Paul Freel reached into the portal joining Earth to Mars, pulled himself through, turned about, and closed the hatch on his side. Julia followed suit on hers. Immediately she felt, as much as heard, the hisses and clunks that signaled the undocking of Red Hope. Unfamiliar noises radiated through the module’s hull too, very close to her, and she realized that these were the boots of space suits moving around.
“The alert is canceled,” announced a synthetic voice. The color of the lights changed.
Camila emitted a short, explosive scream. Then she pointed down the length of the Shipyard, toward where it connected with the Stack.
Down in the Caboose, some thirty meters away, a few people could be seen, dressed in orange vests. One of them looked directly at her.
It was Tekla.
The synthesized voice spoke out again, sounding a second alert.
That wasn’t part of the plan.
Tekla must have gathered her legs against something down in the Caboose capable of pushing back, because all of a sudden she was flying toward them like a rocket. Her arms were in motion, reaching this way and that to slap at anything that could help her correct her course, but her eyes were fixed on Julia and she was coming straight for her. Something gleamed in her hand, a thin arc of silver light: the honed edge of a dagger.
A crisp metallic noise resounded through the module as Julia pulled back the hammer on Pete Starling’s revolver.
“Gun!” shouted the bleeding man. “Gun! Gun!”
If Tekla heard, she did not care, but only pushed back harder against a strut in the neighboring module and came on faster.
To Julia the weapon’s recoil came too soon, as if it had gone off accidentally. She’d been in space long enough to know that it would knock her back, and it did; but she also saw things she could not explain. Camila had entered the picture, flying in from the side with an arm outstretched. The wall of the Shipyard itself reached out to body-check Tekla. A moment later it struck Camila, then Julia. She had expected the high-pitched hiss of a bullet-sized hull puncture; but what followed was more like a roar. Like the crowd in a football stadium when a pass is intercepted. Camila’s arm had turned into a wing of fire. Something took Julia from behind and hurled her toward the Caboose. She looked around, thinking, crazily, that the bleeding man had somehow gotten loose and tackled her. But the force pushing her along was no human being. It was a torrent of escaping air.
“JIRO, CAN YOU HEAR ME?” DINAH ASKED FOR THE FOURTH TIME.
She conjectured that he could, but that he was simply too weak to answer. So she went ahead and delivered the good news. “We made it,” she said. “I have Izzy on optical. We’ll converge with them in about half an hour.”
“Good,” he said, “good.” She was startled to hear anything at all. But the second “good” was a lot fainter than the first one, and she reckoned it was all he could get out.
She decided not to tell him anything further. Entombed in Ymir’s boiler room, simultaneously freezing to death while being cooked alive by radiation, he didn’t need to hear a description of what Dinah was seeing through the telescope.
They had been calling this the Cloud Ark for two years. The name had been meant somewhat poetically. Today, however, it really did look like a cloud. Her view of Izzy, which usually was so crisp and sharp in the high-contrast light of outer space, was cloaked in a glinting and winking shroud of what might be clinically described as particulate matter.
It went without saying that Izzy had taken a direct hit from a bolide. Beyond that, it was difficult to make out details.
Ymir’s final burn—for Jiro, a suicide mission—had settled her in an orbit quite similar to Izzy’s: the same plane, the same average altitude. The only difference was that it was a little bit more oval, calculated to cross Izzy’s path twice during each revolution around the Earth. They were approaching one of those crossings, and so from Dinah’s point of view the space station kept getting closer, filling the window on her computer screen, obliging her to zoom out, giving her a progressively sharper, more detailed picture. As minutes ticked by, she was able to piece together a guess as to what had happened.
The rock must have come in from an angle, missed Amalthea cleanly, and struck somewhere near H2, the hub that anchored Tori 2 and 3. Both of the tori had huge bites taken out of them, and both had stopped rotating. Aft of that point, Izzy’s spine—her central Stack—was actually bent. The spreading wings of the Shipyard were still attached to the Caboose, but they were askew, and leaking debris. The original torus—the one that contained the Banana—was still rotating, and looked whole, but as she drew closer she saw it had taken damage, perhaps from shrapnel.
A faint thud resounded through the ice hull. They’d probably struck a piece of jetsam. No matter, it wouldn’t be moving very fast. Ymir could nuzzle her way through a cloud of that stuff and never feel it.
One of the windows on her screen flashed up a video feed, triggered by the motion detector on a Grabb’s camera, and she saw a human body drifting away into space. She swallowed against a sharp contraction of her throat.
Part of her wondered if she would find Izzy a ghost ship—if she were the only human remaining alive. For Vyacheslav had stopped communicating with them yesterday. Before then, he had mentioned that he had been suffering from diarrhea. If this was caused by radiation exposure, it was a death sentence. He might simply have committed suicide rather than wait for the inevitable.
Alone at the controls of Ymir, she coasted toward Izzy, silent and adrift in the cosmos, and entertained the thought, just for a while, that she might be the only human being left in the universe.
Then a red light—a laser, aimed right at her—began to flash from the Mining Colony, and her mind began to pick out Morse code.
SENDING FLIVVERS TO EFFECT FINAL MANEUVERS
DISREGARD STRAY ARKLETS
WELCOME HOME
Lacking any way to respond, she waited, and watched. Shreds of insulation, scraps of structural material, spilled vitamins, and the occasional body tumbled across the window as she panned and zoomed over various details. Everything forward of Zvezda looked pretty good. The Mining Colony and Moira’s stash of genetic equipment appeared to be unscathed. Good.
Three Flivvers had separated themselves from the cloud and established trajectories that would bring them to Ymir within a few minutes. She guessed that they would act as tugboats, butting their heads against the shard and using their main engines to effect the final delta vee needed to achieve rendezvous. So, the first part of the transmission made sense. DISREGARD STRAY ARKLETS, however, was something of a mystery. Why would there be such a thing? And what did it mean, anyway, for an arklet to be “stray”? And yet as Dinah panned the telescope across the arc of space forward and aft of Izzy—the realm where most of the arklets normally parked themselves—she found it curiously underpopulated. It was just a general visual impression. She couldn’t verify it scientifically without access to a Parambulator screen.
It occurred to her, then, that all she needed to do was switch on her tablet’s connection to the mesh network. Shortly after New Caird’s departure from Izzy, she had turned it off because, once they got out of range, it was a useless battery drainer. And indeed the tablet soon brought up the little icon announcing it had found a connection, perhaps relayed through one of those Flivvers. A minute or two went by as the device downloaded all of the email and message traffic that had been piling up in her inbox during her “vacation.”
She passed the time playing with the telescope. A detail caught her eye as she panned across the scene, and she went back and zoomed in on it for a closer look.
It was a MIV, an unusually big one. Basically a five-layer stack, wasp-waisted. The bottom layer was an engine of the most powerful class in the MIV toolkit. Above that was a fat cluster of propellant tanks. The third layer—the narrow waist—was a single arklet with an airlock on its side—a command module, she guessed, similar to New Caird’s. Above that was a tri
ad, and on top, forming the fat head of the vehicle, was a heptad. All of it was shrouded in structural webbing. Snared like little bugs in the edges of that web were small modules that she recognized as attitude control thrusters. The most notable thing about the vehicle was her outsized propellant tanks, hinting at a long journey—to where? The thing was keeping station several kilometers forward of Izzy, in a region that had been largely denuded of arklets.
Her tablet finally finished downloading messages, most of which were long out of date by this point. She sorted them by age, newest first, and scanned the headings. Very few had come through in the last several hours. That stood to reason, given that the Cloud Ark had other things on its mind. But close to the top was one that caught her eye: OPEN COMMUNIQUÉ FROM PRESIDENT JBF TO THE PEOPLE OF THE CLOUD ARK.
Merely seeing those words gave her a feeling as if she’d been socked in the solar plexus. She tapped it anyway, and read it:
Today’s shocking tragedy has left us all bereaved, and seeking answers. I was in a Shipyard module when it happened, having just bid farewell and godspeed to the brave explorers of the Red Hope expedition. Thanks to the automatic closure of a hatch, I experienced only minor injuries and discomfort from partial decompression. As we all know, many members of the General Population were not so lucky. I join with all humanity in mourning their sacrifice. By its nature, the Arkie Community was less affected by this disaster. As I had envisioned from the very beginnings of the Cloud Ark project, the distributed architecture of the swarm prevented serious damage. We did lose three arklets, I am sorry to say, and several more sustained damage from minor collisions or debris impacts. But overall the system worked as we had planned from the beginning. Many members of the AC are now, quite naturally, asking themselves whether it is safe to remain in low Earth orbit, clustered around a heavy, aging space station that lacks the ability to maneuver out of harm’s way. The open vista of clean space beckons above us. Red Hope will soon fire its main engine and begin its trek across that unexplored frontier to a planet that will one day have room for us all. The Cloud Ark cannot follow her—yet. But as all members of the AC know, having gone through extensive training in space operations and orbital mechanics, it is well within the capability of any arklet to raise its orbit substantially by making use of its engines and its onboard propellant supplies. Alone, a single arklet, triad, or heptad will not long endure. As part of a swarm, however, it has a fighting chance. Many members of the Arkie Community who have been watching the desperate trials and tribulations of the Ymir expedition, and who have now witnessed the damage inflicted upon Izzy by a single bolide, are now asking themselves whether it is safe to remain, and to trust themselves to the agonizingly slow climb toward clean space envisioned by the partisans of the Big Ride faction. I am a politician, not a scientist, and so I cannot pretend to render a technical opinion. Some may question whether I should be making a public announcement at all. The simple fact of the matter is that my past career as President of the United States has given me prominence in the Arkie Community, whether or not I deserve it. Many have been asking me what I shall do now. Rather than wait for rumor to sow confusion, I am therefore issuing this communiqué. For what it is worth, I have, with the assistance of some loyal friends, escaped from the wreckage of Izzy and found safe haven aboard Arklet 37, currently part of a triad. Shortly after I transmit this message, we will initiate a burn of our main propulsion that will lift us clear of the drifting debris that surrounds what once was the International Space Station, and move us in the direction of clean space. Our orbital parameters will be posted openly on the network so that like-minded members of the AC may join us in creating a swarm-based solution to the acute problems currently imposing themselves on the human race. From a safe position in higher orbit, we will look for ways to extend a helping hand to our surviving friends marooned in the General Population. Working together as a community, we will preserve what we have and build a stable way of life in the sky as we await with breathless anticipation the results of Red Hope’s inspiring venture to the welcoming surface of Mars.
“She’s right about the ‘breathless’ part of it,” Dinah muttered to herself, closing the window and looking at the time stamp again. It had been transmitted three hours ago. Then, only half an hour ago, Ivy had responded with a counter-communiqué. Dinah didn’t read it, but based on the subject heading she knew what it would say: don’t listen to J.B.F., stay in formation, we need you and you need us.
But from what Dinah was seeing, both through the optical telescope and on Parambulator, Ivy’s message had come too late to forestall the departure of a large number of arklets. Somewhere out there, up above them in higher orbit, a new swarm was taking shape, running its own, independent instance of Parambulator, and looking to J.B.F. for leadership.
Dinah had been through many emotional ups and downs while retrieving Ymir. More downs than ups, of course, given the fatality rate. In a strange way, however, the emotional high point was just a few moments ago when she had scanned the word “desperate” in J.B.F.’s communiqué. She rather liked being described as desperate, particularly when she was just on the verge of succeeding.
Parambulator was working on her screen now. She used it to check the status of those three Flivvers. They were still closing. Messages were starting to come in from their pilots, trying to make out whether anyone was still alive in the shard, whether it was safe to approach.
Dinah texted back: One survivor. Stand clear for a sec while this thing takes a big glow-in-the-dark crap.
Then she pulled up the window she used to communicate with her network of robots and typed in a single-word command: JETTISON. It was the name of a program that Sean had started, Larz had improved, and Dinah had recently finished. It was a program meant to be run simultaneously by every robot in the shard, as well as some other systems down in the boiler room.
A prompt came back: ARE YOU SURE Y/N
Y, she typed.
CONGRATULATIONS!!! came back. The dead crew of Ymir had sent her a message from the void.
She pushed herself over to the companionway, got her head aimed “down” through the hole in the floor, and pulled herself straight to the bottom level of the command module. The hatch in the floor—the one that led to the ice tunnel that terminated in the boiler room—had already been closed, as a basic safety measure. But Dinah verified that one last time and made sure it was sealed. Because in a few seconds, there would be nothing but vacuum on the other side of it.
Ymir had begun grumbling. Dinah felt as if she were trapped inside the belly of a frost giant with indigestion. What she was hearing, she knew, was the collective noise made by thousands of Nats, and hundreds of larger robots, as they moved to safe positions on the inner surface of the hollow shard and gnawed away at the structural webbing that connected it to the reactor core.
She returned to her seat in the command module and pulled up a video feed from the interior of the shard. Its walls were now thin enough to admit some sunlight, and so it had become a sort of vast pellucid amphitheater where all of those robots could look inward to the smooth beryllium pod—a neutron-reflecting shroud—surrounding the reactor core. Formerly this had been buried in ice; the recent excavations made to fuel the big perigee burns had left it exposed, also revealing the smaller pod of the boiler room mounted on its side, and the system of hoppers and augers that fed it. Aft of that was what remained of the ice cavern of the nozzle bell, now mostly melted away to expose the blackness of space beyond. The only thing now holding the reactor chamber in place was the massive central thrust pillar, a tree trunk of ice that grew from its forward end and extended straight up to the solid nose of the shard, where the command module was embedded.
JETTISON did her the courtesy of showing a countdown on the screen, so that she could plug her ears. When it hit zero, a sickening crack resounded through the whole structure. The video feed showed a brilliant spray of ice blown free from the central pillar, just above where it connected
to the reactor vessel. Demolition charges, placed there long ago by Sean’s crew, had detonated and severed the connection. For a moment she feared nothing further would happen, but then jets of white steam lanced from the reactor vessel’s rounded top. JETTISON had opened valves, releasing pressure that had built up in the chamber from the reactor’s residual heat, and those valves were now acting as makeshift rocket engines, pushing the whole reactor, and everything attached to it, down toward the vacancy of the nozzle.
The entire reactor chamber dropped out the bottom of the shard and was gone.
If JETTISON continued to do its work, the reactor, now a free-floating vehicle, all brawn and no brains, would execute a few clumsy maneuvers to kill its own orbital velocity and drop itself into the atmosphere.
“Bye, Jiro,” Dinah said. “Thank you.”
One of the Flivver pilots texted her: Wow.
Dinah gave it all one more thorough scan, using several cameras. But there wasn’t much to see. Ymir was now a hollow, sugarloaf-shaped shell, crawling with robots, and helplessly adrift in space.
She texted, Did someone place an order for a megaton of propellant?
INSTINCT HAD HERDED THEM TOGETHER IN THE SCRUM, CLOSE TO Amalthea and far away from the parts of Izzy that had been damaged or destroyed. That was where Dinah found them, after she’d been brought aboard, scrubbed clean, checked and checked again for contamination. Pink and raw, she embraced Ivy first, for a long time, and then made the rounds to Doob, Moira, Rhys, Luisa, Steve Lake, Fyodor, and Bo. Konrad Barth and many others were dead. Tekla was still in surgery. One of her breasts had been damaged by a fragment and was being surgically repaired.
Curled up in very nearly a fetal position at one end of the SCRUM was a woman who was quietly weeping. She hid her face from the room with an arm swathed, from fingertips to shoulder, in white gauze. Dinah recognized her as Camila, Julia’s sidekick.
Ivy insisted that they all move back down the Stack and meet in the Banana. It took some gentle persuasion to get Camila to come with them, but eventually Luisa talked her into it. Out of habit she kept reaching for the veil she normally drew across the lower half of her face, but it wasn’t there anymore. She was dressed like everyone else, in a shapeless coverall.
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