Seveneves: A Novel (76 page)

“A long way to carry a dead fish,” Beled remarked.

“Yeah,” Kath Two said, and felt her face warm slightly. Obvious as it seemed now that Beled had pointed it out, she’d missed that detail.

“Did you investigate further?” Beled asked.

“Unable,” Kath Two said. “I saw this person from my glider, on my way out.”

“It is not mandatory to explain every last thing in your report,” Beled pointed out. “To leave a loose end, under those circumstances, is acceptable. It will give some other surveyor a challenging and welcome task to shoulder.”

An idea came to Kath Two. “What if we were shouldering it?”

“Explain.”

“Does it seem to you as though there was an unusual concentration of Survey activity in that one zone?”

“Unusual,” Beled allowed, after thinking about it for a few moments. “Not without precedent.”

“Makes me wonder,” Kath Two said, “if some previous surveyor saw what I saw, and triggered a wave of missions in the same area.”

“In that case,” Beled pointed out, “Survey would have informed us of what it was they were sending us to look for.”

That was so sensible, and Beled said it with such simple conviction, that Kath Two nodded and declined to press it any further. But she was thinking,
Unless it is something they don’t want us to know
.

The conversation with Beled had been useful in that it had given her a way to proceed, which was simply to type up the Indigen sighting as a loose end, and thus drop it into the lap of whoever read the report. She went to work on that general plan, trying to clarify the fleeting memory in her mind’s eye, to sort out objective observations, made in the moment, from judgments and suppositions she’d added later. Which was tricky, since the latter were supposed to be part of her job.

A while later Rhys was awakened by an alarm he’d set on his wrist. He made a sleepy flight to the toilet and back, looking at her in the classic style of the extrovert who wants you to drop whatever you’re doing so that you can have a conversation with him. After exchanging a few words with Beled, he settled in to work on his own report, and the cabin was quiet for a while. Later the two men broke out some rations and had a snack, talking of this and that.

Kath Two was snapped out of her work reverie by a mild shift in their tone of voice. Now they were talking about something important. Not in an urgent or concerned way. A glance at the display told her what it was: they were nearing the ring, which meant that they were about to lance through the twenty-kilometer-wide gap between two space habitats. There was no reason that this should be a problem, but it was the sort of feat that focused one’s attention and brought a discernible edge to one’s voice.

She reached up and found the lever on her varp that activated an opaque screen over the lenses: essentially, a blindfold. Her view of the cabin was now blocked. The only things she could see were those being projected into her eyes by the varp. At the same time she activated an application that gave her the ability to see the flivver’s surroundings as if she were floating adrift in space. The same service could have been provided by a bubble of glass on the flivver’s hull,
but it wouldn’t have been as good. It would have exposed the user’s head to cosmic radiation, and the contrasty light would have made it difficult to see certain things. The varp, on the other hand, played games with the light’s dynamic range so that bright things were less so while dim things were bright enough to see; it gave everything a luminous warm quality that did not exist in reality. It was so far superior to looking at the world directly that many space suits eschewed transparencies altogether and just encased the wearer’s head in a radiation-shielded dome with a varp on the inside.

She was now “looking” at an enhanced view of the universe from their current location, which was just inside, but rapidly approaching, the habitat ring.

The ring was spinning past them. It was a little like being on the inside of a carousel watching the horses wheel by, except that instead of horses, these were space habitats as much as thirty kilometers across, and they were moving at three thousand meters per second.

The task was to shoot between two of them without getting hit. By the standards of orbital mechanics it was no great feat, but it looked shockingly dangerous, and as such it was great fun to watch. As Kath Two looked straight ahead, the habitats seemed to be whizzing across their path like the teeth of a buzz saw. But through an apparent miracle the flivver found a gap between two of them.

“Whip dock in three,” announced a synthesized voice, and Kath Two’s hands moved around to check the straps holding her into her seat.

An immense bullwhip was burgeoning toward them. Its general dimensions were about those of an exceptionally long Old Earth freight train, but instead of boxcars it was made up of many flynks coupled nose-to-tail into a chain.

If Rhys’s earlier preparations had gone according to plan—and Kath Two would have heard about it, were that not the case—then, several hours ago, the hundreds of flynks that lived in this whip station had begun to assemble themselves into a chain. When it had
reached the desired length—which was a function of the specific mission to be performed—the chain had joined itself nose-to-tail into an endless loop and gone into motion, driven by a simple linear motor in the whip station. It had formed an elongated oval known as an Aitken loop and then devoted some time to tweaking its shape and dialing in its exact velocity. Flynks were simple beasts, consisting mostly of structure: solid aluminum cast into certain shapes. Each flynk had a knuckle amidships, enabling it to bend freely in both directions—in mechanical engineering terms, it was just a heavy-duty universal joint. Fore and aft it had couplers that enabled it to form a strong, rigid connection with other flynks. Somewhere in all of that structure were a few grams of silicon that made it smart, and lines for carrying power and information down the length of the chain.

A few moments ago, word had gone out to one of the flynks that it should decouple from the one behind it. This had happened just as it was emerging from the whip station. At the instant the coupler had disconnected, the system had stopped being an Aitken loop and started being a giant bullwhip. The niksht—a very old mispronunciation of
Knickstelle,
referring to the U-shaped bend at the apex of the loop—had begun to propagate away from the whip station, towing the free end of the whip behind it, accelerating as it went, and rapidly building to thousands of meters per second of velocity. This was the thing Kath Two saw in the VR: the elbow in the whip, coming right at them. The free end was concealed behind it, but she knew that in a few moments it would come whipping around in a huge final burst of acceleration.

All the energy was directed “backward” from the point of view of the bored crew members who were presumably monitoring all of this in the station at the “handle” end of the whip. They were moving a lot faster than the flivver. In order to make physical contact with the approaching craft, they had to reach “back.” And “reach” wasn’t really the right term; they had to
punch
backward with explosive suddenness to match the flivver’s much lower velocity. This was the kind of task that bullwhips were made for.

Still, she couldn’t help but flinch as the final few flynks snapped around toward them. The perspective on the VR was almost sickening. The eye was confused by the fact that the whip as a whole was moving away from them so rapidly, and yet its uncoiling tip was coming right at them. Any failure in the calculations and it would have either hurtled away from them, leaving them alone and adrift, or else smashed into them at hypersonic closing velocity and destroyed them as surely as a bolide strike during the Epic.

Instead of which the two velocities matched perfectly and the last flynk in the chain was, just for a moment, right there in front of them, much like the hanger she had docked with earlier.

“Coupling,” said the voice, unnecessarily since she could hear the mechanical connection being made and then feel the acceleration as the flivver was slapped sideways and then jerked forward by the momentum of the whip. “Brace for stabilization.” A polite way of saying that the situation in the whip was a little chaotic in the aftermath of the snap-around. In general they were now being pulled forward with tremendous force, being brought up to a speed to match that of the whip station and all the other objects in the habitat ring. But the physics of the whip led to some side-to-side oscillation, some surges and lapses in the acceleration that could be dampened but not removed by the tiny adjustments of the flynks. “Hebel has toggled,” the voice confirmed. “Hebel,” like
Knickstelle,
was a term from the German; it was a lever at the base of the whip, anchored to the whip station and capable of flipping freely from one side to the other. It was, in effect, the arm that held the handle and cracked the whip, and shortly after the completion of the first crack—the one that had culminated in successful docking—it had snapped around to the other side of the station and initiated a second crack in the opposite direction. A new niksht had been formed, just at the place where the whip was attached to the hebel, and was beginning to accelerate “forward,” accelerating the flivver to the velocity it would need to accomplish the rest of the mission.

The process lasted for about three minutes. The visual cues in her headset gave her mind the context: the buzz saw whirling past them seemed to slow down. Of course it was still moving at the same speed; in truth the flivver was speeding up to match its pace. But, from her point of view, the habitat ring stopped looking like a whirling dervish and began to resolve itself into a series of discrete objects, still rushing past them, but more and more slowly until the whole ring seemed to grind to a halt. And at that moment, something especially huge drifted into view: the Eye, dead in their path.

“Decoupling,” the voice announced, and not a moment too soon, since the acceleration had become difficult to tolerate. Had they not broken their connection to the tip of the whip, the gee forces would have rendered them unconscious, then killed them, and finally ripped the flivver to shreds. Flynks were built to survive forces that humans and ordinary spacecraft could not. But the geometry and the timing of the niksht had been programmed so that it would bring them to their desired velocity and release them into their new trajectory just before the crisis that, in an Old Earth bullwhip, would have been signaled by the sharp bang of a sonic boom. Weightlessness returned, unless you counted a bit of corrective jostling from the flivver’s thrusters. Kath Two’s vision cleared and she swallowed a few times, trying to settle her stomach.

The funny thing was that the entire procedure, from Kath Two’s landing her glider in the hanger, to the bolo release, to the just-concluded interaction with the whip, would have looked graceful, even gentle, when viewed from a distance. In order to understand the sheer intensity of the acceleration and the jostling, you had to live through it.

Trying to think about something other than her stomach, she took a good look at the Eye.

Right now it was encircling Akureyri, a big (population 1.1 million), newish (eighty-four years old) habitat constructed in the style known informally as the double barrel, historically known as the
O’Neill Island Three type. It was two large cylinders, parallel to each other, rotating in opposite directions. Each was enshrouded in complexes of mirrors and other infrastructure. The mirrors were aimed at the sun, whose light was bounced through windowed strips on the cylinder walls to illuminate the landscapes within. But it was about six in the evening local time, and so those mirrors were gradually being feathered to simulate twilight. By using the varp to zoom in, Kath Two could have peered through the windows to see the farms, forests, waterways, and habitations inside Akureyri, but she knew generally what it would look like, so she remained zoomed-out for now.

Which she had to, if she was going to take in the Eye. Akureyri, big as it was, was dwarfed by the construct surrounding it. Of this, the most eye-catching part was the Manhattan-on-a-roller-coaster spectacle of the Great Chain, whipping around at terrific speed, completing a full circuit every five minutes.

But that wasn’t where they were going. As the Eye became larger and larger in her view, its whirling iris drifted to one side, and it became clear that the flivver’s tiny corrective burns had aimed them toward one of those inhabited bits contained within its massive, pitted iron frame: a ring of four score docking ports encircled by a large, glowing yellow letter Q that was universally recognizable as the logo and the badge of Quarantine.

At a glance, two-thirds of the ports in the Q were already occupied by other ships, mostly flivvers of various types plus a couple of liners. The ports were individually numbered with glowing digits, and annotated, in the mixture of Latin and Cyrillic used throughout the ring, as to their purposes:

TRANZIT

IMMIGRAШON

MILITARY

CURVEY

CPEЦ

A ring of green lights surrounding a vacant port—number 65—began to flash. The systems that were controlling the flivver already knew where to go, so this was solely for the benefit of human beings, as well as serving as a backup plan in the rare event that a vehicle needed to be piloted by hand.

Kath Two had seen enough dockings in her time, so she peeled off the varp and held it in her lap through the ensuing series of nudges and jerks, which terminated with the opening of the airlock door.

A yellow-striped tube stretched away into the part of Quarantine set aside for people who, like them, were returning from the surface of Earth. A few meters in, they were confronted by a one-way door, constructed so that only one person at a time could pass through it. Hanging on a rack nearby were a number of hard bracelets, color-coded to indicate that they were intended for Survey personnel, also striped with machine-readable glyphs. Kath Two selected one and ratcheted it around her wrist. After a moment, a red diode began to blink on its back and digits began to count time. She waved it at the door, which unlocked itself and allowed her to pass into the tube beyond.