this, the brain trust behind the Cloud Ark—an ad hoc working group of governmental space agency veterans and commercial space entrepreneurs—had opted for the only strategy that could possibly work, which was decentralized and distributed. Each arklet, as the component ships were being called, would be small enough that it could be heaved into orbit on the top of a single heavy-lift rocket. It would draw power from a small, simple nuclear reactor fueled by isotopes so radioactive that they would throw off heat, and thereby generate electricity, for a few decades. The Soviet Union had used such devices to power isolated lighthouses, and they had been employed in space probes for decades.
Each arklet would accommodate a small number of people. The number kept changing as different designs were drawn up, but it meandered between about five and a dozen. Much depended on how rapidly it would prove feasible to mass-produce inflatable structures; these made it possible to create much more spacious volumes by housing people in what amounted to thick-skinned balloons. But making balloons that could withstand atmospheric pressure indefinitely while also standing up to solar radiation, thermal swings, and micrometeoroids was no small project.
It went without saying that, in the long run, the Cloud Ark as a whole was going to have to be self-sustaining in terms of food production. Water would have to be recycled. Carbon dioxide exhaled by humans would have to be used to sustain plants, which would produce oxygen for the humans to breathe and food for them to eat. All of this had been the subject matter of science fiction stories and practical experiments for decades. Those experiments had produced mixed results that were now getting a lot of attention from people who understood such things a lot better than Dinah. But she gathered that she had better get used to a low-calorie vegetarian diet, and occasional oxygen shortages.
Isolated arklets wouldn’t survive for long. It didn’t matter how good their internal ecosystems were. Things would go wrong, people would get sick, supplies and nutrients would run low, and people would just plain go crazy from being cooped up with the same few individuals.
The design of the arklets, and of the whole Cloud Ark system, kept changing. One day it was all about being “fully distributed,” which meant that in the long run there was no central depot—no Izzy—and that all exchanges of material and “human resources” between arklets would happen through “opportunistic docking,” meaning that two arklets would agree to come together and connect nose-to-nose for a time so that food, water, vitamins, or people could be exchanged. This was envisioned as market driven, without any central command and control mechanism.
The next day a new edict would be handed down to the effect that overall coordination would be handled by a command center on Izzy. The space station would also serve as a central depot for anything that could be stockpiled. The torus—or tori, since Rhys was on track to construct a second one—would be available for rest and recreation; arklet dwellers going stir-crazy from living in tin cans and suffering loss of bone density from floating around in microgravity would be rotated through and allowed to vacation there.
The schemes envisioned by the Arkitects, as Dinah and Ivy started calling them, ping-ponged back and forth between those two extremes, and seemed to reflect the existence of at least two factions. The centralizing faction pointed to the dangers of prolonged zero-gee existence as a reason for rotating people through the torus. The decentralizers came back a couple of days later with a sketch of the so-called bolo scheme, wherein a pair of arklets would connect to each other with a long cable and then begin spinning around their common center of mass, creating simulated gravity in each arklet that was stronger and better than what could be achieved in a torus. A couple of days after that, the centralizers posted an animated simulation of what would happen when two bolos ran into each other and got their cables tangled. It was funny in a kind of slapstick-horror way.
None of this really mattered in the short term, because, even on a hysterically accelerated schedule, it was going to take weeks to design and manufacture even a single arklet. And it would take longer to ramp up the production lines for the giant heavy-lift rockets needed to boost them into space. What Izzy’s crew would be seeing in the meantime was a hodgepodge of preexisting spacecraft, mostly Soyuz capsules, being sent up using the existing stock of rockets. These would carry “Pioneers” whose job would be to build new extensions onto Izzy’s Integrated Truss Assembly: for docking many arklets at a time, for storing material, and for making it all run. The Pioneers would spend most of their time in space suits performing EVAs: extravehicular activities, a.k.a. space walks. There would be something like a hundred Pioneers all told. They were being trained now, and their space suits were being hastily manufactured.
But Izzy in her current form couldn’t support anything like a hundred new people. She didn’t even have the spacecraft docking ports needed to berth their vehicles when they arrived. So in order to accommodate the Pioneers who would begin arriving in a few weeks, the Arkitects sent up Scouts. The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian.
There wasn’t room for them on the space station. Actually, to be precise, there was plenty of physical space to accommodate them, but the support systems weren’t there. The CO2 scrubbers could only handle the output of so many lungs. The entire space station had only three toilets, one of which was almost twenty years old.
The Scouts were going to live most of the time in their space suits. This made sense as far as it went, since their mission was to work to exhaustion every day. Sixteen hours in a space suit meant sixteen hours that the Scout was not imposing a direct burden on Izzy’s life support systems.
At Zero, the total number of functioning space suits in the known universe had been something like a dozen. Production had been ramped up since then, but they were still a scarce resource. In its most common form, the Orlan space suit used by the Russians could only function independently for a couple of hours, which was fine since normal people were completely exhausted by that point anyway. Beyond that, its internal reserves were used up. So, the Scouts would mostly be working on umbilicals. Their suits would be connected to an external life support system by a bundle of plumbing and cables that would supply air and power while taking away waste and excess heat.
During the few hours they were allowed to rest, the Scouts needed a place to go and to climb out of their space suits.
Whoever was running things at Roskosmos had pulled up an old idea for an emergency crew rescue device and begun actually producing them. It was called Luk. The word meant “onion” in Russian. It was pronounced similarly to “Luke,” but English speakers inevitably started calling it “Luck.”
In the best traditions of Russian technology, Luk was straightforward. Take a cosmonaut. Enclose him in a large plastic bag full of air.
With any normal plastic bag material, the cosmonaut will suffocate or the bag will pop, because plastic bags aren’t strong enough to withstand full atmospheric pressure. So, fill the bag with only as much air as it can handle—some fraction of one atmosphere—and then place another bag inside of it. Inflate that bag with air at slightly higher pressure. That’s still not enough air to keep a cosmonaut alive, so put a third bag inside of the second bag and inflate it to higher pressure yet. Keep repeating, like with Russian nesting dolls, until the innermost bag has enough air pressure to keep a human alive—then put the cosmonaut inside of that one. All of those layers of translucent plastic gave it an appearance reminiscent of an onion.
The scheme had many advantages. It was cheap, simple, and lightweight. Deflated, a Luk could be pleated and rolled up for storage in a backpack-sized container.
Of course, the air inside the innermost bag would get fouled with carbon dioxide as the occupant breathed, but this could be handled as it usually was on spaceships and submarines, by passing the air over a chemical such as lithium hydroxide that would
