Seveneves: A Novel (67 page)

“So?” Ivy asked.

“Michael saw some weird stuff just now, and drew my attention to it.”

“He’s floating in space!”

“He’s floating in space and checking his email.”

“What weird stuff did he notice?”

“They’re cannibals, Ivy.”

“We already know that.”

“A few hours ago,” Moira said, “they slaughtered Tav and ate what was left of him.”

Dinah was having difficulty focusing on her work.

“They wanted to be well fed for today.”

The time was approaching when the spacewalkers would have to go to their airlocks and get indoors ahead of the storm. Dinah had to focus on them. There was nothing she could do about what Moira
was saying. She began speaking to one of them but was interrupted when Zeke came over the PA again: “Ten survivors aboard. Waiting for J.B.F. to emerge from the hatch.”

“Zeke, be on your toes,” Ivy said. “We have indications they may be up to no good.”

“Get inside,” Dinah said to the spacewalkers. “Head for the nearest airlock. Stay away from the new people, we don’t trust them.”

“Ditching the rock,” Ivy announced. A sharp hiss came through the walls as compressed air flooded the hair-thin gap between the outer surface of the Hammerhead and the surrounding cavity of Amalthea. “Plug your ears.” Then, before anyone could comply, a shattering, sickening bang as Dinah’s demolition charges went off, destroying the structural connections that joined Amalthea to
Endurance
. They felt a sharp jostle—more acceleration than they had experienced in three years—as the Hammerhead sprang free, pushing the rest of
Endurance
along with it.

“Three minutes before the storm hits,” Doob said.

“J.B.F. is aboard,” Luisa announced. She was on voice to Zeke and the rest of the crew aft, relaying what they said to the others in the Hammerhead. Her brow wrinkled. “Something’s wrong with her—I don’t quite follow.”

“Burning hard,” Ivy announced. Meaning that they were near their apogee, entering the fringe of the main lunar debris cloud, and that all the surviving engines had just come on full force. She had inaugurated the big burn that would, with a delta vee of some twelve hundred meters per second, inject them into the debris cloud.

Every loose object in the Hammerhead dropped to what was now the floor. At the same time they could hear all manner of percussion, from all over
Endurance.

Zeke’s voice came in over the voice link. “We are in combat,” he said.

“Combat?” Ivy asked.

“They shot Steve Lake.”

“We are now experiencing very high levels of high-energy proton radiation from the CME,” Doob announced. “Everyone who is not in the Hammerhead should be getting into a storm shelter.”

“Shot him?” Ivy asked.

“With J.B.F.’s revolver. I suggest you try to lock down the network, they are trying to backdoor it.”

After that, communications were hectic and confused for a minute, and seemed to suggest that adversaries in different parts of the ship were all trying to use the same channel.

Then their communications went dead. The equipment still worked; they’d simply been locked out of the network. Ivy could still fly the ship, but none of them could talk to people outside the Hammerhead.

They were startled by a metallic rapping on the hatch that sealed the Hammerhead off from the SCRUM. Dinah’s ears soon read it as Morse code.

“‘Chocolate,’” she said. “That’s kind of a code word between me and Tekla. I think we should open the hatch.”

They did so, not before arming themselves with whatever makeshift weapons they could find, and found Tekla, suffering from a knife wound to the hand; Zeke, looking flustered but unharmed; and a woman, barely recognizable as Julia Bliss Flaherty given that most of her hair was gone and she had both of her hands firmly clamped over her mouth. Tekla vaulted into the Hammerhead and pulled Julia along behind her.

“What is going on?” Ivy demanded.

Zeke held up both hands. “I got this,” he said. “We have killed four of them already. Two more are casualties. We have them outnumbered. We just have to keep fighting.”

“You need to get into a storm shelter,” Ivy said.

Tekla, unaccustomed to working in even weak gravity, had
gotten her footing enough to drag Julia into a corner of the Hammerhead and sit her down on the floor. She then turned back toward the hatch. Dinah had never seen Tekla in this state before, and feared her greatly in that moment. Moira had a different reaction; peeling off her headphones, she lurched across the space and threw her arms around Tekla’s neck. It looked like a greeting but soon developed into something else as Tekla began dragging Moira toward the hatch and Moira began trying to prevent her from returning to the fray.

“Sweet one,” Tekla was mumbling into Moira’s ear, “you want me to use wrestling moves on you? Then you should let me go, because I am going to kill that bitch Aïda.”

“Zipping into storm shelters is exactly what they wanted us to do,” Zeke explained. “Their plan was to take the ship as soon as we did so. Good thing you warned us.”

Tekla by now had peeled herself loose from Moira’s grip and advanced toward the hatch with a full stride.

Zeke, waiting for her, reached out with one hand. He was holding a small black plastic box. He pressed it against Tekla’s thigh and pulled a little trigger on its side. The device erupted with a sharp ticking, buzzing noise. Tekla’s leg collapsed and she floated to the floor, glassy-eyed.

“Sorry, Tekla,” Zeke said. “You stay here. Get your hand fixed. Keep Moira company—she needs you. And if you have a little boy, name it Zeke.”

Then, before any of them could respond, he slammed the hatch shut.

In the silence that followed, a sharp crack resounded through the structure of
Endurance
. Everyone knew the sound: they’d just taken a hit from a bolide.

“Aren’t you supposed to be flying the ship?” Doob shouted to Ivy.

Wordlessly, Ivy went back to her screen.

Dinah rounded on Julia. “What the hell is going on?” she demanded.

Julia’s hair had been cropped. In the last three years it had gone
silvery. Her hands still obscured the lower half of her face. Her eyes were clearly recognizable, though without benefit of cosmetics they seemed to be staring out of a face two decades older.

Slowly she removed her hands.

She was sticking her tongue out. It looked like a piece of metal was caught in her teeth.

On a closer look, it was clear that J.B.F. now had a pierced tongue. It had been done cleanly and professionally; there was no bleeding, no apparent signs of infection or discomfort. A stainless steel bolt about two inches long had been inserted vertically through the piercing, fixed in place with nuts and washers above and below the tongue. It was too long to fit into Julia’s mouth, so it kept her tongue stretched out. Above and below, the rod pressed against her lips.

“Oh Jesus Christ,” Dinah said.

Julia tapped at the bolt with one finger, then made screwing and unscrewing gestures with both hands. The nuts had been doubled, and torqued tightly against each other. Dinah took a multitool from a holster on her belt and unfolded its needlenosed pliers, then borrowed Ivy’s. By twisting gently in opposite directions she was able to loosen the nuts. Julia pushed her away and unscrewed the nuts with her fingertips, then gently extracted the bolt. Her tongue retracted into her mouth. She put one hand over her lips and leaned back against a bulkhead for a few moments, moving her jaw to work up some saliva and get limbered up.

When she finally spoke, Julia sounded weirdly normal, as if delivering remarks from the White House briefing room. “When we surrendered,” she said, “they took my gun, and they tortured Spencer Grindstaff until he spilled everything he knew about the IT systems here. All the passwords, all the back doors, all the details as to how it all works. Exactly what they would need in order to take the place over. Then they killed him, and . . .”

“Ate him?”

Julia nodded. “They have a sort of hacker type among their group.
When he came on board just now, he went to a terminal and began to execute this plan. Steve Lake tried to stop him. One of the others had the gun—shot Steve to death. That was always part of their plan. They knew that only Steve could stop them.”

“How many bullets are left in that thing?”

“I’m sure it is empty now. Most of them are using knives and clubs. They didn’t expect a real fight, because . . .”

“Because they thought we’d all be zipped up in our storm shelters,” Dinah said, “like lambs to the slaughter.”

THE BIG BURN LASTED FOR THE BETTER PART OF AN HOUR. BY THE
end of it, they’d consumed so much propellant and made
Endurance
so light that acceleration made the blood fall out of their heads and pool in their feet. Ivy piloted the ship lying flat on her back, lest she lose consciousness. The journey was punctuated by a few terrific bangs, and those who could stand to watch
Endurance
’s status readouts could observe various modules turning yellow, then red, then black as they succumbed to damage. Dinah watched through the eyes of several cameras as a ten-mile-long piece of the moon tumbled past them, overtaking them and zooming by just a few hundred meters to their starboard side. Nor was that the last such encounter; but with Doob acting as her wing man, calling out the biggest threats, and with Dinah making such use as she could of Parambulator, Ivy was able to steer them clear of the big stuff.

They had no way of knowing the progress of the combat aft. Zeke had spoken optimistically of their odds, but there was no telling how the damage they’d taken from bolides might have swung the course of the battle to one side or the other.
Endurance
’s automatic sealing off of damaged parts of the ship had now partitioned her into a number of separate zones between which movement was impossible.

Zero gee returned, meaning that the engines had shut off. They
were now traveling as fast, on average, as the rest of the debris cloud. Dinah had only just adjusted to the steady acceleration of the big burn and now felt a wave of sickness come over her as the inner ear readjusted. Her eyes closed and she sank into a sort of catnap, floating loosely around the Hammerhead, thudding gently against a wall every so often when Ivy used the thrusters to avoid a rock.

Then she realized she’d been fully asleep for a time.

Part of her wanted to stay that way. But she knew that big things were happening, so she opened her eyes, half expecting to find herself alone, the last person alive.

Ivy was the only person awake, her face lit up by her screen. And for the first time in a long time, it looked the way it had used to when she’d been on the track of some fascinating science problem: alive, intent, fiercely joyful.

“Why’s it so quiet?” Dinah asked. For it seemed to her that it had been a long time since she had heard the crack of a bolide or sensed the thrust of one of
Endurance
’s engines.

“We’re in the shadow,” Ivy said. “A new Cone of Protection. C’mere.” She tossed her head.

Dinah came around behind and hooked her chin over her friend’s shoulder. The monitor had several windows open. Ivy enlarged one of them to fill most of the screen. A legend superimposed at the bottom identified it as
AFT CAMERA
.

The field of view was entirely filled by a close-up image of a huge asteroid.

Dinah was an asteroid miner. She had looked at many pictures of asteroids in her day. She had learned to recognize them by their shapes and their textures. She had no difficulty in identifying this one. “Cleft,” she said.

Ivy reached out and touched the screen. Red crosshairs appeared beneath her fingertip, which she dragged across the big rock’s surface until centered on a vast black crevasse that looked like it nearly split
the asteroid in two: the canyon that had given this rock its name. She pulled her finger away, leaving the crosshairs in the middle of the cleft. “I was thinking there,” she said.

“How about a little below, where it gets wider?”

“I don’t think we want a wide place. Too much exposure.”

“Go there, then,” Dinah suggested, reaching out and dragging the crosshairs to a slightly different location. “Then we can snuggle into the narrow part once we’ve gotten inside.”

“You ladies enjoying yourselves?” Doob rasped.

“Not as much as you’re going to in about an hour,” Ivy said.

“I’ll try to hold out that long.”

THERE WAS NO PROBLEM GETTING INTO IT. IVY FLEW
ENDURANCE
into the great crevasse like a Piper Cub into the Grand Canyon. Within minutes the walls were reaching far above them. The bottom was still lost in shadow.

Following Dinah’s general suggestion, Ivy then nudged the ship toward a part of the canyon, several tens of kilometers distant, where the walls converged and the radioactive sky became a narrow, starry slit above. Still she kept pushing onward, occasionally scraping the ship’s outlying modules against the walls, until she reached a place where she could go no deeper.

Looking both directions along the crevasse from this place, they could see spots where the sun was shining in. Here, though, they were protected from rocks and radiation alike. Ivy set
Endurance
down on the floor of the canyon. Cleft’s gravity was exceedingly faint, but it was enough to give words like that a little meaning, and it was enough to keep the ship lodged in one place until they decided to move it.

Which they never would.

ON THE SURFACE OF CLEFT, A HUMAN WEIGHED ABOUT AS MUCH AS
three pints of beer would weigh on Earth.
Endurance
weighed about as much as a couple of semi-trailer rigs.

Ivy lit the ship’s attitude control thrusters one last time and pivoted her tail up until it was vertical.
Endurance
was standing on her head, the torus aloft, iron Hammerhead nose-down on the iron floor of the crevasse. Dinah sent out some Grabbs to weld the ship to the asteroid. Ivy shut down the thrusters.

Endurance
was no longer a ship but a building.

From the Hammerhead, now one piece of metal with Cleft, the Stack ran straight up like the trunk of a tree. Various structures ramified outward from it like boughs. Its widest part was the array of eighty-one arklets that had formerly made up the stern of the ship. These now projected upward like leaves.

Or so they imagined. They couldn’t actually go outside and look at it until they got out of the Hammerhead. During the battle, they
had sealed the hatch. By the time they had brought her to rest and welded her down, the rest of
Endurance
had been quiet for a long time. Finally they opened the hatch and began to explore it one module at a time. They sent Buckies and Siwis out ahead of them to illuminate dark spaces and aim cameras into hidden corners. Tekla then went in, taking point, with Dinah and Ivy watching her back. They were armed with cudgels made from lengths of pipe. But they never had to use them.

It was some combination of crime scene, battleground, and disaster zone. Only about half of the modules were still pressurized. Some of them had become completely isolated and could only be reached by a person in a space suit. It took days to get to them all.

In one of them they found Aïda, the only other survivor from the heptad. Two days had passed since she had eaten the last of Tavistock Prowse, so she was very hungry, but otherwise in good shape. After becoming trapped by a combination of combat and bolide strikes, she had holed up in a water-filled storm shelter, then begun drinking its contents as she awaited rescue.

The total number of living humans was now sixteen. Several had suffered injuries from combat or from the consequences of bolide strikes. Anyone who had not taken shelter in the Hammerhead, or in a storm shelter, was suffering from radiation sickness. The healthy ones patched holes, repressurized modules, got the torus spinning again, and turned it into a sick bay, which filled up immediately.

Dinah managed to get Doob out for one last space walk. He had been failing for days. Once they got him into the suit, though, his energy flooded back. Dinah took him out on the floor of the crevasse where he could walk, light-footed, with magnetized Grabbs latched onto his boots to keep him from floating away with every step. They rambled for about a kilometer, turning around every so often to look back at humanity’s new home. Above the spinning torus, where Moira was even now unpacking her genetics lab, Tekla was inspecting the arklets on the top level, learning which were whole, which were
beyond repair, and which could be patched up for future occupancy. On the floor of the crevasse, Grabbs and Siwis were at work, rooting
Endurance
to her final resting place with spreading cables and struts.

Where they walked, it was dark most of the time. That was the price of being sheltered from cosmic rays and coronal mass ejections. Looking up, however, they could see sunlight gilding the edges of the crevasse above them. They talked about how to set up mirrors that would bounce sunlight downward onto the arklets, which could grow food and scrub air in their translucent outer hulls. Doob spoke of Endomement, the idea that, in time, a ceiling could be thrown over the top of the crevasse and walls built to keep in the air, whereupon a whole section of the valley could be given an atmosphere and turned into a place where children could go “outside” without the need for space suits.

Then he walked home and died.

They stored his body with the others, in a damaged arklet that would serve as a mausoleum until such time as they could cut a grave out of Cleft’s surface. That would take a long time, but the survivors all shared the conviction that, having sacrificed so much to make it here, they should be interred and not burned. Doob would share a grave with Zeke Petersen, Bolor-Erdene, Steve Lake, and all the others who had died at about the same time.

Some of those remained conscious long enough to relate the stories of what had happened to them during the conflict with the people who had come in from the Swarm, and
Endurance
’s final, hectic passage through storm and stone. Their accounts were recorded and archived. One day some historian would piece the story together, comparing it with data logs to figure out who had slain whom in combat and which module had gone dark when.

Aïda, of course, might have been their best source of information, had she felt like talking. But she didn’t. She had sunk into a profound depression, emerging from it at seemingly random moments to chatter about whatever stray thoughts were flitting through her head.
No one wanted to talk to her. When she talked to you, she watched you too carefully with those avid, penetrating eyes, as if she saw, or imagined she saw, too deeply. It was impossible to be the object of that gaze without thinking of what she and the others had done, and without imagining that you were being sized up as food.

An epic tale was told by the three-year backlog of email, Spacebook posts, blog entries, and other ephemera that filled up all of their inboxes as soon as the network of the Swarm recombined with that of
Endurance
. The general arc of the story seemed to be a growing detachment from reality that had afflicted J.B.F. and some of her inner circle. Luisa likened it to the growth of spiritualism after the First World War. During the 1920s, many who had not been able to bring themselves to accept the loss of life in the trenches and the subsequent influenza epidemic had fallen prey to the belief that they could communicate with their lost loved ones from beyond the grave. They had, in effect, sidestepped grief by convincing themselves that nothing had happened.

The analogy was a loose one. The loss of life in the Hard Rain had, of course, been much worse. And few of the Arkies had adopted spiritualist beliefs per se. But after a particularly severe coronal mass ejection had slain nearly a hundred Arkies, Tav had written a blog post about the journey he had made to Bhutan with Doob and the conversation that they’d had en route with the king concerning the mathematics of reincarnation. It was a meditative piece, a secular eulogy for those who had fallen, but in retrospect it seemed to mark an inflection point in the survivors’ thinking. The Swarm had always had a sort of quasi-divine status to some, who had perhaps read too much chaos theory too superficially and were prone to believing that its collective decisions, lying beyond human understanding, partook of the supernatural.

The mishmash of techno-mystical ideation that had grown out of that one blog post was unreadable and incomprehensible to Luisa
or to anyone else who read it after the fact, with a clear mind, but it seemed to have offered hope and comfort to many terrified young people trapped in arklets. Tav, to his credit, had backed away from any efforts to elevate him to prophetlike status. If anything, though, his modesty might have backfired.

“I have no idea,” Luisa said, “how anyone could read these threads and find hope in them. Or even meaning. But they did. Long enough to distract them from the real problems they were facing. And when Aïda and the others finally came to their senses and began to push back against J.B.F. and the others, the reaction was just that much more severe. Because things had gone too far by that point.”

The backlash had started in a two-triad bolo where a number of like-minded Arkies, including Aïda, had “called bullshit” on the prevailing tone and substance of official statements emanating from the White Arklet and begun to denounce Tavistock Prowse as a puppet blogger for the regime. Dubbing themselves the “Black Bolo Brigade,” they had begun to spread their insurrectionist message to other arklets in the Swarm.

That message—which made perfect sense, as far as it went—was all about the need to face reality and to implement realistic, effective steps to address the Swarm’s problems. That included, if need be, throwing themselves on the mercy of
Endurance
. They had demanded that J.B.F. open the books and provide a current and accurate account of all stocks of water, food, and other staples, and how those numbers were changing over time. Julia had resisted those demands until the data had finally been leaked by a turncoat on her staff. The food picture had turned out to be bleak. This had led to a variety of responses that had determined the history and politics of the Swarm ever since: among some, a further retreat into mysticism and wishful thinking, based on a belief that the Agent had been some sort of avenging angel sent by God, or by aliens so powerful that they might as well be God, to bring about the end of days and the
merging of all human consciousness into a digital swarm in the sky; among others, a frank embrace of cannibalism—in the sense not of killing people for food but of eating those who had died of natural causes—as a stopgap measure until J.B.F. could be toppled and replaced by people who knew what they were doing. The first group, the mystics, had tended to rally under Julia’s banner. The cannibals had ended up under Aïda, who because of her intensity and her charisma had gradually emerged as the leader of the Black Bolo Brigade.

The one Swarm had thus fissioned into two smaller ones, neither of which was as viable, and thereby worsened the same problems that had led to the split in the first place. From there the story had been predictable enough, and had led to the events of the last few days.

Aïda still wasn’t talking, but Julia was. According to her, Aïda and the other Black Bolo survivors had calculated, in the last weeks, that their turn to cannibalism would be so repugnant to the survivors of
Endurance
as to render them permanent outcasts. Rather than passively await the judgment—which they foresaw as extremely pious, sanctimonious, and punitive—of Ivy and her claque, they would seize part or all of
Endurance,
beginning with her network, and then negotiate terms from a position of strength.

This explained, at least in a general way, everything that had happened, save possibly for the physical mutilation of both Julia and Tav.

Asked for a theory as to that, Julia shrugged. “We were criminals to them. Criminals need to be punished. It’s hard to punish people who are already starving to death in a confined space. What is really left in the executioner’s tool kit, other than attacking the body? They wanted to silence me, and so they did. And they wanted to give Tav a taste of his own medicine by uploading his physical body into theirs.”

A WEEK LATER, WHEN THE LAST OF THE VICTIMS HAD SUCCUMBED
to their wounds or to radiation sickness, eight humans remained alive and healthy.

Ivy called for a twenty-four-hour pause to grieve and to take stock. She then called a meeting of the entire human race: Dinah, Ivy, Moira, Tekla, Julia, Aïda, Camila, and Luisa.

They did not know quite what to do with Julia and Aïda. For years they had dreamed, in idle moments, of one day bringing J.B.F. to justice—whatever that would mean. Then, at the last moment, she had been eclipsed by Aïda. And now it all seemed a moot point anyway. Could six women put two women in jail? What would it mean to be in jail in a place like this? Corporal punishment was at least a theoretical possibility. But Aïda had already gone there, with results that they all found sickening.

J.B.F. was a threat to no one. Aïda still possessed an air of menace. But short of locking her up in an arklet, there was nothing they could do about that save keep an eye on her. And so they did, never letting her out of their sight, never letting her get behind them.

They met in the Banana, sitting around the long conference table. To one side of it was death: the sick bay where Zeke, the last man alive, had given up the ghost a day and a half ago, after making a joke about what a shame it all was: being the only man alive, with eight women to choose from. They had scrubbed the place down with bleach and made the beds with clean sheets in the hopes that none of them would be occupied for a long time. To the other side was life: the series of compartments where Moira had been setting up her genetics lab.

The meeting would later be known as the Council of the Seven Eves. For, though eight women were present, one of them—Luisa—had already gone through menopause. Ivy opened with a report on their general situation. From a certain point of view, this was surprisingly good. They had grown so inured to terrible news that she had to emphasize this more than once. Few places in the solar system were as safe as the one where they had come to rest. No cosmic radiation could touch them here. From coronal mass ejections they were equally immune. Sunlight for energy and agriculture could be had a
short distance above them, high on the walls of the crevasse, where the sun shone almost all the time.

In the meantime, their big reactor as well as four dozen arklet reactors were producing far more power than they could ever use, and would continue doing so for decades. Of water they still had a hundred tons left over. While melting and splitting the water they’d used for propellant, they had extracted from it many tons of phosphorus, carbon, ammonia, and other chemicals, left over from the dawn of the solar system, that had once cloaked Greg’s Skeleton in a reeking black carapace. That stuff, as Sean Probst had well known, would be priceless as nutrients to support agriculture.

They no longer had to worry, ever again, about the things that had been their obsessive concerns for the last five years: perigees, apogees, burns, propellant, movement of any kind. No bolide could touch them down here. Even if Cleft banged into an equally huge rock at some point, they would probably survive it.

The vitamins that had been packed into every arklet launched up into the Cloud Ark had been intended to support a population of thousands. Even though many of these had been lost, what remained was still more than enough to keep a small colony in aspirin and toothbrushes for a long time.