Julia Bliss Flaherty, as Ivy now realized, was of the same stripe. Pinned down and obliged to justify herself, she would explain her actions in terms of some altruistic plan. And she might even believe it. But it wasn’t that at all. She was like Ivy’s grandmother. If you paid fealty to her, she would favor you, and your reputation and power would grow among all the others who did likewise. If you sent her off to an arklet and ignored her, you became an enemy of her and of her network. She wielded no power other than that. But, ignored long enough, she could become a mighty foe. Her status as an ex-president — and not just any old ex-president, but the one who had overseen the construction of the Cloud Ark and even used nuclear weapons to protect it — gave her credibility among the Arkies. It had become common to think of those as scattered and demoralized, just waiting for a leader to bring them identity and purpose. Ivy had lost track of whether that was an accurate perception or a self-perpetuating myth spread by J.B.F. In any case, it had taken on the force of reality.
She was sitting across the table from Tekla, wondering whether it would be productive to explain all of these thoughts to her. Would this Russian heptathlete care about, or understand, Ivy’s dead Cantonese grandmother in Reseda?
Maybe. But Tekla came from a tradition in which details were hoarded and dispensed on a need-to-know basis. Presented with too much information, she became baffled, bored, and finally irritated. Toward those who talked too freely, she felt the same sort of contempt as a businessman might feel toward a spendthrift. She just wanted to know what her job was.
The same quality made it difficult to get inside Tekla’s head. But that was okay. In a big organization with a military-style chain of command, you didn’t have to be everyone’s friend and treasured colleague. Markus understood as much, which was why he had ended up running the place. More Ivy’s speed had been the boutique operation that had been Izzy at Zero. Markus would have been terrible at that.
“This thing with Julia is a distraction. Nothing more,” Ivy said. “Much more important things demand my focus. Making a big deal out of it will backfire — give her more power than she deserves. But we can’t ignore what she is doing.”
Tekla was nodding. Good.
“I want you to go and visit her heptad,” Ivy continued. “You will go there in your capacity as Markus’s security chief. Do you understand? It is an official visit. You will explain that there have been problems with the Situational Awareness Network that could have dangerous consequences unless they are fixed. Beyond that, I just want you to listen to her. Because I think that she will try to bring you over to her side. It’s what she does with everyone. You would be a prize catch.”
“If she does as you predict,” Tekla said, “what should be my response?”
It was a measure of Ivy’s naïveté that she didn’t even follow Tekla’s question at first. Then she understood that Tekla was suggesting she might pretend to become one of Julia’s followers. She was volunteering to become a mole in Julia’s network.
Tekla stolidly watched Ivy’s face as Ivy figured it out.
“I would suggest taking no immediate action,” Ivy said. Which, in truth, was Ivy being not so much cagey as timid.
“Of course,” Tekla said, “to show eagerness is poor tactics, it will only arouse her suspicion.”
Ivy said nothing. Tekla explained, “I know many people with such minds.” And you obviously don’t, honey.
“My suggestion is that you report to me in person first and then we will come to a decision.”
“We?”
“I. I will come to a decision.”
“It is good that we meet here. In the Banana,” Tekla said.
“You like it?”
Tekla looked nonplussed. “It is not that I like it. The Banana is more secure.”
“From bolides, you mean.”
Tekla shook her head. “From Grindstaff.” Then she stood up — carefully, so as not to fly up and bang her head on the ceiling — and departed, leaving Ivy alone with a head full of questions. Had she really just embarked on the project of setting up an internal espionage network within the Cloud Ark? How was she going to explain that to Markus? Would he be horrified, or impressed? In either case, how would she feel about his reaction? When the hell was Dinah going to get back so that they could discuss this kind of thing over distilled spirits?
And what had Tekla meant by that last comment, that the Banana was more secure from Grindstaff? It was old, pre-Zero, and so its connection to the SAN was retrofitted and kludgy. Tekla seemed to be suggesting that if Spencer could hack the SAN to the extent of disconnecting Julia’s arklets from it, then maybe he could also hack it to the extent of placing other parts of the Cloud Ark — including the Farm, the Tank, and Markus’s office — under surveillance.
I know many people with such minds, Tekla had said. She was talking about Russian military and intelligence types, accustomed to the byzantine thoughtways of those professions. Perhaps Tekla herself had once been groomed as an intelligence asset. If Tekla really did become a mole in Julia’s network, then how could Ivy be sure that she was a straight-up mole, loyal to Ivy, and not a double agent, loyal to Julia?
THE SCRAPE WITH THE ATMOSPHERE HAD LEFT YMIR TUMBLING slowly as it hurtled away from the Earth on its new orbit. Calculating exactly what that orbit was took them fifteen or twenty minutes, and told them that they had fewer than four hours in which to take actions needed to save their lives.
If all had gone perfectly, the nuclear burn would have slowed Ymir down to the point where a rendezvous with Izzy could then have been achieved with a few small additional delta vees. They had hoped this might happen, but not seriously expected it. The best they could really hope for was to shed some velocity and reduce the height of their apogee.
That figure — the distance separating the Earth and the ship at the top of her orbit — was directly related to how much velocity she had at the bottom. Because Ymir had “fallen” in from an extremely high apogee, far beyond the moon’s former orbit, she had come in screaming hot for her skip off the atmosphere. Every bit of velocity that was killed by the huge nuclear retro-rocket burn, or by friction with the air, translated into a lower altitude at the succeeding apogee, which — depending on how the numbers had worked out — would occur weeks, days, or hours later.
The answer, once they had run the numbers, turned out to be hours.
In one sense, Ymir had missed her target by a mile; the total delta vee she had achieved had been less than a third of what they’d hoped for. And yet this had been enough to bring her apogee down from far beyond the moon’s orbit to a figure only about thrice the altitude at which Izzy circled the Earth.
Likewise, the period — the amount of time it took to complete an orbit — had dropped from seventy-five days to a mere eight hours. The lesson being that huge alterations in those figures could be purchased for comparatively small amounts of delta vee.