Having seen to all of those matters, they turned out the lights and slept. Dinah slept through her alarm, in fact, and finally woke up to realize she’d been out for twelve hours.
Her next thought was to wonder where Markus was. Then she remembered, with a kind of astonishment, that he was dead. It came as a stinging slap, followed by grief. But on the heels of the grief came a feeling of deep fear that she had rarely experienced in all the time since Zero. It was not the sharp bracing fear one felt on an adventure, such as the ride through perigee, nor the kind of intellectual, abstract fear that had been with them ever since Doob had predicted the Hard Rain. This was a kind of morbid panic that was second cousin to depression. It was how a child might feel upon learning that she had been orphaned. Not a child, rather, but an adolescent, the oldest sibling, on whom responsibility for the family now fell. Markus was gone. He wasn’t going to shoulder any more burdens for them. Others would have to take up those burdens. And some of those—the ones, perhaps, most eager to step into Markus’s place—would certainly make the wrong decisions. And so, as sad as Dinah felt about the fact that she would never see Markus again or feel his embrace, the thing that really made her want to contract into a fetal position was this knowledge that it was on her now. On her, and Ivy, and Doob, and the others who could be trusted.
She went “up” into the common room and found Jiro, as usual, lost in contemplation of arcane plots on his computer screen, reflected in miniature on the lenses of his bifocals. During the year he had been in space, his prescription had changed, and so he had been the first consumer of the optical lens-grinding machine that had been sent up and installed in Izzy. Without it, much of the Cloud Ark’s population would gradually have been rendered nonproductive as their eyeglasses were broken or wore out. It was a military machine capable of making glasses in one style, and one style only. At some point a few years down the road, everyone who needed glasses would be wearing this style. It was interesting to contemplate how many decades or centuries would have to go by before the population had grown, and the economy developed, to the point where it could support an eyewear industry with different styles.
He looked up at her through the milky reflections. “I let you sleep,” he said. “Your robots seem to be working fine. There is nothing to do until I finish these calculations.”
“And then what?”
“We have to eliminate the last of the tumbling,” Jiro said, “before we make the final braking burns.”
For Dinah, that was all clear. Ymir was in a safe orbit now and would not fall into the atmosphere anytime soon. But she was still going much too fast, and way too high, to rendezvous with Izzy. They needed to finish the execution of the same plan they’d had all along, which was to make one or two more braking burns as Ymir passed through her perigee, slowing her down to the point where a rendezvous with Izzy was feasible. This required getting the nozzle pointed forward again, and keeping it that way.
“How much damage was done to the—”
“They were destroyed,” Jiro said. “We have two remaining.” They were both referring to the thruster packages, embedded in the ice, that would normally have been used to manage the shard’s attitude. “It is fine. It was necessary,” Jiro added, almost as if worried that Dinah would think poorly of him for criticizing the decisions made by a dead commander.
“Can more be sent out from—”
Jiro nodded. “It is possible to assemble a MIV that could rendezvous with us and assist with the problem. Just in case my idea does not succeed. But since our radio link was lost with New Caird, we cannot coordinate this.”
“And what is your idea?”
“We can use your robots to alter the shape of the nozzle exit,” Jiro said. He held up one hand like a blade, pointed toward the ceiling, and then flexed his knuckles slightly, indicating a shallow bend. “Make it asymmetrical.”
“Like a scarfed nozzle?”
“Exactly. When we fire the main propulsion it will give us an off-axis thrust. If the scarf is oriented correctly, it will have tremendous control authority.”
“Maybe too much,” Dinah said. “We’ll end up overcorrecting.”