Seveneves - Страница 61

It was happening now, in response to Izzy’s course change. The red only spread so far, then began to recede, first fraying around the edges, then dying off in patches. A few dots went yellow, then corrected themselves as they caught up. Ivy’s expectation, based on the last few months’ tests and exercises, was that the last few red dots would turn white very soon and cease to be a concern. But this didn’t happen. Some remained stubbornly red. Spinning the plot around, looking at it in various modes, she zeroed in on those dots and queried them. Almost all of them were cargo modules or passenger capsules that had been launched during the Splurge: the last-minute effort made by all the spacefaring nations of the world to launch every last rocket they had capable of reaching orbit.

Her phone buzzed. A message had come back from Cal; his boat must have resurfaced.

What’s that supposed to mean?

He had only just now seen her last text.

It means we are no longer engaged.

That seemed a little blunt, so she added, You need to find some nice mermaid.

After a minute he answered {crying} I was going to do the same. Your odds considerably better.

She answered Bullcrap, which was an old joke between them. When she had first met him at Annapolis, he had been such a straight arrow that he was unable to speak the word “bullshit.”

SAB = Straight Arrow Babe came back.

SAB is sad:(Why did you dive?

Big surface wave came through. Bad news for East Coast.

Who tells you? Do you have a chain? Meaning chain of command.

One rung left above me. Then, after a pause, POTUS has gone dark.

She typed in Thank God for that and hesitated before sending it. But the world was coming to an end; she didn’t have to worry about repercussions. She hit Send.

She’d never talked to Cal about what had happened on Day 700: the fuel-air devices, the nuclear warhead. But she was certain it had been his finger on the button.

May God have mercy on her soul, Cal answered, and she knew the subtext: and may He have mercy on mine.

This exchange of messages was interrupted by one from Markus: need u.

She pocketed the phone to free her hands for movement through Izzy, maneuvered through the maze of habitation modules to the Stack, and headed aft, bound for the Tank. The trip down the Stack took no time at all. A week ago she would have had to maneuver around people clumped in twos and threes for conversation. Since Markus had declared PSAPS, this had changed; one of his edicts had been that the Stack must be kept clear for rapid movement of essential personnel. Right now it was as empty as she’d ever seen it. Down in the Zvezda module she saw some comings and goings, and recognized, for a moment, the spiky profile of Moira’s hair. She would be busy making preparations to disperse the Human Genetic Archive to the cloud, a project that in and of itself was at least as complicated as anything happening with swarms and params. Essential personnel indeed.

Luisa popped into view down in H1 and propelled herself up the Stack like she meant business. After nearly colliding with one of Moira’s helpers, she let her momentum carry her up into Zarya, then stopped hard at the entrance to the tube that led to the Woo-Woo Pod. She looked into it for a few moments, evaluating, then made a decision and pulled herself into it.

Ivy passed by the same location a few moments later, slowed for a moment, and glanced down the length of the tube. It was possible to see straight down its length, across the spherical Pod, and through its windows to the Earth. Normally this meant the blue light of the oceans and the white light of clouds and ice caps. Sometimes, a lot of green when they were passing over well-watered parts of the world, or some yellow when over the Sahara.

Right now the light was orange because the Earth was on fire.

People were screaming down there in the Pod. Luisa must have been sent there to calm people down. Ivy was almost drawn in by a sort of magnetic power of fascination. Earth looked as if some god had attacked it with a welder’s torch, slashing away at it and leaving thin trails of incandescence. Some of these were red and steady: things burning on the ground. Others were blinding bluish-white and evanescent: trails drawn through the atmosphere by meteorites.

She fancied she could almost feel the warmth radiating from the planet.

Markus needed her. She couldn’t help the screaming people down in the Pod. She turned her head aft and pushed on.

Hovering in the entrance to the genetic storage modules, Moira was ticking off items on her tablet, listening, dead faced, to something on a large pair of headphones. She noticed Ivy. She peeled a headphone away from one ear and aimed it at her. Ivy recognized a cappella music, medieval polyphony. “King’s College is holding up rather well,” she said. “Do you know the piece?”

“I’m certain I’ve heard it before, but I can’t place it,” Ivy said.

“Allegri’s ‘Miserere mei, Deus,’” Moira said. Thanks to the Morg’s insistence that she take Latin, Ivy knew what it meant: Have mercy on me, O God.

“It’s beautiful.”

“They would sing it at Tenebrae, in the wee hours, as they extinguished the candles one by one.”

“Thank you, Moira.”

“Thank you, Ivy.”

A minute later she was in T3. As always, she stood flat-footed for a moment to get the feel of simulated gravity, then headed toward the Farm and the Tank. Passing through the utility section she considered getting herself a cup of coffee. Then she felt shock and shame over the fact that she was thinking about coffee while her planet was being set on fire.

Then she poured herself a cup of coffee anyway and stepped into the Farm. This was crowded. Most of the Situational Awareness Monitors were showing status displays relating to the functions of the Cloud Ark. The big one at the head of the room was just showing a view of Earth through a camera aimed in that direction. But the video image had nothing like the impact of seeing it directly through the windows of the Woo-Woo Pod. The arc-light intensity of the streaking bolides was reduced to a blurry flare of maxed-out pixels. Out of habit she wondered why they didn’t change the channel to CNN, or Al Jazeera, or one of the other full-time news networks. Then she remembered what was happening.

She proceeded to the door that led into the Tank.

Flanking it was a pair of people who were doing nothing — just standing there. Odd.

She noticed that both of them had unfamiliar devices slung from their belts.

She realized that they were Tasers.

Before she could fully adjust to that, one of them — she recognized him now as Tom Van Meter, an engineer and sort of a jock — nodded politely and opened the door for her.

The Tank was a quarter the size of the Farm, just a medium-sized conference room with, at the moment, six people seated around the table working on tablets or laptops. At its far end was the door leading to Markus’s office. This was ajar. Ivy went through it, and for the first time since coming to Izzy three years earlier, she felt ill at ease doing so, as if someone might jump out and Tase her. But Markus was sitting there talking to Doob.

“Have you been watching Parambulator?” Markus asked her.

“Yes. After we made that course change, a few minutes ago.”

“The performance of the cloud was not everything we could have hoped for.”

“There were some stragglers.”

“Still are,” Doob said, and drew her attention to a projection screen on the wall.

“It looked like they were all new arrivals,” Ivy said. “Cargo modules, passenger carriers from the Splurge. I’m assuming they haven’t logged on to the cloud yet, are not with the program.”

“That is all true but it is dangerous nonetheless,” Markus said.

“Of course it is.”

“It is distracting me.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“As far as bolides are concerned, the systems are working okay and Doob is keeping an eye out for anomalies. But I need to delegate to you, Ivy, this problem of the stragglers.”

“Consider it done.”

“We will destroy them if we have to.”

“How would you even do that, Markus? We don’t have photon torpedoes.”

“We have a module full of freeze-dried dead people,” Markus reminded her, “that we need to jettison anyway. And I would be happy to jettison it in the direction of any straggler that is threatening the Cloud Ark.”

“I will keep that in mind,” Ivy said, “as a bargaining chip.”

Luisa entered, looking a little wild, her face wet with tears.

“Luisa?” Markus said politely. “Did you find out what was going on in the Vu-Vu Pod?”

“A few people getting very emotional,” Luisa said, “as you would expect. Nothing dangerous. Whoever called that in as a disturbance was being a little paranoid.”

“Thank you for investigating it.”

“Speaking of which — you have armed guards posted outside the door to the Tank!”

“I will speak briefly to that, because I am busy,” Markus said. “My feelings about it are basically the same as yours. But I am not here to express my personal feelings but to carry out certain operations to the best of my ability. I didn’t want to be the king of the universe. Nevertheless, now I am. Everything I have ever seen in the history of human civilization, disagreeable as it might seem, says that someone in my position needs to have security.”