Seveneves: A Novel (59 page)

“They can’t make a break for it without hoarding certain critical supplies,” Ivy said. “We can’t allow people to just ransack our storage facilities for whatever they want. And we have clear evidence that this has been happening. There’s traffic on Spacebook about where to look
if you want to score a box of fresh batteries or scrubber cartridges. So, our basic approach to this is going to be simple. We’ve identified the worst offenders, where hoarding is concerned. I’m going to make an announcement in an hour, explaining how the Cloud Ark Constitution works when it comes to theft of public supplies, and I’m going to offer a twenty-four-hour amnesty during which anyone can turn in stuff that they have been hoarding. As soon as that time is up, Tekla and her team are going to move on one arklet that we know is being used as a storage dump for contraband, and they are going to restore order. And then Sal will step in, as prosecutor, and take whatever action he deems justified.”

“How can you put people in jail when they are already confined to tin cans?” Luisa asked. “How can you fine them when there is no money?”

“We will have to evolve solutions as we go,” Sal said.

Tekla stared him down, then drew her thumb across her throat.

“WELL, THAT SEEMS DEFINITIVE,” JULIA SAID.

She and Spencer Grindstaff were hovering in the middle of the White Arklet. Drifting near them was a laptop whose speakers had been playing the audio feed from the Banana. They could hear the sounds of the meeting breaking up, and people separating into smaller conversations as they moved out of the room. Spencer pulled it closer and whacked the volume button a few times to mute the sound.

“As I said before: hook, line, and sinker.”

“Unless,” Julia said, “they are somehow aware of the fact that we have surveillance on the Banana, and everything we just heard was a sort of radio play staged for our benefit.”

Spencer beamed. “Now,
that
is paranoid! I thought I had it bad, but—”

“Just kidding,” Julia said, a little too quickly. “This is actionable,
Spencer. I believe we are justified in taking everything we just heard at face value. Which means I am comfortable giving good news to the Martians. Are they ready?”

“Yes, they’ve been waiting,” Spencer said, and thumbed out a text message to summon them.

The Martians all had to come via the same hamster tube, so it took a few moments for the core members of the first human expedition to the Red Planet to filter in: Dr. Katherine Quine, whose professional role was obvious; Ravi Kumar, who would be the expedition’s commander; Li Jianyu, who would act as a general science officer; and Paul Freel, an American MIV expert, the head engineer. They, as well as a score of other Arkies waiting in the wings, had sworn an oath that they’d not spend the rest of their lives sealed up in tin cans, but would walk on the surface of Mars or die in the attempt. In their wake came several other members of Julia’s “staff.”

Julia opened the meeting with a few words of greeting and a solemn announcement to the effect that the Mars mission was a go. Once the ensuing round of zero-gee high fives and embraces had trailed off into an awkward silence, she singled out Paul Freel. “Paul, no doubt you’ve briefed these others on the very latest while you were so patiently cooling your heels, but might I know what has been going on with the MIV?”

“Of course, Madam President. As you know, they’re trying to stabilize
Ymir
with—”

“A Rube Goldberg scheme in the form of an ice sculpture. Yes, I know about that.”

Paul chuckled, showing a lot of gum. “Not surprisingly, the powers that be are a little nervous about that and so word came down from on high that we ought to be preparing a backup plan, so we can go pull
Ymir
’s fat from the fire if need be. Well. That couldn’t be better, from a Martian point of view! As you know, we have been planning this mission for years. After Zero, I kept it going as a side
project all through the development of the MIV program, and we managed to grease it in as one of the use cases.”

“Use cases?”

“One of the hypothetical uses to which the MIV kit might eventually be put,” Spencer explained.

“Basically it just gave us an excuse to include a few components, like throttleable landing engines and aeroshield material, that might not have made it in otherwise,” Paul went on. “So, stabilizing
Red Rover
’s design has been a piece of cake.”

“
Red Rover
?”

“Yeah, that’s what we’re calling her.”

“I would like to propose something a little more suggestive of a higher purpose,” Julia said. “
Spearhead
or some such thing.”

This led to an uneasy silence terminated by Camila, who said, “I’ll draw up a list of options and submit it to you right away, Madam President.”

“Thank you, Camila. You understand, Paul, that this mission will have symbolic as well as scientific value, and we want to send the right message to the other Arkies so that they will feel inspired to follow in her wake.”

“Of course! Consider it a working title only,” Paul said. “A code name.”

“It’s not even good as a code name,” Spencer pointed out, “because anyone can—”

“Let’s move on,” Julia said. “You were talking, Paul, about the design.”

“Done. It took, like, a man-day. We just had to make a few tweaks to a preexisting use case to reflect the materials and supplies we actually had on hand.”

“Excellent.”

“But a design is not a ship, of course,” Paul continued, “and until a couple of days ago it would’ve been pretty darn hard to put the
actual propulsion system together without bringing down the wrath of Ivy!”

“That is not a phrase calculated to strike fear into the heart of anyone except those most worshipful of her authority,” Julia remarked, speaking with the gravity that could only be summoned by one who had recently used nuclear weapons on live targets.

Paul cackled. “You know what I’m saying, though—everything happens in a fishbowl here! So, you can imagine the grin on my face when we got the order to begin assembling the
Ymir
rescue MIV.”

“Are the specifications similar?”

“Similar enough. They can both use the same main engine. The thruster packages, the control systems, life support—all of that stuff is completely standardized; it doesn’t change from one use case to another, it’s just a matter of punching different parameters into the code. It’s just a config file!”

Seeing that Julia didn’t necessarily know what a config file was, Spencer put in, “They can essentially download the DNA, if you will, of
Red Rover,
or whatever we end up calling it, into the
Ymir
rescue vehicle with a few keystrokes.”

Satisfied with that, Julia asked, “What of the arklets? The heptad and the triad?”

“Well, they’re already functional, independent space vehicles. Way more than enough space for twenty-four Martians and their vitamins. Obviously, we’ve been stocking up,” Paul said, waving his hands around at the bags of food and other supplies crowding the White Arklet.

“Yes,” Julia said, “but the critical part of the operation is going to be moving them from their default positions in the swarm—which will seem unremarkable as far as Parambulator is concerned—to the propulsion stack that you have been assembling. And that’s going to make a hell of a stink, is it not?”

The smile on Paul Freel’s face became a bit frozen. “We could just go for it,” he said.

“I have a workaround,” said Spencer Grindstaff. “I think we can make this happen. A Streaker Alert is all we need. It’ll go down tomorrow.”

“How do you know there’s going to be a Streaker Alert?”

“Such an event is nothing,” Spencer said, “other than a particular configuration of bits.”

DINAH HAD BEEN DREAMING OF MARS.

As an asteroid miner, she had never been that interested in the distant and inhospitable Red Planet. The politics of the pre-Zero space exploration world had obliged her to show skepticism, even disdain toward those who wanted to go there and to build colonies and terraform the planet. Mars colonists were siphoning attention and resources away from the asteroid miners, who wanted to use easier-to-get resources to make much more human-friendly habitats: space colonies, rotating to provide full gravity, with plenty of water and fresh air.

In any event, it had been a dead issue for two years. But that didn’t prevent Mars from showing up in her dreams, and now infiltrating her daydreams. Almost three years had now gone by since she had walked on the surface of a planet, looked up into a sky, seen a horizon. Intellectually she knew that death would take her, sooner or later, before she did any of those things again. She and everyone else in the Cloud Ark would live out their lives in environments resembling bomb shelters, hospital basements, and research labs. The best they could hope for was to look out a small window at the starry sky. The view of the blue, green, and white Earth had once provided fascination and solace. The orange ball of fire they now circled was such a disagreeable sight that most people actively avoided looking at it. No one was ever going back there. For those who still aspired to go for a walk before dying of old age, Mars was the only hope, be it ever so impractical. People had been talking about it on Spacebook,
and on some of the blogs that had been cropping up on the Cloud Ark’s miniature Internet. Before the loss of
New Caird
had severed
Ymir
’s data link to the Cloud Ark, some of it had trickled through to her tablet, and Dinah read it in idle moments.

At least she
had
some idle moments now. Since the decision to try the scarfed-nozzle approach, they had executed two burns, about twenty-four hours apart, each with a slightly different configuration of the ice nozzle: a canted lip, constructed by the Nat swarm, projecting almost imperceptibly above the aft surface of the shard and bending the torrent of steam slightly. The first of those burns had gotten them spinning the way they wanted to go, though “spinning” might be too strong a word for a rotation that took the better part of a day. During that day the Nats had decamped to the other side of the nozzle’s rim and built a lip there. The second burn, then, had stopped the rotation that the first one had started, and brought them close enough to their desired attitude that the surviving thrusters could handle the details.

Another perigee was coming up soon. This time the nozzle would be aimed the way they wanted it—forward, once again turning the nuclear engine into a powerful retro-rocket. The robots on the inside of the shard had been at work scooping it out, sculpting the walnut-shell architecture that, according to the structural engineering simulations, would enable the whole thing to hold together during the last round of maneuvers. The hoppers were full of ice, with more on the way, and they’d finally learned how to make the system work consistently. Part of that lesson was not to try to accomplish too much with any one burn. It was better to take it easy, set a reasonable delta vee target, get it done and lock it down, then take stock of the situation and plan the next burn at leisure. Consequently their rendezvous with Izzy looked to be happening much later than they’d first expected, and almost every day brought a further postponement. But at the same time it came to seem more and more of a sure thing, less of a wild chance, and this began to affect Dinah’s thinking. Her
robots were doing their work almost entirely on autopilot, leaving her somewhat bored. Vyacheslav, sealed up on the other side of a wall of plastic, could be talked to, but preferred keeping to himself. Jiro, on the other hand, had been working almost around the clock and had been showing signs of strain. Dinah would find excuses to float behind him and look over his shoulder at his screen. Was he playing solitaire? Running orbital mechanics simulations? Writing his memoirs? He seemed mostly to be looking at video feeds of machinery. By process of elimination, this had to be near the core of the reactor.

In the floor of the “bottom”-most level, three stories “below” them, was a manhole giving way to a shaft sunk into the ice. At the far end of that shaft was another hatch providing access to what, on an oceangoing ship of Old Earth, would have been called the boiler room. A small pressurized compartment housed control panels and access ports connected to the reactor, which was only a few meters away, on the other side of a heavy wall. The wall was a radiation shield, at least in theory. But sending up a huge piece of lead hadn’t been an option for the hastily assembled
Ymir
expedition, and so the “boiler room” got washed with neutrons and gamma rays whenever the reactor was used. The radiation detectors that Sean and company had left behind, the last time they’d closed that hatch, didn’t leave much to the imagination. The place was a hellhole now. Fortunately, all the systems connected there had been designed to be operated remotely, from the safety of the command module, so there was no need to go down that ice tunnel and open that hatch.

Their instruments told them they were nearing perigee again. Jiro, assisted by Dinah, executed what they hoped would be the second-to-last burn of the big engine. This went on longer than Jiro had predicted, but it seemed to work.
Ymir
shed most of her excess velocity. Her orbit, at apogee, was now only a few hundred kilometers higher than Izzy’s. In spite of attrition suffered by the robots as they wore out, broke, or succumbed to radiation damage, Dinah still had enough of them to restock the hoppers for the final major burn,
which they calculated would be happening at a perigee a few hours later.

“If you are satisfied with the disposition of your robots,” Jiro said, “I would like to show you how to operate the main propulsion.”

She had grown up in mining camps where older men liked to amuse her, and themselves, by teaching her how to operate heavy machinery, blow things up with dynamite, pilot airplanes, and the like. So Jiro’s offer didn’t seem unusual to her, at first. Teaching people how to do stuff was, among other things, a way to alleviate boredom. But over the course of the next hour it slowly became clear to her that Jiro really was expecting her to operate the engine during the upcoming burn. It might have been the language barrier; but his English was pretty good, and he was being quite persistent in saying things like “you will keep an eye on this thermocouple” and “you might see some flutter in this valve.”