On a whim, she dug into a pocket of her pressure garment and pulled out the handful of grass which Vladimir Viktorenko had given her. She held it in her palm and rubbed it gently; it gave off a sweet aroma, like a herb. It was polin, a kind of wormwood, common all over the Kazakhstan steppe.

Stone finished the burn. His push-button control, released, popped back out of the panel on its spring. “Two hundred seven feet per second,” he said.

“Right on the wire,” Gershon murmured. “One hundred ninety-five times two hundred zero one.”

Young called up, “Copy your burn, Ares. You are two hundred fifty miles from the stack, and closing.”

“Copy, John. Preparing for NC Two…”

The crew had arrived in orbit with half the Ares cluster: their Apollo Command and Service Modules, the Mars Excursion Module — the MEM — and the Mission Module, their habitat for the journey. The rest of the cluster — the main injection booster and its huge fuel tanks — had already been placed in orbit and assembled, ready for them to dock with it.

The Mission Module was a squat cylinder, with the Apollo a slim, silvery cylinder-cone attached to its front, and the MEM — a fatter, truncated cone — stuck on the back. Fixed to the base of the MEM’s shroud was an Orbital Maneuvering Module, a fat doughnut fitted with a modified Apollo Service Module propulsion system. The OMM would be discarded before they docked with the booster cluster. But first Stone had to use the OMM in a series of four burns, to chase the booster cluster around the sky.

Stone announced: “Ready for NCC.”

“Copy,” Young said. “Ninety miles and closing.”

The corrective burn was crisp and short, a brief hiss.

Stone murmured, “Natalie, you ought to be able to see the booster by now. Right out front.”

York pressed her face to the window. The brief burns were placing Ares on segments of successively wider orbits; following the new orbits, Ares would eventually overtake the booster stack.

The craft was noticeably higher than when they had first been injected into orbit; the curvature of the Earth was much more pronounced, and she was able to see complete landmasses, speckled with cloud.

Suddenly it was there: a pencil, gleaming silver, hanging over the dipping horizon.

“I have it.”

“That’s a relief,” said Stone drily. “Okay, Houston, I’m going for the twenty-eight feet per second coelliptic combination burn.”

“Copy, Phil.”

Another sharp rattle.

Young said, “Slight underburn that time, Ares. One point six feet per second.”

“Copy that,” said Gershon, and he clucked at Stone in mock disapproval.

Young said, “Your orbit is now ten miles under the booster’s. Range sixty-three miles and closing.”

“Rog,” Stone said. “Going for terminal phase initiation.” York could hear solenoids clatter as Stone worked the push-button controls of the reaction control clusters. “How about that. Right down Route One.”