Seveneves: A Novel (53 page)

“Yes. You saw your friend and colleague Pete Starling get chowdered by a bolide. I did actually see your Spacebook post about that, Julia. It was most affecting. I sense a ‘but’ coming, however.”

“As the days go by without a serious incident, people begin to wonder how dirty space really is. Interest grows in the Dump and Run option. The White Sky now feels like ancient history. The Hard Rain is upon us. Every day brings a course correction or two, to avoid a major bolide, and a litany of minor events. But the death toll stands at—”

“Eighteen, as of ten minutes ago,” Doob said. “We just lost Arklet 52. See, I am keeping my ear to the ground.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” Julia said, “and I’ll bet the rest of the
AC will feel the same way, once that news has been distributed to them.”

“It’s on a fucking spreadsheet, Julia. All you have to do is look at it. We don’t distribute news. This is not the White House.”

“But in many respects it behaves like the White House,” Julia said. “An orbiting White House unfettered by constitutional checks and balances. But at least the White House had a briefing room, a way of reaching out. I would be happy to . . .”

“Why are you even talking to me about this?” Doob asked. “I’m a fucking astronomer.” Then, a thought. “How many conversations like this one have you been having with other members of the GPop?” He’d been assuming that Julia had singled him out as special, but for all he knew she had a call list as long as her arm, organized by those assiduous youngsters in the background. “Ivy is temporarily in charge.”

“I am familiar with the chain of command that has been improvised,” Julia returned. “To answer your question, Dr. Harris, I am talking to you precisely because you are an astronomer, and well positioned to answer the questions and concerns among the AC about the exact nature of the dirty space threat. This news from Arklet 52 is going to raise questions about the effectiveness of Ivy’s current strategy.”

“It is a statistical problem,” Doob said. “On about A+0.7 it stopped being a Newtonian mechanics problem and turned into statistics. It has been statistics ever since. And it all boils down to the distribution of bolide sizes, and of the orbits in which they are moving, and how those distributions are changing over time—which we can only know from observation and extrapolation. And you know what, Julia? Even if we had perfect knowledge of every single one of those statistical parameters, we still wouldn’t be able to predict the future. Because we have an n of 1. Only one Cloud Ark, only one Izzy to work with. We can’t run this experiment a thousand times to see the range of different
outcomes. We can only run it once. The human mind has trouble with situations like that. We see patterns where they don’t exist, we find meaning in randomness. A minute ago you were casting doubt on whether dirty space was really that dirty at all—obviously arguing in favor of Dump and Run. Then I told you about what just happened to Arklet 52 and now you’re swinging around to the other point of view. You are not helping, Julia. You are not helping.”

Julia did not look to be accepting Doob’s remarks in the spirit intended. Instead she squinted through the screen at him and shook her head slightly. “I don’t understand the intensity of your reaction, Dr. Harris.”

“This conversation is over,” Doob said, and hung up on her. He then fought off a temptation to slam the tablet down on the table. Instead he sat back in his chair and looked Luisa in the eye for the first time in a while. On one level he’d wanted to watch her face the whole time. But Julia would have noticed that, would have figured out that someone else was in the room, silently listening.

Just as someone had probably been doing at Julia’s end.

Luisa just sat there in her listening shrink mode.

“It would be easier,” Doob said, “if I could figure out what the hell she wanted.”

“You’re assuming,” Luisa said, “that she has a plan. I doubt that she does. She is driven to seek power. She finds some way to do that and then backfills a rationalization for it afterward.”

Doob pulled his tablet closer and started trying to find Tav’s blog. “To what extent do you imagine she really is reporting facts about the AC? As opposed to creating the reality she describes?” Doob asked.

“What’s the difference?” Luisa asked.

DINAH LOOKED UP AND SAW THAT THE EARTH WAS THE SIZE OF A
grapefruit. She took a nap, ate some food, and buckled down to work again, then looked up to see that it was the size of a basketball. Still
not that big; and yet such was their speed that it was only an hour away.

They had a final briefing session in
Ymir
’s common room, which had become a makeshift bridge for this ungainly ship.

Dinah had scrounged three flat-panel monitors from various parts of the command module and zip-tied them to the common room table. These were covered with overlapping windows of various sizes. Some were terminal windows showing log entries or editors showing code, but most were video feeds showing different robots’ points of view on the mining operation. Only one of them looked outward: she’d positioned a redundant Siwi on the stern, toward the nadir, and aimed its camera at Earth. Other than that, her only “situational awareness” would come from a celestial navigation program that would display, in a small window, a three-dimensional rendering of the Earth with
Ymir
’s trajectory superimposed on it as a geometric curve. Along the bottom of that window was a series of graphs plotting velocity and altitude versus time. Their velocity at the moment was some six thousand meters per second, up from four thousand just a couple of hours ago; within the next hour it would double if they took no action, then begin to drop again as they left perigee behind and coasted away into space.

That velocity would take them all the way back out to L1 again unless Jiro succeeded at his task, which was to slow them down. He had satisfied himself with but a single flat-panel screen, which he’d set up directly across the table from Dinah’s triptych. From here he would be managing the reactor. He had already begun to pull some of the control blades, just to get a sense of how quickly it would come to full power when he did it for real. A miscalculation on that front had led to the fuel rod breach that had indirectly killed Sean, and Jiro didn’t want any surprises this time around.

Some minutes before perigee, if Markus felt that things were otherwise going to plan, Jiro would issue commands that would bring the reactor up to its full thermal power output of about four gigawatts.
Ice would melt to superheated water, and steam would howl through the Inconel throat of the nozzle, expanding and cooling in the bell until it turned into a hypersonic blizzard, a white lance of cold fire pushing against the great ship’s movement, slowing her down. Not so much as to let her fall into the atmosphere and die, but enough to reduce her orbit to something more like Izzy’s.
Ymir
would experience acceleration, which would feel to its inhabitants like gravity. All the stuff that was now floating around loose aboard
Ymir
and
New Caird
would fall “down.” Dinah and Jiro would drop into the chairs that they’d positioned in front of their monitors. So would Markus, for he had built his own nest of tablets and monitors at the head of the table, mostly occupied with navigational data. Up in
New Caird,
Slava would find himself pressed into his acceleration couch at an awkward sideways angle. The gee forces would be modest enough—even a four-gigawatt nuclear propulsion system could only exert so much force against the momentum of such a large chunk of ice. If their “weight” remained steady over time, it was a sign that things were going well. If it increased, it probably meant that they were going to die. For the only thing that could slow them down and increase their perceived weight beyond a certain level was contact with the atmosphere. The more they slowed down, the lower they dropped. The lower they dropped, the thicker the air got. The thicker the air got, the more force it exerted on the ship. They would read this as a sense of increased weight. It was an exponential spiral that, beyond a certain point, would lead to the inevitable destruction of
Ymir, New Caird,
and everyone on board. The only real question would be the manner of their death. In a smaller, lighter craft they might be burned alive. Here, being surrounded by ice, it was more likely that they would lose consciousness from the gee forces first—a relatively painless way to go. Dubois Harris and Konrad Barth, gazing down on them from a few hundred kilometers above, would see them go out as a blue streak over the southern hemisphere, and
would give the news to Ivy so that she could issue a statement to the Cloud Ark that, if Dinah was any judge of her friend, she had already written, just in case she needed it.

It was strange to be so close to them in distance, but so far away in the nonintuitive space of delta vees. Bandwidth between
New Caird
and Izzy was excellent now, and Dinah had to make a conscious effort not to get distracted by the availability of text messaging and even Spacebook.
See you in a few xoxo,
Ivy had texted her, and Dinah had sent back something in the same vein, then closed the window.

Vyacheslav was donning one of the blue thermal garments worn beneath space suits. This, she knew, was just a precaution, in case he had to “go outside” on short notice for some reason. Slava had stationed his space suit in
New Caird
’s airlock, so that he could exit to the outside of the shard if needed, and Dinah had pre-positioned two Grabbs there, to help him get around.

Markus could be pretty unceremonious about things, which was just his leadership style—his way of implicitly telling people he expected them to do their bloody jobs without pep talks beforehand or congratulations afterward. It didn’t work for everyone. Some people liked ceremony. But he hadn’t invited any of those along on this expedition. So there was no particular moment when it all started. They just kept getting closer to the Earth. Slava darted up the companionway to the top of the command module, and a minute later announced that he was positioned before the controls of
New Caird
. Jiro called out milestones in the startup of the reactor, occasionally proffering hints as to how the figures should be understood: “That is a little faster than I expected . . . settling down now . . . this is according to plan . . . ready to proceed on your command . . .” and so on. Markus’s participation consisted largely of chewing his thumbnail while staring fixedly at his screen. From time to time he would reach out and type something, or swipe and tap on his tablet. Dinah’s work was almost entirely abstract, several layers removed from what obviously
mattered. She tried to focus on it and to ignore the sounds of a thousand loose objects settling to the “floor” of
Ymir
as gravity “came on” due to a combination of
Ymir
’s increasing thrust and the steady buildup of atmospheric pushback.

“Now,” Markus said.

“Acknowledged,” Jiro responded. “Control blades are responding to program . . . and . . . we have criticality.”

Four gigawatts of thermal power—enough to supply Las Vegas—came online in the next few seconds. Dinah felt it as a massive increase in weight and heard it as a cacophony of creaks, groans, and crashing noises as the command module, and the ice surrounding it, came under structural load. She saw it on her screens as sudden and frantic change in windows that had remained frustratingly static for the last hours. The ice hoppers, which had been brimful for weeks, began to empty at a shocking pace as the augers spun. A couple of her “point of view” robots fell or skidded from their points of anchorage, events that showed up as sudden and unhelpful shifts in camera angle. She hit “go” on a program that tasked every robot in the shard to deliver more ice into the hoppers as fast as possible, and tried to keep one eye on that while monitoring the structural integrity of the shard as a whole. In the traditional scheme of things, miners had done all their work under gravity, so structural mistakes had manifested themselves soon, and dramatically, as cave-ins.
Ymir
was a mine that had been slowly delved under zero gee and only subjected to “gravity” for short periods when the engine came on, and so there was a certain nervous feeling of not knowing whether it might all collapse. So far, it looked fine.

“We are losing velocity nicely,” Markus muttered through what was left of his thumbnail, and Dinah permitted herself a glance at the graphs to verify that this was so. Time had gone by faster than she had known; they were just minutes away from perigee. “Nicely” in Markus’s phrasing meant “enough to make a difference but not so much as to kill us.”

Then Markus said, “Slava. A three-second burn, please.”

“Da,”
answered the Russian. Then, a few seconds later, he said, “It is beginning.”

They wouldn’t have known Slava was doing anything, save for an external camera that Dinah had positioned on the surface of the shard at some distance from
New Caird,
looking back at it. This showed a ghostly blue flare emerging from the small ship’s nozzle bell, shoving
Ymir
’s nose down and swinging its stern up slightly.

Ymir
shuddered faintly. Dinah didn’t know what to make of it. She feared it might be a cave-in until she identified it as a sensation she had never expected to feel again: atmospheric buffeting. She had not been this close to the surface of the Earth since she’d been launched into orbit almost a year before Zero. And if the next few minutes went well, she’d never be this close again.

The shuddering didn’t last. The graphs on her screen had all picked up little wiggles that were steadily receding into the past. “We skipped,” Markus said. “I think we will do it at least one more time.”

“Augers four and eleven are down,” Jiro announced. “I will try reversing them to clear the jam.”

This brought Dinah’s attention back. At a glance she checked all of the levels in the hoppers and saw them dropping quickly, as expected, despite the robots’ efforts to replenish them. The two that Jiro had identified were overfull, since there was no way to get the ice out of them. Dinah activated a subprogram that would put some Grabbs to work transferring surplus ice from hoppers 4 and 11 to nearby ones that could use it.