Satisfied with that, Julia asked, “What of the arklets? The heptad and the triad?”
“Well, they’re already functional, independent space vehicles. Way more than enough space for twenty-four Martians and their vitamins. Obviously, we’ve been stocking up,” Paul said, waving his hands around at the bags of food and other supplies crowding the White Arklet.
“Yes,” Julia said, “but the critical part of the operation is going to be moving them from their default positions in the swarm—which will seem unremarkable as far as Parambulator is concerned—to the propulsion stack that you have been assembling. And that’s going to make a hell of a stink, is it not?”
The smile on Paul Freel’s face became a bit frozen. “We could just go for it,” he said.
“I have a workaround,” said Spencer Grindstaff. “I think we can make this happen. A Streaker Alert is all we need. It’ll go down tomorrow.”
“How do you know there’s going to be a Streaker Alert?”
“Such an event is nothing,” Spencer said, “other than a particular configuration of bits.”
DINAH HAD BEEN DREAMING OF MARS.
As an asteroid miner, she had never been that interested in the distant and inhospitable Red Planet. The politics of the pre-Zero space exploration world had obliged her to show skepticism, even disdain toward those who wanted to go there and to build colonies and terraform the planet. Mars colonists were siphoning attention and resources away from the asteroid miners, who wanted to use easier-to-get resources to make much more human-friendly habitats: space colonies, rotating to provide full gravity, with plenty of water and fresh air.
In any event, it had been a dead issue for two years. But that didn’t prevent Mars from showing up in her dreams, and now infiltrating her daydreams. Almost three years had now gone by since she had walked on the surface of a planet, looked up into a sky, seen a horizon. Intellectually she knew that death would take her, sooner or later, before she did any of those things again. She and everyone else in the Cloud Ark would live out their lives in environments resembling bomb shelters, hospital basements, and research labs. The best they could hope for was to look out a small window at the starry sky. The view of the blue, green, and white Earth had once provided fascination and solace. The orange ball of fire they now circled was such a disagreeable sight that most people actively avoided looking at it. No one was ever going back there. For those who still aspired to go for a walk before dying of old age, Mars was the only hope, be it ever so impractical. People had been talking about it on Spacebook, and on some of the blogs that had been cropping up on the Cloud Ark’s miniature Internet. Before the loss of New Caird had severed Ymir’s data link to the Cloud Ark, some of it had trickled through to her tablet, and Dinah read it in idle moments.