"Yeah, that's a pretty good one," Martinez said. "Not nearly as much fun, though-you still get dragged down by gravity. With these babies, you fly."

Martinez spent an hour running him through the egg's controls. At the basic level, there wasn't much to it. The joystick and some push buttons controlled the low-power thrusters. Grips on either side controlled the manipulator arms. "Looks like an old-fashioned video game," Sandy observed.

"You play those?" Martinez's face lit up.

"When I was a kid, I was obsessed with them. Played 'em, took 'em apart, put them back together again. Sometimes they still worked when I got done with them."

"What was your best old game?" Martinez asked.

"Jeez . . . if you put a gun to my head, I'd say, Hi-Speed Ass-Teroids."

Martinez: "No! You got one?"

"Somewhere. There's something fundamentally wrong with the left-hand wiper, though."

"Oh, man. You gotta get that up here."

When Sandy had the major controls down, Martinez asked, "You wanna go out and play in the yard?"

"Can we?"

"That's why we're here."

Martinez slaved Sandy's egg to his own, so that he could override Sandy's controls if he needed to. "That's not likely unless you get really disoriented. The thing is equipped with safeties up the wazoo. You can't spin it too fast or ram it into anything. Proximity and acceleration sensors and overrides won't allow it. You can't blow yourself out of orbit. And if you think of some other way to wreck it . . . don't do it."

"Gotta take my cameras," Sandy said.

"Yeah. There's an equipment rack just to the left of your seat," Martinez said. "I'll take us free of the dock. Once we're well clear of the station, I'll let you mess around for a while and then I'll hand the controls over to you and you can try it for real."

When Sandy was set, Martinez moved to the next air lock over and strapped himself into another egg: Sandy could watch him through a hardened glass window that separated the two compartments.

A few seconds later, Martinez spoke to him through a speaker set into the bulkhead behind his head: "You ready?"

"All set."

"Opening the air locks."

The outer doors rolled back, and the overhead mechanical arm pushed them out of the station, then retracted. They were floating free, and Martinez said, "I'll take us out to the playground."

They slowly jetted away from the station, and Sandy had his first good, long look at the Resort.

The living modules, the habitats, rotated about the main axle at a leisurely one revolution per minute, attached by hundred-meter-long elevator shafts at both ends, which conveyed personnel and cargo to and from the center axle. Computer-controlled counterweights piggybacked on the shafts, a few tons of dead weight that slid in and out to keep everything in balance as equipment and personnel moved around the modules.

The one RPM rotation of the habitats produced enough centrifugal force to simulate one-tenth of Earth gravity in the living quarters. Because of the distance between the tubes and the axle, the rotation actually looked quite swift from Sandy's viewpoint outside the ship. An egg that was motionless relative to the center axis, if struck by a moving tube, would be batted away like a tennis ball. The egg's proximity alerts would not permit that, and it had never happened, but it was a theoretical possibility, given a dead egg.

The habitats themselves were squarish tubes, ten meters on a side and a hundred meters long, with meter-thick walls. The walls were slabs of self-healing structured foam that was less dense than air. The foam was inter-layered with ceramic-composite and carbon fiber fabric, designed to be resistant to micrometeorite impacts. Anything smaller than a millimeter or so shattered against the fabric layers in the wall.

A centimeter-sized rock could punch its way entirely through and exit the far side, but that wasn't a fatal accident as long as it didn't hit anyone on its way through. The foam could fill in a several-centimeter-diameter hole in seconds. In the thirty years the station had been operational, an impact like that had happened only once. A researcher's quarters had been trashed as it went through, but she'd been working, so all she suffered was considerable aggravation and the irrevocable loss of a childhood teddy bear that had been unlucky enough to be in the meteorite's path.

When they were a few hundred meters out, Martinez said, "I'm giving you your controls. Try not to screw it up, but if you do, I've still got you."

"Got it." Sandy sat there for a minute, looking around. Strapped into the egg's chair, he was as comfortable as he had been on the shuttle. Not even his subconscious had to think about what to do with body parts and zero-gee. All that surfing: sometimes you'd get driven under by a big wave, and you needed to relax, and let it happen, but always remain aware of where "up" was. Where the air was.

And the view here was much better than anything he'd had in the Pacific: his own personal window into the universe.

"You just gonna sit there?" Martinez called.

"Just soaking in the view. You've got one hell of a backyard," Sandy said. He started to laugh, and didn't stop for a moment, his first good laugh since the day he left for Argentina. He felt like somebody had just taken two hundred pounds of lead off his back.

Martinez laughed with him, the pure joy of being outside.

They worked it for an hour, Martinez pushing Sandy to react more and more quickly to weird, unnatural commands. He fumbled a few times, but got it right more often than not. As they worked, station personnel would sometimes pause at a nearby view window and watch them play.

For some reason that Sandy didn't know at the time, the station wall behind the port was painted black. He found out later that the paint job cut down internal reflections, so if you were contemplating, say, the Milky Way, you could really see the Milky Way. What he saw with his art history eye, though, was that when the station personnel paused by the window, framed in a rectangle slightly wider than it was high, they looked like paintings by Caravaggio.

Sandy unhitched the lid of his camera case and pulled out a Red. He pressed it up against the egg's window, using the front-edge electro-adhesive grips to hold it in place. Then he nudged the controller and sent the egg into a very slow spin, doing a fifteen-second pan of Habitat 1, the earth, and the black, starry space surrounding it all.

He killed his rotation with the window facing the station and did a slow zoom-in on the viewing port. He moved closer, and closer, until he was hovering just outside, and his proximity alarm beeped.

Martinez said, "You're getting pretty tight there."

"I know," Sandy said. "Give me a second." Sandy unstuck the Red, selected a 100mm zoom setting. A crewman walked past the window, paused to look at the egg hovering outside, then went on, but Sandy had time to do a basic reading on the light coming off his face.

"Hey, Joe, how much of a hassle would it be to get Fiorella over by that observation window?"

"Depends on what she's doing," Martinez said. "We've got links to all you new guys, let me try her."

"Thanks."

Joe came back a moment later. "She's at Starbucks, probably fifty meters away. What's up?"

"Can you link me to her?"

"Sure. Hold one . . ."

Fiorella came up: "What?"

"I need you to walk fifty meters down the hall, or whatever, to the viewport. I'm outside in an egg. I want to look at the light on your face. Do an establishing shot."

After a second of silence, probably calculating exactly how much she hated him, Sandy thought, Fiorella said, "Okay."

A minute later, she appeared at the window. The reflected sunlight off her hair was spectacular, maybe too spectacular.

"What do you want me to do?" she asked.

"Let me get a read . . ." Sandy thumbed down the red-gain, just a bit, because he wanted to keep the play of light off her hair, added a touch of color to her face, brought up her cheekbones, deepened a few shadows, then said, "Look sort of pensively off to your left, as though you're watching construction work. . . . Tip your head just a millimeter or so to the right, I need to get that reflection off your nose. . . . Step five centimeters back. . . . Okay, hold that . . . one, two, three. Now slowly, slowly turn back to your right, turn your shoulder as you survey the scene. . . . Shit, I'm losing your hair. Let's do that again. I need to make the background a little denser, and I need you to do all that over again, and talk, tell people what you're seeing out there."

They worked it for five minutes, then Sandy said, "Okay, I got it."

"Send it to me," Fiorella said.

"Don't have your phone number."

He could see her sub-vocalizing, talking to her implants, and then she said aloud, "You should have it."

Sandy checked his wrist-wrap, saved the number, and sent the vid file. "You've got the file. I'll talk to you when I get back inside."

Martinez called: "You ready to go back in?"

"I'm ready, but I don't want to."

"I'm getting hungry out here."

"Then let's go. I've got some vid to look at."

- Inside the air lock, Sandy popped the egg's door, then relaxed back in the seat, pulled the monitor out of the Red, and skipped through his survey footage to the shots of Fiorella. Martinez cycled through the double doors to look over his shoulder.

When the last of the shots ran out, Sandy asked, "What do you think?"

"You're a natural on the egg. You could get a job up here. And if Fiorella doesn't like that vid, she's nuts. She's a redheaded Venus."

"Thank you. Listen, how hard is it to alter the canopy on the egg?"

"What do you need?"

"I need to inset some ports. I need to take out a few chunks of standard glass and replace it with optical glass. Shooting through the standard canopy glass degrades the image. That's okay for the propaganda vid, but if we want the highest level of detail on the documentary stuff, I'll need optical glass."

"I can do the insets if you can get the glass, and if it can pass the stress tests," Martinez said.

"We'd probably need some clip-on covers-lens caps-when we're not actually using the glass, protect it from scratches."

"We've got a good fabrication shop up here, shouldn't be a problem," Martinez said. "Shoot me some specs on size and I'll print them for you."

"I'll talk to Leica, see what they can get us," Sandy said. "I'll try to get the specs to you soon as I hear from them." He thought for a moment. "Is your stuff sophisticated enough to print a guitar?"

"You gotta be kidding me-you play?"

"Yeah. You too?"

"I've printed maybe twenty guitars since I've been here," Martinez said. "Shoved all but two of them into the recycling, but I've got a Les Paul replica that's so sweet you won't believe it. Right now, me and another guy are about halfway done printing a piano-like a whole fucking grand piano with strings-but making pianists happy is a lot harder than getting a guitar right."

"We could start a band," Sandy said, with his toothy grin.

"We got a band-in fact, there are five or six bands, if string quartets count as bands," Martinez said. "Music is big up here. Everybody's a specialist in something, with not a lot of overlap. Music is one thing you can do in low gravity without complications, and it's a good way for people to get together."

They headed back down the corridor to the lift that would take them to Habitat 1, talking about cameras, video games, and guitars-a friendship being formed. On the way, Sandy's wrist-wrap tingled: Crow.

"Yeah, what's up?"

"What'd you do?" Crow asked.

"I was getting checked out on an egg," Sandy said.

"I mean, what did you do with Fiorella?"

"Took some pictures of her. Why?"

"She mentioned that it's barely possible that she might be able to work with you, after all."

Captain Fang-Castro looked from the visitor sitting across the desk, to the screen on the wall opposite. The screen was divided into chunks, the chunks growing or shrinking depending on who was speaking. The occupants of the screen's real estate were scattered across the U.S., the best and brightest geeks that DARPA money could buy. Which was pretty damn good, she'd found out back when she was a DARPA liaison.

They were the reigning heavyweight champions of design, putting together a system that would kick her station across 1.5 billion kilometers of empty space, to a rendezvous with who-knows-what.

The geeks were not happy.

Their unhappiness was focused on the challenger, a short, round blonde who was part of a team ferried up by Crow, who'd told Fang-Castro that the blonde, Rebecca Johansson, was probably the best in the world at what she did, which was designing power and heat flow management systems.

Fang-Castro was still getting a read on the engineer; she mixed the soft-spoken style of a well-raised Midwestern woman with the social graces of an engineer, which was to say, not all that many.

She was quiet, pleasant, and blunt.

Johansson was wrapping up her spiel. "That's about the size of it. Literally. If we try to run ordinary low-temperature heat radiators, they will be so many kilometers in size that the mass will kill us-they'll be larger than the mass budget for the entire ship. We need to go to high-temperature radiators, I'm thinking around six hundred Celsius, with molten metal heat exchangers. Then I can pump the heat from the reactors fast enough, and get the waste heat into the radiators fast enough, to dump all of that waste heat into space with a radiator that's a few percent of the size we'd need otherwise."

One of the earth engineers started to jump in, but Johansson cut him off. "I know the reactors are up to it, don't tell me they're not. You can get a lot better than a gigawatt out of a ton of core, and I can siphon it off with pressurized liquid sodium at around two thousand Celsius. You can either boil that directly or run a secondary boiling sodium cycle to run the primary turbines at nineteen hundred Celsius and a downstream supercritical water vapor turbine to get the exhaust down to six hundred and fifty Celsius, and I can take it from there."

The face of one of the earthbound engineers, Harry Lomax, ballooned in size on the view screen, as he waved his hands in frustration. "Are we really supposed to consider this? It's nuts. There's no possible way."

From the corner of her eye, Fang-Castro saw Johansson about to jab back. Without taking her eyes from the monitor and the engineer, she waved one hand at the blonde in a way that said, Wait. I'm the referee. Let me ref.

"Harry," Fang-Castro said, "you're saying it's literally impossible? Because if it is, if this is simply a dreadful mistake on Ms. Johansson's part, I'll be happy to dismiss our new engineer and request someone better suited to the task."

The blonde opened her mouth, Fang-Castro waved again, and the blonde closed her mouth.

Lomax paused a moment, disconcerted by the opening he'd been handed. Fang-Castro waited patiently.

"Okay, maybe the wrong choice of words," Lomax said. "It's not physically impossible: it doesn't violate any known physical laws and it doesn't require materials we haven't invented yet. But it's completely and utterly unrealistic."

"So what you're saying is, it's a possible solution in a terribly difficult situation, you just don't have the wherewithal to do your part of the required design."

"That's not exactly what I was saying . . ."

Fang-Castro pointed to Becca, who said, "I agree with Dr. Lomax that the whole mission timetable is ridiculous and unrealistic, but it is what it is. Dr. Lomax, you can design all the reactors you want, but if they melt, they ain't going to Saturn. We gotta get rid of the heat. That's not optional. Run the numbers yourself. If you've got a better suggestion than mine, I'd be delighted to hear it."

Fang-Castro jumped in: "Harry, I agree with Dr. Johansson here. We've got to get rid of the heat. I also agree with you: this solution does strike me as unrealistic. Come back to me with a better idea. Quickly, if you please. Orders need to be cut."

Lomax wasn't ready to let it go. "Dr. Johansson's scheme wastes huge amounts of energy. We'll need to scale up the entire power plant by fifty percent to compensate, and we still have to stay within our weight budget. I don't see how."

"That's why I'm giving you options," Fang-Castro said. "You can come up with a different way to handle the heat management, or figure out how to upscale the power plant. Give me a call when you get that figured out. Tomorrow would be good."