Seveneves - Страница 52

Doob reread the message.

“You’re right,” he said. “All he says is that they’re thrusting. Nothing about transferring back to low Earth orbit. Then he asks for a situation report.” He put his hands over his face and rubbed it. “I’m fading,” he announced. “I should be Skyping my family right now.”

“Get outta here,” Dinah said. “I can work on the report. And I can encrypt it, now that you showed me how it works.”

Doob pushed off and drifted to the exit, then caught himself and turned back. “I could figure this out myself,” he said, “but it’s late. Maybe you know off the top of your head. If Sean goes into that transfer orbit from L1 to here, how long before he shows up?”

“Thirty-seven days,” Dinah said.

“About seventeen days into the Hard Rain,” Doob said. “Awkward timing.”

Dinah looked back at him. She didn’t say a word, but he knew what she was thinking: If only awkward timing were the worst of our problems.

“Okay,” Doob said. “Thanks, Dinah.”

“Next time,” she said, and made a drinky-drinky motion with her thumb and pinkie.

“Next time,” he agreed, and pushed through the curtain.

Dinah checked the time. Now that she knew roughly where Ymir was, she understood the timing of the transmissions. During a certain part of each ninety-three-minute orbit, Izzy was on the wrong side of the Earth, and couldn’t receive Sean’s signal. Following each blackout period was a window during which they could talk. They had just burned a window taking down his transmission and decrypting it, and were about to go into blackout again. During that span of time Dinah should be able to write a short message and get it encrypted using the next one-time pad.

What to write wasn’t entirely clear. She could provide some obvious data like the number of arklets currently in orbit, the number of people, how many robots she had up and running. But she suspected that Sean wanted a different kind of information. He wanted to know what would happen were he to show up, thirty-seven days from now, with a mountain of ice. The Cloud Ark could use it, that was for sure. Likewise, Sean needed the Cloud Ark; two guys on a spaceship pushing a giant ball of ice was not a sustainable civilization. But Sean was going to be cagey. He was going to want something. He would want to make a deal.

He would want to make a deal with Dinah’s boyfriend.

One step at a time. Just sending him a few basic stats would occupy the next transmission window. Rather than driving herself crazy worrying about the longer game, Dinah focused on that through the next blackout period, writing up a message as tersely as possible and then encrypting it using Doob’s Python script.

The L1 point of the Earth-sun system was located on a straight line between those two bodies. Ymir, for all practical purposes, was at L1. So, generally speaking, when Izzy swung around the dark side of the Earth and emerged into the sunlight, it meant that they could “see” L1, and communicate with Ymir. This next occurred at about 7:30 A.M. Greenwich time, which happened to be sunrise in London. Dinah, gazing down out her little window, was able to see the terminator — the dividing line between the day and night sides of Earth — creeping over the Thames estuary down below, and lighting up a few tall spires in the London financial district. Then she turned to her telegraph key, established contact with Ymir, and tapped out her message. This ended up consuming the entire transmission window. She had to send the characters very slowly, because Sean wasn’t very good at reading Morse code. And because the message was encrypted, he wasn’t able to guess missing letters from context, and so every letter had to be read clearly. By the time she was finished, Izzy had swung almost halfway around the world and was about to plunge back into night. She finished her transmission with TBC, which she hoped they would understand as “to be continued,” then went right back to work writing and encrypting a supplement.

She was getting ready to open another broadcast window, a little before 9:00 A.M. London time or “dot 9” in Izzy-speak, when Ivy floated in without knocking.

“I want to look out your window,” she announced.

“That’s fine,” Dinah said. “What’s up?” Because obviously something was up. Ivy’s face looked funny. And she had said “your window,” not “your window.”

“What’s so special about my window?” Dinah asked.

“It’s next to you,” Ivy said.

“Is everything okay?” Dinah asked. Because clearly everything wasn’t. Her first thought was that the Morse code transmissions had been intercepted and that Dinah was in trouble. But if that were the case, Ivy would not be in here asking to look out her window.

She looked at her friend. Ivy went immediately to the window and then positioned herself to look down at the Earth. By now the terminator had advanced to the point where it had lit up the easternmost bulge of South America. Izzy was about to cross the equator, which was almost directly below them.

“I heard from Cal,” Ivy said. She said it without the usual note of pleasure in her voice.

“That’s good. I thought his boat was underwater.”

“It was until a couple of hours ago.”

“They popped up?”

“They popped up.”

“Where?”

“Down there,” Ivy said.

“How do you know?” Dinah asked. “Surely he’s not beaming you his coordinates.”

“I can tell,” Ivy said. “By putting two and two together.”

“What did he say?”

“He said to prepare for some launches out of Kourou.”

“They’re going to reopen the spaceport?”

Ivy gasped.

Dinah glided over and got right behind Ivy, hugging her and hooking her chin over Ivy’s shoulder so that she could share the same viewing angle.

They knew where Kourou was; they looked at it all the time, and sometimes even saw the bright plumes of rocket engines on the launch pads.

What Ivy had reacted to was a little different. Sparks of light were appearing along the coast, spreading, and fading. A barrage of them, peppered across the interval between the beach and Devil’s Island.

“What the hell are those?” Dinah asked. “Are those nukes?”

“I don’t know,” Ivy said.

Then Dinah’s question was answered by a much brighter light that flared along the coast to the northwest, fading slightly to a luminescent ball that tumbled upward toward space.

“I think that was a nuke,” Ivy said.

“We just nuked. . Venezuela?”

It took a few moments for their eyes to readjust. That was just as well, since their minds had to do some adjusting as well. Once the light had faded, they could see that the mushroom cloud was actually offshore of the Venezuelan landmass, a few miles out to sea.

“A demonstration shot? Visible from Caracas?” Dinah asked.

“Partly that,” Ivy said. “But yesterday they were saying that the whole Venezuelan navy was headed for Kourou to restore order. I’ll bet that navy no longer exists.”

“The smaller fireballs? Near the spaceport?”

“I’m going to guess fuel-air explosives. They would do almost as much damage as tactical nukes without contaminating the launch site.”

Ivy had shrugged loose from Dinah’s embrace and turned around so that her back was to the window. They were now hovering close to each other.

Dinah finally got it. “You said that Cal’s boat had popped up. That it was on the surface. That he knew something. You think—”

“I know,” Ivy mouthed.

Cal had received the order, direct from J.B.F., and he had launched the nuke. He’d probably launched cruise missiles with fuel-air devices as well.

People assumed that Ivy and Dinah had grown apart in the last year — but then, people had assumed that they were at odds to begin with. There was no point in trying to keep track of what people imagined. Ivy’s loss of her position to Dinah’s boyfriend hadn’t made matters any simpler. But things had never been bad between them. Just complicated.

Ivy was pretty articulate, but there wasn’t a lot about the current situation that could be talked through.

After a few minutes, though, she found a way. “I guess what sucks is that all I’m going to have of him is memories,” Ivy said, “and I was trying to cultivate some good ones to carry with me.” She wasn’t exactly crying, but her voice had gone velvety.

“You know he had no choice,” Dinah said. “The chain of command is still in effect.”

“Of course I understand that,” Ivy said. “Still. It’s just not what I wanted.”

“We knew it was going to get ugly,” Dinah said.

Her radio started beeping.

“Speaking of which. .”

“Who the hell is that?” Ivy asked.

“Sean Probst,” Dinah said. “He’s back.”

Ivy hung out in Dinah’s shop for a while as Dinah laboriously keyed out the second half of her situation report. By the time South America had passed from view, long trails of black smoke were streaking northeast from the burning wreckage of the People’s Justice Blockade and casting shadows on the wrinkled skin of the Atlantic. Bright sparks had appeared over Kourou again, but now they were the incandescent plumes of solid boosters chucking heavy-lift vehicles into the sky.

“Back in business,” Ivy said. “I guess I better revise those spreadsheets.”