Текст книги "Seveneves"

Автор книги: Neal Stephenson

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 57 страниц) [доступный отрывок для чтения: 21 страниц]

“Have you been watching Parambulator?” Markus asked her.

“Yes. After we made that course change, a few minutes ago.”

“The performance of the cloud was not everything we could have hoped for.”

“There were some stragglers.”

“Still are,” Doob said, and drew her attention to a projection screen on the wall.

“It looked like they were all new arrivals,” Ivy said. “Cargo modules, passenger carriers from the Splurge. I’m assuming they haven’t logged on to the cloud yet, are not with the program.”

“That is all true but it is dangerous nonetheless,” Markus said.

“Of course it is.”

“It is distracting me.”

“I’ll take care of it.”

“As far as bolides are concerned, the systems are working okay and Doob is keeping an eye out for anomalies. But I need to delegate to you, Ivy, this problem of the stragglers.”

“Consider it done.”

“We will destroy them if we have to.”

“How would you even do that, Markus? We don’t have photon torpedoes.”

“We have a module full of freeze-dried dead people,” Markus reminded her, “that we need to jettison anyway. And I would be happy to jettison it in the direction of any straggler that is threatening the Cloud Ark.”

“I will keep that in mind,” Ivy said, “as a bargaining chip.”

Luisa entered, looking a little wild, her face wet with tears.

“Luisa?” Markus said politely. “Did you find out what was going on in the Vu-Vu Pod?”

“A few people getting very emotional,” Luisa said, “as you would expect. Nothing dangerous. Whoever called that in as a disturbance was being a little paranoid.”

“Thank you for investigating it.”

“Speaking of which—you have armed guards posted outside the door to the Tank!”

“I will speak briefly to that, because I am busy,” Markus said. “My feelings about it are basically the same as yours. But I am not here to express my personal feelings but to carry out certain operations to the best of my ability. I didn’t want to be the king of the universe. Nevertheless, now I am. Everything I have ever seen in the history of human civilization, disagreeable as it might seem, says that someone in my position needs to have security.”

Luisa’s face suggested that she could make all kinds of objections to that. But she got the better of it, and just let out a sigh. “We will talk about it later,” she said.

“Good.”

“Do you know what is happening down there?”

“I can guess what is happening. It is none of my concern.”

“Understood. But I think that the king of the universe needs to make an announcement pretty soon.”

“I have one prepared,” Markus said.

“Oh, yes, of course you would have one prepared. When were you thinking of delivering it? Because there are a lot of people who need to be calmed down.”

“Is one of those people you, Luisa?” Markus asked the question clinically, but not unkindly.

Luisa drew herself up. Ivy braced herself for a sharp reaction, but then a change came over Luisa’s face as she saw that Markus was merely asking for information. Not being snide.

“Yes,” she answered. “A few minutes ago, Manhattan was struck by a hundred-foot wall of water. I presume that the same is true of most of the East Coast. I was listening to the service from St. Patrick’s Cathedral when it went off the air.”

Markus nodded and changed the display on the projection screen to a live view of Earth.

Ivy was shocked by how far the fire had spread during the few minutes she’d been in here.

She pulled her phone out of her pocket and discovered a series of messages from Cal, sent during the last several minutes.

Hey

You busy?

OK I guess you got pulled away

In case we get cut off I love you

Will look for a mermaid like you said but no substitute 4 u

Lost contact with Norfolk. No chain above me

Holy crap it is getting hot

Diving

Bye

And the last message in the series was a photograph snapped on his cell phone’s camera. It took Ivy a minute of panning and zooming to figure out what she was seeing. Cal had taken the photo while standing in the conning tower of his boat, looking straight up the ladder at the open hatch above him. This provided a tunnel-vision view of a disk of sky.

The sky was on fire.

In his other hand he was holding up his engagement ring—a simple band of polished titanium. He was holding it between his thumb and index finger, shooting the picture through the ring, making it concentric with the disk of the burning sky.

She looked up. Someone had spoken her name.

“Mine just faded away,” Doob told her.

“I beg your pardon, Dr. Harris?” Ivy said, the Morg’s manners triumphing over all circumstances.

“I had been gearing up for these final goodbyes with Amelia, with my kids,” Doob said. He spoke quietly, without marked emotion, as if relating a mildly surprising anecdote. “But, you know, the communications just broke down slowly over a couple of days, and there was never really a goodbye.”

“Very well,” Markus said, “I will make the announcement.”

HOT ENOUGH TO BAKE TATERS ON HOOD OF THIS TRUCK

GO INSIDE DAD

NOT KIDDING ABOUT THERMAL EFFECTS. PAINT BUBBLING

I AM NOT KIDDING EITHER YOU HAVE TO GET INSIDE

GOT A SPACE BLANKET TO PROTECT ME WHEN I MAKE A RUN FOR IT

THEN FOR GODS SAKE USE IT DAD

AH BUT THEN I CAN’T CHEW THE RAG WITH YOU ANY LONGER DINAH

WHAT IF YOUR GAS TANK EXPLODES

HA HA WE DRAINED IT FOR GENERATOR FUEL. WAY AHEAD OF YOU KID

GOD U R A SMARTASS

Dinah was keying this in, thankful that Morse code still worked when your vision was blurred by tears and your voice choked by sobs, when a voice came out of a speaker. It was Markus’s voice: “This is Markus Leuker.”

“I know who you are,” she answered. But then she understood that Markus was speaking on the all-Ark PA system, which supposedly reached into every corner of Izzy as well as to all of the arklets. They had tested it a few times with prerecorded messages, but never actually used it. Markus considered the thing a relic of the twentieth century, and detested it; communications ought to be targeted, busy people ought not to be interrupted by disembodied voices barking from speakers.

“The Cloud Ark Constitution is now in effect.”

Dinah drew breath, knowing what this meant. Markus spelled it out anyway. “This means that all nation-states of Earth, and their governments and constitutions, no longer exist. Their military and civilian chains of command are no more. Oaths you may have taken to them, allegiances you may have held, loyalties you may have felt, citizenships you may have had are now and forever dissolved. The rights granted you by the Cloud Ark Constitution, no more and no less, are your rights. The laws and responsibilities of the Cloud Ark Constitution now bind you. You are citizens of a new nation now, the only nation. Long may it endure.”

She keyed:

MARKUS IS CALLING IT

WHO SAID HE WAS BOSS?

Rufus’s transmission was getting scratchy. Dinah wiped her eyes and looked out her window to see Earth encircled by a belt of fire. The trails of the incoming meteorites, once a pattern of bright scratches in the air, had merged into a blinding continuum of superheated air that had set fire to anything on the surface capable of burning. Since more of the rocks were coming in around the equator, the belt of radiance and fire was brightest there; but north and south of it, long swaths of the surface were aflame, and the belt was widening to envelop the high latitudes of Canada and South America.

She transmitted:

ABOUT TO LOSE YOU, TELL BOB AND ED AND GT AND REX I LOVE THEM. AND BEV.

ALREADY DID BUT WILL AGAIN. CHRIST IT IS HOT

GET INSIDE DAD

DONT WORRY I AM RIGHT BY THE DOOR. CAN HEAR THEM ALL SINGING BREAD OF HEAVEN.

THEN GO JOIN THE CHORUS DAD

OKAY BOB AND ED ARE COMING OUT TO GRAB ME. BYE HONEY DO US PROUD QRT

QRT QRT QRT QRT

She wasn’t sure how many times she keyed that in.

She pulled herself out of her sobs, later, by imagining what had happened: her brothers, Bob and Ed, dressed in silver fireman suits, rushing out of the mine’s entrance to haul Dad out of the old pickup truck, wrapping him in the space blanket to keep him from being broiled by the sky, and dragging him inside. An inch-thick steel plate being slammed across the doorway, the welders going to work laying down fat fillets made to last five thousand years. Once that was done, the heavy machinery fired up, shoving tons of rock and gravel up against the steel plate to bolster it against any shock waves powerful enough to punch it out of its frame.

Then silence, save maybe for the distant thuds of meteorite strikes, and sitting around the table to say grace and tuck into the first of fifteen thousand or so meals that the MacQuaries and their descendants would have to prepare and eat if they were ever to escape from that tomb. They had five hundred people down there, and, at least on paper, enough food-growing capacity to keep that many alive. Exactly how you made that a sustainable proposition wasn’t clear to Dinah; she hadn’t bothered Rufus for every last little detail of his plan.

Markus’s announcement was continuing. He was telling everyone what they already knew, which was that Earth was over, and that the great dying that they had been expecting for the last two years was now in the past. Everyone knew it, but someone had to say it.

He asked for 704 seconds of silence: one second for each of the days that had passed since Zero. About twelve minutes. All nonessential duties would be suspended during that time, and it would be the sole responsibility of the survivors to think, and remember, and mourn. After that, they must put Earth in the past, as a thing that had once been, and apply their minds to what was now.

Drawn up into a fetal position, Dinah hovered alone in the middle of her shop, listening to weird squeals and hisses coming out of her radio’s speaker. Alone of all the people in the Cloud Ark, she knew that her family was still alive, and might go on being alive for a long time. It was not clear to her whether this was better or worse than simply knowing that they were dead. All she had to go on was DO US PROUD, her father’s final transmission. Morse code didn’t leave a paper trail, or an email thread on the screen of your tablet. She would never be able to scroll back and reread the exchange she’d just had with Rufus. She hoped she’d said the right things and that he’d remember it well, and that he would tell the others about it at dinner this evening.

She tried then to mourn for all the others who had died, but it was too big. Emotionally, it was little different from reading about a great war that had happened a hundred years ago. Which maybe was Markus’s whole point. Even though the dying was still going on, they had to force themselves to think about it like the Irish potato famine, or like what had happened to the peoples of the New World when Columbus had arrived and infected them with a slew of deadly diseases. Regret, even horror were appropriate. But detachment was necessary. They all had 704 seconds in which to effect that detachment.

So Dinah thought about what exactly would be entailed in doing Rufus MacQuarie proud. There was a simple answer, which had to do with doing the right thing, being honorable, upholding a few rough-and-ready ethical standards. A sort of frontier code of conduct. All of which was easy to understand if not always quite so easy to live up to. But Rufus was not a cowboy, and he certainly wasn’t a preacher. He was a miner: a delver, a demolisher, a builder, a businessman. If he lived by a simple code of ethics, it was not an end in itself, but a way to get something done without selling his soul or destroying his reputation. It was a tool to be wielded like a shovel or a stick of dynamite. Tools were for building things; and pride was something you could feel after the fact, when you stood back, looked at what you had built, and passed it on to your children. Dinah could spend the rest of her life living by her word, giving everyone a fair shake, and all of that. Rufus would no doubt approve of all those things. But it was not the charge he had given her. He had told her, though not in so many words, to get busy building a future.

“Are you about finished?”

She turned her head to see Ivy hanging in the SCRUM, looking at Dinah through the hatch.

“We’re only, like, two hundred seconds into the—”

“Markus said I could skip it. He sent me on a mission. I need your help,” Ivy said.

“Bitch.”

“Slut.”

“Shall we?”

“REMEMBER WHEN THE INTERNET WAS NEW, AND SOME PEOPLE IN your life just didn’t get it?” Ivy asked. She was preceding Dinah through the seemingly endless maze of docked modules and hamster tubes, headed toward the periphery of Izzy.

“People in my world got it pretty fast. You don’t know many miners, do you?”

“Not in my world. We had these throwbacks who would do stuff like printing their emails out on paper to read them, or asking you for your goddamn fax number two decades after you had thrown away your fax machine.”

They were hurtling through an otherwise perfectly silent space station, still only about five minutes into the twelve minutes of silence. Faces in open hatches would turn to look at them in shock, then recognize them and go back to mourning, praying, meditating, or whatever it was that they were doing.

Dinah understood that this was terribly important but was secretly pleased that Ivy had given her dispensation to get to work.

“How does that apply to—”

“The system works—Parambulator and all of that—as long as every ship in the Cloud Ark is playing by those rules. Logged on to the system, communicating with the agreed-on protocols, obeying the dictates of the swarm. If even one is just hanging out and doing its own thing, well, it might as well be a meteoroid, in terms of its destructive potential.”

“We’ve got one of those?”

“A few of them. But one in particular that is causing havoc.”

“Any collisions yet, or—”

“No, but every time it draws near it triggers an explosion of red in Parambulator and a hundred arklets have to burn fuel to alter their courses. It’s like the whole Cloud Ark is turning somersaults around the movements of this one ship.”

“What is it?”

“Optically it’s an X-37.”

“Fits,” Dinah said.

“Yeah,” Ivy said.

Translation: someone had looked at the craft through a telescope and thought it looked like a Boeing X-37 Orbital Test Vehicle, which resembled a miniature Space Shuttle. It was so miniature, in fact, that it couldn’t carry any crew; it had a cargo bay that accounted for most of its fuselage. It had been developed by DARPA in the late 1990s and early 2000s when it had become obvious that the Space Shuttle was going to be phased out and they needed a small, easily launched vehicle that could go up and, by remote control, perform maintenance tasks on the United States’ fleet of military satellites. Since then it had come in for very little actual use, but when it was used, it was for black-budget spook stuff that Dinah and Ivy wouldn’t know about. It was a footnote in history, obsolescent, not designed for the requirements of the Cloud Ark. It had probably been launched into orbit by some trigger-happy launch crew that just wanted to send up everything they could. With a sufficient amount of sifting through old emails they might be able to find some record of who had launched it, and what, if any, cargo was aboard; but for now it was easier to just go and look at the damned thing. Nearly all the engineering that had gone into it had been devoted to the problem of reentry. Most of its proudest features were therefore useless to them.

Approaching the end of a side-stack, they were able to see through the round orifice of a port into the vehicle docked to its far side: a Flivver, or Flexible Light Intracloud Vehicle. These had begun showing up a few months ago; they were the jeeps of the Cloud Ark, the small utility vehicles used to move people and valuable stuff from one arklet to another, or between an arklet and Izzy. Because they didn’t have to operate in the atmosphere, they had the same general utilitarian look as the arklets. But the pressure hull was smaller in diameter, and instead of an inflatable outer hull the Flivver had more practical stuff: two different styles of docking ports, an airlock big enough to accommodate a human in an Orlan, a robot arm, lights, thrusters. At Dinah’s suggestion they had studded the pressure hull with attachment points that a Grabb could latch on to; this made it possible for each Flivver to carry its own complement of Grabbs, Siwis, Buckies, and Nats, which swarmed all over it like crabs, remoras, and sea lice. Instead of being limited by the hard-engineered capabilities of the robot arm, the Flivver was constrained only by the imagination and ingenuity of the programmer inside, telling the robots what to do.

The silvery burr of Tekla’s head poked out in front of them; apparently she’d been dispatched to assist with closing the hatch and undocking the Flivver. She’d been waiting in the adjacent DC, or docking compartment, which was just a small side module tacked on to serve as an airlock and provide a little extra space for personnel in cases like this. She drew her head back in to make space as Ivy and then Dinah cruised by her. As soon as those two were inside the Flivver, Tekla emerged and exchanged a nod with Ivy.

“Lamprey is in airlock and is functioning,” Tekla said, and closed the hatch. Dinah had some ambivalent feelings about Tekla, but there was no one she’d rather work with in a case like this. She was all business; she got the job done without useless conversation or touch-feely stuff. Dinah closed the Flivver’s hatch and began going through the undocking sequence while Ivy, strapped into the vehicle’s pilot seat, ran down the preexcursion checklist. Befitting a craft that had been designed in a hurry to be Flexible and Light, this wasn’t that lengthy, and so Flivver 3—one of a fleet of eight—was under way before Markus’s 704 seconds of silence had quite expired. Dinah strapped into a jump seat beside Ivy’s. The Flivver’s front end dome consisted largely of windows, bolstered by a sturdy web of curved aluminum struts, so from behind Ivy looked like a bombardier seated in the glass nose of a World War II bomber. She touched the controls and made the craft rotate in a way that caused Earth to pass beneath them, and then the resemblance became stronger. Dinah was reminded of a painting Rufus had shown her, depicting a bomber flying over a burning city, red light flooding into the plane from below. The same effect held now, save that the firestorm covered most of the surface of the Earth.

“I can feel the warmth on my face,” Ivy said.

Dinah couldn’t think of anything useful to say to that. During their passage from her shop to the Flivver she had forgotten about the fact that the Earth was burning, and she didn’t enjoy being reminded of it. Instead she tried to focus on the red light emanating coolly from the screen of her tablet, which was running Parambulator. Flivver 3 had been picked up on the swarm’s collective sensorium and identified as a bogey that might potentially collide with as many as a hundred different arklets if it stayed on its current course. Rather than controlling its thrusters directly, which would lead at best to confusion and at worse to a chain-reaction disaster, Ivy was negotiating a solution with the rest of the Cloud Ark, telling it where she wanted to go and finding a way of getting there that would minimize the amount of maneuvering demanded of all the others.

It was not a speedy way of getting around, and indeed ran at right angles to the fighter-jockey ethos of many of the ex-military types who had come up here in the astronaut and cosmonaut corps. But as they got farther away from Izzy they were able to move into orbits that caused minimal consternation to the rest of the cloud, and move in a more direct way to rendezvous with the wayward X-37.

This had been placed, by whoever the hell had launched it, in an orbit with the same period and plane as the Cloud Ark, but with somewhat greater eccentricity. The orbit of Izzy, and hence of the Cloud Ark, was almost perfectly circular. The X-37’s was more oval, meaning that about half of the time it was “beneath” the Cloud Ark and the rest of the time it was “above,” but twice during each ninety-three-minute orbit it crossed through, each time touching off the havoc that was wasting so much propellant and causing so much annoyance to Markus. Right now it was “above” and due to cross over in another twenty minutes.

“Any bolides we need to worry about before I focus on this?” Ivy asked her.

“Nothing in particular,” Dinah said, meaning that there was nothing so big as to force the entire Cloud Ark to make a course change.

“Let’s make this fast then,” Ivy said, and went over to manual control. For they were now far enough away from the Cloud Ark that she could execute solo maneuvers without making Parambulator screens turn solid red. “Can you scope it?”

Dinah spent a minute refamiliarizing herself with the user interface for the optical telescope mounted to the Flivver’s nose; this was an electronic eyeball about the size of an orange. The controls were intuitive, but getting it to aim at a particular bogey took a bit of doing. Soon enough, though, she was able to see something white and bright. She locked on to it and zoomed in.

From longer zoom it was clearly a winged craft with a black nose, like the Shuttle of old, but it seemed to have taken on added parts. Zooming in further she was able to see that the cargo bay doors that constituted most of the X-37’s “back” had been opened at some point after it had reached orbit. Its payload had then been lifted out of the bay using the built-in robotic arm, which was still holding it, frozen in position. The payload was almost as big as the X-37 itself; it was yet another dome-ended cylinder. But unlike a Flivver or an arklet, it lacked thrusters or any sort of visible power source. It was just a burnished aluminum capsule, gleaming white on one side from sunshine, red below where it reflected the planetary firestorm.

Ivy was looking at it too, dividing her attention between the Flivver’s status displays and the window running this optical feed. “Can you get more detail on the forward end? There’s a fitting there that might be a—”

“Yeah,” Dinah said, zooming in and panning to center it. “That’s a docking port all right.”

“Well, I guess we’re being invited to dock with it,” Ivy said.

“It’s weird. I don’t like it.”

“I agree,” Ivy said, “but we can’t come back later. That thing is tiny. Less than four feet in diameter. If there’s humans in there, they are running out of stuff to breathe.”

“Why would they send a human up in something like that?”

“It’s some plan that went awry. An email didn’t get answered, a transmission got garbled, now these people are marooned and probably waiting to die.” Ivy spoke brusquely, a little irked by Dinah’s questions.

Dinah heard thrusters pop and felt them nudging her around as Ivy maneuvered. She knew better than to distract her friend when her brain had gone into orbital mechanics mode. She unbuckled herself from the jump seat and moved to the docking port on the Flivver’s “top” surface, steadying herself by reaching out to grab the adjacent handles whenever Ivy effected a little course adjustment.

Within a few minutes Ivy had matched orbits, maneuvered the Flivver into the right attitude, and driven it straight onto the capsule’s docking port.

“Got a positive mate,” Dinah remarked. She activated a valve that flooded the little space between the Flivver’s hatch and the capsule’s with air. “Here goes nothing.”

She opened the Flivver’s hatch. She was now looking at the outside of the capsule’s hatch, which, until a few seconds earlier, had been exposed to space.

A strange detail: taped to the aluminum hatch was an ordinary sheet of 8½ x 11 inch North American printer paper. On this had been printed a color image: a yellow ring encircling a blue disk lined with stars. Spread-eagled on its center, an eagle with a red-and-white-striped shield. The printer that had spat this thing out had been low on cyan ink and so the image was strangely banded and discolored. Exposure to space hadn’t done it any favors either.

Even though the United States had only ceased to exist a few minutes earlier—declared extinct by Markus under the authority granted him by the Cloud Ark Constitution—this image already seemed as old and quaint to Dinah as a pilgrim or a musketeer.

She heard a mechanism activating on the other side of it.

“It’s aliiiive!” she called. Then, in spite of this effort at jocularity, she held her breath.

The hatch swung open to reveal a haggard, space-bloated, sickly green face, hair floating around it in disarray. But the eyes in that face were as cold and hard as ever, and they were fixed on Dinah.

“Dinah,” the woman said. It was her voice, more than her face, that Dinah recognized. “Even in these tragic circumstances, what a relief to see a familiar face.”

“Madam Pres—” Dinah began. Then she caught herself. “Julia.”

Julia Bliss Flaherty looked as if she didn’t appreciate one bit being addressed that way.

Ivy was using the thrusters quite a bit. Now that the Flivver, the capsule, and the X-37 were all joined together mechanically into a single object, it was possible—though awkward—to maneuver them into sync with the Cloud Ark and clean up all of that Parambulator red. There was some lurching. Julia was getting knocked around a little, learning she had to keep a grip on those handles. Random stuff, including some filled barf bags and a large number of what looked like red marbles, were careering around inside her tiny capsule. Looking through it during a moment when Julia had been flung to one side, Dinah saw a man floating in the far end of the capsule. He was bloody, and he was kind of floppy too. He was dressed in the remains of a navy-blue suit. He was not the ex–First Gentleman.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Dinah said.

“Who the hell is that?” Ivy was shouting. “Markus wants to know if we have survivors.”

“My loss?” Julia asked.

“Your husband,” Dinah said.

“He took the pill,” Julia announced, “in the limo.”

“Oh my god.”

“I’ll need your help getting Mr. Starling squared away. He’s too big for me to move.”

“No, he isn’t,” Dinah said.

“I beg your pardon?” Julia said sharply.

“You’re in zero gee,” Dinah pointed out. “So he’s not too big for you to move. But I can still help you if you want.”

“If you would be so kind,” Julia said. She got a hand over the rim of the hatch while reaching out with the other for a shoulder bag, and looked expectantly at Dinah, who was still blocking her path.

Dinah looked at the back of Ivy’s head. “Julia Bliss Flaherty requests permission to come aboard.”

Julia let out a hiss of exasperation.

“Granted,” Ivy said.

“One casualty on the way too,” Dinah said, and cleared out of Julia’s way.

Julia launched herself through the hatch too hard, flew across the Flivver, and slammed into the far side of it elbow and shoulder first. “Augh!” she cried. But Dinah didn’t think she was hurt, and so she pushed through into the capsule. One of those red marbles was drifting toward her face and she reached out with a hand to brush it away before realizing that it was blood.

Pete Starling was suffering from a number of lacerations, as if he’d been in a stick fight or a car crash. He was groggy, and gagging on blood—probably from a broken nose—which he would cough out explosively when it got in the way of his breathing. Dinah grasped the lapel of his jacket, trying to find a usable handhold. When she pulled on it, the front of the coat came away from Starling’s chest for a moment, revealing an empty shoulder holster.

No matter now. She planted her feet, put her back into it, and got him stretched out in the middle of the capsule, head aimed toward the docking port, drifting slowly in that direction. She was looking to Julia to reach through and pull her companion through the hole. But Julia, banged up from her first attempt to move, was still flailing around, learning the basics of zero gee locomotion the hard way.

Dinah was at the back of the capsule, staring at Pete’s feet, which were kicking weakly. One of his feet was stocking clad; the other still wore an expensive-looking leather shoe. She grabbed a foot with each hand and tried to push him toward the docking port, but he reacted against it. He had no idea what was going on, didn’t understand that he was in space, didn’t like having his feet grabbed. She moved forward, got her waist between his knees, hugged him around the thighs, squeezing his legs together to either side of her body, and tried to get him re-aimed toward the port.

She heard a sharp pop and felt warm wet stuff all over her arms. More of it had splashed up her throat, all the way to the point of her chin. She smelled shit and heard a loud hissing noise. Pete Starling jerked once and then went limp.

She looked up toward the source of the hiss and saw starlight through a jagged hole in the skin of the capsule. The hole was about the size of a man’s thumb. Triangles of metal were bent back away from it.

On second thought, the hissing was coming from two places at once. Another hole had been punched in the other side of the capsule. Pete Starling’s body was between the two holes. The middle of his torso was just a rib-lined crater. Blood was hurtling out of it and accelerating through both holes.

Her ears had popped several times already.

She looked down the length of the capsule at Julia, who had finally gotten herself properly oriented and was looking into the hatch, wild eyed, utterly confused.

“Julia,” Dinah said, “we’ve been struck by a small bolide. We’re losing air, but not that fast. Pete’s dead. He’s in my way. If you could reach through and grab him by the collar and pull him toward you—”

The conversation, and her view of Julia’s face, was cut off by the Flivver’s hatch swinging shut.

ANY CURVE YOU COULD MAKE BY SLICING A CONE WITH A PLANE—A circle, an ellipse, a parabola, or a hyperbola—could be the shape of an orbit. For practical purposes, though, all orbits were ellipses. And most of the naturally occurring orbits in the solar system—those of the planets around the sun, or of moons around planets—were ellipses so round as to be indistinguishable, by the naked eye, from circles. This was not because nature especially favored circles. It was because highly elongated elliptical orbits tended not to last for very long. As a body in a highly eccentric orbit went rocketing in toward the central body and executed a hairpin turn at the periapsis—the point of closest approach—it was subject to tidal forces that could break it up. It might strike the central body’s atmosphere or, in the case of heliocentric orbits, come too close to the sun’s heat and suffer thermal damage. If it survived the plunge through periapsis, it would fly out on a long trajectory that would take it across the orbits of other bodies. After rounding the turn at apoapsis—the point of maximum distance—it would cycle back across the same set of orbits on its way back in toward the center. The solar system was sparse, and so the odds that it would strike, or come close to, any given planet or asteroid on any given circuit were small. But over astronomical spans of time, the likelihood of a close encounter or a collision was high. Collision would, of course, result in a meteorite strike on the planet and the destruction of the formerly orbiting body. A mere close encounter would perturb the body’s orbit into a new and different ellipse, or possibly into a hyperbola, which would eject it from the solar system altogether. The sun still maintained a stable of comets and asteroids in highly eccentric orbits, but their number dwindled over time, and they were rare events to astronomers. In its early aeons the solar system had been a much more chaotic place, with a wider range of orbits, but the processes mentioned had gradually swept it clean and, by a kind of natural selection, produced a system in which nearly everything was moving in an almost circular orbit.