The life scientists were Lina Ferreira; Margaret Coghlan, an Australian woman studying the effects of spaceflight on the human body; and Jun Ueda, a Japanese biophysicist running some lab experiments about the effects of cosmic rays on living tissues. Also in that general category was Marco Aldebrandi, an Italian engineer who focused on the more practical matter of running the life support systems that kept the rest of them alive. Of those four, Lina already had a special status in that she had actually done work on swarming. It wasn’t that closely related to what she had been doing on the space station, but now she was going to have to dust it off and make it her life’s work. Sparky gave her carte blanche to hole up in a quiet place and cram her brain with papers on that topic for a little while, getting back up to speed. Margaret and Jun were told to put their more abstract research work out the airlock and work under Marco on readying Izzy for a large expansion in population.
That covered eleven of the twelve. So far, Sparky hadn’t said a word to Dinah.
Meetings had never been her strong suit. She felt like she was playing an away game whenever she sat down in a conference room. Her awareness of this got in the way and turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It had always been thus. The fact that the world was ending changed nothing. As Sparky kept ticking down the list, telling each person what they would be doing in the coming weeks, she kept feeling more and more the point of focus precisely because she hadn’t been focused on yet. And when it became clear that she was last on Sparky’s list, she had a good long while, as he talked to Margaret and Jun and Marco, to wonder what that meant. Being Dinah, her first assumption was that she was considered so important that she was being saved for last. But by the time Sparky finally spoke her name, she had arrived at a different guess as to what was happening. Her heart was already thumping and her pinkies tingling, her tongue bulky in her mouth.
“Dinah,” Sparky said, “you’re indispensable.”
She knew exactly what this meant, in meeting-speak: they would put her out the airlock if they could.
“You have such a wide range of capabilities and we all admire your attitude so much.”
Sparky hadn’t said a word to anyone else about their attitude.
“Obviously, asteroid mining — which you’ve devoted so much of your career to — is a project with a long-term payoff. But we are in short-term mode now.”
“Of course.”
“I am detailing you to assist Ivy and look for ways that you can put your amazing skill set to use in supporting the activities of the others. Fyodor and Zeke can only go on so many space walks. Maybe your robots can be put to use doing things that they can’t.”
“As long as it involves cutting through iron, they’ll be awesome,” Dinah said.
“Sounds great,” Sparky said, missing the sarcasm entirely. In his own mind he was finished with the conversation, tolerating a few moments’ small talk before the after-meeting with Doob and Konrad.
Dinah thought better of herself than this. How could she let herself get into this frame of mind at such a time?
Because maybe there was actually a good reason for how she was feeling.
She was halfway through saying goodbye to Sparky when she pivoted back. “Hang on a sec,” she said. “I respect what you said about short-term mode. I get that. But if, or when, this Cloud Ark thing works, you know what’s next, right?”
Sparky was in no mood. Not so much annoyed with her as bewildered. “What’s next?”
“People need a place to live. And if the surface of the Earth is going to be burned off, we’re going to have to make those living places up here, out of stuff we can get our hands on. Asteroids. Of which we have a lot more now, thanks to the Agent.”
Sparky put his hands over his face, exhaled, and sat motionless for about a minute. When he took his hands away, she could see he’d been weeping. “I wrote half a dozen goodbye letters to old friends and family before this meeting,” he said, “and when it’s over I’m going to keep working my way down the list. Maybe I’ll write half of all the letters I want before their intended recipients get killed by the Hard Rain. The point being, I guess, that I am thinking like the dead man walking that I truly am. Which is wrong. I should be thinking about what you are thinking about. The future that you and a few others may look forward to if all of this other stuff works.”
“You really think we’re looking forward to it?”
Sparky winced. “Not in the sense of thinking that that future’s going to be great but in the sense of at least thinking about it. I don’t disagree with you. But what do you want me to do now?”
“Watch my back,” Dinah said. “Don’t let them ditch Amalthea. Don’t let them cut up all of my robots for spare parts. You want me to work on other stuff for a while, fine. But when the sky turns white and the Hard Rain begins to fall, the Cloud Ark needs to have a viable program for making things out of asteroids or else there is no way people are going to stay alive up here for thousands of years.”
“I have your back, Dinah,” said Sparky, “for what that is worth.” And his eyes strayed in the direction of the door through which the president had exited.
AT A+0, THE TWELVE-PERSON CREW OF THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE Station had included only a single Russian: Lieutenant Colonel Fyodor Antonovich Panteleimon, a fifty-five-year-old veteran of six missions and eighteen space walks, the éminence grise of the cosmonaut corps. This was unusual. In the early years, out of the ISS’s usual crew of six, at least two had normally been cosmonauts. The addition of Project Amalthea and of the torus had expanded the station’s maximum capacity to fourteen, and the number of Russians had typically varied between two and five.
The moon had disintegrated only two weeks before Ivy, Konrad, and Lina had been scheduled to return home, to be replaced by two more Russians and a British engineer.
Since that rocket and its crew were ready to go anyway, Roskosmos — the Russian space agency — went ahead and launched it from the Baikonur cosmodrome on A+0.17.
The Soyuz spacecraft docked at Izzy’s Hub module without incident. Unlike Americans, who liked flying things by hand, the Russians had made docking into an automated process a long time ago.
The Soyuz — the workhorse, for decades, of human space launch — was a stack of three modules. At its aft end was a mechanical section containing engines, propellant tanks, photovoltaic panels, and other equipment that didn’t require an atmosphere. Its forward section was a more or less spherical vessel meant to be pressurized with breathable air, and containing enough empty space for cosmonauts to move around, work, and live. In the middle was a smaller bell-shaped section containing three couches where the space-suited occupants would ride into space and later descend back to Earth cloaked in a fiery comet tail. Accommodations in that section were extremely cramped, but it didn’t matter since it was only used briefly during launch and reentry; the orbital module, which was the larger sphere on the front, was where the cosmonauts spent most of their time. And on its nose was the mating contraption that enabled it to connect with the space station, or any other object suitably equipped.
Until a couple of years ago the Soyuz capsules had usually docked at the aft end of the Zvezda module, which had been the “tail” of the ISS. More recently a new module called the Hub had been attached to the Zvezda, extending the main axis of the space station “rearward,” and providing the axle around which the torus revolved. In order to maintain compatibility with the ubiquitous and time-tested Soyuz, the Hub had been equipped with a suitable port and hatch.