Cruithne,” he said.

Maura Della:

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Dan began, “welcome to JPL. Today, June eighteenth, 2011, a U.S. spacecraft piloted by a genetically enhanced cephalopod is due to rendezvous and dock with near-Earth object designated 3753, or 1986TO, called Cruithne, a three-mile-diameter C-type asteroid. We should be getting images from a remote firefly camera shortly, and a feed from the Nautilus herself…” He stood in a forest of microphones, a glare of TV lights. Behind him a huge softscreen was draped across the wall like a tapestry. It showed a mass of incomprehensible graphic and digital updates.

As Dan lectured his slightly restive audience, Maura allowed her attention to drift.

JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had turned out to look like a small hospital, squashed into a cramped and smoggy Pasadena-suburb site dominated by the green shoulders of the San Gabriel Mountains. A central mall adorned with a fountain stretched from the gate into the main working area of the laboratory. And on the south side she had found the von Karman auditorium, the scene of triumphant news conferences and other public events going back to NASA’s glory days, when JPL had sent probes to almost every planet in the Solar System.

Absently she listened to the talk around her, a lot of chatter about long-gone times when spirits were high, everybody seemed to be young, and there was a well-defined enemy to beat.

Heady days. All gone now.

Well, today the big old auditorium was crowded again, almost like the old days, mission managers and scientists and politicians and a few aging sci fi writers, all crammed in among the softscreen terminals.

Just as NASA had declared that Malenfant’s BOB design was a criminal joke that could never fly until it had flown, so its experts had declared that Bootstrap’s cephalopod-based asteroid expedition was irresponsible and absurd — until it had survived out in deep space, and, more important, had started to gather

some approving public attention.

And so, as Sheena 5 neared Cruithne, here everybody was,

basking in reflected cephalopod glory.

As they waited for the rendezvous, Dan launched stiffly into a

formal presentation on the technical aspects of the spacecraft.

“The membrane that is the core of the ship’s design is based on technology Bootstrap developed for undersea methane-extraction operations. As far as the biosphere itself is concerned, efficiency is the key. Phytoplankton, one of the most efficient life-forms known, can convert seventy-eight percent of available nitrogen into protein. The simplicity of the algae — no stems, leaves, roots, or flowers — makes them almost ideal crop plants, one hundred percent foodstuff. Of course the system is not perfect — it’s not completely closed, and imperfectly buffered. But it’s still more robust, in terms of operational reliability, than any long-duration mechanical equivalent we can send up. And a hell of a lot cheaper. I have the figures that—” What about the problems, Dan ?

He looked uncomfortable. “Sheena has had to spend more time acting as the keystone predator than we expected.”

Say what?

“Culling pathological species that get out of hand. And you have to understand that the system is inherently unstable. We have to manage it, consciously. Or rather Sheena does. We have to replace leaked gases, regulate the temperature, control the hydrological cycle and trace contaminants…”

And so on. What Ystebo didn’t say, what Maura knew from private briefings, was that this could be a very near thing. It’s so fragile, Maura thought. She imagined the tiny droplet of water containing Sheena drifting in the immensity of interplanetary space, like a bit of sea foam tossed into the air by a wave, never to rejoin the ocean.

What about Sheena herself?

At that question, Dan seemed to falter.

Maura knew that Sheena had been refusing to participate in her “medical briefings,” or to interface with the remote diagnostics that Dan used to monitor her health. Not that Dan, or anybody else, knew why she was refusing to cooperate. Maura tried to read the emotions in Dan’s bearded, fat-creased face.

“You understand I can only speak to her once a day, when the spacecraft is above the horizon at Goldstone. She is in LOS — loss of signal — for fifteen hours a day.”

How do you feel about the fact that she’s not coming home?

Again Dan blustered. “Actually the simplification of the mission goals has worked benefits throughout the profile. The cost of the return — the mass penalty of return leg propellant and comestibles and the aerobrake heat shield — multiplied through the whole mission mass statement.”

Yeah, but it’s become a one-way trip for your squid. The Cala-mari Express.

Uncomfortable laughter.

Dan was squirming. “Bootstrap has plans to deal with the ethical contingencies.”

Technocrat bullshit, Maura thought; whoever coached this poor sap did a bad job. But she pitied Dan, nonetheless. He was probably the only person on the planet who truly cared about Sheena 5 — as opposed to the sentimental onlookers on TV and on the Net — and here he was, having to defend her being sentenced to death, alone in space.

And now, at last, an image came through on the big wall-mounted softscreen. Pictures from space. A hush spread over the hall.

It took Maura some seconds to figure out what she was seeing.

It was an asteroid.

It was misshapen and almost black, the craters and cracks of its dusty surface picked out by unvarying sunlight, a potato left too long on the barbecue. And a spacecraft of rippling gold was approaching, dwarfed by the giant rock.

There was applause, whooping. Way to go, Dan! Right down U.S. One.

Dan fumbled at a touchpad, and a new image came up on the softscreen: Sheena 5, a Caribbean reef squid, drifting in blue-gold shadows, live from Nautilus. Eerily, her head was hidden by a metal mask that trailed wires back to a mass of machinery.

Then the cephalopod pulled back, leaving the metal mask dangling in the water, and she began an elaborate dance. It was enchanting: her chromatophore organs pulsed with colors and shapes, black and orange and aquamarine and ocher, and her tentacles and arms flashed as she arced, twirled, and pirouetted through the tank. She was very obviously producing signals: one, even two a second, signals that flowed into each other, varying remarkably in their intensity.

Can you interpret what she s saying, Dan?

Hesitantly he began to translate.

“Stop and watch me. Stop and watch me. You have to understand her language elements are based on those she inherited from the cephalopod shoals. This is a signal she might use to distract prey, or even a predator.

“Now this is what we call the pied pattern. Court me. Court me. She’s asking for admiration. She’s proud. Asteroid. Come near. Come near. Another mating signal. It’s as if she’s luring the asteroid. Star shoal all around. No danger, no danger. Literally, no predators. But she means that her navigation has been a success, that the systems are working nominally. Stop and watch me. Court me. . .”

His posture was stiff as he stared at the screen, the separation from his dancing friend a tangible, painful thing.

The audience was silent, Maura noted absently: stunned by this shard of cheap emotion.

The digital displays told her the moment of rendezvous was near. The remote firefly-camera images returned to the soft-screen, a stop-start sequence updated every few seconds. The gold spark tracked across the blackened surface.

Sheena 5:

The asteroid was big now, covering almost half of the sky.