Bolor-Erdene was flying the ship, working in the Hammerhead — the deeply sheltered control room that they had built into the lee side of Amalthea. Or at least she was on the duty roster as the nominal pilot. Distinctions of rank and specialty had ceased to matter much. Everyone who had survived — nine men and nineteen women — knew how to do everything: fly the ship, fix an arklet engine, go on a space walk, program a robot. The Doob of a few years ago would have ridden it out in the Hammerhead with her, looking over her shoulder, checking the params, swapping witty remarks in the occasional moment of downtime. The Doob sitting in the Banana right now had seen it all before, thousands of times, and knew that it was as routine to Bo, or to any of the survivors, as driving to work would have been before Zero. Being there would only have gotten his stomach riled up. He needed to conserve his energy.
He realized that he had dozed off. Opening his eyes and focusing, with some effort, on the screen, he saw that nearly an hour had passed since apogee. They were falling toward Earth for the last time.
His phone rang. Held at arm’s length it was blurry, but some vestigial part of his brain could still recognize the smear of pixels as a snapshot of Bo, taken years ago. He swiped it on and answered it.
“We are being contacted by the Swarm,” Bo said.
“Are we really?” he answered. Suddenly he was awake. “What does J.B.F. want?”
“It’s not J.B.F. It’s someone named. .” Bo paused. “A-ida. Or something. Two dots on the i.”
Doob tried to place the name. Aïda. He had a vague memory of her from his early days on the Cloud Ark. An Italian girl. Young. Arkie, not GPop. Socially a little weird. Hyperacute in a way that could be exhausting.
“It’s pronounced ‘I-yeeda,’” he told Bo.
“Anyway, they send congratulations on the successful completion of our maneuver, and request a parley. Should I wake up Ivy?”
“I’ll be there in a minute,” Doob said. “Let her sleep.”
He hated to think this way, but the Swarmers well knew what time it was, and which shift Ivy slept on, and that she was sleeping now. Rousting her out of bed would send the wrong message, making the crew of Endurance seem overeager.
Which might have been an excess of caution — a J.B.F.-style exercise of byzantine thinking — he reflected, as he pushed himself up the middle of the Stack. This had become a dingy place, sort of yellowed and shiny with human exhalations, condensed on its ice-cold walls and never really scrubbed off. He was glad he couldn’t see it very well.
They knew so little about the Swarm. From the straggler arklets they’d picked up over the last three years, they knew that J.B.F. had moved swiftly to consolidate her power, exploiting the crisis of the first coronal mass ejection — which had killed something like 10 percent of the population — to set up her own version of martial law. From there the trains had run more or less on time, albeit with a steadily dwindling population, until about a year ago, when some Arkies had begun to rebel and the Swarm had divided into two Swarms, coexisting with each other — as they had little choice — but not talking.
The people of Endurance had paid surprisingly little attention to matters Swarm related, because, in the end, it didn’t really matter that much. The die had been cast on the day of the Break. Not so much on the level of politics as on physics. Those who had stayed behind on Izzy had committed themselves to following Doob’s plan, his life’s work: the Big Ride. You were either aboard Endurance, simultaneously trapped and protected by her mass, or you weren’t. If you were, there was no getting off. If you weren’t, you had to find a way to survive as part of the Swarm, which meant moving to a completely different orbit and following a plan that was incompatible, on an orbital mechanics level, with the Big Ride. Once those orbits had diverged, the only way to reconnect was by effecting a big delta vee. That meant spending a lot of water that you were never going to get back. Less water meant less shielding from coronal mass ejections, limited food production, and hobbled maneuvering when bad rocks came at you. Getting a whole Swarm to agree on that course of action was impossible, and might actually have been a bad idea, since Endurance couldn’t accommodate a lot of refugees. Her mission plan was predicated on her ability to absorb significant bolide strikes without taking serious damage. A bunch of naked arklets following in her wake would soon get beaten to death. So on a physics level alone, the Break had been irrevocable, even had the two groups badly wanted to get together.
But apparently what was left of the Swarm had been watching Endurance. Biding their time, waiting to see whether she would win through.
This Aïda person must understand Doob’s plan. She knew what was at stake now. If the remnants of the Swarm could rejoin Endurance in the next ten days, before she disappeared into the maelstrom of the debris cloud, they had a hope of reaching the comparative safety of Cleft. Otherwise they were condemned to circle Earth in some relatively clean and safe orbit as their population and their water supply dwindled.
Doob swam into the Hammerhead. Three other people were in here: Bo, Steve Lake, and Michael Park, a former Arkie, a gay Korean-Canadian from Vancouver who had found six different ways to make himself indispensable.
“Aïda Ferrari, according to our records,” Bo said, before he asked. “A leader of the anti-J.B.F. faction. Sounds like J.B.F. lost.”
Steve seemed busy. It was good to see him active. He had come down with some kind of long-running bowel complaint, an imbalance in the bacteria that lived in his gut. He had kept the dreadlocks, but they were now bigger than he was. He must weigh less than a hundred pounds. But his fingers still flew over the keys of his laptop.
Bo had already turned her attention back to the business of running the ship, but Michael explained, “Steve’s getting a video feed going. No one’s done it in years.”
He meant that no one had recently been doing it over the old-school S-band radios used for long-range communication between space vehicles. Of course, on the short-range mesh network that the Arkitects had set up to knit the Cloud Ark together, people did it all the time using Scape. But depending on where they were in their orbit, the remnants of the Swarm might be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from Endurance, far out of mesh range, and so they had to use the same sort of pre-Internet technology that the Apollo astronauts had used to send television signals back from the moon.
Eventually Steve did get it going, and then they were treated to a full-face image, in blocky pixels, of a dark-eyed woman with a fine-featured head that had been buzz-cut a few weeks ago and little tended since.
Once Steve did him the favor of throwing it up on a big screen where he could actually see it, Doob saw the obvious signs of malnutrition that had been affecting everyone on Endurance. He was mildly surprised by that. They had tantalized themselves by imagining the Swarm as a cornucopia of agriculture. But maybe it was low on water. The woman’s gaze was downcast, which, as everyone understood, meant that she was focusing on the screen of a tablet below the camera. Once she understood that the link was up and running, she raised her chin and seemed to stare directly into the Hammerhead with a pair of huge dark eyes. The low quality of the video made these seem pitch black, with no distinction between iris and pupil, and starvation had given them a sort of hot gleam.