All the energy was directed “backward” from the point of view of the bored crew members who were presumably monitoring all of this in the station at the “handle” end of the whip. They were moving a lot faster than the flivver. In order to make physical contact with the approaching craft, they had to reach “back.” And “reach” wasn’t really the right term; they had to punch backward with explosive suddenness to match the flivver’s much lower velocity. This was the kind of task that bullwhips were made for.
Still, she couldn’t help but flinch as the final few flynks snapped around toward them. The perspective on the VR was almost sickening. The eye was confused by the fact that the whip as a whole was moving away from them so rapidly, and yet its uncoiling tip was coming right at them. Any failure in the calculations and it would have either hurtled away from them, leaving them alone and adrift, or else smashed into them at hypersonic closing velocity and destroyed them as surely as a bolide strike during the Epic.
Instead of which the two velocities matched perfectly and the last flynk in the chain was, just for a moment, right there in front of them, much like the hanger she had docked with earlier.
“Coupling,” said the voice, unnecessarily since she could hear the mechanical connection being made and then feel the acceleration as the flivver was slapped sideways and then jerked forward by the momentum of the whip. “Brace for stabilization.” A polite way of saying that the situation in the whip was a little chaotic in the aftermath of the snap-around. In general they were now being pulled forward with tremendous force, being brought up to a speed to match that of the whip station and all the other objects in the habitat ring. But the physics of the whip led to some side-to-side oscillation, some surges and lapses in the acceleration that could be dampened but not removed by the tiny adjustments of the flynks. “Hebel has toggled,” the voice confirmed. “Hebel,” like Knickstelle, was a term from the German; it was a lever at the base of the whip, anchored to the whip station and capable of flipping freely from one side to the other. It was, in effect, the arm that held the handle and cracked the whip, and shortly after the completion of the first crack—the one that had culminated in successful docking—it had snapped around to the other side of the station and initiated a second crack in the opposite direction. A new niksht had been formed, just at the place where the whip was attached to the hebel, and was beginning to accelerate “forward,” accelerating the flivver to the velocity it would need to accomplish the rest of the mission.
The process lasted for about three minutes. The visual cues in her headset gave her mind the context: the buzz saw whirling past them seemed to slow down. Of course it was still moving at the same speed; in truth the flivver was speeding up to match its pace. But, from her point of view, the habitat ring stopped looking like a whirling dervish and began to resolve itself into a series of discrete objects, still rushing past them, but more and more slowly until the whole ring seemed to grind to a halt. And at that moment, something especially huge drifted into view: the Eye, dead in their path.
“Decoupling,” the voice announced, and not a moment too soon, since the acceleration had become difficult to tolerate. Had they not broken their connection to the tip of the whip, the gee forces would have rendered them unconscious, then killed them, and finally ripped the flivver to shreds. Flynks were built to survive forces that humans and ordinary spacecraft could not. But the geometry and the timing of the niksht had been programmed so that it would bring them to their desired velocity and release them into their new trajectory just before the crisis that, in an Old Earth bullwhip, would have been signaled by the sharp bang of a sonic boom. Weightlessness returned, unless you counted a bit of corrective jostling from the flivver’s thrusters. Kath Two’s vision cleared and she swallowed a few times, trying to settle her stomach.
The funny thing was that the entire procedure, from Kath Two’s landing her glider in the hanger, to the bolo release, to the just-concluded interaction with the whip, would have looked graceful, even gentle, when viewed from a distance. In order to understand the sheer intensity of the acceleration and the jostling, you had to live through it.
Trying to think about something other than her stomach, she took a good look at the Eye.