“If it comes down to me and Tekla,” Julia said, “I’m not going to miss.”
ALL DINAH WANTED TO DO WAS SLEEP. SINCE NEW CAIRD HAD DEPARTED from Izzy she had never gotten more than four consecutive hours, and the numbers for the last day or so were even more dismal. In a weird way, she wanted to sleep so that she would be able to grieve properly. She knew Markus was dead, but it hadn’t really sunk in. Nor would it, as long as she was running from one crisis to the next.
The burn had worked. Ymir’s perigee altitude had been raised to the point where it would never again be troubled by the atmosphere. But the ship was still tumbling, albeit slowly. And Vyacheslav was still trudging around on its outer surface with his feet zip-tied to Grabbs.
At the start of this extravehicular activity, Slava had exited through the airlock on the side of New Caird—a ship that was no longer with them. His supplies were running low. He had to get inside the command module before he ran out of air. This could be achieved using an airlock built in for that purpose. It was located adjacent to the docking port in the “nose” of the ice-buried command module. Passing through it, he would enter the uppermost level of the module, where he could breathe the same air as everyone else. But he had taken the precaution of checking himself out with an Eenspektor, and found powerful radiation coming from several locations on his suit — basically, wherever he had come into contact with the surface of the shard.
“I was worried about this,” Jiro said, “but there was nothing to be done.”
“Worried about what?” Dinah asked. “I thought the surface was reasonably clean.”
“It was,” Jiro said, “until we did the perigee burn. The nozzle was pointed forward. Some of the steam was blown back over us by the wind — by the atmosphere we were passing through. It condensed and stuck to the surface of the shard. So, now there are little pieces of fallout all over the outside of Ymir. And some of them have gotten stuck to Slava’s space suit.”
“He’s got to get out of that thing.”
Jiro shrugged. “The suit will block most of the beta.”
“I mean, he’s got to get out of it before he runs out of oxygen.”
“That is true.”
“Which means he has to come in here.”
“Also true.”
“He’s going to bring that radiation inside with him.”
“It will take weeks to kill us. By that time we will have accomplished our mission. Or not.”
In the end, though, they came up with a workaround that did not involve dying, which was that they taped some plastic over the companionway that joined the command module’s top level to the one below it. Before doing so, they moved a generous supply of food and water to that level, along with toiletries, a sleep sack, and other items Vyacheslav would be needing. Slava passed through the airlock with some minutes to spare, doffed his suit, and closed it up in the chamber of the airlock, which would block most of the beta radiation coming off it. He then stripped off his clothes and went through several repetitions of decontaminating himself with premoistened towelettes, throwing all of it into the airlock chamber before slamming its hatch shut.
Then he threw up.
The upper level of the command module, along with Slava himself, now had to be treated as contaminated, but they didn’t need it anymore. Jiro and Dinah would be confined to the lower levels, separated from Vyacheslav and the possible contamination by a sheet of plastic, until they reached Izzy or died. A common air supply circulated through all the levels in ducts, but it had a filter system, which they hoped would catch any floating motes of fallout.
Having seen to all of those matters, they turned out the lights and slept. Dinah slept through her alarm, in fact, and finally woke up to realize she’d been out for twelve hours.
Her next thought was to wonder where Markus was. Then she remembered, with a kind of astonishment, that he was dead. It came as a stinging slap, followed by grief. But on the heels of the grief came a feeling of deep fear that she had rarely experienced in all the time since Zero. It was not the sharp bracing fear one felt on an adventure, such as the ride through perigee, nor the kind of intellectual, abstract fear that had been with them ever since Doob had predicted the Hard Rain. This was a kind of morbid panic that was second cousin to depression. It was how a child might feel upon learning that she had been orphaned. Not a child, rather, but an adolescent, the oldest sibling, on whom responsibility for the family now fell. Markus was gone. He wasn’t going to shoulder any more burdens for them. Others would have to take up those burdens. And some of those — the ones, perhaps, most eager to step into Markus’s place — would certainly make the wrong decisions. And so, as sad as Dinah felt about the fact that she would never see Markus again or feel his embrace, the thing that really made her want to contract into a fetal position was this knowledge that it was on her now. On her, and Ivy, and Doob, and the others who could be trusted.
She went “up” into the common room and found Jiro, as usual, lost in contemplation of arcane plots on his computer screen, reflected in miniature on the lenses of his bifocals. During the year he had been in space, his prescription had changed, and so he had been the first consumer of the optical lens-grinding machine that had been sent up and installed in Izzy. Without it, much of the Cloud Ark’s population would gradually have been rendered nonproductive as their eyeglasses were broken or wore out. It was a military machine capable of making glasses in one style, and one style only. At some point a few years down the road, everyone who needed glasses would be wearing this style. It was interesting to contemplate how many decades or centuries would have to go by before the population had grown, and the economy developed, to the point where it could support an eyewear industry with different styles.
He looked up at her through the milky reflections. “I let you sleep,” he said. “Your robots seem to be working fine. There is nothing to do until I finish these calculations.”
“And then what?”
“We have to eliminate the last of the tumbling,” Jiro said, “before we make the final braking burns.”
For Dinah, that was all clear. Ymir was in a safe orbit now and would not fall into the atmosphere anytime soon. But she was still going much too fast, and way too high, to rendezvous with Izzy. They needed to finish the execution of the same plan they’d had all along, which was to make one or two more braking burns as Ymir passed through her perigee, slowing her down to the point where a rendezvous with Izzy was feasible. This required getting the nozzle pointed forward again, and keeping it that way.
“How much damage was done to the—”
“They were destroyed,” Jiro said. “We have two remaining.” They were both referring to the thruster packages, embedded in the ice, that would normally have been used to manage the shard’s attitude. “It is fine. It was necessary,” Jiro added, almost as if worried that Dinah would think poorly of him for criticizing the decisions made by a dead commander.
“Can more be sent out from—”
Jiro nodded. “It is possible to assemble a MIV that could rendezvous with us and assist with the problem. Just in case my idea does not succeed. But since our radio link was lost with New Caird, we cannot coordinate this.”
“And what is your idea?”
“We can use your robots to alter the shape of the nozzle exit,” Jiro said. He held up one hand like a blade, pointed toward the ceiling, and then flexed his knuckles slightly, indicating a shallow bend. “Make it asymmetrical.”
“Like a scarfed nozzle?”