Dinah, who had spent most of the last couple of days preparing for the docking to occur on Caboose 2, sent her robots scrambling forward along the outside of the Stack, bringing their cables with them. That caught her up in a stew of minor complications that more than filled the time it took for the heptad to get its dead thruster up and running again.
They watched the second approach, and the docking, in silence. It took about ten minutes. Doob interrupted once to give an update on the approaching radiation storm.
Unexpectedly, it was Moira who broke the silence. “Don’t let them dock,” she said.
“What?!” Ivy said.
“It’s a trap.”
Zeke’s voice came over the PA: “Positive docking achieved. Getting ready to open the hatch.”
Moira added, “Michael figured it out.”
“Fifteen minutes before the storm breaks,” Doob announced.
Dinah had entered into a state of intense focus on the problem to be solved, seeing through the eyes of ten different robots performing ten different tasks, occasionally blurting out terse requests to the two surviving spacewalkers, asking them to shake a stuck cable loose or pull a wriggling Grabb out of trouble. She tried to filter out the conversation between Moira and Ivy.
“What do you mean, it’s a trap?”
“A?da’s heptad joined the mesh network as soon as it got within range,” Moira said. “If you check your email right now, or your Spacebook, you’ll see stuff flooding into it. Terabytes of old messages and posts that have been bottled up in the Swarm. Mailing list traffic that’s three years old.”
“So?” Ivy asked.
“Michael saw some weird stuff just now, and drew my attention to it.”
“He’s floating in space!”
“He’s floating in space and checking his email.”
“What weird stuff did he notice?”
“They’re cannibals, Ivy.”
“We already know that.”
“A few hours ago,” Moira said, “they slaughtered Tav and ate what was left of him.”
Dinah was having difficulty focusing on her work.
“They wanted to be well fed for today.”
The time was approaching when the spacewalkers would have to go to their airlocks and get indoors ahead of the storm. Dinah had to focus on them. There was nothing she could do about what Moira was saying. She began speaking to one of them but was interrupted when Zeke came over the PA again: “Ten survivors aboard. Waiting for J.B.F. to emerge from the hatch.”
“Zeke, be on your toes,” Ivy said. “We have indications they may be up to no good.”
“Get inside,” Dinah said to the spacewalkers. “Head for the nearest airlock. Stay away from the new people, we don’t trust them.”
“Ditching the rock,” Ivy announced. A sharp hiss came through the walls as compressed air flooded the hair-thin gap between the outer surface of the Hammerhead and the surrounding cavity of Amalthea. “Plug your ears.” Then, before anyone could comply, a shattering, sickening bang as Dinah’s demolition charges went off, destroying the structural connections that joined Amalthea to Endurance. They felt a sharp jostle—more acceleration than they had experienced in three years—as the Hammerhead sprang free, pushing the rest of Endurance along with it.
“Three minutes before the storm hits,” Doob said.
“J.B.F. is aboard,” Luisa announced. She was on voice to Zeke and the rest of the crew aft, relaying what they said to the others in the Hammerhead. Her brow wrinkled. “Something’s wrong with her—I don’t quite follow.”
“Burning hard,” Ivy announced. Meaning that they were near their apogee, entering the fringe of the main lunar debris cloud, and that all the surviving engines had just come on full force. She had inaugurated the big burn that would, with a delta vee of some twelve hundred meters per second, inject them into the debris cloud.
Every loose object in the Hammerhead dropped to what was now the floor. At the same time they could hear all manner of percussion, from all over Endurance.
Zeke’s voice came in over the voice link. “We are in combat,” he said.
“Combat?” Ivy asked.
“They shot Steve Lake.”
“We are now experiencing very high levels of high-energy proton radiation from the CME,” Doob announced. “Everyone who is not in the Hammerhead should be getting into a storm shelter.”
“Shot him?” Ivy asked.
“With J.B.F.’s revolver. I suggest you try to lock down the network, they are trying to backdoor it.”
After that, communications were hectic and confused for a minute, and seemed to suggest that adversaries in different parts of the ship were all trying to use the same channel.
Then their communications went dead. The equipment still worked; they’d simply been locked out of the network. Ivy could still fly the ship, but none of them could talk to people outside the Hammerhead.
They were startled by a metallic rapping on the hatch that sealed the Hammerhead off from the SCRUM. Dinah’s ears soon read it as Morse code.