Seveneves: A Novel (54 page)

“The
Caird
burn worked,” Markus said, “but it gave us a little too much rotation. I am counteracting using thrusters—and this will take a little while.” He entered some commands that, presumably, turned on those of
Ymir
’s attitude thrusters that pushed in the opposite direction from
New Caird
’s big engine. “By the way, we just passed through perigee—I hope.”

Dinah glanced at the plots and saw that they had indeed passed
the midway point of the maneuver. Somewhat paradoxically, though, their altitude was dropping—headed for their second, and hopefully their last, “skip” off the atmosphere.

“We’re on some weird new course now,” she said.

“It is true,” Markus said. “If we survive the next few minutes, we can fix it later.”

“Auger eleven works again,” Jiro reported, “but two and three are down. We may have a critical propellant shortage.”

“Damned thrusters are not powerful enough. We have overcorrected,” Markus said, “and now we are coming in for another skip. We are flying not only backward but upside down.”

So the burn from
New Caird
’s engine had done its job. It had depressed the ship’s “nose,” which was pointed backward, and prevented the stern, currently pointed forward, from digging in. They’d grazed the atmosphere with the shard’s broad side and gotten a nice skip out of it—a bounce that might’ve saved their lives. But once the shard began to rotate, it was difficult to make it stop, and now it had gone too far. The nose was pointed too steeply downward, the nozzle bell was aimed up toward space.

“So we’re thrusting
down
toward the planet now?” Dinah asked.

“Not enough to hurt us. Maintain thrust,” Markus ordered.

“I am running out of ice,” Jiro said, and glanced over his monitor at Dinah.

Dinah had already warned them that supplying enough propellant to do all of this in one huge burn would be a close-run thing, assuming everything went perfectly. Everything hadn’t. She met Jiro’s eyes, shook her head, and went back to work.

“Get ready to shut it down, Jiro,” Markus said. “We are descending into thick air and I don’t know what is going to happen.”

Their inner ears told them that
something
was happening. The powerful thrust was still driving them into their seats, but some force had taken
Ymir
by the nose and was torquing it around.

“We hit nose first,” Markus said, “and we are spinning back. Main engine shutdown in three. Two. One. Now.”

A nuclear steam engine didn’t shut off quickly. The thrust faltered and tapered off in response to whatever commands Jiro had entered. It was the better part of a minute, though, before they were back in zero gravity—meaning in a free orbit with no thrust pushing them around.

“I’ll give you our new orbital parameters in a minute,” Markus said. “It is complicated because we are tumbling.”

In the sudden silence that followed the engine’s shutoff, Dinah could hear distant, tinny shouting. She realized it was an open audio channel from Izzy, coming from a pair of headphones she had ripped off her head during the maneuver. It was the sound of people in the Tank. When she pulled the phones back onto her head she could tell that they were celebrating.

“THAT WAS A BIG-ASS DELTA VEE YOU GUYS JUST RIPPED OFF!” DOOB
said when he heard Dinah’s voice on the other end of the link. “You deserve congratulations.”

Dinah’s response, after a few seconds’ delay, was guarded. “But not big-ass enough?”

It was strange hearing the voice of one you knew well modulated through this old-school audio tech. Like hearing Dinah doing a Buzz Aldrin impression at a party. The emotional nuance came through more clearly than the actual words.

“Konrad is still calculating your params,” Doob said, “but just on visual inspection we can see how much you slowed down. Fantastic.”

“Sounds like we’ll be needing another pass then,” she said. Meaning that they would have to wait for
Ymir
to loop once more around the Earth, and do another burn at her next perigee, in order to slow down enough to rendezvous with Izzy.

“This time you can work with a higher perigee,” he pointed out, “so you don’t have to fly that damn piece of ice through the pea soup again.”

“Flying this damn piece of ice kind of stresses me out,” Dinah allowed.

“The glass is half full, baby,” Doob said. “The glass is half full. You
lit
that candle. It worked. You bounced off the atmosphere. You’re a hell of a lot closer to us—Konrad is saying your apogee is definitely sublunar.” Meaning that
Ymir
would turn around and start falling back toward the Earth before reaching the orbit of the former moon. “This is huge,” he added. “It is going to change the picture politically.”

After a lengthy pause, Dinah asked, “Politically?” as if she couldn’t quite believe what she had heard.

“I’M AWARE OF THE FACT THAT IVY HAS TURNED A DEAF EAR TO ALL
of your ideas,” Julia began, just as soon as Spencer had typed in the commands that disconnected Arklet 453 from the Situational Awareness Network. “I presume she also went out of her way to place obstacles in the path of your coming here for this meeting.”

The Martians—Dr. Katherine Quine, Ravi Kumar, and Li Jianyu—looked somewhat nonplussed. It was
always
difficult to travel between arklets. The waiting time for nonurgent Flivver trips was about two days, and emergencies could rearrange the queue at the last minute. As a member of the General Population, Dr. Quine had the most Olympian perspective on this—she was an urgent care doctor frequently called upon to make excursions to arklets. She was about ten years older than Kumar and Jianyu, who were Arkies chosen in the Casting of Lots from India and China respectively. Those two had ended up together in Arklet 303, which had turned out to be a hotbed of Martian agitation. It was part of a triad with a total population of eighteen, half of whom currently had the flu, and
so Katherine Quine had had a legitimate excuse to go there. She’d made the most of the opportunity by scooping up Ravi and Jianyu and coming here with them. Of the people in this conversation, she was probably the least inclined to see dark deeds by Ivy in the slowness of inter-arklet transport. It was a different story with Ravi and with Jianyu, who, for a number of reasons, were receptive to Julia’s suggestions on that front. In another time and place, Dr. Quine might have quibbled. But time was short, and trying to raise Julia’s opinion of the Cloud Ark’s current management did not seem like an efficient way to use it. So she let it go. And by the time she had processed all of that, Julia had moved on anyway.

“Given that, I’m all the more appreciative that you made the arduous and risky journey to meet with me in person,” Julia said. “It is my firm conviction that, centuries from now, young Martians sitting in classrooms on the Red Planet will read in their history books—or whatever they have in place of books—about this meeting and what came of it.”

Ravi Kumar raised an index finger. “Instead of educating the young in classrooms,” he said, “why not do away altogether with the traditional structure of mass education and take a personalized, individualized approach? There’s no reason to repeat Earth’s mistakes on Mars.”

“I could not agree with you more,” Julia said, “and these sorts of fresh ideas only make me more eager to find a way of getting as many people there as soon as possible. How do we get started? What would be entailed in sending a forward advance party to Mars?”

For the second time in as many minutes, Dr. Quine looked a bit unsettled. She glanced around Arklet 453. This was the central, common-space arklet of the heptad that included numbers 174—the abode of Julia and Camila—and 215—that of Spencer Grindstaff. Or at least that was what it said on the official records. Some reshuffling had occurred. All the men and women who lived in those two
arklets now seemed to conceive of themselves as members of J.B.F.’s personal staff. They had taken over 453 and turned it into a sort of West Wing.

Katherine Quine said, “Presuming we had authorization to send such a mission—”

“Let me just cut you off there, if you would indulge me, Dr. Quine. What you just raised is a matter of politics. I consider that to be my ‘superpower’ and I would like to place it at the disposal of you and the other members of the Martian Community—the ones you already know of, the ones who sympathize with you in secret, and others who may sign on once it becomes clear to them what a fundamentally sensible idea the Mars trip really is. So I would propose that we assume, for purposes of this little chat, that authorization is not a problem. I would like to see you three using your own ‘superpower’ of designing this mission in a way that makes sense without letting the political dimension interfere at all. Once we have designed a coherent plan, we can then move on to questions of implementation.”

“In a perfect scenario we would dump the rock and simply take everything, all at once,” Jianyu said. It was the first time he had spoken, but he seemed to have been emboldened by Julia’s talk of superpowers.

“There are powerful forces that would have to be convinced before such a thing could happen,” Julia said. “Let’s think in terms of an advance party: lean, efficient, smart, but big enough to get the job done. That means landing on Mars and reporting back to the remainder of the Cloud Ark.”

“We’ve been talking about such a mission. We think we could do it with a bolo consisting of a heptad and a triad,” Katherine said.

“Ten arklets,” Julia said. “That doesn’t seem all that many, does it?”

“During the initial delta vee,” Ravi Kumar said, “the arklets would be stacked. Once they were on course for Mars they would form a bolo, so that the members of the expedition could experience Earth-normal gravity during the six-month journey.”

Jianyu added, “Propulsion and other components could come from the MIV kit. Most of the design work has already been done for us.”

Katherine said, “Aerobraking would be needed at the end, to slow it down. Before that, the bolo could be reeled in, the arklets could restack into a unified ship, and there would be time to survey the surface from orbit and decide on a landing place.”

Julia nodded. “And if I may put a hard question to you all, what would be the survival time of this isolated colony, once it had landed? How long before it ran out of provisions?”

This caused the three Martians to clam up and look at one another.

“I only ask,” Julia said, “because politics—my department—once again rears its ugly head here. Once your heroics have been accomplished, the burden falls to me to seal the deal, as it were. The advance party lands and sends back its joyous message. A ticking-clock element enters the picture. Which I do not mean in a negative way—this can be a powerful incentive to mobilize people’s energies, as we saw in the case of the buildup to the Hard Rain. It is at that point when I can address the people of the Cloud Ark and say, ‘Here is the opportunity—will we seize it? Or will we shrink away from it and let these brave people slowly expire?’ That is a speech that I think I could deliver to great effect. I just need to have some sense of the time element.”

“A year for sure,” Katherine said. “Beyond that, it becomes a medical question. A statistical question.”

“Statistics,” Julia repeated, and sighed. “I have been hearing a lot about that from Dr. Harris.”

“SO, YOU’RE TELLING ME WE’VE LOST TRACK OF WHO IS EVEN IN J.B.F.’S
heptad?” Ivy asked.

There was silence around the big table in the Banana. Ivy had
begun to hold important meetings in this old familiar space, closer to the central axis of the Stack and farther forward in Amalthea’s cone of shelter. It wouldn’t do to have the Cloud Ark’s command structure decapitated by a single unlucky bolide strike—a disaster much more likely to happen whenever they met in the big T3 spaces like the Tank and the Farm.

Present for this meeting were Doob, Luisa, Fyodor, and three handpicked members of Markus’s staff who had become a sort of executive troika: Sal Guodian, the one-man judicial system. Tekla, the head of security. And Steve Lake, the dreadlocked ginger who was responsible for network and computer matters.

“The default system for keeping track of who is where,” Sal began, “is based on the assumption that people will actually cooperate with it.”

Ivy held up a hand. “Stop. Before you go into explanations, I need a yes or no.”

“Yes,” Steve Lake said, “we have lost track of who is in J.B.F.’s heptad.”

“Thank you,” Ivy said. “And somehow the SAN isn’t helping us fill in the gaps?”

Steve said, “One of the people who is definitely in that heptad is Spencer Grindstaff.”

Ivy nodded.

Sal said, “Steve, when Markus pulled you into his office, just before the White Sky, and put you in charge of the network—replacing Spencer—you made some remark to the effect that Spencer might know of back doors into Izzy’s systems. Back doors that would be impossible for you to know about until he used them.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Almost by definition, we can’t find something like that until it’s used. Not without manually reading through every line of code.”

“You think he has a back door into the SAN?”

“We know he’s doing something,” Steve said, “because as soon as
he turned up there, the arklets in J.B.F.’s heptad began dropping off the network from time to time. Whenever she’s having a meeting she doesn’t want us to know about, he turns everything off.”

Ivy considered this for a moment, then looked across the table at Tekla and nodded. Tekla rose—carefully, for the gravity was quite weak here—and went to the door. She opened it to reveal Zeke Petersen waiting outside, and waved him in.

“Thanks for joining us,” Ivy said, breaking a silence during which Zeke took a seat at the foot of the table. Ivy was at the head of it. She was looking “up” a long ski jump ramp at him, and he was doing likewise at her.

“Just like old times, Commander Xiao,” Zeke said.

“Well, I appreciate your loyalty,” Ivy said. “I know this must be awkward for you.”

“Not at all, actually,” Zeke said. “The announcement that Markus made, when he called it, at the onset of the Hard Rain—declaring all existing nations to be dissolved—I took that to heart. Julia didn’t hear that announcement. She didn’t get the memo.”