Another perigee was coming up soon. This time the nozzle would be aimed the way they wanted it—forward, once again turning the nuclear engine into a powerful retro-rocket. The robots on the inside of the shard had been at work scooping it out, sculpting the walnut-shell architecture that, according to the structural engineering simulations, would enable the whole thing to hold together during the last round of maneuvers. The hoppers were full of ice, with more on the way, and they’d finally learned how to make the system work consistently. Part of that lesson was not to try to accomplish too much with any one burn. It was better to take it easy, set a reasonable delta vee target, get it done and lock it down, then take stock of the situation and plan the next burn at leisure. Consequently their rendezvous with Izzy looked to be happening much later than they’d first expected, and almost every day brought a further postponement. But at the same time it came to seem more and more of a sure thing, less of a wild chance, and this began to affect Dinah’s thinking. Her robots were doing their work almost entirely on autopilot, leaving her somewhat bored. Vyacheslav, sealed up on the other side of a wall of plastic, could be talked to, but preferred keeping to himself. Jiro, on the other hand, had been working almost around the clock and had been showing signs of strain. Dinah would find excuses to float behind him and look over his shoulder at his screen. Was he playing solitaire? Running orbital mechanics simulations? Writing his memoirs? He seemed mostly to be looking at video feeds of machinery. By process of elimination, this had to be near the core of the reactor.
In the floor of the “bottom”-most level, three stories “below” them, was a manhole giving way to a shaft sunk into the ice. At the far end of that shaft was another hatch providing access to what, on an oceangoing ship of Old Earth, would have been called the boiler room. A small pressurized compartment housed control panels and access ports connected to the reactor, which was only a few meters away, on the other side of a heavy wall. The wall was a radiation shield, at least in theory. But sending up a huge piece of lead hadn’t been an option for the hastily assembled Ymir expedition, and so the “boiler room” got washed with neutrons and gamma rays whenever the reactor was used. The radiation detectors that Sean and company had left behind, the last time they’d closed that hatch, didn’t leave much to the imagination. The place was a hellhole now. Fortunately, all the systems connected there had been designed to be operated remotely, from the safety of the command module, so there was no need to go down that ice tunnel and open that hatch.
Their instruments told them they were nearing perigee again. Jiro, assisted by Dinah, executed what they hoped would be the second-to-last burn of the big engine. This went on longer than Jiro had predicted, but it seemed to work. Ymir shed most of her excess velocity. Her orbit, at apogee, was now only a few hundred kilometers higher than Izzy’s. In spite of attrition suffered by the robots as they wore out, broke, or succumbed to radiation damage, Dinah still had enough of them to restock the hoppers for the final major burn, which they calculated would be happening at a perigee a few hours later.
“If you are satisfied with the disposition of your robots,” Jiro said, “I would like to show you how to operate the main propulsion.”
She had grown up in mining camps where older men liked to amuse her, and themselves, by teaching her how to operate heavy machinery, blow things up with dynamite, pilot airplanes, and the like. So Jiro’s offer didn’t seem unusual to her, at first. Teaching people how to do stuff was, among other things, a way to alleviate boredom. But over the course of the next hour it slowly became clear to her that Jiro really was expecting her to operate the engine during the upcoming burn. It might have been the language barrier; but his English was pretty good, and he was being quite persistent in saying things like “you will keep an eye on this thermocouple” and “you might see some flutter in this valve.”
“If you don’t hear from me beyond the thirty-second mark,” he said at one point, “then you are on your own and you will have to initiate shutdown based on observed delta vee.”
“Why would I not hear from you?” Dinah asked. “Where are you going to be?”
“In the boiler room,” Jiro said.
“Why would you go there?”
“Some of the control blade actuators have stopped responding,” he said. “I think that the electronics have been damaged by radiation. It’s okay. We have replacements. But they will have to be installed manually.”
“So you’re going to go down there?”
“Yes,” Jiro said. “And that is where I am going to stay.”
“IT IS FOR ALL PURPOSES EMPTY,” TEKLA REPORTED OVER AN ENCRYPTED voice link to Ivy. “Empty of people. Empty of supplies.”
She, Tom Van Meter, and Bolor-Erdene had spent the last ten minutes searching Arklet 98 from front door to boiler room, under the eye of Sal Guodian. They had arrived via Flivver, docked, and entered 98 without incident. Sal had gone through first, carrying a tablet on which was displayed the first search warrant ever issued under the provisions of the Cloud Ark Constitution. He had been ready to show it to the first person who challenged him. But no one was here.
Tekla, Tom, and Bo had then come in, wearing orange vests improvised from survival kits that, since they’d been designed for use on Earth, had no practical utility anymore. These would serve as police uniforms until something else could be stitched together. With any luck, they wouldn’t be needing a lot of cop gear. But Ivy had been clear, and the others in her ad hoc council had agreed, that if they were executing what amounted to a police action, they couldn’t beat around the bush—couldn’t try to palm it off as an informal visit. A new constitution had to be exercised, or it was just words.
“Can you get it back on the SAN?” Ivy asked, over the voice link. “I’d like to see what’s happening.”
“I’ll reboot everything,” Sal said, pulling himself up into the control couch. “But it depends on what Spencer did—whether he broke it permanently, or just entered a temporary command.” He reached around in back of a panel, felt for a connector, pulled it out, and jacked it back in.
“We had estimated that you were going to find ten person-years worth of nonrenewables in that thing,” Ivy said. She meant, not bulk food (which could be grown in the outer hull space of an arklet) or air (which was renewed by the life support system), but generally smaller items like toiletries, vitamins, medicine, and specialty food. “That was based on circumstantial evidence—the amount of stuff that’s gone missing, the number of Flivver trips and EVAs that have touched that arklet. We always knew it was only a guess. But for it to contain nothing at all is . . . odd.”
“More than odd,” Tekla said. “Surprise attack.”
“You think there’s going to be an attack?”
“Maybe not in sense of violent assault,” Tekla said, “but something.”
“And Arklet 98 was a decoy?”
“Obviously.”
A musical tone sounded from the arklet’s PA speakers, and the white LEDs changed their hue to red. “Alert,” said a synthesized voice. “All personnel should now be awake and at stations for urgent swarm maneuver. This is not a drill.”
They’d heard it before. It was a Streaker Alert.
Normally, though, they took it at face value. “Remarkable coincidence,” Tekla said.
“I think you guys had better get back in the Flivver,” Ivy said. “Follow the usual procedures for one of these, but keep your eyes open.”
“STEVE, DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING YET ON THE BOLIDE?” IVY ASKED. They were about five minutes into the alert, which had obliged them to move down into the Banana. As much as Ivy wanted to know what was happening with J.B.F., and what Tekla had characterized as a “surprise attack,” her responsibility in a case like this one was clear: all of her attentions had to be focused on the evasive maneuvers being carried out by the Cloud Ark and their possible consequences. Those might include collisions between arklets or the separation of one or more arklets from the swarm. In dire case
s it might be necessary to send out rescue teams, which was why her first act had been to get Tekla and the others into their Flivver. For the normal role of that makeshift police service was not to serve warrants on hoarders; it was to respond to emergencies. As keenly as the space geek in Ivy’s soul wanted to pay attention to the scientific phenomenon of the incoming rock, it was a task she had to delegate; and she’d delegated it to Steve Lake as soon as the alert had sounded.
Thus far, the alert had been proceeding as most of them did, which meant that most network activity had been shut down to leave open bandwidth for Parambulator. That system swung into action without human intervention, calculating courses, making suggestions, and gathering data about what the motes in the data cloud were doing. The Parambulator screens were looking pretty angry, but that was normal as almost every arklet fired its thrusters and shunted into a new trajectory. In time it would get sorted out. It always did. But part of the sorting-out process was refining what they knew about the trajectory of the incoming streaker. The closer it came, the more precisely they could track it. By the time it passed through, or near, the swarm, they’d have its parameters dialed in to high precision. And once it had flashed by, all Parambulator had to do was clean up the mess.
Ivy had asked Steve about the bolide for a couple of reasons. One was that hot rocks, by definition, tended to come and go rapidly. This one had been approaching for several minutes—a long time to wait. Another was that Parambulator looked more chaotic than usual. Normally there would be a spray of red in the first couple of minutes. Presently it would begin to fade as the arklets reported that they were out of harm’s way. But in this case, it never seemed to get any better. “Are we having trouble with bandwidth, or—”
“The rock is weird,” Steve said. “Normally I’d expect to see a stream of packets from SI, refining the params as they gathered more data.” He meant Sensor Integration: the department that managed the radars and telescopes.
“And you’re not?”
“Well, I am—but with different numbers.”
“What do you mean, different numbers?”
“It’s like we have two different Streaker Alerts happening at once. The packets are stepping on each other. There’s some kind of crosstalk going on.” Steve sat back from his screen for a moment and tugged his beard. “Just a sec,” he said. “I think that these packets are coming from different sources.”
“But they should all have the same point of origination,” Ivy said. “SI.”
“They claim to,” Steve said, “but I think that some of them are forgeries.”
Feeling his chair shift subtly beneath him, he reached out involuntarily with one hand and held the edge of the table. Izzy was firing her thrusters, coming about to a new orientation, trying to put Amalthea between herself and the bolide—real or imagined.
“You think this whole alert is them spoofing us?”
“It would fit in with Tekla’s theory of what’s going on,” Steve said.
“I’ll try to voice with Doob,” Ivy said. “Work on that forgery hypothesis.”
“MADAM PRESIDENT,” CAMILA SAID, PULLING A HEADPHONE AWAY from her ear. “As you requested, I am informing you that Ivy has figured it out.”
“She knows?” Julia asked.
“Not quite, but Steve Lake has detected the forged packets and is running further analysis.” Camila’s eyes were big and her voice—which was always somewhat impaired by her facial injuries—was thick and dry.
Julia threw her a shrewd look, then turned to Spencer Grindstaff, who shrugged. “Sooner or later a man of Steve’s talents was bound to—”
“I don’t care about that,” Julia cut in. “I want to know whether our gambit has bought us enough time.”
“There’s—” Camila began.
Spencer ran Camila off the road. “It has bought us enough confusion. We should be in a position to dock this heptad at the Shipyard in twenty seconds.”
“There’s another bolide!” Camila squeaked. “I think.”
Julia shook her off, keeping her focus on Spencer. “Where is the triad?”
“Already there,” Spencer said.
“The spacewalkers?”
“Suited up, out of the airlocks, in position.”
“Still. The assembly. The integration. It will take time.”
“Madam President, if I may,” Paul Freel broke in. “All we need is to slap her together—with zip ties, if that’s what it takes—and achieve separation from the Shipyard. A small thruster burn will do it. Izzy doesn’t have phasers to blast us out of the sky! They could send a Flivver after us, but what are they going to do? All we need is to get clear. Then we can spend days prepping Red Hope before we embark on the mission in earnest.”
“I wouldn’t put anything past that Tekla.”
“Say what you will about her, she’ll follow orders,” Paul said.
“Well, as a stay-behind supporter of your expedition, I will be happy to run interference for you until you can get cleanly away,” Julia said.
Through the heptad’s structure, a programmed series of whirrs and clunks resonated as it docked with a port on the long truss projecting to the side of the Caboose: the heart of the Shipyard, rich in airlocks and anchoring points. Docked at the next port along was a glinting, angular framework: the skeleton of Red Hope, awaiting its final components. It sported four large propellant tanks clustered around a knot of pumps, valves, actuators, and sensors that fed a rocket engine centered below.
“Madam President?” Ravi asked. “I’m afraid the time is now. Unless you want to go to Mars. Which you would be welcome to do.”
Julia snapped to attention. She had been checking herself in the mirror of her compact. Hardly glamorous, but by Cloud Ark standards, her appearance would do.
“It is tempting,” Julia said, “but I have responsibilities here, I’m afraid.” She snapped the compact shut and glanced over, verifying that Camila was ready to shoot video on her phone. She was, but she still had that rattled look on her face. What had come over her? They’d have to have a heart-to-heart later.
“Very well,” Ravi said, with a note of regret that sounded only a little forced. “Perhaps you’ll be wanting this.”
He held out a sheet of paper. Taking it from him, Julia recognized it as the presidential seal, much the worse for wear. Ravi had carefully peeled it from the wall, bringing most of its rectangle of blue tape with it. Julia smoothed it out and tucked it under one arm.
Slowly drifting away from her, Ravi snapped out a salute.
Julia returned it. “Godspeed, Ravi. I look forward to hearing your first transmission from the surface of Mars.”
“And I look forward to sending it, Madam President.”
“We shall meet again, I feel. Somehow the intrepid people of the Cloud Ark will find a way, in spite of all opposition, to win through to the realm of clean space and follow Red Hope to a better place.”
Ravi was one of those who could never quite tell when he was dismissed. He began to mumble out a stirring response, but Julia glanced at Camila to let her know that she could stop recording, then propelled herself toward the nose of the White Arklet. Camila followed in her wake.
After a few moments of squirming through tubes, they emerged from the port into one of the modules that made up the Shipyard. It was something of a madhouse. The total roster of the Red Hope expedition was two dozen. Most of those were already aboard the heptad or the triad, waiting to be mated with the vehicle’s frame, but a few were “outside” in space suits and several were in here, engaging in hasty conferences or shoving bundles of supplies about.
Adding a bizarre note were four members of the General Population—apparently Shipyard workers—who had been zip-tied, hands behind backs, to convenient attachment points around the inside of the module. Most looked fine, but one man had a stream of small blood globules drifting away from a laceration on his eyebrow. Paul Freel had mentioned in passing that several of the MIV team had become
unwitting accomplices, helping to assemble the frame of Red Hope on the understanding that it was part of a backup plan to rescue Ymir. Apparently they had changed status to witting, and raised objections.
The bleeding man was staring at Julia through the eye that hadn’t swollen shut. “Julia!” he called out.
In an odd way Julia had nothing to do. The other Martians were busy shoving their hoarded supplies through the port into the heptad. One by one the Martians were following suit, and so the space was rapidly clearing out. She ignored the bleeding man at first. But it got to the point where only one Martian—Paul Freel himself—was remaining. Lacking Ravi’s feel for ceremony, he was checking off items on the screen of his tablet, paying Julia no attention whatsoever.
“Julia!” the zip-tied man said again. He wasn’t shouting. His tone was almost conversational.
“Yes,” she finally said.
“What’s your friend’s name?” he asked, nodding toward Camila.
Julia bridled for a moment at the impertinent request, then remembered that it was never too late to turn an enemy into a friend. “Her name is Camila,” she said. “And let me say, sir, that I am shocked and dismayed to see what has occurred to you. Let me assure you that—”
“Hey, Camila!” the man said.
“Yes?” Camila answered, sounding very much the scared eighteen-year-old girl.
“Your friend is crazy,” the man told her.
“Madam President?” Paul asked, before Julia had time to react.
She turned toward Paul, her face burning.
“If you would do the honors?”
“What honors?” Honestly, these engineers. Was she supposed to break a bottle of champagne over it?
“Close the hatch when I have gone through. Then we can undock.”
“Happy to.”
“See you on Mars.” He stuck his hand out. She grasped it lightly and gave it a little shake. Camila, rattled by the exchange with the bleeding man, had forsaken her duties as camera operator.