is another.”
“It’s going to take a long time,” Luisa said, nodding. “And it might not work.”
“Yeah. Look, I just make robots.”
“All of which will be making the trip?”
“Yes,” Dinah said. “They’ll be needed on the comet’s surface, for anchoring cables and netting. It’s a big chunk of ice. It’s brittle. We don’t want it to fall apart like a dry snowball when thrust is applied.”
“A dry snowball,” Luisa repeated. “Is that a thing, where you come from?”
“The Brooks Range? Yeah. Terrible place to make snowballs.”
“Unless you’re the kid sister,” Luisa said, “and everyone’s throwing them at you.”
“No comment on that.”
“In Central Park,” Luisa said, “the snowballs were wet and they were hard.”
DAY 90
When Ivy had opened the meeting on Day 37 with the words “five percent,” Dinah and most of the others on Izzy had looked around themselves and seen a lack of progress that had troubled them. Which, of course, had been Ivy’s point. On that day, twenty-six people had been in space, eight of whom were just barely surviving in temporary Luk shelters. The Banana had, with a bit of crowding, accommodated everyone.
On Day 73, when Ivy had opened another meeting in the Banana with the words “ten percent,” the situation had been transformed. There had been no question anymore of fitting Izzy’s whole population into the Banana; most of them had had to watch the meeting on video feeds. Thanks to Sean Probst and his Arjuna launches out of Moses Lake, no one quite knew what the total off-Earth population was anymore. Allegedly there was a Google Docs spreadsheet where it was being kept track of, but no one could agree on where it was. The population had certainly gone into the triple digits at least a week before.
In the first two weeks of its operation the new shake-and-bake spaceport at Moses Lake had launched three rockets. One had crashed into a high-end vineyard near Walla Walla, destroying several acres of grapes that would have made excellent wine, had there been enough time left on Earth’s clock to age it properly. The others had made it to Izzy.
Most of Arjuna’s big payloads, though, were being launched not from Moses Lake but from sites nearer the equator, whence they could get into orbits closer to the plane of the ecliptic. At least two heavy-lift rockets, one from Canaveral and one from Kourou, had effected a rendezvous and docking maneuver in a low orbit above Earth’s tropics. Others were said to be in the works. But little was known of this project. Communication wasn’t Sean Probst’s strong suit, and his career in private enterprise had instilled a habit of playing his cards close to his vest. In this he seemed to be of one mind with the small cohort of people aboard Izzy, like Spencer Grindstaff and Zeke Petersen, who had impressive security clearances. Dinah and Ivy, comparing notes and sharing fragments of circumstantial evidence, had assembled at least a vague theory of what was going on. Ostensibly, Sean Probst was a wild card. But Arjuna had been mailing Nats to Sparky for weeks, and Sparky had been giving them top priority on launches to Izzy. It seemed, therefore, that Dinah’s results—the feedback she was sending to Arjuna about which Nats worked in space and which didn’t—were of great interest to NASA. And it was significant that at least one of Sean’s payloads had been launched from Canaveral—which was, of course, NASA’s flagship launch facility. Even more so was a launch out of Vandenberg Air Force Base that added a small additional module to the growing Arjuna complex. They knew it was small because of the size of the rocket used, and they knew it was top secret spook stuff because of the precautions that had been taken on the ground—that much had been reported by ordinary citizens, who had been forced to the shoulder of Highway 101 by a long military convoy, and who had aimed long lenses at the launch pad only to find their view blocked by tarps and camo nets.
The next rocket out of Moses Lake had made an uneventful journey to Izzy. Its upper stage, lacking a place to dock, flew in formation with the space station about a kilometer “aft.” Fyodor stared at it balefully out the window and made repeated suggestions that its stores should be confiscated. Its cargo manifest was unusual:
Spare propellant, and other consumables, that would enable Sean’s Drop Top to execute a plane-change maneuver and rendezvous with Ymir in equatorial orbit (for the word “Ymir” was now being used to denote both the spaceship that Sean was assembling and its faraway destination)
Ice
Fiber for combining with ice to make a stronger material called pykrete
Several thousand Icenats: tiny robots optimized for crawling around on ice
Fyodor, and perhaps others as well, coveted the ice and the propellant. Pete Starling had begun rattling legal sabers down on the ground, threatening to seize the Moses Lake spaceport—a scheme that vanished overnight after Sean began to rattle sabers of his own, threatening to make a YouTube video exposing the Cloud Ark scheme as a poorly conceived panacea at best. It was strange, to say the least, that such open conflict could exist between the government’s left and right hands, but the world had become a strange place. Talking of it over meals or during after-work drinking sessions, Dinah and Ivy and Luisa could only speculate at the shouting matches that must be happening down on the ground between the Oval Office, the military, Arjuna Expeditions, and the Arkitects.
Dinah mostly just kept her head down and worked, programming the robots that Sean was going to take with him on his expedition. A comet core was not a solid piece of ice so much as an aggregation of shards, loosely held together by its own self-gravity—which was extremely weak. Merely touching it could cause big pieces to separate. Arjuna Expeditions had known this for many years and had put millions of dollars into inventing technology for capturing such difficult objects. Though “technology” might be too fancy a word for techniques that would have been recognizable to Stone Age hunter-gatherers: surround it with a net, draw the net closed with a loop of string.
Actually performing that feat in space was what Sean described as “an asymmetrical problem,” programmer-speak meaning that there were a lot of contingencies and detail work, so it wasn’t amenable to One Big Solution. Robots would probably end up swarming all over the surface of Comet Grigg-Skjellerup, cinching the net down and reinforcing weak spots by melting the ice, mixing the water with fiber, and letting it refreeze into pykrete. Dinah had offered to help out with that, and had been excited by the thought until Sean had brought her down to earth by pointing out some awkward realities. Communication between Izzy and Ymir was going to be limited by their one radio. They wouldn’t be able to send video. And latency was going to be significant: for a large part of the journey there would be a delay of several minutes as the signals traversed a distance comparable to that between the Earth and the sun. So programming robots on the surface of the comet would be nothing like looking out her window at the ones on Amalthea. Anything Dinah had to contribute, she had to contribute now.
In any case, Izzy’s population had dropped by two, and the level of tension and drama had fallen precipitously, when Sean and Larz had departed in the Drop Top on A+0.82. The plane-change maneuver took them to a rendezvous above the equator with Ymir. After more rendezvous operations extending over a week, and incorporating yet more payloads launched from Cape Canaveral as well as from private spaceports in New Mexico and West Texas, Ymir made a long burn of her main engine that placed her into a transfer orbit bound for L1. A few days after that, she beat the Apollo record for distance traveled from Earth.
Konrad
