Summary

Chapter 4 begins on Day A+0.56. Dinah and Rhys are enjoying frequent sex, but spend every other moment working to exhaustion and beyond. Larz Hoedemaeker at Arjuna Expeditions HQ sends Dinah a demo video of her Ice Nat robots; the time-lapse demo shows hundreds of the Nats scaling an ice block, tunneling, and breaking down the mass—as Dinah has designed them to do for Arjuna's founder, Sean Probst. On Earth, spacecraft, space suits, rocket boosters, and millions of specialized parts are being quickly produced via a global collective. Dinah picks up two assistants: Bo, an exotic Mongol woman; and Larz, the young bearded Dutchman who set up and filmed the Ice Nats demo. This is enjoyable for Dinah, who hasn't had a face-to-face conversation with a colleague in a year.

Dinah shows off her "Grimmed" (hardened and modified) robots. She has been employing...