Alone at the controls of Ymir, she coasted toward Izzy, silent and adrift in the cosmos, and entertained the thought, just for a while, that she might be the only human being left in the universe.
Then a red light—a laser, aimed right at her—began to flash from the Mining Colony, and her mind began to pick out Morse code.
SENDING FLIVVERS TO EFFECT FINAL MANEUVERS
DISREGARD STRAY ARKLETS
WELCOME HOME
Lacking any way to respond, she waited, and watched. Shreds of insulation, scraps of structural material, spilled vitamins, and the occasional body tumbled across the window as she panned and zoomed over various details. Everything forward of Zvezda looked pretty good. The Mining Colony and Moira’s stash of genetic equipment appeared to be unscathed. Good.
Three Flivvers had separated themselves from the cloud and established trajectories that would bring them to Ymir within a few minutes. She guessed that they would act as tugboats, butting their heads against the shard and using their main engines to effect the final delta vee needed to achieve rendezvous. So, the first part of the transmission made sense. DISREGARD STRAY ARKLETS, however, was something of a mystery. Why would there be such a thing? And what did it mean, anyway, for an arklet to be “stray”? And yet as Dinah panned the telescope across the arc of space forward and aft of Izzy—the realm where most of the arklets normally parked themselves—she found it curiously underpopulated. It was just a general visual impression. She couldn’t verify it scientifically without access to a Parambulator screen.
It occurred to her, then, that all she needed to do was switch on her tablet’s connection to the mesh network. Shortly after New Caird’s departure from Izzy, she had turned it off because, once they got out of range, it was a useless battery drainer. And indeed the tablet soon brought up the little icon announcing it had found a connection, perhaps relayed through one of those Flivvers. A minute or two went by as the device downloaded all of the email and message traffic that had been piling up in her inbox during her “vacation.”
She passed the time playing with the telescope. A detail caught her eye as she panned across the scene, and she went back and zoomed in on it for a closer look.
It was a MIV, an unusually big one. Basically a five-layer stack, wasp-waisted. The bottom layer was an engine of the most powerful class in the MIV toolkit. Above that was a fat cluster of propellant tanks. The third layer—the narrow waist—was a single arklet with an airlock on its side—a command module, she guessed, similar to New Caird’s. Above that was a triad, and on top, forming the fat head of the vehicle, was a heptad. All of it was shrouded in structural webbing. Snared like little bugs in the edges of that web were small modules that she recognized as attitude control thrusters. The most notable thing about the vehicle was her outsized propellant tanks, hinting at a long journey—to where? The thing was keeping station several kilometers forward of Izzy, in a region that had been largely denuded of arklets.
Her tablet finally finished downloading messages, most of which were long out of date by this point. She sorted them by age, newest first, and scanned the headings. Very few had come through in the last several hours. That stood to reason, given that the Cloud Ark had other things on its mind. But close to the top was one that caught her eye: OPEN COMMUNIQUé FROM PRESIDENT JBF TO THE PEOPLE OF THE CLOUD ARK.