Busy there?
You know it. Racking and stacking the big boys, getting ready for the Surge.
Doob wondered how it worked. What was to prevent desperate people from rushing the launch pads, trying to cram themselves aboard the last of those big boys? Like the last chopper out of Saigon, people dangling from the skids as soldiers punched them in the face. Or was he underestimating human nature? Maybe it was all perfectly orderly down there.
I need you here. That one was from Markus.
Reluctantly, Doob pushed himself away from the window and got turned toward the tube that would conduct him back to the Stack. From there he would make his way back to T3, where Markus was presumably hanging out in the Tank—
Markus Leuker was hovering directly in front of him, face illuminated by the blue light of a phone. He turned it off and slid it into his pocket.
“I don’t mean that I need you in the same room as I,” he said. “I mean that I need your brain here, in space, on the Cloud Ark, not down there. Your family is dead, Dr. Harris.”
“Dead. But still talking,” Doob said, feeling the start of a slow burn that might lead to him punching Markus in the nose, if only he could get to a place with gravity.
“What is it you think they would most like to hear back from you?” Markus asked. “Lovey-dovey stuff? They know you love them. Were I in their position, you know what I would like to hear? I would like to hear ‘Sorry, my darling, but I am very busy just now ensuring the survival of our species.’ May I suggest you text something in that vein and then join me in the Tank; we have matters to discuss.”
And Markus Leuker, using one of the ropes that were strung across the Woo-Woo Pod as handholds, propelled himself toward the exit. As he passed through into the tube, Doob saw his silhouette against the circle of light, a Da Vinci Man, just for a moment. Then two others swung in behind him and spoiled the effect. That detail caught his attention. Markus now had an entourage. Or perhaps a bodyguard.
Hard Rain
LIKE ANY GOOD STORM, THE HARD RAIN BEGAN WITH A SUDDEN thunderclap: a kilometer-wide rock that lit up eastern Europe with eerie, silent flashes as it skidded in across the upper atmosphere before digging into thick air somewhere around Odessa. Its trail set fire to dry leaves and combustible litter in the Crimea, then painted a long brushstroke of burning buildings and forests across the northeast rim of the Black Sea, ending with a long elliptical crater in the steppe between Krasnodar and Stavropol. The former city was first set on fire by radiant heat from the sky and then flattened by a blast wave. The latter got only the blast, followed by a rain of ejecta. Both disappeared from human ken.
After a few hours’ respite, smaller bolides began to come down. They landed all over the world, but most often in the lower latitudes, close to the equator. Having been told, long in advance, that this would be the case, many people had moved toward the poles in recent months, prompting Rufus MacQuarie and his friends, family, and associates to establish a defensive perimeter around their works in the Brooks Range. That was a terrible place in November. The only refugees likely to make it up that far would be well equipped and well prepared, but those were exactly the kinds of uninvited visitors that Rufus didn’t want creeping around. Unencumbered by the limits on bandwidth that applied to all the other radios in the Cloud Ark, Rufus and Dinah had kept up their Morse code correspondence during the three-day “grace period” between the White Sky and the Hard Rain. Rufus was still transmitting from his truck, which he had parked before the entrance to the mine. He had considered erecting a larger antenna on the top of the mountain and hooking it up to an underground transmitter via armored cables, but Dinah, after surveying the predicted effects of the Hard Rain, had told him not to waste his time.
Ivy had said goodbye to the Maternal Organism several days earlier, immediately before the Morg had swallowed her government-issue euthanasia pill. The one person on Earth she was still in touch with was Cal, aboard his submarine, keeping station on the surface offshore of the Norfolk Naval Base, out where the water got blue enough to facilitate a deep dive when the time came. In those days Ivy’s main link to her family came through music. For the Morg had given five-year-old Ivy a choice between becoming the best pianist in Southern California or the best violinist in Southern California, and Ivy had opted for the violin. She had never become the best in Southern California, or even close to it, but she had played in various youth orchestras and developed some familiarity with the classical orchestral repertoire. She had a violin aboard Izzy, which she would tune up and play from time to time.
When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tiananmen Square, the Potala Palace, the Great Pyramids, the Wailing Wall. After sampling all of them she locked her radio dial on Notre Dame, where they were holding the Vigil for the End of the World and would continue doing so until the cathedral fell down in ruins upon the performers’ heads and extinguished all life in the remains of the building. She couldn’t watch it, since video bandwidth was scarce, but she could imagine it welclass="underline" the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, its ranks swollen by the most prestigious musicians of the Francophone world, all dressed in white tie and tails, ball gowns and tiaras, performing in shifts around the clock, playing a few secular classics but emphasizing the sacred repertoire: masses and requiems. The music was marred by the occasional thud, which she took to be the sonic booms of incoming bolides. In most cases the musicians played right through. Sometimes a singer would skip a beat. An especially big boom produced screams and howls of dismay from the audience, blended with the clank and clatter of shattered stained glass raining to the cathedral’s stone floor. But for the most part the music played sweetly, until it didn’t. Then there was nothing.
Paris is gone, she texted. Through the military systems, which were patched in with NASA’s, she could still communicate with Cal.
Dive bbs, he answered. Which by itself was pretty enigmatic, but she knew its meaning: the submarine had to dive below the surface for a little while, to avoid some danger, but he expected he’d be back soon.
But he might be wrong about that. She might never hear from him again. She decided it was long past time. She texted him a message that he would find waiting when and if his boat returned to the surface: I release you from your vow.
Then she felt a strange wave pass through her body, almost as if she were in a submarine in the Atlantic when a pressure wave rolled through from some distant meteor strike. She assumed it was an emotional reaction to what she had just done. But then she noticed that every loose floating object in her workspace was drifting in the same direction, toward the wall against which she had braced her back. Pops and creaks and groans propagated through Izzy. The space station was accelerating gently, at just a fraction of a gee. The thrusters must be firing.
The lights had turned red. The PA speaker in her module emitted a slight pop as it came on. “Alert,” said a synthesized voice. “All personnel should now be awake and at stations for urgent swarm maneuver. This is not a drill.”
So it had happened. They had been practicing this for months. But this was the first real Streaker Alert. It meant that a bolide had been detected by SI — the Sensor Integration team — on an unusual trajectory that might pose a danger to Izzy unless the course was corrected slightly.