“We don’t trust each other,” he finally told Bascal, without quite looking at him.
“No,” the prince admitted.
“We’re not friends. Not now. Don’t make that appeal to me, because I’m not buying it.”
“All right,” Bascal said soothingly. “All right. We’re not friends. Can we be allies? If we agree on a goal, and the methods for achieving it, is that enough?”
“I ... guess it’ll have to be,” Conrad conceded unhappily.
“Then run your simulations,” the prince said. “And when you’re satisfied, turn off this distress beacon of yours. We’ll shake hands, and work out the details of our final approach and docking. Agreed?”
Well. What exactly had just happened here? Had Conrad’s mutiny succeeded—all his planning and his careful arguments winning the day, forcing Bascal to do the right thing? Had the mutiny failed, with Conrad falling back into error under the spell of the silver-tongued Poet Prince? Had the two of them simply worked things out, or lucked into a solution they could both agree on? It seemed, in a funny way, that all of these things were true at once, and Conrad didn’t know what to make of that, what lesson to draw. Shouldn’t something as basic as right and wrong be easier to figure out?
“We’ll see,” he finally told Bascal.
The prince nodded, accepting that answer although it clearly wasn’t what he’d been hoping for. He gestured to Ho, and the two of them left. But moments later, Bascal burst into laughter, and called out from the other room, “Oh, for crying out loud, let him go!”
“What?” Conrad called back.
“You’ve got to see this,” Bascal said to him, drifting back into the doorway. “Wait, scratch that. Do
not
take your hands off that panel. But boyo, my hat is off to you once more.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
Bascal laughed again. “Jamil and Preston are
gone
. In the fax, I guess. And Steve’s ... glued to the ceiling with a shirtball in his mouth. Xmary, for God’s sake, you win. Let him fucking
go
.”
Oh we’re not too good at rigging, and we’re not too good
at scanning,
And we’re lousy at logistics which is why we’re farting
beans.
But we know just where we’re headed, and we know
just how to get there,
And they’re never gonna ping us till we crash right
through their screens!
Working together again, like old chums, Bascal and Conrad managed to create some telescopic sensors, and to project their images in 2-D on the wellstone ceiling of the bridge. Their target: the fat, squat cylinder of the neutronium barge, twelve hundred meters long and nine hundred forty across. You could practically shrink-wrap the thing in the
fetula
’s sail.
Of course, neither of them knew anything about filtering or image enhancement, and there were certainly no built-in programs for it in any of the wellstone they had on hand, so what they got was a set of straight telescopic images, captured through the equivalent of a two-hundred-meter-wide lens and then magnified a hundred times with no change in detail or resolution.
The sun was too far away to light the scene effectively, so at this range—still nearly a quarter of an AU—the barge’s image was far from clear. You could see nine blooms of yellow light and three of red, which Bascal said were the barge’s running lights: red for the port face and yellow for the capward one, with the green of starboard and the violet of boot hidden behind the cylindrical shape of the barge itself, hulking dimly against the starry background. There was just enough detail to tell—with some staring and squinting and tilting of head—that they were looking at the barge from an aft quarter, seeing most of one side and the six engine bells sticking out from the stern. Of course, the bow would have white lights on it, so their absence here was another clue as to what they were seeing.
“This is raw,” Bascal said, when they’d finally settled on the least-worst focus for the image. “The light we’re seeing takes a minute and a half to reach us from there.”
Conrad whistled. Light was
fast
, so that must be a very long distance indeed. He didn’t get much sense of speed here aboard the
fetula
, but considering they’d covered almost four times that distance already, he couldn’t help but be impressed. They were really doing this! He even jotted some figures into a sketchplate to see what fraction of the speed of light they were going, but the result disappointed him: 0.006%. That made it seem slow again somehow.
Still, having not much else to do, he fiddled with the image parameters, eventually deciding that all the magnification was making the barge harder to see, instead of easier. So he pulled back, shrinking the picture and then refocusing, then shrinking and refocusing again. On the third iteration, though, some sort of smudge appeared near the edge of the ceiling, so he pulled back even farther, and focused again.
And gasped. Bascal, fretting with something on the instrument panel again, turned back to look at him, then up at the images on the ceiling.
The smudge, when properly focused, resolved into two separate objects: jagged lumps of translucent, blue-gray material. Like twin fists of icicle-packed snow—the dreaded “mace heads” of a Kildare snowball fight—with pinpoints of light shining between them. The stars, yes, showing through the fist’s worth of empty space that separated the two. But the points of light were too numerous, too large, too dim and glittery somehow. They couldn’t
all
be stars. The space between the iceballs was populated with something else, something solid. A dust or spume or debris field.
“What ho,” Bascal murmured softly. “What land is this? What shore?”
“I don’t know what I’m looking at,” Conrad said, feeling dwarfed by his own ignorance. Did he belong out here? Did he have even the faintest idea what he was doing?
“A comet,” Bascal murmured. “Everything out here is a comet. Even the Kupier planets are just giant comets.”
“I don’t see tails.”
“They only have those when they swing close to the sun, Conrad. The heat evaporates the lighter ices, and a little bit flies off into space. That’s all the tail is. But there are no warm days out here, right? These Kuiper Belt bodies never swing any closer than Pluto. Nothing evaporates.”
“Are they going to hit each other?”
Bascal studied the objects. “They do—they have. We’re looking at a near-contact binary. Something knocked these fragments apart, and now they’re orbiting each other. Look at those grooves along the side—these guys are in a highly elliptical orbit around their mutual center, and at the low point of the orbit, they touch. They scrape. That’s where all those little shards around them come from.”
Conrad pondered that. It wasn’t difficult to imagine these two mace heads locked in a deadly whirl, swinging close and then far and then close again, their icy spires crashing together thunderously, knocking off pieces of each other in a glittering spray. But wouldn’t that slow them down or something? Wouldn’t they eventually stop, like two sledders colliding at the bottom of a valley?
“I don’t see them turning,” he said. “I don’t see them orbiting.”
“No,” Bascal agreed. “They probably take a hundred years to complete a revolution. There’s some weird shit out here, but none of it’s fast.”
“Will they grind each other up before they stop?”
“Sure. These iceballs are not very tough. But of course their own gravity will keep pulling them back together again. Stop by in a thousand years, it’ll look about the same. A better question is, are they going to grind
us
up?”
Conrad felt a stab of alarm at the question. Because yeah, if they could see this thing ahead of them, that meant it was in their way. And that was bad.
“Now, if we were going to hit it,” Bascal said, pinching his chin, “it would be eclipsing the barge by now. We’re headed directly for the barge, right? Or where the barge will be, anyway.”
He made a diagram with his hands, miming the location of
Viridity
and the barge, and then placing an imaginary object between them. He nodded slowly. “So
that’s
not our problem.”
“I ... guess,” Conrad said uncertainly. “But Jesus, look at all that clutter. It doesn’t matter
what
we hit, right? How close are we going to get?”
The question partially answered itself: a couple of stars winked out behind one snowball’s jagged edge, and a couple more winked into existence on the far side of the other one. The tiny barge hung motionless against the stellar backdrop, but these things were moving visibly. They must be a
lot
closer.
“Boyo, let’s kill the magnification. Let’s have just, like, a window. Yeah. Yeah, okay, that’s good.”
The shrunken image was considerably less menacing: the comets were now the size of regular snowballs, or a couple of large scoops of ice cream, moving visibly but definitely not in the path to the barge.
The prince nodded, and scratched briefly at his forehead. “All right, now, jaggy comets like that are less than a thousand kilometers wide. Probably more like a hundred. So if each one is twice the size of Tongatapu—call it a third of an Ireland—that means we’re looking at them from, I dunno, maybe three thousand kilometers away? Damn, that
is
close.”
“Dangerously?”
“Well, yeah . . . ,” Bascal hedged. “But you have to remember, we’ve been passing this stuff all along. Not as close as this, I guess, maybe not as big, but the density of the Kuiper Belt isn’t a whole lot less than the Asteroid Belt. Pick a Point A and a Point B, and I guarantee you there’s a lot of ice in between. Mostly concentrated in bands and rings, with little shepherd planets nudging them around. The barges follow the high-density corridors, but we’re cutting right across them.”
“Are we in danger?”
Conrad persisted.
“Yes,” the prince acknowledged quietly. He watched the mace heads growing visibly, and crawling along toward the ceiling’s edge. “But there are loose pieces everywhere. It’s why the neutronium barges are out here: to grab and squeeze all this wasted matter. But yes, obviously, our chances increase during a close approach like this. Our worst odds are right at closest approach.”
“Which is when?”
“A minute from now? I’m not sure, Conrad.”
“Shit. Should we try evasive maneuvers?”
“Won’t do any good,” Bascal said. “But you knew that, right? Just sit tight, boyo. No concern.”
Conrad cleared his throat. “We’ve been taking a huge chance all along, haven’t we? Any normal ship would be scanning with radar.”
“Yep. That’s true.”
The twin comet—now the size of a Karl Smoit shirtball—moved to the edge of the ceiling and vanished. Neither of the boys said anything for a tense little while, and it was Bascal who finally broke the silence.
“Do you know how to inspect the sail for holes?”
“No,” Conrad answered.
“We do it electrically. Electricity can’t cross a hole, so you lay down a wire from one end of the sail to the other—say, port to starboard—and if you can get a current across it, it’s intact. If you can’t, you log the position and move on, and then match it later with a scan in the boots-caps direction. That gives you the exact size and location of the hole. Shall ... we try it?”
“Um. Definitely.”
Within minutes, they’d found a dozen pinholes scattered all over the sail—places where some speck of matter had punched through at twenty kips, shattering the nanoscopic wellstone fibers. By themselves these holes were no big deal, except that one of them had begun to tear. The opening had probably started out circular, maybe a tenth of a millimeter across, but it had spread in one direction, forming a linear rip that was several millimeters long.
“I don’t know how long it’s been there,” Bascal said grimly. “It shouldn’t spread like that—the force on the sail just isn’t that much. We’d better grommet these holes, just to be safe.”
“Grommet?”
“Encircle them with little rings of impervium. It shouldn’t affect our invisibility—not much. Not as much as the Jolly Roger image on the sail, and that hasn’t given us away yet.”
“Can’t we just close the holes?” This was not an idle question; things made of wellstone were always dividing and recombining in various ways. Any decent shirt—not these camp rags or the Denver kiddie-flash Ho insisted on wearing—could change its cut and fit on a few seconds’ notice. The shrink-wrap on the cabin itself had had a slit over the door, big enough to walk through, that had sealed itself automatically after liftoff.
“I guess we can try,” Bascal answered uncertainly. “It’s not what you’re thinking, though. When you command a parted seam, the wellstone separates in a very particular way. Even when you
cut
it, it knows it’s being cut, and does the right thing. This is different. Sudden damage like that is a shock to the fibers. Right up next to the hole, I doubt they’re working at all. Anyway, this isn’t exactly fashion-grade sailcloth, is it?”
That bothered Conrad. “I don’t like this, Bascal. Eventually, if we stay out here long enough, we’ll get unlucky. One of these particles will fire right through the cabin, won’t it?”
“Maybe,” Bascal said honestly. “I don’t know. If it was small enough, I think passing through the first layer of wrapping would vaporize it. I doubt it could penetrate the wood after that. But then you’d have a pinhole in your airtight wrapping.”
“And that would be that.”
Bascal thought it over and nodded. “It would be
bad
, anyway. Maybe we should inspect the wrapping.”
They did this, and quickly discovered another hole. A leak. Fortunately it was small—only a tenth of a millimeter—and there didn’t seem to be any significant air loss through it, although over enough time it would surely bleed away their entire atmosphere.
“Before the advent of programmable matter,” Bascal noted, “spaceships were full of leaks. You just couldn’t make them airtight, not if you wanted to get in and out, or get cables in and out. Or have windows.”
“It only has to last fifteen days,” Conrad agreed weakly, trying for the same casual tone.