Seveneves - Страница 95

Her tablet finally finished downloading messages, most of which were long out of date by this point. She sorted them by age, newest first, and scanned the headings. Very few had come through in the last several hours. That stood to reason, given that the Cloud Ark had other things on its mind. But close to the top was one that caught her eye: OPEN COMMUNIQUÉ FROM PRESIDENT JBF TO THE PEOPLE OF THE CLOUD ARK.

Merely seeing those words gave her a feeling as if she’d been socked in the solar plexus. She tapped it anyway, and read it:

Today’s shocking tragedy has left us all bereaved, and seeking answers. I was in a Shipyard module when it happened, having just bid farewell and godspeed to the brave explorers of the Red Hope expedition. Thanks to the automatic closure of a hatch, I experienced only minor injuries and discomfort from partial decompression. As we all know, many members of the General Population were not so lucky. I join with all humanity in mourning their sacrifice. By its nature, the Arkie Community was less affected by this disaster. As I had envisioned from the very beginnings of the Cloud Ark project, the distributed architecture of the swarm prevented serious damage. We did lose three arklets, I am sorry to say, and several more sustained damage from minor collisions or debris impacts. But overall the system worked as we had planned from the beginning. Many members of the AC are now, quite naturally, asking themselves whether it is safe to remain in low Earth orbit, clustered around a heavy, aging space station that lacks the ability to maneuver out of harm’s way. The open vista of clean space beckons above us. Red Hope will soon fire its main engine and begin its trek across that unexplored frontier to a planet that will one day have room for us all. The Cloud Ark cannot follow her — yet. But as all members of the AC know, having gone through extensive training in space operations and orbital mechanics, it is well within the capability of any arklet to raise its orbit substantially by making use of its engines and its onboard propellant supplies. Alone, a single arklet, triad, or heptad will not long endure. As part of a swarm, however, it has a fighting chance. Many members of the Arkie Community who have been watching the desperate trials and tribulations of the Ymir expedition, and who have now witnessed the damage inflicted upon Izzy by a single bolide, are now asking themselves whether it is safe to remain, and to trust themselves to the agonizingly slow climb toward clean space envisioned by the partisans of the Big Ride faction. I am a politician, not a scientist, and so I cannot pretend to render a technical opinion. Some may question whether I should be making a public announcement at all. The simple fact of the matter is that my past career as President of the United States has given me prominence in the Arkie Community, whether or not I deserve it. Many have been asking me what I shall do now. Rather than wait for rumor to sow confusion, I am therefore issuing this communiqué. For what it is worth, I have, with the assistance of some loyal friends, escaped from the wreckage of Izzy and found safe haven aboard Arklet 37, currently part of a triad. Shortly after I transmit this message, we will initiate a burn of our main propulsion that will lift us clear of the drifting debris that surrounds what once was the International Space Station, and move us in the direction of clean space. Our orbital parameters will be posted openly on the network so that like-minded members of the AC may join us in creating a swarm-based solution to the acute problems currently imposing themselves on the human race. From a safe position in higher orbit, we will look for ways to extend a helping hand to our surviving friends marooned in the General Population. Working together as a community, we will preserve what we have and build a stable way of life in the sky as we await with breathless anticipation the results of Red Hope’s inspiring venture to the welcoming surface of Mars.

“She’s right about the ‘breathless’ part of it,” Dinah muttered to herself, closing the window and looking at the time stamp again. It had been transmitted three hours ago. Then, only half an hour ago, Ivy had responded with a counter-communiqué. Dinah didn’t read it, but based on the subject heading she knew what it would say: don’t listen to J.B.F., stay in formation, we need you and you need us.

But from what Dinah was seeing, both through the optical telescope and on Parambulator, Ivy’s message had come too late to forestall the departure of a large number of arklets. Somewhere out there, up above them in higher orbit, a new swarm was taking shape, running its own, independent instance of Parambulator, and looking to J.B.F. for leadership.

Dinah had been through many emotional ups and downs while retrieving Ymir. More downs than ups, of course, given the fatality rate. In a strange way, however, the emotional high point was just a few moments ago when she had scanned the word “desperate” in J.B.F.’s communiqué. She rather liked being described as desperate, particularly when she was just on the verge of succeeding.

Parambulator was working on her screen now. She used it to check the status of those three Flivvers. They were still closing. Messages were starting to come in from their pilots, trying to make out whether anyone was still alive in the shard, whether it was safe to approach.

Dinah texted back: One survivor. Stand clear for a sec while this thing takes a big glow-in-the-dark crap.

Then she pulled up the window she used to communicate with her network of robots and typed in a single-word command: JETTISON. It was the name of a program that Sean had started, Larz had improved, and Dinah had recently finished. It was a program meant to be run simultaneously by every robot in the shard, as well as some other systems down in the boiler room.

A prompt came back: ARE YOU SURE Y/N

Y, she typed.

CONGRATULATIONS!!! came back. The dead crew of Ymir had sent her a message from the void.

She pushed herself over to the companionway, got her head aimed “down” through the hole in the floor, and pulled herself straight to the bottom level of the command module. The hatch in the floor — the one that led to the ice tunnel that terminated in the boiler room — had already been closed, as a basic safety measure. But Dinah verified that one last time and made sure it was sealed. Because in a few seconds, there would be nothing but vacuum on the other side of it.

Ymir had begun grumbling. Dinah felt as if she were trapped inside the belly of a frost giant with indigestion. What she was hearing, she knew, was the collective noise made by thousands of Nats, and hundreds of larger robots, as they moved to safe positions on the inner surface of the hollow shard and gnawed away at the structural webbing that connected it to the reactor core.

She returned to her seat in the command module and pulled up a video feed from the interior of the shard. Its walls were now thin enough to admit some sunlight, and so it had become a sort of vast pellucid amphitheater where all of those robots could look inward to the smooth beryllium pod — a neutron-reflecting shroud — surrounding the reactor core. Formerly this had been buried in ice; the recent excavations made to fuel the big perigee burns had left it exposed, also revealing the smaller pod of the boiler room mounted on its side, and the system of hoppers and augers that fed it. Aft of that was what remained of the ice cavern of the nozzle bell, now mostly melted away to expose the blackness of space beyond. The only thing now holding the reactor chamber in place was the massive central thrust pillar, a tree trunk of ice that grew from its forward end and extended straight up to the solid nose of the shard, where the command module was embedded.

JETTISON did her the courtesy of showing a countdown on the screen, so that she could plug her ears. When it hit zero, a sickening crack resounded through the whole structure. The video feed showed a brilliant spray of ice blown free from the central pillar, just above where it connected to the reactor vessel. Demolition charges, placed there long ago by Sean’s crew, had detonated and severed the connection. For a moment she feared nothing further would happen, but then jets of white steam lanced from the reactor vessel’s rounded top. JETTISON had opened valves, releasing pressure that had built up in the chamber from the reactor’s residual heat, and those valves were now acting as makeshift rocket engines, pushing the whole reactor, and everything attached to it, down toward the vacancy of the nozzle.

The entire reactor chamber dropped out the bottom of the shard and was gone.

If JETTISON continued to do its work, the reactor, now a free-floating vehicle, all brawn and no brains, would execute a few clumsy maneuvers to kill its own orbital velocity and drop itself into the atmosphere.

“Bye, Jiro,” Dinah said. “Thank you.”

One of the Flivver pilots texted her: Wow.

Dinah gave it all one more thorough scan, using several cameras. But there wasn’t much to see. Ymir was now a hollow, sugarloaf-shaped shell, crawling with robots, and helplessly adrift in space.

She texted, Did someone place an order for a megaton of propellant?

INSTINCT HAD HERDED THEM TOGETHER IN THE SCRUM, CLOSE TO Amalthea and far away from the parts of Izzy that had been damaged or destroyed. That was where Dinah found them, after she’d been brought aboard, scrubbed clean, checked and checked again for contamination. Pink and raw, she embraced Ivy first, for a long time, and then made the rounds to Doob, Moira, Rhys, Luisa, Steve Lake, Fyodor, and Bo. Konrad Barth and many others were dead. Tekla was still in surgery. One of her breasts had been damaged by a fragment and was being surgically repaired.