Iris

hole in the ice, do we?' Krzakwa looked at the mazy interconnection of metallic lines, whistling softly to himself, almost a whisper, human static that the 'net would filter out. The last course correction had not produced any major structural damage. Despite its fragile appearance, the craft's em-reinforced infrastructure could withstand very large linear forces. Hoping that the landing on Ocypete would be easy, he imagined a nominal performance.

They floated free a meter or so from the main load-bearing girder of Deepstar's dorsal external vertex, moving toward the nose. Sealock stopped short, and Tem could see what had provoked the reaction: the smooth metallic sheen of the member was discolored by a faint ripple of iridescence, a spectral glistening, as of oil on water.

'Shit,' said Sealock.

The Selenite looked at the featureless cylinder that housed his companion's head. 'Shear stress?'

'Just a minute.' Through a lead plugged into his head, the man sent a command via Shipnet to his suit. It obediently altered its optical system and relayed the result back to him through the same conduit. He examined the area microscopically, across both the gamma and X-ray bands, then cursed again. 'The whole cross section has gone monoclinic on us. Even worse, it's buckled at least five milliarcsec out of true. I can't get any closer with this suit's reticle.'

Krzakwa looked out over the long expanse of the ship for a moment, letting machines calculate quickly, then said, 'That's not enough to cause a structural failure.'

'No.' Sealock grinned, an unseen baring of teeth. 'Not by a long shot. . . . But what the hell. We might as well fix it.'

It made him think of all the times he'd heard the Lunar government's tired old slogan, 'If it's not broken, don't fix it.' Here, he could but try. 'All right.' Another pause, unfilled. 'How do you want to do this?'

' Mmh.' He blinked into the darkness that surrounded him, thinking. 'I've only got two leads in this helmet and Shipnet's not as flexible as it could be ... not yet, anyway. Why don't we split up the job? You take the rebrace fixture and I'll handle the electron-beam welder, OK?' A year or so before, that would have been an impatient command. Krzakwa wished briefly that he could get a handle on what his odd friend was thinking. There was a way, of course, but ... He had to laugh at himself, silently. Even if it could be done involuntarily, secretly, like the work of some telepathic spy . . . well, he too had only two leads to work with, and they were the far less efficient induction leads at that. With such a setup, he would be hard enough pressed to handle communications, suit control, optic response, and a work-pack. Something so complex as Downlink Rapport would be out of the question, even if Shipnet were already in the proper configuration. He smiled, invisibly, to himself. 'OK.'

'I'll call the equipment.'

In response to a series of commands, two work-packs in a service module external-access bay came to life. In a minute they were dancing along on their spindly legs, picking a path through Deepstar's openwork array of girders like a pair of armored, weapons-toting spiders. 'Ready?' Krzakwa responded with a nonverbal assent, a fragment of knowledge transmitted to the other. For a moment he felt helpless—understanding to the nth degree the physics of a situation such as this one wasn't much help.... It was, of course, foolish to feel this way, but how could one avoid these sorts of feelings?

' Inphase, please.' In a work situation, Sealock was completely focused on the business at hand, his normally harsh tone and rancorous manner banished behind a fairly leak-proof screen. The Selenite activated the final reserves of his suit-born resources and tensed as he felt the command/control impulses flood his conscious mind. The rebrace fixture machine was routed through a duodecimal program aspect of Shipnet and, while his handling of the device was suborned to a built-in self-awareness subplot, it took over quite a few reflex responses as well. He walked the machine behind the damaged girder, set its adjustment verniers, and then used a resistance heater to de-blackbody the metal-plastic matrix of the warped region.

When all was ready, he transmitted a squirt of data to Sealock, who began his task. The welder scuttled into place and lit off. An angstrom-thin collimated particle beam sliced away the affected area, which adhered to the fixture device and melted, going into a polyclastic state. Stresses were set up and, as the mixture cooled, the proper orthorhombic array reappeared. Simultaneously, calipers pulled the now isolated beam-ends back to zero azimuth. The welder reattached the cut-out segment and, when it had settled back into its blackbody state, they were done.

Sealock resurfaced out of the 'net depths laughing. 'That was kind of fun. Good job. Come on, let's go in and torture everybody about how smart we are.'

Even after two years, Krzakwa found himself marveling at the man's abrupt changes of manner. He could be crazy, I suppose, but . . . hell. Who knows? His musings faded out, and they went in.

To the crew of a terrifyingly expensive but essentially homemade spaceship somewhere off Neptune, the news of Iris' coming had struck with electrifying madness. They had been bound for Triton, the last frontier of human civilization, fleeing an angst that was not easy to identify. . . . Their reasons for leaving Earth were manifold and well thought out. Their destination had been picked simply because there was no place farther away to which they could go. The stars were too far. The comet cloud . . . maybe, maybe not. They had to have water ice for their fusion plant, and remote exploration had been inadequate. It would have been too long a voyage, in any case. Now this thing fell across their space, in reach, adventurous. . . .

A quick vote was taken, a seemingly unanimous decision made, and a vessel built by the fortune of one of the world's most popular artists made a gravity-boost phasing maneuver around Neptune into a Solar-retrograde orbit, headfirst toward an on-rushing mystery.