Seveneves - Страница 91

Ivy nodded. “Yeah. And I am growingly certain that it will. Even if the scarfed nozzle gambit fails, we still have that MIV we can send out as a backup plan. I think that in a week we’ll have a successful rendezvous with Ymir and we’ll be prepping for the Big Ride.”

Ivy made a gesture indicating that the new arrivals should find places for themselves around the table. “Which brings me to the topic of this meeting,” she continued. “We know what J.B.F.’s plan is. She’s recruiting some number of Arkies willing to strike out on their own. The general scheme seems to be that they’ll get a few arklets stocked with provisions for a few weeks’ journey. Then, on a signal, they’ll break away from Izzy and make burns that will take them to a higher orbit. An orbit that we can’t reach without expending a lot of propellant. We don’t know what their long-term plan is — or if they even have one — but I think Julia is basically playing the odds that these people will survive long enough to send back messages saying ‘Come on in, the water’s fine!’ and encourage other Arkies to follow suit. They all know that they can’t really be pursued once they have departed the swarm. Membership in the Cloud Ark is, under the current state of affairs, voluntary.”

“I infer you mean to change that?” Luisa asked drily, casting her gaze over Tekla and the members of the squad.

“They can’t make a break for it without hoarding certain critical supplies,” Ivy said. “We can’t allow people to just ransack our storage facilities for whatever they want. And we have clear evidence that this has been happening. There’s traffic on Spacebook about where to look if you want to score a box of fresh batteries or scrubber cartridges. So, our basic approach to this is going to be simple. We’ve identified the worst offenders, where hoarding is concerned. I’m going to make an announcement in an hour, explaining how the Cloud Ark Constitution works when it comes to theft of public supplies, and I’m going to offer a twenty-four-hour amnesty during which anyone can turn in stuff that they have been hoarding. As soon as that time is up, Tekla and her team are going to move on one arklet that we know is being used as a storage dump for contraband, and they are going to restore order. And then Sal will step in, as prosecutor, and take whatever action he deems justified.”

“How can you put people in jail when they are already confined to tin cans?” Luisa asked. “How can you fine them when there is no money?”

“We will have to evolve solutions as we go,” Sal said.

Tekla stared him down, then drew her thumb across her throat.

“WELL, THAT SEEMS DEFINITIVE,” JULIA SAID.

She and Spencer Grindstaff were hovering in the middle of the White Arklet. Drifting near them was a laptop whose speakers had been playing the audio feed from the Banana. They could hear the sounds of the meeting breaking up, and people separating into smaller conversations as they moved out of the room. Spencer pulled it closer and whacked the volume button a few times to mute the sound.

“As I said before: hook, line, and sinker.”

“Unless,” Julia said, “they are somehow aware of the fact that we have surveillance on the Banana, and everything we just heard was a sort of radio play staged for our benefit.”

Spencer beamed. “Now, that is paranoid! I thought I had it bad, but—”

“Just kidding,” Julia said, a little too quickly. “This is actionable, Spencer. I believe we are justified in taking everything we just heard at face value. Which means I am comfortable giving good news to the Martians. Are they ready?”

“Yes, they’ve been waiting,” Spencer said, and thumbed out a text message to summon them.

The Martians all had to come via the same hamster tube, so it took a few moments for the core members of the first human expedition to the Red Planet to filter in: Dr. Katherine Quine, whose professional role was obvious; Ravi Kumar, who would be the expedition’s commander; Li Jianyu, who would act as a general science officer; and Paul Freel, an American MIV expert, the head engineer. They, as well as a score of other Arkies waiting in the wings, had sworn an oath that they’d not spend the rest of their lives sealed up in tin cans, but would walk on the surface of Mars or die in the attempt. In their wake came several other members of Julia’s “staff.”

Julia opened the meeting with a few words of greeting and a solemn announcement to the effect that the Mars mission was a go. Once the ensuing round of zero-gee high fives and embraces had trailed off into an awkward silence, she singled out Paul Freel. “Paul, no doubt you’ve briefed these others on the very latest while you were so patiently cooling your heels, but might I know what has been going on with the MIV?”

“Of course, Madam President. As you know, they’re trying to stabilize Ymir with—”

“A Rube Goldberg scheme in the form of an ice sculpture. Yes, I know about that.”

Paul chuckled, showing a lot of gum. “Not surprisingly, the powers that be are a little nervous about that and so word came down from on high that we ought to be preparing a backup plan, so we can go pull Ymir’s fat from the fire if need be. Well. That couldn’t be better, from a Martian point of view! As you know, we have been planning this mission for years. After Zero, I kept it going as a side project all through the development of the MIV program, and we managed to grease it in as one of the use cases.”

“Use cases?”

“One of the hypothetical uses to which the MIV kit might eventually be put,” Spencer explained.

“Basically it just gave us an excuse to include a few components, like throttleable landing engines and aeroshield material, that might not have made it in otherwise,” Paul went on. “So, stabilizing Red Rover’s design has been a piece of cake.”

“Red Rover?”

“Yeah, that’s what we’re calling her.”

“I would like to propose something a little more suggestive of a higher purpose,” Julia said. “Spearhead or some such thing.”

This led to an uneasy silence terminated by Camila, who said, “I’ll draw up a list of options and submit it to you right away, Madam President.”

“Thank you, Camila. You understand, Paul, that this mission will have symbolic as well as scientific value, and we want to send the right message to the other Arkies so that they will feel inspired to follow in her wake.”

“Of course! Consider it a working title only,” Paul said. “A code name.”

“It’s not even good as a code name,” Spencer pointed out, “because anyone can—”

“Let’s move on,” Julia said. “You were talking, Paul, about the design.”

“Done. It took, like, a man-day. We just had to make a few tweaks to a preexisting use case to reflect the materials and supplies we actually had on hand.”

“Excellent.”

“But a design is not a ship, of course,” Paul continued, “and until a couple of days ago it would’ve been pretty darn hard to put the actual propulsion system together without bringing down the wrath of Ivy!”

“That is not a phrase calculated to strike fear into the heart of anyone except those most worshipful of her authority,” Julia remarked, speaking with the gravity that could only be summoned by one who had recently used nuclear weapons on live targets.

Paul cackled. “You know what I’m saying, though — everything happens in a fishbowl here! So, you can imagine the grin on my face when we got the order to begin assembling the Ymir rescue MIV.”

“Are the specifications similar?”

“Similar enough. They can both use the same main engine. The thruster packages, the control systems, life support — all of that stuff is completely standardized; it doesn’t change from one use case to another, it’s just a matter of punching different parameters into the code. It’s just a config file!”

Seeing that Julia didn’t necessarily know what a config file was, Spencer put in, “They can essentially download the DNA, if you will, of Red Rover, or whatever we end up calling it, into the Ymir rescue vehicle with a few keystrokes.”

Satisfied with that, Julia asked, “What of the arklets? The heptad and the triad?”

“Well, they’re already functional, independent space vehicles. Way more than enough space for twenty-four Martians and their vitamins. Obviously, we’ve been stocking up,” Paul said, waving his hands around at the bags of food and other supplies crowding the White Arklet.

“Yes,” Julia said, “but the critical part of the operation is going to be moving them from their default positions in the swarm — which will seem unremarkable as far as Parambulator is concerned — to the propulsion stack that you have been assembling. And that’s going to make a hell of a stink, is it not?”

The smile on Paul Freel’s face became a bit frozen. “We could just go for it,” he said.

“I have a workaround,” said Spencer Grindstaff. “I think we can make this happen. A Streaker Alert is all we need. It’ll go down tomorrow.”

“How do you know there’s going to be a Streaker Alert?”

“Such an event is nothing,” Spencer said, “other than a particular configuration of bits.”

DINAH HAD BEEN DREAMING OF MARS.

As an asteroid miner, she had never been that interested in the distant and inhospitable Red Planet. The politics of the pre-Zero space exploration world had obliged her to show skepticism, even disdain toward those who wanted to go there and to build colonies and terraform the planet. Mars colonists were siphoning attention and resources away from the asteroid miners, who wanted to use easier-to-get resources to make much more human-friendly habitats: space colonies, rotating to provide full gravity, with plenty of water and fresh air.