Seveneves: A Novel (14 page)

Margie Coghlan showed up to watch the final preparations. She was an Australian physiologist who had been sent up to Izzy a few months ago to study the effects of spaceflight on human health. Dinah had always found her a little brusque, but maybe that was just an Australian thing. She brought with her a box of medical supplies and surgical equipment. All the astronauts on the ISS had medical training. Dinah and Ivy had done their time working in Houston emergency rooms stitching up trauma victims and setting bones. But Margie was the best.

“Not exactly what you signed on for,” Dinah said.

“None of us is getting what we signed on for,” Margie observed.

“With the possible exception of Tekla,” said another voice. Ivy’s. She was not in Dinah’s shop—that was full now with Dinah, Bo, and Margie—but she was in the adjacent SCRUM.

“Ivy, you ready to set another record?” Dinah asked.

“Ready to try,” Ivy said.

This was Q code for the number of women on the space station at one time. The old record had been four, set in 2010. They had tied it months ago when Margie and Lina had come up to Izzy, joining Ivy and Dinah. They had broken it when Bo had turned up in the Soyuz launch three weeks ago. Tekla would make six, if they could only get her through the airlock.

Or the number might drop back if this went wrong.

“Bo, thanks for helping. You should probably go out with Ivy.”

“Good luck,” Bo said, and, pushing off from the inner hatch of the airlock, drifted across Dinah’s shop and out through the hatch into the SCRUM, where Ivy hovered, waiting.

“Everything sealed up behind you?” Dinah asked, more out of nervousness than anything else. It was out of the question that Ivy would get that wrong. Since the breakup of the moon, they’d intensified their precautions anyway, keeping the various modules of Izzy separated by airtight hatches wherever possible so that the perforation of one module by a bolide wouldn’t lead to the destruction of the whole complex.

Ivy didn’t answer.

“You know what to do with that hatch if this all goes sideways,” Dinah went on.

“You talk a lot when you’re nervous,” Ivy said.

“I concur,” Margie said. “Are we going to do this or not? That woman might be asphyxiating out there.”

“Okay. Giving her the signal now,” Dinah said.

In the space program that she had dreamed of when she’d been a little girl with a “Snoopy the Astronaut” poster on the ceiling of her shack in the hinterlands of South Africa, or watching live feeds from the space station on satellite TV in western Australia, the signal would have been a terse utterance into a microphone, or a message struck out on a keyboard. But what she actually did was drift over to
her little window and peer through fourteen layers of milky translucent plastic at Tekla, almost close enough to reach out and touch, and give a thumbs-up.

Tekla nodded and held up a small object next to her head. It was a folding knife with a belt clip and a lanyard, which she had prudently wrapped around her wrist. Using one thumb she snapped its serrated blade open.

Dinah nodded.

Tekla nodded back, then drifted out of view, headed toward the airlock.

“Here she comes,” Dinah said.

She had already sized Margie up as a woman of some physical strength. She was stocky, but in a powerful rather than a flabby way.

Dinah got a grip on the mechanical linkage that would swing the outer hatch of the airlock closed. “Brace me,” she said.

She was worried about all that plastic. Shreds of it were certain to get caught in the hatch’s delicate seal.

The principle was simple enough. She’d run through it in her head a hundred times. If Tekla cut a slit, a few inches long, through the innermost layer of the Luk, air would rush out into the space between it and the next layer, which was at a lower pressure. If Tekla put her head and shoulder into that slit, she’d become like a cork in a champagne bottle, and the pressure would try to force her out. If she then cut a slit through the next layer, and the next, and the next, a wave of pressure would build up behind her and spit her out like a watermelon seed. And as long as she kept aiming for the white LED on the airlock’s inner hatch, she would be projected into that airlock.

At that point she’d be naked and unprotected in the middle of a jet of air that would be exploding away from her into the vacuum. And at that point—

There was a whoosh and a meaty thunking impact.

“Jesus Christ, I think that was it,” Margie said.

“She is out,” Bo confirmed. Bo, out in the next compartment, had a tablet on which she was watching a video feed from a nearby Grabb. “I mean she is in the airlock.”

Dinah hauled on the handle, swinging the outer hatch closed. Her body, in accordance with Newton’s Third Law, moved in the opposite direction, stealing her force, but Margie’s arms caught her in a bear hug and pushed back—Margie had found a way to brace herself.

Bo gasped. “You are smashing her foot!”

“Oh, shit.”

“Her foot is sticking out.”

“Dinah,” Ivy said, “you have to open the hatch a little, her foot’s caught.”

Dinah relaxed her arms. What if Tekla was unconscious? What if she was unable to draw herself up into the fetal position they’d shown her in that photograph?

The change in Bo’s and Ivy’s tone told her otherwise. “She’s in!” Ivy exclaimed.

“Close the hatch, close it!” Bo was shouting.

Dinah swung the handle all the way around and snapped it into its locked position. It didn’t feel quite right, but at least it was closed.

Meanwhile Margie was actuating the valve that let air into the airlock. This was supposed to be a gradual process, but she just let it go explosively, with a sudden movement of the air that tugged at their diaphragms and popped their ears.

“Blood is coming out,” Bo said dully. “Leaking out of the hatch.”

“Fuck!” Dinah said. Because that meant two bad things at once: the outer hatch wasn’t really closed, and Tekla was hurt.

“Let’s get it open,” Margie said.

In the end it took all four of them: Dinah, Margie, Bo, and Ivy, all crammed into the space with their fingers under the rim of the hatch, pushing against the wall with all the strength in their legs and
their backs, to break the seal. Whereupon air whooshed out of the compartment and the hatch flew open, like when you finally break the seal on a vacuum-packed jar and the lid flies off.

Tekla was in there, drawn up into the prescribed fetal position, a solid mass of red.

They all stared at her speechless for a moment.

Her head moved. She turned her face up toward them, revealing a huge red smear where an eye ought to have been.

The only thing that kept Dinah from screaming like a little girl was her gorge rising up into her throat. Bo drew in a long breath and began muttering something.

Tekla’s hands unfolded and gripped the rim of the chamber. The lanyard of the knife was still wound around her right wrist. The handle of the knife trailed after it. Dinah supposed that its blade had been snapped off until she understood that the whole thing had become embedded in Tekla’s forearm.

Tekla pulled herself out a few inches, then stopped. Her head was now projecting into the room.

An eye opened. A bloodshot eye in a bloody face. But a normal, working eye.

Dinah’s ears began working again and she realized that she was hearing a loud hissing noise. It was the sound of air escaping from the International Space Station, not through a huge leak but through small gaps in the airlock’s outer seal. The air was flowing past Tekla’s body, creating a vacuum behind her, a vacuum she had to fight in order to advance into the room.

She felt embarrassed then, in the manner of a hostess who forgets to properly welcome a guest, and she reached down and grabbed one of Tekla’s hands. Margie got the other and with a final sucking, squelching noise they dragged Tekla’s blood-lubricated form out of the airlock chamber and into the space station.

Dinah half closed the inner hatch of the airlock. The Big Hoover,
as old-school astronauts referred to the vacuum of space, took care of the rest, and slammed it closed with frightening violence.

They’d lost a measurable percentage of the atmosphere in this module. Not enough to cause oxygen deprivation but more than enough to set off alarms all over Izzy, and all the way down to Houston.

Maggie got to work on Tekla’s arm, which was bleeding quite a lot, while Ivy and Bo, now blue-gloved, cleaned off her face with towelettes. The picture was getting clearer. The basic idea had worked. Tekla’s knife work had been true and well aimed, and perhaps more effective than was really good for her. She had been spat out of the Luk’s outermost layer, and into the airlock chamber, with great force, slamming her face into a metal fitting along the way and opening up big lacerations above and below the eye. These had bled profusely. In the same moment the blade of her knife had caught on something and turned back on her and been jammed into her forearm. She had lain dazed for a moment, one leg hanging out the open hatch as Dinah had tried to close it on her, then had come to and drawn herself up as planned. For a few moments during all of this she had been exposed to vacuum, which hadn’t done her bleeding wounds any favors, but air had rushed into the lock and equalized the pressure before irreparable damage could be inflicted.

As Dinah had worried, scraps of plastic had gotten caught in the outer hatch’s gasket, accounting for those hissing air leaks. But most of them drifted off into space when she swung the hatch back open again, and the remaining bits, stuck to the gasket by Tekla’s freeze-dried blood, she was able to pick clean using a programmed swarm of Nats. She ended up leaving that project as an exercise for Bo, who was climbing the robot learning curve with remarkable speed.

She drifted down the length of Izzy to the Hub and thence out to the torus, where Maggie, getting advice from trauma surgeons down in Houston, was working on Tekla’s arm. This was a lot easier in
the weak gravity of the torus—no globules of blood drifting around. Lina Ferreira and Jun Ueda, both also life scientists, were filling in as assistants.

Ivy was in her office fielding a shit storm of angry reaction from people down in Houston.

They were doing the surgery under local anesthesia, so Tekla was awake. They’d cleaned her up, and closed the lacerations around her eye socket with butterfly bandages and Krazy Glue. The silvery-blond stubble that covered her scalp was still darkened with coagulated blood along that side. The whites of her eyes were red, and she had thousands of tiny red marks all over her face. Dinah had been warned to expect those. They were called petechiae: broken capillaries just under the skin, caused by exposure to vacuum. But from the way her eyes moved in their sockets and focused on things, Dinah could see that her vision was basically intact.

“That was uncalled for,” Tekla said to her.

“True,” Dinah said.

“I shall be in trouble.”

“So are we,” Dinah said, nodding in the direction of Ivy’s office. “We are all in trouble . . . with a bunch of dead people.”

Tekla reacted very little, but among Margie and Lina and Jun there was a collective intake of breath, a momentary halt in the proceedings.

“Margie,” said a Texan voice from the ground, “this dead surgeon would like you to clamp off that arteriole before it starts bleedin’ again.”

“Those of us who are going to live,” Dinah said, “have to start living by our own lights.”

“THE ICEMAN COMETH.”

“Ah.” Rhys sighed. “I was wondering which of us would be first to go there.” He pulled out, drifted away, and did a peel-and-knot on the condom so expertly that it created dark stirrings of jealousy in Dinah’s heart. But at least he didn’t let anything get loose in Dinah’s shop.

“This may have been your last delivery,” Dinah said. “Of ice, that is.”

“You’ve got your freezer?”

“Coming up on tomorrow’s launch from Kourou.”

“Any chance of getting them to send up a martini shaker with it?”

“We use plastic bags for that.”

“Well, I hope that my deliveries—of ice, that is—have contributed something to whatever the hell you’ve been doing.”

“Check this out,” she said. She’d already wrapped herself in a blanket, but now she prodded the wall with a toe and drifted over to her workstation. With a bit of clicking around she brought up a
video. The opening shot was stark: a cube of ice in a black chamber, lit up by bright but cold LEDs.

“From Arjuna HQ, I presume?” Rhys, still naked, came up behind her and wrapped an arm around her waist. She liked to think of it as an affectionate gesture. In part it was. But she’d been in zero gee long enough to understand that he also just didn’t want to drift away while watching the movie.

“Yes.”

A bearded strawberry-blond man entered the frame carrying a sheet of corrugated cardboard—the lid of a pizza box.

“That’s Larz Hoedemaeker, I think—one of the guys I’ve been working with a lot.”

Larz angled the pizza lid slightly toward the camera. It was mostly covered by iridescent fingernail-sized objects, like silicon beetles. Hundreds of them.

“That’s a lot of Nats,” Rhys remarked.

“Well . . . the whole point is to make a swarm.”

“I understand. But it seems they’ve found a way to ramp up production.”

Larz folded the cardboard diagonally to make it into a crude trough and then angled it down toward the block of ice. The Nats avalanched down and tumbled onto it in a heap. Quite a few of them skittered off and tumbled onto the floor. Larz exited the frame for a moment, then returned, pushing a wheeled swivel chair. He arranged this behind the block of ice, then disappeared again, then came back carrying a clock that he had apparently just taken down from the wall of an office. He balanced this on the seat of the swivel chair, leaning back against its lumbar support, so that it was clearly visible in the frame of the video. Then he departed.

A few moments later the lights got much brighter. “Simulating solar radiation,” Dinah explained. “The Nats are solar powered, so the only way to test them is to have a light source as bright as the sun.”

The clock’s minute hand now began to sweep forward. “Time lapse?” Rhys asked.

“Yeah. This stuff happens slowly, as you’ve seen.”

The Nats that had scattered to the floor scurried around aimlessly for a bit, then seemed to find the block of ice, and scaled its vertical sides. “Pretty good adhesion, you’ll note,” Dinah said.

Meanwhile the heap of Nats on top spread out like a pat of butter softening on a pancake, distributing themselves in a somewhat random but basically even layer atop the ice block. A few of them appeared to sink into the ice. “Melting their way in?” Rhys asked.

“No. Uses too much energy—and wouldn’t work in zero gee. They are mechanically tunneling. See the piles forming?” She pointed to the top of the ice block, where mounds of white had begun to form around the exits of the tunnels. “That is spoil being carved out and ejected by the tunneling Nats.”

“You can’t make mounds in zero gee either,” Rhys pointed out.

“One thing at a time!” she said, elbowing him. “The other guys are working on it, see?” She used the cursor to point out another Nat that was making its way along the surface. It seized hold of some little ice grains from a mound, then backed away and headed toward the edge of the ice block.

“How’s it doing that?” Rhys asked.

“You know how when your hand is wet and you reach into the freezer and pick up an ice cube, it’ll stick to your skin? That’s all there is to it,” Dinah said. “And that is also how they crawl around on the ice without falling off.”

The minute hand on the clock began moving faster, and even the hour hand could be seen sweeping around now. The surface of the ice block became pitted and then began to sink toward the floor as material was removed. But at the same time, one edge of the block developed a bulge that grew into a cantilevered prong, like the horn on an anvil.

“What are they building?” Rhys asked.

“Doesn’t matter. This is just a proof of concept.”

The growth stopped, the clock dial slowed to normal time, another engineer walked in to snap some pictures of the result. Then the video cut away to a black screen.

“Interesting!” Rhys said.

She grabbed his hand before he could get away. “Hang on. Check out the superfast version.”

This started a moment later. It was just the same movie, shown ten times faster. So it only lasted for a few seconds. The Nats were invisible because of the speed of their movement—just a jittery gray fog that came and went in patches. This drew the eye to the block of ice. Shown at this speed, it looked less like a crystalline slab and more like an amoeba, sinking down at one end while smoothly projecting a pseudopod into space.

“One has to assume,” Rhys said, “that there’s a reason why Sean Probst is so very keen on making ice sit up and do tricks for him.”

“Yeah. But he’s not sharing it with me.”

“Is there any way,” he wondered, “of joining those Nats end to end?”

“Into a chain?”

“Yes. The Siwis are serviceable, but much more complicated than they need to be.”

“You have got chains on the brain. Yes, there’s a way. And you can join them side to side to make a sheet.”

“Uncle John is calling to me from beyond the grave, telling me to make something of his hobby.”

“Well, stay in my good graces,” she said, “and I’ll let you play with some.”

As of A+0.56, the Hub module around which the torus spun was no longer the aft-most part of Izzy. They called it H1 now. A larger
hub, called H2, had been sent up on a heavy-lift booster from Cape Canaveral and mated with it.

H2 had originally been planned as the basis of a large space tourism operation. Rhys’s original mission, for which he’d been planning and training for two years, had been to get that up and running. It had a new purpose now, of course, but functionally it would look the same: H2, the big central module, with a new and larger torus rotating around it. That new torus, inevitably called T2, was going to be assembled in space from a kit of rigid and inflatable parts, some of which had been shipped up packed inside of H2, others to follow later on subsequent launches. For the time being, H2 had four fat spokes extending from it to terminate in stubs where other parts, forming the rim of the wheel, would be added later.

The Scouts by then had achieved their basic mission, which had been to employ the Integrated Truss Assembly as a backbone to support a tree of hollow pipes, each about fifty centimeters in diameter, with wide spots every ten meters or so. A human being, provided they were reasonably fit, and did not suffer from claustrophobia, and did not have too much stuff in their pockets, could move through a tube of that diameter, somewhat like a hamster scurrying through a plastic tube in a cage. The wide spots were there so that two people going opposite directions could pass each other. Spherical modules served as connectors and branch points. The tubes terminated in docking locations where spacecraft of various types could lock on to the space station and establish solid, airtight seals.

For it had been obvious from the beginning that docking sites were going to be, in the lingo of Pete Starling, “the scarce resource,” “the long pole,” “the critical path.” Building rockets, spacecraft, and space suits was no easy matter, but at least these things happened on the ground, where colossal resources could be thrown into beefing up production. An armada of space capsules hurled into orbit would have nowhere to go, however, unless they could dock somewhere. And the docking sites had to be built the hard way: on site, in orbit.

Docking was no joke, and required specific technology, but it was thoroughly understood and it had been done many times. The Chinese space program had standardized on the same system used by the Russians, so their spacecraft, like the Russians’, could dock at the ISS. So far so good. But the fact remained that every manned spacecraft launched into orbit needed to reach a specific destination within a couple of days’ time, before the occupants ran out of air, food, and water. The task of the Scouts, therefore, had been to vastly increase the number of docks in the quickest and cheapest possible way. Docks couldn’t be too close together, so the distances between them had to be spanned by hamster tubes. Bracketed to the outside surfaces of those tubes, and still being installed by fresh waves of Scouts, were runs of plumbing and wiring, and structural reinforcements tied into the adjacent trusses.

The initial tube tree, built between about A+0.29 and A+0.50 by Tekla and the other first-wave Scouts, sported half a dozen docking locations. These were spoken for immediately by the first wave of so-called Pioneer launches: three Soyuz spacecraft, two Shenzhous, and a space tourism capsule from the United States.

Encouraged by the success of the launch that had carried Bo and Rhys, the Russians had found ways to cram five or six passengers on each Soyuz.

The Shenzhou spacecraft was based on the Soyuz design, except larger, and updated in various ways. Like the Soyuz, it was meant to carry a crew of three—but this was based on the assumption that those three would want to return to Earth alive. Modified for one-way trips, each Shenzhou carried half a dozen. And the American tourist capsule brought a complement of seven astronauts.

So, all told, the first wave of Pioneers brought three dozen people to Izzy, more than doubling its population. They were obliged to live in their space capsules, which had their own toilets, CO
₂
scrubbers, and heat rejection systems. This made for crowded conditions, but it was a step up from the Luks.

On A+0.56, when the H2 module came up on the giant Falcon Heavy rocket, Tekla and the other surviving Scouts spent a day pulling out all that had been stuffed inside of it and anchoring it temporarily to the outside of the module. They then moved into H2, turning it into a Scout dormitory and saying goodbye to their increasingly tatterdemalion Luks, which were deflated, patched, folded up, and stored for later use in emergencies.

About two-thirds of the Pioneers had previous experience doing EVAs or had been hastily trained over the last few weeks. There were not enough space suits to go around—these were being produced as fast as possible on the ground—but the existing ones could be shared. Work shifts were shortened from fifteen to twelve hours, and then to eight, so that fresh bodies could be rotated through the available suits two or three times a day. The spacewalkers divided their time between assembling the T2 torus and extending the tube trees to provide docking space for the next wave of launches.

The remaining Pioneers, the non-spacewalkers, devoted themselves to other activities inside the pressurized parts of the space station. Dinah found herself with two assistants: Bo, who had seemingly assigned herself to the task, and Larz Hoedemaeker—the guy from the video. Larz was a young Dutch man who had been pursuing a graduate degree in robotics at Delft when he had been recruited by Arjuna Expeditions. Dinah knew him as a prolific email correspondent, always willing to answer her questions or supply code patches on short notice. Owing to some lapse in communications, she hadn’t even known that he would be one of the passengers on the American tourist capsule that had arrived on Day 52 (for people were now dropping the A+ notation and simply referring to days by their numbers).

All she knew was that a large strawberry-blond man suddenly appeared in her shop, intent on hugging her. This was unusual. To put it mildly, the International Space Station, until now, had never been the kind of place for surprise visits.

Larz had a fistful of chocolate bars in one hand and a camera
in the other, and all manner of stuff was spilling out of the pockets of his coverall: vials of morphine, antibiotics, reels of microchips on paper tape, disposable contact lenses, condoms, packets of dehydrated coffee, tubes of exotic lubricants, spare leads for mechanical pencils, bundles of zip ties. The policy now seemed to be that everyone being packed onto a ship first had to be so laden down with vitamins that they could hardly move.

Larz was an enjoyable person, and his first day on Izzy was pure fun for Dinah, who had not been able to have a face-to-face conversation with a colleague in a year. She showed him around the shop, such as it was, and let him drive robots around on the surface of Amalthea, and brought a few of her “Grimmed” robots in so that he could admire them. For, inspired by Rhys’s comment of a few weeks ago, Dinah had been putting her otherwise idle robots to work making armor for other robots. The orderly way to do it would have been to bring pieces of the asteroid back to her little zero-gee smelter and produce nice little ingots of pure steel, then weld them onto the frames of the Grabbs. But this was making things too complicated. Amalthea was already made out of perfectly sound material. Maybe it was not structural-grade steel, but it was good enough to serve as radiation shielding. So she had just been slicing pieces of it off, leaving them in their original rough shape, and armoring Grabbs with overlapping plates of the stuff. They looked like walking asteroids now.

“It is an art project,” Larz said. For a moment she thought he was trying to insult her. Because she had met a few engineers in her day who never would have combined art and engineering. But his face was happy and guileless, and it was clear that he was paying her a compliment.

Once she’d gotten a bit used to him, she broached the subject that had been on her mind now for several weeks: Why ice? Given that they had direct access to a giant chunk of iron, why was Arjuna
now putting all of its efforts into working with a material that for all practical purposes didn’t exist on Izzy?