Seveneves. Neal Stephenson

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СКАЧАТЬ it as a packet of tissues. A high-value black market item. She tore it open, pulled out a few sheets, and began the somewhat delicate process of soaking up the tear-globs without smashing them into sprays of equipment-shorting droplets.

      “I mean, my God, what would Markus think of you?” Ivy demanded.

      It took Dinah a few moments to catch up. “Him and me? You think?”

      “It is so obvious.”

      After a thrilling first few weeks, things had kind of trailed off with Rhys. It was okay. Easy come, easy go. She had never seen him as a stable long-term prospect. The times they’d been living in, and the place they’d been living, weren’t really conducive to long-term pair bonding. Luisa, wearing her anthropologist hat, had watched the spontaneous, mostly short-lived couplings of Izzy’s inhabitants with a combination of dry amusement, scientific fascination, and frank, hilarious envy.

      “I don’t know,” Dinah said, “I see where you’re going, but he seems a little Captain Kirk.”

      “You need a little Captain Kirk in your …”

      “In my what?”

      “In your life. Rhys is too introspective.”

      “Is that a euphemism of some kind?”

      “He’s depressed.”

      “Gosh, I wonder why.”

      “No, not that way. Not about the world ending and everyone dying. I mean that when he’s working on a project he’s full of energy but when it’s finished he just kind of collapses.”

      On the tip of Dinah’s tongue was a remark about how well that observation aligned with Rhys’s lovemaking style, but she held back. “You realize that all of this is being recorded?”

      “Get used to it,” Ivy said, and Dinah could sense her shrug from twelve meters away. “Hang on, gonna give the forward thrusters a little pop—backing out of our parking space.”

      She wasn’t kidding. The thrusters gave off something very like a bang when they went off. Dinah, who actually wasn’t hanging on, felt a few moments of disorientation as the whole arklet moved backward around her while she remained motionless. The green grid dropped away from her and the front door approached—but all so slowly that she needed only to reach out and glide a hand along the ladder to control her relative motion. In a few seconds the forward end of the arklet reached her and she stopped herself against one of the struts of Ivy’s couch. Next to it was a knot of straps and pads, like a rock-climbing harness, which Dinah now spent a couple of minutes untangling and climbing into. The bangs of the thrusters, the hisses and clicks of the associated plumbing, and Ivy’s murmuring into the microphone served as accompaniment while she got herself strapped in and donned a headset of her own. That enabled her to hear the clipped military-style transmissions among Dinah, Markus, and their controller on Izzy. An engineer in Houston weighed in every few minutes with questions and observations.

      Once they had drifted well clear of Izzy, they initiated a programmed burn a few seconds long that took them to a slightly higher orbit. For a while they could see nothing but empty space through the windows. The sun must have risen over the Earth’s limb, because bright round spots appeared on the wall.

      Ivy said, “I have Three on radar and am engaging MAP.” That being the three-letter acronym for Monitored Autonomous Piloting. The operation they were about to perform—the High Five—was deemed way too ticklish to be handled by noob spaceship pilots. It had to be a robotic operation the whole way. But the algorithms, and the sensors that told them what was happening, were all brand new, so experienced pilots had to sit at the controls, watching through the window and taking over if and when the robo-pilot started acting screwy.

      The thrusters began to pop in a different rhythm, a patter of tiny firings very different from how a human being would operate them. The star field swung past the windows, the splotches of sunlight veered around the walls, and suddenly Arklet 3 rotated into view, a few hundred meters away. It too was flying under MAP, coming about until its front door was aimed their way. Dinah stifled the impulse to wave at Markus and Fuhua. It was unprofessional, and anyway they wouldn’t be able to see her through the tiny porthole.

      A spindly white arm swung outward from the side of Arklet 3 and locked into position, extended off to one side. A few moments later they heard and felt their own arm actuating likewise, and watched an animation of it on a flat screen.

      “Bringing up the Paw camera,” Dinah muttered, and tapped a control that flooded a screen with high-resolution video from a telephoto lens mounted at the end of the arm. This showed nothing, at first, but the blue limb of the Earth’s atmosphere down in one corner. Then a targetlike pattern veered across the screen, slowed, and veered back. All of this was accompanied by more fidgety percussion from the thrusters. The feed was remarkably close, and clear. Comparing it to the direct view out the porthole, Dinah could see the target on the end of Arklet 3’s extended arm, looking tiny from this distance. But the machine vision system now in control of their little spacecraft had found it, and recognized it, and …

      “We have a lock,” Ivy said. “We see you, Three.”

      “We see you, Two,” Markus answered. “It proceeds.”

      It proceeded with a longer firing of the aft thrusters that nudged them forward enough that Dinah could feel the pressure on her bottom, sense the straps of the harness tightening. The target flailed around some, but a few moments later, the lock was reestablished. Dinah could see Arklet 3 growing larger. Numbers on a screen, gauging the distance between the ships—or, to be precise, between the two ships’ outstretched Paws—were counting down.

      “It is all nominal,” Ivy said, but the last word was drowned out by a digital voice making an announcement over the arklet’s rudimentary PA system: “Bolo Coupling Operation entering its terminal phase. Prepare for acceleration.” And then in classic NASA style it counted down: “Five, four, three, two, one, grapple initiated.”

      At “one” the test pattern on the screen disappeared in shadow, for it was too close now for the camera to even see it. The Paws of Arklet 2 and Arklet 3 slapped together, like runners exchanging a high five as they passed each other going opposite ways. Strange whiny noises propagated down the arm into the hard shell of the arklet.

      “Grappling achieved,” said the voice.

      Dinah’s ears finally identified the whiny noise as the sound of cable unwinding from a spool. She felt a lurch in her stomach as the arklet did a half somersault, reversing its direction so that it was pointed back at its bolo partner.

      As she knew, having studied this maneuver for weeks, the two arklets were now joined together by a cable. They had flown right past each other, but the tension in that cable had spun them around so that they were pointing toward each other again—she verified this with a glance out the window, which gave her a view of the nose of Arklet 3 slowly receding as it “backed away” from them. The spool of cable mounted next to its docking port was in motion, unwinding as the two craft gained distance from each other. In the exact center, the cables of Arklets 2 and 3 were clasped together by a coupling device that could be remotely disengaged whenever they made the decision to go their separate ways.

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