“Is she—”
“She was entrained in the plume of steam and thrown back. I can hardly even see her now.”
“Oh.”
“Dinah?”
“Yes, Slava?”
“Markus was already dead.”
“IT WOULD READ ALMOST AS SLAPSTICK COMEDY IF IT WERE NOT SO tragic—the consequences so dire,” Julia said. She was mesmerized by a video loop, the final transmission from New Caird before radio contact had been lost.
The people hovering around her in the White Arklet—as Julia’s unofficial base of operations had come to be known—all nodded, or made agreeable-sounding murmurs. They were all reading Tav’s blog post about the Ymir catastrophe, which had been posted only seconds ago.
The one exception was Tekla, who had become distracted by a detail. Attached to the wall of the arklet with strips of blue masking tape was a sheet of paper on which had been printed the seal of the president of the United States. Only two printers remained in existence, and both of them were on Izzy. So, by process of elimination, this must have been printed on Old Earth, prior to the Hard Rain, by a device that had been running a little low on cyan ink. It had seen hard service: it was torn in two places and repaired with clear tape. It had been creased and crumpled, then smoothed out. Its edges were fuzzy where previous applications of tape had been peeled away. And in the white space below and to the right of the presidential seal there was a brown smudge, oval, the size of the ball of a person’s thumb. As a matter of fact, Tekla was certain that it was actually a thumbprint, and the more she looked at it the more certain she became that the brown substance was blood.
She looked Julia in the eye, and became aware that the former president was awaiting some form of reaction from her. Unlike most people, Tekla felt no pressure, no obligation to fulfill any such expectations. Julia, a bit unnerved by that, broke eye contact and continued: “I don’t quite understand the story they are telling us anyway!”
“It is pretty convoluted,” said one of her aides, a young male Arkie with an American accent. He was one of the MIV engineers. His tone suggested that he was amused by the sheer cheekiness of the powers that be in trying to get people to believe such a yarn, and that he was much too clever to be taken in. “It kind of hinges on the idea that the hull was made out of what amounts to plastic. If it gets too hot, it—”
“It’s like plastic on a stove burner, I understand that,” Julia said. “It melts and it stinks.”
“New Caird shifted in a way that caused the hull to come into contact with a nozzle that was extremely hot.”
“But according to the story they are putting out, Vyacheslav had shut that nozzle off beforehand.”
“They stay hot for a long time. Anyway, the nozzle melted right through the hull. First it would have made a lot of toxic smoke. That would have been enough to kill him. Then, when the melting proceeded to the point where the hull was perforated, all the air would have escaped through the hole.”
“Well, that is horrible—if it is true,” Julia said, and then swiveled her eyes toward Tekla, looking for some sign in the visitor’s face that it might not be true. Tekla stared back at her in a manner that betrayed nothing. “What sort of pass have we come to, one wonders, when such crazy improvisations are called for—ramming one ship with another!”
More murmurs of agreement.
Julia was on a roll. “And as far as I can make out, it didn’t even solve the problem!”
“Problem is solved,” Tekla said. She was fluent in English and was perfectly capable of saying “The problem is solved,” but sometimes dropped the article for effect. Anglophones found this mysterious and impressive. It was also an implicit statement of Russian pride. The language of the Cloud Ark, by default, was English. That was never going to change. But the dialect was going to evolve over time, and Russians could bend it in their direction by finding ways to inject their grammar and vocabulary into everyday speech. “Burn is complete,” she went on.
“But the ship is still tumbling out of control!” said the American boy who so fancied his own intelligence.
“Slow tumble,” Tekla said. “Not problem. Plenty of time to fix now that perigee is raised.”
“Fix it how?! Markus demolished three of the external thruster packages by ramming them! Who does that? Anyway, there are only two of them left. It is a basic reality of physics that you can’t control a three-axis tumble using only two thrusters!”
“Thank you for explaining basic reality,” Tekla said. “Tumble can be eliminated by making scarfed nozzle.”
This silenced them for a few moments. One of Julia’s followers—Jianyu, a Chinese Arkie, very passionate about going to Mars—looked like he understood it. Tekla nodded in his direction. “This man will explain later. My time here is limited.”