That wasn’t part of the plan.
Tekla must have gathered her legs against something down in the Caboose capable of pushing back, because all of a sudden she was flying toward them like a rocket. Her arms were in motion, reaching this way and that to slap at anything that could help her correct her course, but her eyes were fixed on Julia and she was coming straight for her. Something gleamed in her hand, a thin arc of silver light: the honed edge of a dagger.
A crisp metallic noise resounded through the module as Julia pulled back the hammer on Pete Starling’s revolver.
“Gun!” shouted the bleeding man. “Gun! Gun!”
If Tekla heard, she did not care, but only pushed back harder against a strut in the neighboring module and came on faster.
To Julia the weapon’s recoil came too soon, as if it had gone off accidentally. She’d been in space long enough to know that it would knock her back, and it did; but she also saw things she could not explain. Camila had entered the picture, flying in from the side with an arm outstretched. The wall of the Shipyard itself reached out to body-check Tekla. A moment later it struck Camila, then Julia. She had expected the high-pitched hiss of a bullet-sized hull puncture; but what followed was more like a roar. Like the crowd in a football stadium when a pass is intercepted. Camila’s arm had turned into a wing of fire. Something took Julia from behind and hurled her toward the Caboose. She looked around, thinking, crazily, that the bleeding man had somehow gotten loose and tackled her. But the force pushing her along was no human being. It was a torrent of escaping air.
“JIRO, CAN YOU HEAR ME?” DINAH ASKED FOR THE FOURTH TIME.
She conjectured that he could, but that he was simply too weak to answer. So she went ahead and delivered the good news. “We made it,” she said. “I have Izzy on optical. We’ll converge with them in about half an hour.”
“Good,” he said, “good.” She was startled to hear anything at all. But the second “good” was a lot fainter than the first one, and she reckoned it was all he could get out.
She decided not to tell him anything further. Entombed in Ymir’s boiler room, simultaneously freezing to death while being cooked alive by radiation, he didn’t need to hear a description of what Dinah was seeing through the telescope.
They had been calling this the Cloud Ark for two years. The name had been meant somewhat poetically. Today, however, it really did look like a cloud. Her view of Izzy, which usually was so crisp and sharp in the high-contrast light of outer space, was cloaked in a glinting and winking shroud of what might be clinically described as particulate matter.
It went without saying that Izzy had taken a direct hit from a bolide. Beyond that, it was difficult to make out details.
Ymir’s final burn—for Jiro, a suicide mission—had settled her in an orbit quite similar to Izzy’s: the same plane, the same average altitude. The only difference was that it was a little bit more oval, calculated to cross Izzy’s path twice during each revolution around the Earth. They were approaching one of those crossings, and so from Dinah’s point of view the space station kept getting closer, filling the window on her computer screen, obliging her to zoom out, giving her a progressively sharper, more detailed picture. As minutes ticked by, she was able to piece together a guess as to what had happened.
The rock must have come in from an angle, missed Amalthea cleanly, and struck somewhere near H2, the hub that anchored Tori 2 and 3. Both of the tori had huge bites taken out of them, and both had stopped rotating. Aft of that point, Izzy’s spine—her central Stack—was actually bent. The spreading wings of the Shipyard were still attached to the Caboose, but they were askew, and leaking debris. The original torus—the one that contained the Banana—was still rotating, and looked whole, but as she drew closer she saw it had taken damage, perhaps from shrapnel.
A faint thud resounded through the ice hull. They’d probably struck a piece of jetsam. No matter, it wouldn’t be moving very fast. Ymir could nuzzle her way through a cloud of that stuff and never feel it.
One of the windows on her screen flashed up a video feed, triggered by the motion detector on a Grabb’s camera, and she saw a human body drifting away into space. She swallowed against a sharp contraction of her throat.
Part of her wondered if she would find Izzy a ghost ship—if she were the only human remaining alive. For Vyacheslav had stopped communicating with them yesterday. Before then, he had mentioned that he had been suffering from diarrhea. If this was caused by radiation exposure, it was a death sentence. He might simply have committed suicide rather than wait for the inevitable.