Seveneves - Страница 74

“Any residual beta now?” she asked.

“We are well clear of the nozzle and the plume,” Jiro said, a little taken aback.

“I mean, did we pick up any contamination on that flyby?”

“It is back down to background levels,” Jiro said. “But the detector would only ‘see’ sources on its side of the hull. We will have to do a more thorough survey later.”

“Get a load of this,” Markus said, and punched in a maneuver that swung New Caird around ninety degrees. They were now flying “sideways,” their nose aimed directly at Ymir, which was only about a hundred meters away from them. She more than filled the window. Her narrow end — her bow, if you wanted to think of her as a ship — was a hill of dirty ice. A few fine structures suggested that humans had been at work there: some structural netting, some cables, a glinting wire that might have been the radio aerial. But it wasn’t obvious, yet, where they were actually going to dock.

“It is really buried,” Markus observed. He didn’t have to explain that “it” was the command module — the part of Ymir that had life support systems. It ought to be reachable through a docking port. But they weren’t seeing anything. They had known — because it was part of the plan — that Sean and his crew would have buried it in the ice, to protect them from radiation and from rocks. They looked to have buried it deep.

Dinah’s tablet was running a terminal window, a simple programmer’s interface that just displayed lines of text. For the last little while, this had shown only a blinking cursor, but now it came alive and began to display cryptic, one-line messages.

“Picking up some new bot sigs,” she reported. These were the digital signatures of robots, pinging the universe to find out what, if anything, was listening. New Caird had shipped with a complement of robots of various types, but she knew all of their sigs and was filtering them out of this terminal window. Anything that showed up here was, by process of elimination, from Ymir’s complement of robots.

Like the clicks on Jiro’s Eenspektor, these came up sporadically and in bursts.

“At least twenty. . so I am going to filter out the Nats,” she said, typing in a command. Being so numerous, Nats tended to overload the screen. “Okay, in addition to a pretty well-developed Nat swarm I have half a dozen Grabbs and at least that many Siwis.”

“Any clues in their names?” Markus asked. It was possible to give each robot a unique name, which would show up on its sig. By default these were just automatically generated serial numbers, but they could be manually changed.

“Well,” Dinah said, “here is a Grimmed Grabb whose name is ‘HELLO I AM RIGHT ON TOP OF THE DOCKING PORT,’ which seems promising.”

“Can you make it flash?”

“Hang on.” Dinah established a connection to HELLO I AM RIGHT ON TOP OF THE DOCKING PORT and, after quickly checking its status, told it to blink its LEDs until further notice. Before she even looked up from her screen she could tell, by subvocal exclamations from the others, that it had worked.

“I see it very clearly,” Markus said. Some pops and bangs sounded from the thrusters as he adjusted New Caird’s attitude. They were now flying in nearly perfect sync with Ymir, looking at the flashing Grabb from a distance of maybe five meters. It was anchored into the surface of the shard in an area that was relatively free of the black stuff.

“Aim the light down into the ice, please? And put it on continuously?” Markus requested.

The Grabb’s LEDs were mounted on snaky stalks that could be aimed. Dinah made it happen. When next she looked up through the window, she could see the silhouette of the Grabb centered in a nimbus of white light, produced by its aiming its lights directly into the ice. A sharp white disk was visible in the center of that silvery cloud. It was blurred by the ice, but they all recognized it for what it was: a docking port, buried at least a meter deep.

“Did anyone bring an ice pick?” Jiro asked. It was not like him to make a joke, but Dinah was happy to take humor from any quarter at this point.

“Slava,” Markus said, “you’re up. Dinah, maybe you can help by bringing more of the robots to the area.”

By entering a fairly simple command, Dinah was able to summon every Grabb and Siwi in range, telling them, in effect, “Figure out a way to get closer to HELLO I AM RIGHT ON TOP OF THE DOCKING PORT and don’t bother me with the details.” By the time Vyacheslav was suited up, enough of these had drawn near that she was able to clinch several of them together and form a temporary construct that “reached” up from the surface of the ice to grapple New Caird, first in one location and subsequently in two more. So, even though they had not been able to dock yet, they at least had a mechanical link to Ymir that would prevent them from drifting away.

Other robots, including HELLO, meanwhile busied themselves carving a hole in the ice “down” toward the buried docking port. Vyacheslav exited through New Caird’s airlock, clambered down a stack of robots to the surface, and then made his way toward the site. Since the gravity of Ymir was negligible, Vyacheslav’s “weight” here was about half a gram, and the faintest contact with the surface would send him rebounding off into space. So instead of walking he had to rely on some sort of anchor fixed into the ice. Dinah was able to send two of New Caird’s Grabbs scuttling along ahead of him. These had been engineered for movement on ice, and could rapidly anchor themselves by melting and refreezing it with their footpads. All Slava had to do was follow them and hold on to them. Once he had reached the mouth of the hole he was able to embed anchors and carabiner himself into place. Then he speeded up the work of the robots by scooping out more ice, more quickly, than they were capable of moving with their little claws.

Not knowing what to expect, they had brought with them a small arsenal of improvised ice-mining tools, including a Craftsman garden shovel that had mysteriously made its way up from a Sears, Roebuck in an Old Earth mall. Slava put it to work.

Meanwhile Markus was sending a status report back to the Cloud Ark, and Jiro was doing more typing than seemed necessary just for taking notes. He was communicating with someone, or, more likely, something. Dinah was tempted to ask what, but there was only one plausible answer: he had established contact with the computer that controlled the reactor core.

Markus seemed to have come to the same conclusion. “Jiro?” he asked. “News from the belly of the beast?”

“It’s alive,” Jiro said, in what might have been either awkward phrasing, or a second consecutive joke. “I am trying to make sense of the logs. There is a lot of repetitive material.”

“Error messages?” Markus asked, making the obvious guess.

“Not so much. It is robot stuff. Status reports.”

Dinah moved over one seat and had a look. Though she couldn’t tell exactly what was going on, her general read tallied with Jiro’s. Lots of robots had been working away, executing variations on the same small set of programmed behaviors, pumping out occasional status reports — and, yes, some error messages — that had generated a log too vast for any human to read. They would have to sort it out later by writing a computer script that would crawl through it, accumulating statistics and looking for patterns.

“Could you scroll to the top, please?” she asked. She wanted to know the date and time of the first log entry.

“I checked it,” Jiro said. “Right around the time of Sean’s last transmission.”

So Sean, probably knowing that he was at death’s door, had told the robots to do something, and to keep doing it, until they were ordered to stop. Since the outer surface of the shard was pretty quiet, this probably related to some internal work hidden beneath the surface. “Mining fuel, probably,” Dinah guessed. Then, before Jiro could object to the incorrect choice of words, “Propellant, that is.”

Vyacheslav exposed the docking port. Using a combination of taps on New Caird’s thrusters, some pushing and pulling by the robots, and Vyacheslav simply grabbing the spacecraft and nudging it this way and that, they inserted her “front door” docking port into the little crater that Vyacheslav and the robots had excavated, and mated it with that of Ymir’s buried command module.

Slava then had to reenter New Caird through its side airlock. By sounds conducted through the hull they could track his progress as he climbed into the chamber, closed the outer hatch, and activated the system that would fill the lock with air.

In the meantime, Markus was able to make contact with the computers on the other side of the port, and verify that there was breathable air and other amenities.

It was damned cold, though: about twenty degrees below freezing.

“That was Sean doing us a favor,” Markus said. “He turned the thermostat down before he died. His body will be frozen solid.” For Ymir had no lack of power from its nuclear generators, and its electrical systems were still working.

Markus entered a command that would turn the command module’s environmental systems back on and bring the temperature back up. He pressurized the tiny space between Ymir’s hatch and New Caird’s. Then he opened the latter.

They were all looking now at the slightly domed exterior surface of the hatch that would lead into Ymir’s command module.