“Yes,” Doob said.
“And doesn’t that mean that we’ll be consuming the structure that’s holding everything together?”
“Yes,” Doob repeated, “but it’s okay. Because the more of it we use, the lighter we get, and the less thrust we need. So it’s okay to sacrifice some structure as we go along.”
Sal had been listening intently. “I don’t mean to throw cold water on the idea,” he said. The pun — assuming he meant it as such — elicited a few groans. “But we’ve been hearing about radioactive contamination.”
“On the outer surface of the shard, yes,” Dinah said. “Microscopic motes of stuff that is super radioactive, stuck to the ice. Beta won’t penetrate our living spaces. We’ll have to be careful, though, not to track it inside. We can program robots to crawl around, look for those hot motes, and get rid of them over time.”
Sal looked unconvinced.
“I won’t lie to you,” Dinah said. “People are going to die of it.”
“But the trade is as follows,” Rhys said. “Izzy already has a massive battering ram of nickel-iron on her snout. Her flanks are vulnerable, as we learned today. Now we have the ability to shroud everything — the entire space station — in reinforced ice. Oh, it will dwindle over time. But through most of the Big Ride we’ll be living deep inside of a gigantic iceberg with a steel nose. I submit that the death toll from possible contamination will be minor compared to what we would experience if we went on the same journey unprotected.”
“What do you need to make it happen?” Ivy asked.
“Permission,” Dinah said.
“When did you ever ask for that before?”
The joke elicited a high-pitched laugh from the corner of the conference room. Heads turned toward Camila.
“Camila,” Ivy said, “we’ve hardly heard a word from you since we found you in the Shipyard. One of our witnesses there claims you may have saved Tekla’s life. You had the opportunity to escape with Julia. Instead you stayed behind to free the bound Shipyard workers. You saved their lives. Now you’re here among us. You must know how this looks.”
The look on Camila’s face made it clear that how it looked had never crossed her mind. She didn’t even get what Ivy was saying.
“Dear,” Luisa said, “people are going to say you are a spy who volunteered to be left behind.”
Camila held up a closed fist and opened it to reveal a small white plastic box, loose tape still dangling from it. “Julia’s bug,” she announced. “It was here.”
No one looked very convinced.
“She invited me to dinner at the White House,” Camila said. “She helped me pick out a dress. She introduced me to generals, ambassadors, movie stars. She wrote me letters on White House stationery. I was — I was in love with her. You can call me naive if you want. All right. I was naive. Until this morning. And then all of a sudden I saw. I saw what I was dealing with. I hate her now. And I hate myself for having been in love with her.”
“Best remember that, sweetheart,” Moira said. “Because she made the wrong choice today. And sooner or later, she’ll be coming back.”
“I’ll be ready,” Camila said.
Endurance
SEEN BY HUMAN EYES, THE HOLLOW HULK OF YMIR’S ICE SHARD WAS as dead, brittle, and gleaming as the discarded carapace of a beetle. Captured through the electronic eyes of cameras, then speeded up a hundred-thousandfold, so that the events of one day were compressed into one second of video, it looked like an amoeba pursuing, capturing, and swallowing Izzy. A person with no preconceptions of what they were watching would perceive Izzy as a steel-headed insect, all legs and pods and antennas, twitching and kicking in an effort to defend itself from the slow, relentless, liquid onslaught of the ice monster.
In truth, of course, the four hundred survivors, moving at lightning speed compared with the slow evolutions of the ice, were reconfiguring the space station in preparation for the Big Ride. The crippled Caboose was cut free and the components of the Shipyard moved forward. The big power reactor was brought in close to the Stack; from now on they would rely on ice to shield the rest of Izzy from its radiation. The eighty-one arklets arranged themselves into nine groups of nine and were tacked into place at the aft end, nozzles aimed backward. The structural works holding them into place at first were flimsy trellises on which spacewalkers could string cables, propellant lines, and hamster tubes. As soon as those were in place, the ice caught up with them, driven forward by the ceaseless operations of a giant Nat swarm, and the arklets were gradually cemented into place within a solid matrix of the fiber-reinforced ice known as pykrete.
Forward the ice flowed. It was like watching video of a melting iceberg played in reverse. The Nats, blindly following a simple collection of rules, packed it into every vacant space they happened upon. In the few minutes out of each day when the crew could take some rest and eat some rations, they would try to top each other telling funny stories about where they had found a living infestation of ice, and what they had done to beat it back.
Within a month, the remnants of Ymir had all been consumed, and Izzy had seemingly ceased to exist. The two of them had merged into an orbiting mountain. Its summit was a battered and scarified lump of nickel-iron, hazy with angular scaffolding where antennas and sensors were mounted. Its slopes were a smooth rampart of black ice, interrupted here and there by outcroppings of thrusters or other equipment, observation domes peeking out like hermits’ huts. Its base was a plane decorated with a neat grid of eighty-one small holes from which blue-white fire erupted from time to time as the ship passed through her perigee.
They couldn’t make out what to call the thing. People tried and failed to combine the words Izzy and Ymir. The closest they came was Izmir, but that had been the name of a city in Turkey. Sentiment was in favor of naming her after the martyrs of the Ymir expedition, but there had been several. In honor of Markus it was likened to the Daubenhorn, later shortened to the Horn. Which was not a bad nickname. But the name that stuck was a continuation of the Shackleton theme that Markus had established with New Caird. Shackleton’s big ship had been called Endurance, and was famous for having gotten stuck in the ice. So Endurance it was, and Fyodor christened her thus by getting into his battered Orlan, climbing out onto the surface of Amalthea, and dashing a bottle of champagne against the metal.
A more distant camera, looking down on Earth from high above the North Pole and watching the career of Endurance over the next years, would have seen a nail-biter of an opening, followed by endless grinding tedium, slowly building to a dramatic final reel.
Prior to Ymir’s arrival, the Cloud Ark’s pilots had put no small amount of attention into the problem of keeping Izzy out of the expanding atmosphere. This produced greater drag, which Amalthea, with its high ballistic coefficient, was well made to resist. But the decay of her orbit had to be mended from time to time with burns of the big engine that in those days had lived on the aft end of the Caboose, fueled by the Shipyard’s reactor-powered splitters.
The Break — as they called the event when the big bolide had smashed into Izzy, and the Swarm and Red Hope had gone their separate ways — had put an end to all that. Between then and the day about a month later when Endurance was christened, she spiraled gradually downward. Had the featherweight arklets tried to keep formation with her, they’d have been pushed back by the wind. They were forced to creep into the lee of Amalthea and ride along within her bow wave, like bicyclists slipstreaming behind a truck, until they could be integrated into the framework of the ship. Down and down she spiraled, and the SI team had to send Grabbs out onto the forward trusswork and remove the fragile antennas and sensors mounted there, lest they be slowly burned off by a rarefied but white-hot windblast. Fyodor’s champagne space walk was a brief one, and when he got back inside he reported that he could see the spraying foam of the champagne being blown backward by the atmosphere.