one. It was a slow ramming, like a tugboat shoving its nose against the side of an oil tanker to nudge it into a berth. But it was ramming nonetheless: not a thing for which spacecraft were generally designed.
She relaxed her painfully tight grip on the edge of the table just a bit when, moments before the collision, Markus fired the retro-thrusters, slowing New Caird at the moment of impact. But still she felt and heard the crunch resounding through the walls of the ice palace. She’d heard it before over the last couple of hours and wondered what it was; apparently Markus had done this several times already.
He had aimed for the place where the structural framework emerged from the ice, forming a sort of angle into which New Caird’s nose could trap itself, as long as the thrust stayed on. Right now that force was being delivered by her aft thrusters. But Dinah, watching Markus’s face through the front window, saw him working at the touch screen that served as New Caird’s control panel, and had a pretty good idea of what was coming next.
She pulled up the interface for Ymir’s attitude control system and saw craziness: thrusters firing all over the shard, lit up by angry icons warning of too little propellant, not enough time, overheated nozzles. The thing that Markus had just rammed was flashing red, indicating that it wasn’t even connected to the system anymore. Graphs at the bottom of the screen, and a three-dimensional rendering of the shard in space, showed just how far off they were from where they wanted to be.
She heard a little symphony of grinding, groaning, and popping, and felt the ship rotating around her.
The video feed showing New Caird was awash in white light as her main propulsion came on full blast. A quick glance at the attitude control plots showed good things happening.
“It is good,” Jiro said, “but we are going to over-rotate now.”
“Not if I got the timing right,” Markus said. “We should rotate through the correct attitude just at the time of the apogee burn. Afterward, yes, we’ll over-rotate. But we’ll have plenty of time to fix it.”
Then his transmission was cut off by an exclamation and a thud. He cursed in German, and then the audio went dead.
Dinah looked at the video feed to see New Caird canted over at the wrong angle. The flame from the engine flickered out.
The framework against which New Caird had been pushing had given way under the thrust of the big engine and crumpled, causing her to slew around. She now lay almost sideways against the ice, the crushed remains of the thruster system sandwiched between her hull and the stern of Ymir.
“Some kind of gas escaping,” Jiro observed quietly. “Or smoke.”
He was right. The eye didn’t pick it up right away because smoke behaved differently in space than in an atmosphere, under gravity. But something was burning, or at least smoldering, along the side of New Caird’s hull, no more than an arm’s length from where Markus sat.
Vyacheslav said, “The hot nozzle of the thruster is melting through the hull.”
Markus came back on the air. “Jiro and Dinah, you must be ready to fire the main propulsion at apogee—” The word was cut off by a constriction of his throat, and he coughed several times. When he resumed speaking, his voice had a strangled timbre. “About two minutes from now. Focus on that—initiate the startup procedures. Vyacheslav can help me with this little problem.” He was coughing convulsively. “Switching off,” he said.
Dinah, against orders, made a last glance at the video feed showing the nose of New Caird. Through its front window she could no longer see Markus. She could see only smoke, and the flickering, lambent light of a fire within it.
The realization of what was happening struck her like a two-by-four across the forehead. She grabbed the edge of the table and closed her eyes for a few moments, felt them fill with hot water, felt the snot flooding into her nose.
“Dinah,” Jiro said. “The auger startup checklist begins now.”
She opened her eyes and saw glowing blurs where user interface widgets ought to have been.
“If it is to mean anything,” Jiro said. “Please.” Then he reached up to enclose his headset’s little microphone with one hand, muffling the sound, and added: “He can probably hear us.”
She reached out and typed a command. “Auger one,” she said. “Go.” And she slapped the Enter key.
And so on down the list. It got easier as she went. Jiro did his part of it delicately, quietly, efficiently. And when the nuke came on to full power, right on schedule, she made sure to mention it. Loudly. In case Markus could hear them.
Only then did she look at the video feed. She was expecting to see Markus’s final resting place, a tomb of acrid smoke.
But nothing was there except a crumpled framework and Vyacheslav, standing with one hand braced against it, gazing away aft. In the background, a spreading plume of steam the size of Manhattan as Jiro’s engine fired.
“Slava?” she said. “Where is—”
“She fell off,” Vyacheslav answered. “When the engine came on, and we began to accelerate. New Caird did not come along for the ride.”