Seveneves - Страница 64

Ivy was looking at it too, dividing her attention between the Flivver’s status displays and the window running this optical feed. “Can you get more detail on the forward end? There’s a fitting there that might be a—”

“Yeah,” Dinah said, zooming in and panning to center it. “That’s a docking port all right.”

“Well, I guess we’re being invited to dock with it,” Ivy said.

“It’s weird. I don’t like it.”

“I agree,” Ivy said, “but we can’t come back later. That thing is tiny. Less than four feet in diameter. If there’s humans in there, they are running out of stuff to breathe.”

“Why would they send a human up in something like that?”

“It’s some plan that went awry. An email didn’t get answered, a transmission got garbled, now these people are marooned and probably waiting to die.” Ivy spoke brusquely, a little irked by Dinah’s questions.

Dinah heard thrusters pop and felt them nudging her around as Ivy maneuvered. She knew better than to distract her friend when her brain had gone into orbital mechanics mode. She unbuckled herself from the jump seat and moved to the docking port on the Flivver’s “top” surface, steadying herself by reaching out to grab the adjacent handles whenever Ivy effected a little course adjustment.

Within a few minutes Ivy had matched orbits, maneuvered the Flivver into the right attitude, and driven it straight onto the capsule’s docking port.

“Got a positive mate,” Dinah remarked. She activated a valve that flooded the little space between the Flivver’s hatch and the capsule’s with air. “Here goes nothing.”

She opened the Flivver’s hatch. She was now looking at the outside of the capsule’s hatch, which, until a few seconds earlier, had been exposed to space.

A strange detail: taped to the aluminum hatch was an ordinary sheet of 8½ x 11 inch North American printer paper. On this had been printed a color image: a yellow ring encircling a blue disk lined with stars. Spread-eagled on its center, an eagle with a red-and-white-striped shield. The printer that had spat this thing out had been low on cyan ink and so the image was strangely banded and discolored. Exposure to space hadn’t done it any favors either.

Even though the United States had only ceased to exist a few minutes earlier — declared extinct by Markus under the authority granted him by the Cloud Ark Constitution — this image already seemed as old and quaint to Dinah as a pilgrim or a musketeer.

She heard a mechanism activating on the other side of it.

“It’s aliiiive!” she called. Then, in spite of this effort at jocularity, she held her breath.

The hatch swung open to reveal a haggard, space-bloated, sickly green face, hair floating around it in disarray. But the eyes in that face were as cold and hard as ever, and they were fixed on Dinah.

“Dinah,” the woman said. It was her voice, more than her face, that Dinah recognized. “Even in these tragic circumstances, what a relief to see a familiar face.”

“Madam Pres—” Dinah began. Then she caught herself. “Julia.”

Julia Bliss Flaherty looked as if she didn’t appreciate one bit being addressed that way.

Ivy was using the thrusters quite a bit. Now that the Flivver, the capsule, and the X-37 were all joined together mechanically into a single object, it was possible — though awkward — to maneuver them into sync with the Cloud Ark and clean up all of that Parambulator red. There was some lurching. Julia was getting knocked around a little, learning she had to keep a grip on those handles. Random stuff, including some filled barf bags and a large number of what looked like red marbles, were careering around inside her tiny capsule. Looking through it during a moment when Julia had been flung to one side, Dinah saw a man floating in the far end of the capsule. He was bloody, and he was kind of floppy too. He was dressed in the remains of a navy-blue suit. He was not the ex — First Gentleman.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Dinah said.

“Who the hell is that?” Ivy was shouting. “Markus wants to know if we have survivors.”

“My loss?” Julia asked.

“Your husband,” Dinah said.

“He took the pill,” Julia announced, “in the limo.”

“Oh my god.”

“I’ll need your help getting Mr. Starling squared away. He’s too big for me to move.”

“No, he isn’t,” Dinah said.

“I beg your pardon?” Julia said sharply.

“You’re in zero gee,” Dinah pointed out. “So he’s not too big for you to move. But I can still help you if you want.”

“If you would be so kind,” Julia said. She got a hand over the rim of the hatch while reaching out with the other for a shoulder bag, and looked expectantly at Dinah, who was still blocking her path.

Dinah looked at the back of Ivy’s head. “Julia Bliss Flaherty requests permission to come aboard.”

Julia let out a hiss of exasperation.

“Granted,” Ivy said.

“One casualty on the way too,” Dinah said, and cleared out of Julia’s way.

Julia launched herself through the hatch too hard, flew across the Flivver, and slammed into the far side of it elbow and shoulder first. “Augh!” she cried. But Dinah didn’t think she was hurt, and so she pushed through into the capsule. One of those red marbles was drifting toward her face and she reached out with a hand to brush it away before realizing that it was blood.

Pete Starling was suffering from a number of lacerations, as if he’d been in a stick fight or a car crash. He was groggy, and gagging on blood — probably from a broken nose — which he would cough out explosively when it got in the way of his breathing. Dinah grasped the lapel of his jacket, trying to find a usable handhold. When she pulled on it, the front of the coat came away from Starling’s chest for a moment, revealing an empty shoulder holster.

No matter now. She planted her feet, put her back into it, and got him stretched out in the middle of the capsule, head aimed toward the docking port, drifting slowly in that direction. She was looking to Julia to reach through and pull her companion through the hole. But Julia, banged up from her first attempt to move, was still flailing around, learning the basics of zero gee locomotion the hard way.

Dinah was at the back of the capsule, staring at Pete’s feet, which were kicking weakly. One of his feet was stocking clad; the other still wore an expensive-looking leather shoe. She grabbed a foot with each hand and tried to push him toward the docking port, but he reacted against it. He had no idea what was going on, didn’t understand that he was in space, didn’t like having his feet grabbed. She moved forward, got her waist between his knees, hugged him around the thighs, squeezing his legs together to either side of her body, and tried to get him re-aimed toward the port.

She heard a sharp pop and felt warm wet stuff all over her arms. More of it had splashed up her throat, all the way to the point of her chin. She smelled shit and heard a loud hissing noise. Pete Starling jerked once and then went limp.

She looked up toward the source of the hiss and saw starlight through a jagged hole in the skin of the capsule. The hole was about the size of a man’s thumb. Triangles of metal were bent back away from it.

On second thought, the hissing was coming from two places at once. Another hole had been punched in the other side of the capsule. Pete Starling’s body was between the two holes. The middle of his torso was just a rib-lined crater. Blood was hurtling out of it and accelerating through both holes.

Her ears had popped several times already.

She looked down the length of the capsule at Julia, who had finally gotten herself properly oriented and was looking into the hatch, wild eyed, utterly confused.

“Julia,” Dinah said, “we’ve been struck by a small bolide. We’re losing air, but not that fast. Pete’s dead. He’s in my way. If you could reach through and grab him by the collar and pull him toward you—”

The conversation, and her view of Julia’s face, was cut off by the Flivver’s hatch swinging shut.

ANY CURVE YOU COULD MAKE BY SLICING A CONE WITH A PLANE — A circle, an ellipse, a parabola, or a hyperbola — could be the shape of an orbit. For practical purposes, though, all orbits were ellipses. And most of the naturally occurring orbits in the solar system — those of the planets around the sun, or of moons around planets — were ellipses so round as to be indistinguishable, by the naked eye, from circles. This was not because nature especially favored circles. It was because highly elongated elliptical orbits tended not to last for very long. As a body in a highly eccentric orbit went rocketing in toward the central body and executed a hairpin turn at the periapsis — the point of closest approach — it was subject to tidal forces that could break it up. It might strike the central body’s atmosphere or, in the case of heliocentric orbits, come too close to the sun’s heat and suffer thermal damage. If it survived the plunge through periapsis, it would fly out on a long trajectory that would take it across the orbits of other bodies. After rounding the turn at apoapsis — the point of maximum distance — it would cycle back across the same set of orbits on its way back in toward the center. The solar system was sparse, and so the odds that it would strike, or come close to, any given planet or asteroid on any given circuit were small. But over astronomical spans of time, the likelihood of a close encounter or a collision was high. Collision would, of course, result in a meteorite strike on the planet and the destruction of the formerly orbiting body. A mere close encounter would perturb the body’s orbit into a new and different ellipse, or possibly into a hyperbola, which would eject it from the solar system altogether. The sun still maintained a stable of comets and asteroids in highly eccentric orbits, but their number dwindled over time, and they were rare events to astronomers. In its early aeons the solar system had been a much more chaotic place, with a wider range of orbits, but the processes mentioned had gradually swept it clean and, by a kind of natural selection, produced a system in which nearly everything was moving in an almost circular orbit.