I put my head in my hands. The tears started to come. Why did this have to happen to me? “Can I think about it?”

“Yes,” Stratt said. “But not for very long. If you say no, we have to get Cáceres here in a hurry. I want your answer by five P. M. tonight.”

I stood and shuffled out of the room. I don’t think I even said goodbye. It’s a dark and depressing feeling to have all your closest colleagues get together and decide you should die.

I checked my watch—12:38 P. M. I had four and a half hours to decide.

The spin drives of the Hail Mary are incredibly overpowered for its current mass. When we left Earth, the ship weighed 2.1 million kilograms—most of it being fuel. Now the ship only weighs 120,000 kilograms. About one-twentieth its departure weight.

Thanks to the Hail Mary’s relatively low mass, the scrappy little beetles are able to collectively give me 1.5 g’s of thrust. Except that the ship wasn’t designed to have a bunch of thrust coming in at 45-degree-angle force pushing arbitrary EVA handles on the hull. If we fire up the beetles at full power, they’ll just rip free of the handles and ride off into the Tauset.

Rocky was mindful of that when he zeroed out our rotation. Now we have that under control and I can do EVAs in zero g like God intended. I 3-D print a model of the Hail Mary’s internal skeleton and give it to Rocky for his perusal. In under an hour, he not only has a solution but has fabricated the xenonite struts to implement it.

So I do another EVA. I add the xenonite supports to the beetles. For once, everything goes according to plan. Rocky assures me that the ship can now handle full thrust from the beetles and I don’t doubt him for a second. The guy knows engineering.

I type in a bunch of calculations into a complicated Excel spreadsheet that’s probably got errors in it somewhere. It takes me six hours to put together. I finally come up with what I think is the right answer. At least, it should put us close enough that we can see the Blip-A. Then we can fine-tune our vectors from there.

“Ready?” I say from the pilot seat.

“Ready,” Rocky says in his bulb. He holds the three control boxes in his hands.

“Okay… John and Paul to 4.5 percent.”

“John and Paul, 4.5 percent, confirmed,” he says.

Sure, Rocky could have made controls for me to use, but this is better. I have to watch the screen closely and pay attention to our vectors. Best to have someone give their full attention to the beetles. Besides, Rocky’s a ship’s engineer. Who better to run our makeshift engines?

“John and Paul to zero. Ringo to 1.1 percent,” I say.

“John and Paul zero. Ringo 1.1.”

We make numerous tweaks to the thrust vectors bit by bit to angle the ship roughly the direction I want. We finally achieve what I hope is the right direction.