Beyond Harmony was Node X. NASA liked to give these things names by organizing contests for schoolchildren, which was how Harmony had ended up being called that, but the Node X naming project had been defunded before achieving a result, so Node X it was. It had never really found a purpose, so it had become the place where the life sciences gear was stored—or rather the central connector to which the life sciences modules had docked, one by one, as they had been sent up. This part of the Stack was very close to Amalthea, and accordingly well protected, and so it was a good place to store that irreplaceable equipment during the wait for it to become useful. Doob poked his head into several of those modules, hoping to encounter Moira, then remembered that, London girl that she was, she was on third shift, not due to wake up for another three hours—it was about dot 5, predawn in London.
Beyond Node X was the considerably larger SCRUM, which was literally bolted onto Amalthea at its forward end. So it was the forward-most thing in the Stack. Before Zero it had been nearly deserted. Since then it had grown and developed into the space-based headquarters of Arjuna Expeditions. People called it the Mining Colony. They had plugged in more modules until all of its ports were occupied, and then they had begun to attach scaffolding and additional modules—rigid and inflatable—directly to the aft surface of Amalthea.
It was around now that Doob forgot entirely about the task that the flack in Houston had assigned him, and decided to hang out here for a little while and see what was going on. By all rights this ought to have been his favorite part of the Cloud Ark. Yet he never visited, because coming here put him in mind of politics, which stressed him out and distracted him. His earlier conversation with Luisa had brought home to him, however, that ignoring politics might not be the wisest long-term strategy. He might not care about politics, but politics cared about him. And besides, the people who actually worked here—people like Dinah—were terrific. He had no problem with them personally. He should spend more time with them. Right now he was three hours short of the end of his waking cycle. This was the rough equivalent of mid-evening. Time to kick back and grab a beer. No better people to do that with than miners.
The Mining Colony was political for two reasons. First of all and most obviously, it had originated from a public-private partnership of which the private half was Arjuna Expeditions—Sean Probst’s company. Which had been all well and good until he had burst into H2, raised hackles, and ruffled feathers all over the place. Secondly, but much more murkily, there seemed to exist some kind of fundamental disagreement about what the Cloud Ark was supposed to be and how it was expected to develop in the years following the White Sky. Was it going to stay in place, i.e., remain in the same basic orbit? Transition to some other orbit? Would it stay together as a compact swarm or spread out? Or would it split up into two or more distinct swarms that would try different things? Arguments could be made for all of the above scenarios and many more, depending on what actually happened in the Hard Rain.
Since the Earth had never before been bombarded by a vast barrage of lunar fragments, there was no way to predict what it was going to be like. Statistical models had been occupying much of Doob’s time because they had a big influence on which scenarios might be most worth preparing for. To take a simplistic example, if the moon could be relied on to disassemble itself into pea-sized rocks, then the best strategy was to remain in place and not worry too much about maneuvering. It was hard to detect a pea-sized bolide until it was pretty close, by which time it was probably too late to take evasive action. A strike from a rock that size would perforate an arklet or a module of Izzy, but not destroy it; people might get hurt and stuff might get broken, but the worst case was that a whole module or arklet would be destroyed with the loss of a few lives. On the other hand, in the more likely scenario where the Hard Rain included rocks the size of cars, houses, and mountains, detection from a distance would be easier. Evasive action would be not only feasible, but obligatory.
Or at least it was obligatory for Izzy. For a single arklet, it didn’t matter whether it got struck by a rock the size of a baseball or one the size of a stadium. It was equally dead in either case. Izzy, on the other hand, could survive the first of these with the loss of a few modules, but the second would obliterate the whole space station and probably lead to the slow death of the entire Cloud Ark. Izzy had to be capable of maneuvering out of a large bolide’s path.
“Maneuvering” conjured images, in nontechnical minds, of football players weaving among their opponents in an open field. What the Arkitects had in mind was considerably more sedate. Izzy would never be agile. Even if she were, maneuvering in that sense would waste a lot of fuel. If an incoming rock big enough to destroy her were detected long enough in advance, she could get out of its path with a thruster burn so deft that most of her population would not even know it had happened. So, the optimistic view of how this was going to work was that Izzy would remain in something close to her current orbit, with occasional taps on the thrusters that would move her out of the way of any dangerous bolides hours or days in advance of the projected collision. The analogy was made to an ocean liner gliding through a field of icebergs, avoiding them with course changes so subtle that the passengers in the dining room wouldn’t even see the wine shifting in their crystal stemware.
There was, inevitably, a more pessimistic vision in which Izzy was more like an ox blundering across an eight-lane highway in heavy traffic. Depending on who was making the analogy, the ox might or might not be blindfolded and/or crippled.
Which of these analogies was closer to the truth boiled down to a statistical argument in which were braided together assumptions about the range and distribution of bolide sizes, the amount of variation in their trajectories, how well the long-range radars worked, and how good the algorithms were at sorting out all the different bogeys and deciding which ones were dangerous.
Somewhere in the middle, between the ocean liner and the blind ox, was the football player pushing the wheelbarrow.
It didn’t matter whether “football” for you was soccer or the American sport played by men in helmets. In either case you were meant to envision a player trying to weave a path downfield among defenders. A skilled player could succeed at this when running unencumbered but would fail if obliged to push a wheelbarrow with a boulder in it. The boulder, of course, was Amalthea, and the wheelbarrow was the asteroid mining complex that had been constructed around it. If this analogy were the one closest to the truth, then the wheelbarrow would have to be abandoned.
The image was sufficiently clear, and sufficiently alarming, that some had begun to argue for ditching Amalthea as far back as Day 30. More levelheaded analysts pointed out that if the ocean liner analogy applied, there was no need to take such drastic action, and if Izzy were a blind, crippled ox on a freeway, there was no point anyway.
Doob had his own bias, a bias frankly rooted in a certain frozen embryo, which was that the Mining Colony should be preserved at all costs. When he tried to filter out that bias and to look at the models and the data in a completely objective way, he concluded that the jury was still out. So, technical discussions of the matter tended to be unproductive, except insofar as they revealed the biases that the participants had brought into the room with them. And here was where it started to get difficult for him personally, because he couldn’t understand why anyone would harbor a bias different from his own. Why would anyone not want to keep the Mining Colony? What were they thinking? How could the Cloud Ark, and the human race, have a future without those tools and capabilities?
In any case the controversy had ramifications that extended into many seemingly mundane aspects of the Cloud Ark program. If Izzy was going to maneuver with Amalthea attached to it, then the structure holding the rock to the space station needed to be strong. To put it another way, the stronger it was, the more heroic maneuvers could be achieved without breaking it. The ability to perform such maneuvers made the survival of Izzy more likely, and so requests for additi
onal structural work had a kind of self-justifying force. Conversely, a weaker structure limited maneuvering ability and increased the odds that they would have to jettison the Mining Colony in order to survive. And why dump scarce resources into beefing up a subassembly that was going to be abandoned anyway? A similar dynamic obtained in the case of propellant. More of it was needed to maneuver an Izzy with a big rock on it, which meant less of it for the arklets, limiting their autonomy and operating range. Thus physics drove politics to the extremes of “ditch the rock now” or “keep the rock at all costs.”
The Mining Colony now comprised eight modules, plus an inflatable dome that was attached directly to the asteroid. The robots had spent several weeks welding a three-meter-diameter ring onto a circular groove that they had prepared on Amalthea’s surface. The inflatable had been mated to it about a hundred days ago, and filled with breathable atmosphere. It was not quite a shirtsleeves environment, since the asteroid was cold and chilled the air in the dome. And many of the robots’ normal operations produced gases that were toxic, or at least irritating. But that wasn’t the point of having a dome. The point was to recapture and reuse the gases used by the robots’ plasma torches, making it possible to excavate and reshape the asteroid much faster than had been possible in the early days, when all of those gases had leaked away into space. Since then Dinah’s complement of robots had been heavily reinforced by newer and better versions of the same basic models that had been shipped up from Earth. And Dinah herself was now managing a crew of twelve, working in shifts around the clock. They’d been expanding the tunnel she had carved into the asteroid long ago to protect her circuit boards from cosmic rays, making slow progress on hollowing out the asteroid, carrying bits of metal away to a bigger and better smelter that was turning them into steel. Since there was no real place for it in Izzy’s master plan, they’d been putting that steel to work in reinforcing Amalthea’s structural connection to Izzy, feeding back into the political argument again.
Doob glided through a few of the Mining Colony’s modules, asking people where Dinah was, and got noncommittal answers. When he made a move in the direction of her shop, he sensed an uptick in nervous tension, and did not understand why until Markus Leuker emerged, greeted him personally, and engaged him in friendly, inconsequential chitchat. Stalling for time, as Doob understood, so that Dinah could have a few minutes to herself.
It had been known for several months that Dinah had been having sex with Markus, an activity referred to on Izzy as “climbing the Daubenhorn.” Two other women were known to have attained that summit, not long after Markus’s arrival, but since then Dinah had had him all to herself. By the standards of earthbound organizations, be they corporate or military, it was an eyebrow-raising violation of ethical standards for the boss to be sleeping with a subordinate. But a month from now every living human would technically be one of Markus’s subordinates, so he either had to break the rules or be celibate for the rest of his life. No one who knew him very well saw the latter as a realistic option, unless he were to have his testicles surgically removed (a procedure that certain people on Izzy were longing to see performed). That being the case, there was a certain logic in his having settled, quite early, on Dinah. It might be unethical, but at least everyone knew where matters stood. Dinah was no one’s idea of a pushover; no sane person could be worried that she was in any way feeling pressured or harassed. And on the other side of that coin, people seemed to feel more comfortable knowing that Dinah was not on the prowl. By the mundane standards of Izzy gossip, her dalliance with Rhys Aitken had been sensational, their eventual breakup a big story, detailed in London tabloids. After that she’d been unable to have coffee with any male crew member without stirring up more whispers. Being unequivocally in the bag with Markus was a lot simpler. And yet it still had to be treated as if it weren’t happening, which was why Markus and Doob had to take part in this charade.
“I don’t know if you heard,” Doob told him, “but fighting has broken out on the ground, between the spaceport and the beach.”
It was clear that Markus hadn’t heard, which was hardly surprising given that (a) it wasn’t his problem and (b) he’d been occupied. He was, understandably, quite relaxed at the moment, and it took a while for him to bring his formidable powers of concentration to bear on the matter at hand.
“I can’t believe they will let it go on like that,” he said.
“The president made a statement. She looked like she was eating bolts.”
“A government run by doomed persons is nothing to trifle with,” Markus said, “but I suppose the same could be said of the Venezuelans.” He sighed. “I wonder if we should just accommodate some Venezuelan Arkies. There must be a few bright sparks.”
“That would have worked a couple of days ago,” Doob said, “but now it’s turned into one of those ‘we don’t negotiate with terrorists’ things.”
A trace of a dry smile came over Markus’s lips. He had washed his face with the towelettes they all used; Doob could smell the industrial fragrance with which they were permeated. “Of course,” he said, “it wouldn’t do to set a precedent that might be abused during the next three weeks.”
The joke, such as it was, would have been completely unacceptable when uttered in public, or even in a meeting, and so this was a way of saying to Doob, You are in my confidence. Doob wasn’t a leader, but he was fascinated by people who were, and how they went about their work.
“Ivy’s figuring out the ramifications of not having those arklets, those supplies.”
“Thank God for Ivy,” Markus said. Since winning command of the Cloud Ark he had never lost an opportunity to praise her—another skill that Doob reckoned must be inculcated into leaders in whatever mysterious Leader Academy churned them out. More likely it was an instinct.
“Well, my day begins,” Markus continued. “Thank you for the briefing.” Markus, like a lot of the Europeans, ran on third shift, which meant that he was, in fact, beginning his day a couple of hours early.
“Mine is winding down,” Doob said. “I thought I would get drunk with some miners.”
“No better people for it,” Markus said with a wink. “I believe Dinah will be out in a minute. I think she would enjoy seeing you.”
With that Markus pulled his phone from the pocket of his coverall and turned his attention to its screen while using the other hand to pull himself out of this module and down the Stack.
Doob was left floating in the middle of the SCRUM. The only thing between him and Dinah was a privacy curtain. He was about to say “Knock knock!” when he heard a string of beeps emerge from a speaker on the other side. An incoming Morse code transmission, which he had not the skill to understand. To that point Dinah had been quiescent, but he now heard her going into movement, peeling herself out of her sleeping bag. He thought better of bothering her just now, and decided to check his own email.
SHE RAN ON FIRST SHIFT, WHICH MEANT THAT THIS WAS MIDAFTERNOON for her: traditionally a time when she began to feel a little drowsy even when Markus had not just been helping her relax. She felt that going fully to sleep would be a bad idea, partly because she had work to do and partly because it would lead to more gossip than was happening already. She could hear Markus chitchatting with Dubois Harris on the other side of the curtain. She knew that he was stalling for her, giving her some time to pull herself together; she was duly appreciative, and she made the most of it, gliding in the liminal zone between dozing and waking until her radio began to beep. She knew immediately that this was not Rufus; she could tell as much by the “fist” of the transmission. It was faint and it was clearly not the work of an experienced ham.
Her eyes opened as a thought came to her: maybe this was the source known as the Space Troll. That term had originated with Rufus, who had first mentioned it several days ago: Have you heard from the Space Troll yet? It was his name for a transmitter that he had begun picking up recently, and it matched what Dinah was hearing now.
&n
bsp; She ejected herself from the bag, turned up the volume on the receiver, and listened while pulling on a T-shirt and some drawstring pants. The signal sounded as if it was coming in from a home-brew transmitter. The owner had a sketchy understanding of the practices and etiquette of the CW (Morse code–using) radio world. His dots and dashes were perfectly formed, and came rapidly, as much as proving that he was using a computer keyboard and an app that automatically converted keystrokes into Morse. He was sending out a lot of QRKs and QRNs, which were queries about the strength of his own signal and the degree to which it was being interfered with. So, he seemed a little insecure about the quality of his equipment.
According to Rufus, as soon as you started transmitting back to the Space Troll he would shoot back a spate of QRSes, meaning “please transmit more slowly,” further proof that he was a novice using a computer keyboard to form the groups, but not very good at deciphering what came back. He transmitted on one frequency only, which was the one that Rufus had, until a year ago, generally used to contact Dinah. This had become known to the Internet in the wake of a human interest story about the MacQuarie family, and so for a few weeks it had been damned near unusable as every CW ham on the planet had tried to use it to contact Dinah. Then word had gotten around that the MacQuaries père et fille weren’t using it anymore and it had gone pretty silent, except for a few people who apparently hadn’t gotten the memo, such as the Space Troll. Anyway, Rufus had gone back to monitoring that frequency again and Dinah was now doing likewise. She had not personally heard any transmissions from the Space Troll. This was not remarkable. Her antenna was nothing compared to the one that Rufus had installed above his mine, and her receiver was something out of a fifth-grade science project. Except when Izzy was passing over his meridian, she and Rufus would naturally “hear” different stations.