The Break—as they called the event when the big bolide had smashed into Izzy, and the Swarm and Red Hope had gone their separate ways—had put an end to all that. Between then and the day about a month later when Endurance was christened, she spiraled gradually downward. Had the featherweight arklets tried to keep formation with her, they’d have been pushed back by the wind. They were forced to creep into the lee of Amalthea and ride along within her bow wave, like bicyclists slipstreaming behind a truck, until they could be integrated into the framework of the ship. Down and down she spiraled, and the SI team had to send Grabbs out onto the forward trusswork and remove the fragile antennas and sensors mounted there, lest they be slowly burned off by a rarefied but white-hot windblast. Fyodor’s champagne space walk was a brief one, and when he got back inside he reported that he could see the spraying foam of the champagne being blown backward by the atmosphere.