For a moment, nothing happened. Then a metal mesh cable snaked out onto the visiplate, moving toward the shell like a striking cobra. It made contact, but it did not hold. If it had, it would have snapped instantly like a cobweb strand. The shell was turning with a rotational momentum amounting to thousands of tons. What the cable did do was to set up a powerful magnetic field that acted as a brake on the shell.
Another cable and another lashed out. Rioz sent them out in an almost heedless expenditure of energy.
“I’ll get this one! By Mars, I’ll get this one!”
With some two dozen cables stretching between ship and shell, he desisted. The shell’s rotational energy, converted by breaking into heat, had raised its temperature to a point where its radiation could be picked up by the ship’s meters.
Long said, “Do you want me to put our brand on?”
“Suits me. But you don’t have to if you don’t want to. It’s my watch.”
“I don’t mind.”
Long clambered into his suit and went out the lock. It was the surest sign of his newness to the game that he could count the number of times he had been out in a suit. This was the fifth time.
He went out along the nearest cable, hand over hand, feeling the vibration of the mesh against the metal of his mitten.
He burned their serial number in the smooth metal of the shell. There was nothing to oxidize the steel in the emptiness of space. It simply melted and vaporized, condensing some feet away from the energy beam, turning the surface it touched into a gray, powdery dullness.