Paul heard Bart’s cries in the background. “I told you it felt wrong. I told you! We shouldn’t’ve … I’ll jettison. They’ll have that much!” Bart shouted. “If the farking relay’ll work.”

“Use the manual jettison lever, Bart,” Ongola yelled over Paul’s shoulder.

“I’m trying, I’m trying … She’s heating up too fast, Nabhi. She’s heatin—”

Horrified, Paul, Ongola, and Jake watched the dissolution of the shuttle. One stubby wing sheared off and the shuttle began to spin. The tail section broke off and spun away on a different route, burning up in the atmosphere. The second wing followed suit.

“It’ll hit the sea?” Paul asked in a bare whisper, trying to calculate the impact of that projectile on land. Ongola nodded imperceptibly.

Like an obituary, the relay screen lit up with a glorious sunlit spread of many bits and one larger object, disappearing into many faint pricks of glitter.

A team of dolphins were sent out to the Ring Sea to find the wreck. Maximilian and Teresa reported back a week later, tired and not too happy to tell humans that they had seen the twisted hulk wedged into a reef in waters too deep for them to examine closely. All the dolphins were still searching the Ring Sea for the jettisoned scoop.

“Tell them not to bother,” Jim Tillek muttered dourly. “There’s unlikely to be anything left to analyze. We know that the junk goes back in a years’ long tail. We’re stuck with it. Hail Hoyle and Wickramansingh!”

“Ezra?” Emily asked the solemn astronomer.

Keroon’s butterscotch-colored skin seemed tinged with gray, and he looked bowed by his responsibilities. He heaved a heavy, weary sigh and scratched at the back of his head. “I have to concede that Jim’s theory is correct. The contents of the pod would have been the final proof, but I, too, doubt the scoop survived. Even if it did, it could take years to find it in such a vast area. Years also apply to that tail, I fear. We won’t be able to judge until the end of that tail comes in sight.”

“And where does that leave us?” Paul asked rhetorically.

“Coping, Admiral, coping!” Jim Tillek replied proudly. With a twitch of his sturdy shoulders, he had thrown off his doomsday expression and instead challenged them all. “And we’ve Thread falling in two hours, so we’d better stop worrying about the future and attend to the present. Right?”

Emily looked at Paul and managed a tentative smile, which she also turned on Zi Ongola, who was watching them impassively.

“Right! We’ll cope.” She spoke in a firm, resolute voice. Surely we can hold out ten years, she thought to herself, if we’re very careful. She wondered why no one mentioned the homing capsule. Perhaps because no one had much faith in Ted Tubberman. “We’ve got to.”