“WELL, THAT WAS HARD,” DOOB CROAKED, THEN WETTED HIS WHISTLE with a swig of the Ardbeg, mixed with a few drops of five-billion-year-old asteroid water.
He was in the Banana, speaking to an empty room, staring up at a projection screen on the wall. His reading glasses no longer worked; zero gravity had changed the shape of his eyeballs. The people who knew how to operate the lens-grinding machine were all dead or missing, so there was no way to make new eyeglasses until someone figured out where the machine had been squirreled away and read the instruction manual. Since only twenty-eight people remained alive on Endurance, this didn’t look like it would happen anytime soon. His distance vision was still pretty good, but because of the problem with the glasses he didn’t like to use his laptop for long periods of time. Instead he would come here to the Banana, soak up a little gravity, plug the computer into the projector cable, and work at long range.
He had been here for an hour, because he didn’t want to miss the big moment. He knew exactly when that moment would occur, plus or minus a few seconds, but in the meantime he couldn’t concentrate on anything else. The other twenty-seven were asleep or busy. So he was celebrating alone.
The display in front of him was dominated by a single large window displaying six numbers in fat, easy-to-read block letters. These were the orbital parameters of Endurance. They were updated several times a second, the numbers blurring and twitching. The one he was focusing on was labeled R, short for Radius. It was the distance separating Endurance from the center of Earth. At the moment, it was the highest it had ever been, at 384,512,933 meters and still climbing, slowly, in the last few digits. Endurance was creeping toward apogee, the highest apogee she had ever attained, and the height of that apogee was slightly beyond the distance at which the moon had once orbited Earth. For the first time they were as high in the sky, now, as Cleft.
Loose objects shifted position as Endurance’s remaining engines came on. They were down to thirty-seven functioning arklet engines from the original complement of eighty-one. On a good day they could muster thirty-nine. The other half of them had been cannibalized to keep the good ones working. To compensate for the losses, they had jury-rigged all the other engines they could get: the big one from the Caboose, all the propulsion units that had once been part of the Shipyard, and a few spare motors from straggler arklets that had become separated from the Swarm and found a way to rejoin them. Despite the reduction in engine power, Endurance was at least as maneuverable now as she had been at the beginning, when she had wallowed at the bottom of Earth’s gravity well, burdened with years’ worth of propellant. She weighed half as much now as she had in those days.
The burn went on for a while. It concluded with a change in attitude and a burn in another direction. Doob didn’t have to read the numbers on the screen to know what they were doing. They’d been planning it for three years.