“Aïda,” the woman said, by way of self-introduction. “I see you, Dr. Harris.” She began to smile, offering a glimpse of bad teeth, then thought better of it. Her eyes changed direction momentarily to someone or something off-camera, then came back to them. She raised her tablet up closer to the camera so that she could look at the feed from Endurance. Her hand passed briefly in front of the lens and they caught a glimpse of dirty, ragged fingernails, the frayed and shiny cuff of a sleeve. Faint murmurs in the background suggested that other people were in the same arklet with her, off-camera. She was in zero gee, therefore, not part of a bolo. Her eyes were exploring the feed on her tablet, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. The Hammerhead had not existed at the time of the Break, so it was a new thing to her. “Steve Lake,” she muttered, as she recognized him.
“Bo,” Bo said.
“Michael,” Michael said.
“Who is in charge?” Aïda asked. “Is Ivy. .”
“Ivy’s still alive and she is still the commander as per CAC,” Doob said. “She’s off shift. We can wake her up if you need to speak to her urgently.”
“No. Not necessary,” Aïda said, recoiling slightly and narrowing the eyes just a bit. The distance between her and Endurance introduced a time lag in the video, which made conversation halting and awkward.
“How many do you have?” Doob asked.
“Eleven.”
Doob, accustomed to working professionally with extremely large numbers, couldn’t quite process one so small. Eleven. One plus ten.
A thought came to him. “Do you mean eleven arklets?” That would imply scores, maybe a hundred people.
Aïda looked amused. “Oh no, of arklets we have many more. We have twenty-six.”
“Ah. So what is it you have eleven of?”
“People,” Aïda said.
“Aïda,” Bo said, “just to be clear. So there is no misunderstanding. You are speaking for the entire Swarm. And you are saying that, of the entire Swarm, there are eleven survivors.”
“Yes. Plus one. .”
“One what?”
A look of amusement came over Aïda’s face. She broke eye contact. It almost seemed that she rolled her eyes a little. Doob was reminded, hardly for the first time, that the Arkies had been sent up as teenagers. “It is complicated. Let’s just say there is one more who might as well be dead.”
Those in the Hammerhead still could not quite process it. Something occurred to Michaeclass="underline" “We know that the Swarm broke up into two factions. One led by J.B.F. You were part of the opposing group?”
“Yes.” Aïda laughed. Again she reminded Doob of a teenager going through the pretense of talking to a clueless parent about something they would never understand.
Michael, a little wrong-footed, went on haltingly: “And so when you say that there are eleven. . plus one who is, I take it, in a bad way. . anyhow, are you referring just to the anti-J.B.F. faction?”
“They were defeated a long time ago. Months.”
“When you say that, do you mean that there was some kind of a conflict? A war?” Doob asked.
Aïda shrugged. “There was some fighting.” She didn’t see it as important. “Call it a war if you wish. More like some brawls. The real battle was, you know, on the Internet. Social media.”
Silence ensued. Aïda waited for them to respond. When no one did, she shrugged. “What were we going to do? Smash our arklets into each other? There is no way to have, like, actual violence in this setting! So we just had a war of words.” She held her hands up in front of her, making them into little pantomime mouths, aimed at each other, thumb-jaws flapping up and down. “Trying to, you know, persuade others to join our side. Trying to make the other side look bad. Just like the Internet always was.” She chuckled, put one hand to her cheek, rubbed her eye. “Look, it is very complicated and I cannot explain everything right now — how it all came out.”
“But you said that J.B.F.’s faction was defeated,” Michael said. Of all the people in the Hammerhead, he seemed most committed to the proposition that there was a reasonable and logical explanation for all of this.
“Her and Tav, yes.”
“By which you mean, you defeated them with words. Ideas. A social media campaign.”
“We were more persuasive,” Aïda said. “I was more persuasive. Arklet by arklet, they came over to my side. The White Arklet held out for a while, then they gave up.”
“What became of them?”
“J.B.F. is fine. Tav, not so good.”
“He’s the one you mentioned. The twelfth one who might as well be dead.”
“I am afraid so, yes.”
“So getting back to the earlier question,” Doob said, “the number you quoted is for the entire Swarm. Both factions.”
Aïda, finally seeming to understand what they were getting at, sat up straighter and got a more serious look on her face. “Yes. There are no other survivors whatsoever. Of the eight hundred, eleven remain.”
There was a long silence as the four in the Hammerhead took this in. They had all harbored fears that the Swarm might go terribly wrong, but this was worse than anything they had imagined.
Finally Doob raised his hands in front of him, palms up, and shrugged. “What happened?”
“Agriculture crashed.” Aïda turned her head and stared off-camera for a few moments. “I mean, I could say many things, but that is basically it. Between the CMEs, algae blights, lack of water. . very few arklets produce food anymore.”
“What have you been eating?”
Aïda snapped her head around, as if surprised by the question, and looked quizzically into the camera. “Each other. Dead people, I mean.”
There was a long silence during which Doob, Bo, Michael, and Steve all exchanged looks.
The terrible thing was that they had considered doing the same thing, many times. Every freeze-dried corpse that they jettisoned was a big collection of protein and nutrients that, from a certain point of view, could seem mouthwatering.
Seeming to read their minds, Aïda went on: “And you?”
“You mean, have we resorted to eating dead people? No,” Doob said.
“Tav started it,” Aïda said. “He ate his own leg. Soft cannibalism, he called it. Legs are of no use in space. He blogged it. Then it went viral.”
No one had anything to say to that. After a few moments had gone by, Aïda continued. “But Endurance is better stocked with MREs and so on. Plenty of water. You would not have gone there.”
“No, we did not go there,” Doob said. He could tell from the body language of the others in the Hammerhead that they were too shocked to be entrusted with speaking at the moment.
“As for us,” Aïda said, “you should also know that supplies were conserved. Even as people died and we lost arklets. We moved what we had into the arklets that survived. Our twenty-six arklets are well stocked.”
“With everything except food,” Doob said.
“Yes.”
“Do you have enough water to match our trajectory?”
“Yes,” Aïda said. She was a beautiful young woman, Doob thought, with a fierceness about her that helped explain her success in the social media campaign against Tav and J.B.F. “We have performed all of the calculations. If we jettison mass and pack all we have into a heptad, we can make the rendezvous around the time of your next apogee. But we will need to know your exact params.”
“We will discuss your proposal,” Doob said, “and make any necessary preparations.” He looked over at Steve Lake, who severed the connection just as Aïda was about to say something.
THEY SAT IN THE BANANA AND DISCUSSED IT AS IF THERE WAS ANYTHING really to discuss. They all registered their rote shock and disgust at what the Swarm had been reduced to. It all sounded hollow to Luisa. Finally she spoke up. It was what Luisa did. They expected it of her. They relied on it.