“What is Camila doing here?” Dinah asked Moira, as they maneuvered down the Stack.
Moira had obviously been crying and seemed badly shaken up. She and Tekla had become a couple at some point, and Moira was taking the news of her partner’s injury hard.
“Tekla came for J.B.F.,” Moira said, “and J.B.F. tried to shoot her. Camila reached out and grabbed for the gun, I guess. She was always wearing that gauzy wrap, as a veil. The fabric caught fire from the flash of the gun, and burned her arm before she could get it off.”
“But she saved Tekla?”
“Who knows? The bullet struck something else and fragmented, apparently.”
The holes where shrapnel had struck T1—the first, oldest, and smallest torus—had been patched, and it had been repressurized. They had always considered it a safe place before; they needed to begin thinking of it in that light again, which was why Ivy had insisted they come here. They took seats in the Banana.
The numbers had come in. Ivy opened the meeting by reciting them.
At the onset of the Hard Rain, the human population—not counting any who might still be alive on Earth—had been 1,551, or 1,553 if you counted the two late arrivals, Julia and Pete Starling. Starling hadn’t even made it out of his space capsule, so the initial number had been 1,552.
At the same time there had been 305 occupied, free-flying arklets plus 11 spares that were attached to Izzy but not occupied. The free-flying ones had housed 1,364 people; the remaining 188 humans had lived aboard Izzy as members of the General Population. But at any given time, 10 percent of the Arkies had been rotating through Izzy, bringing its population on a typical day up to 324.
Prior to today’s disaster, 26 people had been killed in various mishaps, mostly smaller bolide strikes. Another 24 were now aboard the stolen MIV calling itself Red Hope, and if their claims were taken at face value, they would soon be en route to Mars.
Of the persons who had been aboard Izzy at the time of the disaster, 211 had been killed outright and another two dozen or so remained in critical condition. The number of living people aboard Izzy had therefore been reduced to 113. The General Population—the older, more experienced, highly trained specialists—had been reduced from 188 to 106.
At the moment of the disaster, 1,178 persons had been living in arklets. The distributed nature of the swarm, combined with the fact that many arklets had flown the coop with Julia, made it difficult to estimate casualties. The best estimate they currently had was that seventeen arklets had fallen victim, with assumed 100 percent loss of life, reducing that population to about 1,100. If that was correct, then the day’s full death toll had been close to 300.
In terms of arklet count, they’d started the day with 299 surviving, occupied arklets, a figure that had been reduced to 282 by the collision. Ten of them—a heptad and a triad—were attached to Red Hope, leaving 272. Approximately 200 were missing and presumed to have flown the coop with J.B.F. The remaining 70 or so had elected to stay behind and were still reporting in as members in good standing of the Cloud Ark. The 11 spares were still attached to Izzy and would be inspected for damage later.
The arklets still with them probably had a population of some 300. That plus the survivors aboard Izzy added up to a bit over 400. The population of J.B.F.’s breakaway swarm must then be something like 800 souls. She had taken two-thirds of the human race with her.
“God forgive me,” Doob said, “but right now I don’t even care about head count. The number I’m after is engines. Arklet engines. Until Dinah showed up with all of that ice, they were useless. Now, we have a way to fuel them. If we get them all pointed in the same direction, all pushing on Izzy, we can go on the Big Ride.” He paused to look at his notes. With his reading glasses down on his nose he suddenly looked a lot older to Dinah. She could only imagine how she looked. “Based on what you just told me, am I right in thinking we have—”
“About seventy,” Ivy said, “plus the eleven spares. We haven’t checked those yet, but on visual inspection they seem undamaged.”
“Eighty-one,” Doob said. “I like that number. A perfect square.”
“A perfect square of perfect squares,” Rhys put in.
“If we could come up with a structural system for ganging them in clusters of nine—just a three-by-three grid, with shared propellant feeds—and make nine of those clusters, and integrate them into Izzy’s structure somehow—that being the hard part—then we’d have an array of eighty-one engines. If those things all come on at full power when we pass through perigee, it’ll give us enough combined thrust to make a difference. I think we can make the Big Ride work with that level of power.”
“It’s a lot of structure,” Fyodor pointed out. “A lot, a lot, a lot.”