“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?”