Most of the Lamprey—the entire box—jumped away, headed toward Earth, propelled by white plumes of solid rocket exhaust. After a couple of seconds the motors burned themselves out and the box continued to coast away, unreeling a wire behind it. This came to a stop a minute later, dangling half a kilometer below the X-37, and pulled taut by tidal force.
“We have positive current flow in the tether,” Dinah reported. “So it’s working.” The wire, sweeping through Earth’s magnetic field on its orbit, was picking up a weak electrical current, creating a force that would slow the X-37 down. The effect was slight, but within a few hours the X-37’s orbit would decay to the point where it no longer posed a danger to the Cloud Ark, and in days or weeks it would descend into the atmosphere and be annihilated.
Twenty minutes remained before the Flivver’s orbit would next cross Izzy’s. But the physical separation was only a few tens of kilometers and they were still “on swarm,” meaning that the Flivver’s computer was talking to the Cloud Ark network and searching parameter space for the safest and most efficient way to reintegrate with it and to dock. That, plus the Lamprey’s success in moving the X-37 out of the way, ought to have cleared up most of the red that had been maculating Parambulator displays at the time of their departure. But when Dinah and Ivy turned their attention back to those screens, they looked worse than before. It was not immediately clear why. Parambulator was a beautiful thing from the standpoint of mathematics and data visualization, but there were times when you just wanted to know what the hell was happening. You wanted a narrative.
A text came through on Ivy’s phone. It was from Markus. She read it out loud. “Approach using visual observation and manual control,” it said. “Warning: collision debris.”
“Already?!” Dinah exclaimed. It wasn’t a good start if they’d already suffered a bolide strike a couple of hours into the Hard Rain.
“It was fratricide,” Ivy said, still reading. “Looks like an arklet got cornered.”
Getting cornered was a problem that had arisen in simulations. The swarm as a whole would look for solutions that would prevent arklets from banging into each other with minimum expenditure of propellant. In a pinch, of course, it was okay to burn a lot of propellant to avoid a collision. But there were situations where a collision was going to happen no matter what, and there was nothing to do for it but choose the least damaging outcome. Getting cornered wasn’t supposed to happen; everything about Parambulator was supposed to prevent it. But the number of possible scenarios was infinite and nothing was ever certain.
“A controlled collision,” Ivy said, “no fatalities. But then some follow-on. Still being evaluated. There might be loose debris drifting around. That’s why he wants me to fly it in manually.”
“What kind of debris?” Dinah asked. “Hard stuff or—”
“Thermal protection, looks like,” Ivy said. “So that’s good.”
Apparently one of the modules, or an arklet, had lost some of the layers of reflective foil and insulation that were used to shield it from the heat of the sun. The stuff was feather light and so probably didn’t pose much of a threat to the Flivver. But it would look huge on radar and make Parambulator go crazy.
Ivy, in the pilot’s chair, was monopolizing the only window. Dinah didn’t like flying blind, so she pulled up the interface for the Flivver’s eyeball camera.
Julia began to make a weird repetitive noise, a sort of wet, gurgling drone.
She was snoring.
“Long day for her, I guess,” Ivy remarked.
“Yeah.” Dinah had no precedents to tell her how she should feel toward the ex-president at a time like this. On the one hand, her behavior had been reprehensible. On the other, she had, within the last few hours, lost her husband, her daughter, her country, and her job.
With a few moments’ panning around, Dinah was able to center Izzy in the camera’s frame, then zoom in. Izzy was on the night side of the Earth just now. In normal times—or what used to be normal—it would have been dark, but now she was lit up from below by the red glow of the atmosphere, punctuated from time to time by bluish flashes, like lightning strikes, as large bolides plowed into the air three hundred kilometers below. Of course, Dinah had never seen Izzy so illuminated, and it took a bit of getting used to.
From a distance Izzy looked fine, but at higher magnification Dinah began to see visual noise that gradually resolved into drifting bits of debris—the shredded thermal protection that Ivy had mentioned.