“It was fratricide,” Ivy said, still reading. “Looks like an arklet got cornered.”
Getting cornered was a problem that had arisen in simulations. The swarm as a whole would look for solutions that would prevent arklets from banging into each other with minimum expenditure of propellant. In a pinch, of course, it was okay to burn a lot of propellant to avoid a collision. But there were situations where a collision was going to happen no matter what, and there was nothing to do for it but choose the least damaging outcome. Getting cornered wasn’t supposed to happen; everything about Parambulator was supposed to prevent it. But the number of possible scenarios was infinite and nothing was ever certain.
“A controlled collision,” Ivy said, “no fatalities. But then some follow-on. Still being evaluated. There might be loose debris drifting around. That’s why he wants me to fly it in manually.”
“What kind of debris?” Dinah asked. “Hard stuff or—”
“Thermal protection, looks like,” Ivy said. “So that’s good.”
Apparently one of the modules, or an arklet, had lost some of the layers of reflective foil and insulation that were used to shield it from the heat of the sun. The stuff was feather light and so probably didn’t pose much of a threat to the Flivver. But it would look huge on radar and make Parambulator go crazy.
Ivy, in the pilot’s chair, was monopolizing the only window. Dinah didn’t like flying blind, so she pulled up the interface for the Flivver’s eyeball camera.
Julia began to make a weird repetitive noise, a sort of wet, gurgling drone.
She was snoring.
“Long day for her, I guess,” Ivy remarked.
“Yeah.” Dinah had no precedents to tell her how she should feel toward the ex-president at a time like this. On the one hand, her behavior had been reprehensible. On the other, she had, within the last few hours, lost her husband, her daughter, her country, and her job.
With a few moments’ panning around, Dinah was able to center Izzy in the camera’s frame, then zoom in. Izzy was on the night side of the Earth just now. In normal times — or what used to be normal — it would have been dark, but now she was lit up from below by the red glow of the atmosphere, punctuated from time to time by bluish flashes, like lightning strikes, as large bolides plowed into the air three hundred kilometers below. Of course, Dinah had never seen Izzy so illuminated, and it took a bit of getting used to.
From a distance Izzy looked fine, but at higher magnification Dinah began to see visual noise that gradually resolved into drifting bits of debris — the shredded thermal protection that Ivy had mentioned.
Izzy had become unfathomably complicated in the last two years. Dinah rarely saw it from a distance, so she didn’t have a strong sense of what was normal. But the more she zoomed in, the more certain she became that something weird had happened on the nadir side, near the junction of Zvezda and Zarya.
Complicated though she might be, Izzy was complicated in a way that was orderly, stiff, and stable. The one exception to that rule was Amalthea, but even that had become more regular as the Mining Colony’s robots had reshaped it. What Dinah was zooming in on now was messy, and it was unstable: big expanses of thermal shielding material that had been torn loose and were now stirring randomly in the nearly imperceptible wind. At a glance, it did not look like a serious matter. “Serious” would have meant a hull breach, air erupting from a hole, perhaps dragging debris, or even human bodies, along with it.
“I’m thinking maybe a grazing impact at most,” Dinah reported. “A near miss between an arklet, or something, and the nadir side of Zvezda. Destroyed some thermal shielding but caused little if any structural damage.”
“They are reporting zero serious casualties,” Ivy said. “Some bumps and sprains aboard an arklet. So maybe you’re right.”
“Maybe,” Dinah said. For they had now drawn close enough that the camera could provide more detail. What had been exposed by the damage to the thermal shielding looked unfamiliar to her at first glance: a big T-shaped construct that jutted out to the nadir side of the Stack like a pair of handlebars. It was studded with many long neat rows of small, identical objects, gleaming in the occasional flashes from below.
Finally it all snapped into place in her head: she was looking at Moira’s thing. The HGA, the Human Genetic Archive. Moira had given her a tour once, but that had been from the inside, or enclosed and pressurized part of it. Now Dinah was seeing the same thing from the outside. Until now, this had always been concealed from view by the thermal shielding. Once that was torn away, its internal structure could be seen: the rows and rows of hexagonal sample racks, each carrying its load of deep-frozen sperm, ova, or embryos, waiting in the near-absolute-zero cold and dark of space.
“How has Moira been doing with the dispersal project?” Dinah asked, forcing her voice to sound relaxed.
“Well. . obviously, the schedule got compressed when we learned about the Eight Ball. Just like all of our other preparations did. But I guess my real answer is that I don’t know,” Ivy said.
Ymir
“. . AND THEN THE FORCE OF THE VACUUM CAUGHT HOLD OF THE hatch, and to my horror I saw it slam shut right in front of me! I tried to pull it back open, but the suction was too strong. I cannot tell you, Markus, how helpless and guilty I felt when I realized that Dinah was trapped on the other side.”
Markus’s eyes went to Ivy. He had been listening to Julia for a long time, and needed a break.
Ivy threw her hands up. “I was trying to fly this ungainly contraption. I didn’t really understand what was happening even when Julia tried to explain it to me.”
“Yes,” Markus said, “I can’t believe you were able to fly that thing at all. People will be talking about it a hundred years from now.”
Assuming people still exist, Dinah thought.
Ivy was just regarding Markus, blinking slowly, looking for signs that he was being sarcastic. He wasn’t. The Markus bluntness worked both ways: he could blurt out astonishingly generous compliments as easily as he could cut and burn you with his words.
“It sure used up all of my brain,” Ivy said.
They were sitting around the conference table in the Tank. Markus had not used the term “inquest” to describe this meeting, but that was clearly what it was. Or as close as they would ever get, in any case, to a formal determination of what had happened yesterday. It had gotten off to a reasonably brisk start with a summary from Markus, then gone off the rails as Julia had insisted on telling her story “from the beginning”—which turned out to mean from the moment she had woken up in the White House next to her late husband and gone down to breakfast with her late daughter, straight through to the end of the world, and her hastily arranged launch into orbit, some thirty-six hours later. Along the way had been a sequence of mishaps and coincidences just shaggy enough to be somewhat plausible. No liar could fabricate such a story. The narration had lasted for the better part of an hour despite Markus’s increasingly frequent and obvious glances at his Swiss watch, and left all the others in a strange combination of spellbound, bored, horrified, and bemused.
She seemed to believe that they would actually care about all of her interactions with those dead people on that dead planet. It was a common enough mistake among new arrivals. In her case it was magnified considerably by the fact that she was used to being the president. Everyone was always happy to sit and listen to the most powerful person in the world.
“Thank God,” Julia said, “that we were able to—”
“Yes,” Markus said, cutting her off. Plainly he did not wish to hear any more from Julia. But just as plainly he was a little reluctant to move on to the next part of the story.