“One what?”
A look of amusement came over A?da’s face. She broke eye contact. It almost seemed that she rolled her eyes a little. Doob was reminded, hardly for the first time, that the Arkies had been sent up as teenagers. “It is complicated. Let’s just say there is one more who might as well be dead.”
Those in the Hammerhead still could not quite process it. Something occurred to Michael: “We know that the Swarm broke up into two factions. One led by J.B.F. You were part of the opposing group?”
“Yes.” A?da laughed. Again she reminded Doob of a teenager going through the pretense of talking to a clueless parent about something they would never understand.
Michael, a little wrong-footed, went on haltingly: “And so when you say that there are eleven . . . plus one who is, I take it, in a bad way . . . anyhow, are you referring just to the anti-J.B.F. faction?”
“They were defeated a long time ago. Months.”
“When you say that, do you mean that there was some kind of a conflict? A war?” Doob asked.
A?da shrugged. “There was some fighting.” She didn’t see it as important. “Call it a war if you wish. More like some brawls. The real battle was, you know, on the Internet. Social media.”
Silence ensued. A?da waited for them to respond. When no one did, she shrugged. “What were we going to do? Smash our arklets into each other? There is no way to have, like, actual violence in this setting! So we just had a war of words.” She held her hands up in front of her, making them into little pantomime mouths, aimed at each other, thumb-jaws flapping up and down. “Trying to, you know, persuade others to join our side. Trying to make the other side look bad. Just like the Internet always was.” She chuckled, put one hand to her cheek, rubbed her eye. “Look, it is very complicated and I cannot explain everything right now—how it all came out.”
“But you said that J.B.F.’s faction was defeated,” Michael said. Of all the people in the Hammerhead, he seemed most committed to the proposition that there was a reasonable and logical explanation for all of this.
“Her and Tav, yes.”
“By which you mean, you defeated them with words. Ideas. A social media campaign.”
“We were more persuasive,” A?da said. “I was more persuasive. Arklet by arklet, they came over to my side. The White Arklet held out for a while, then they gave up.”
“What became of them?”
“J.B.F. is fine. Tav, not so good.”
“He’s the one you mentioned. The twelfth one who might as well be dead.”
“I am afraid so, yes.”
“So getting back to the earlier question,” Doob said, “the number you quoted is for the entire Swarm. Both factions.”
A?da, finally seeming to understand what they were getting at, sat up straighter and got a more serious look on her face. “Yes. There are no other survivors whatsoever. Of the eight hundred, eleven remain.”
There was a long silence as the four in the Hammerhead took this in. They had all harbored fears that the Swarm might go terribly wrong, but this was worse than anything they had imagined.
Finally Doob raised his hands in front of him, palms up, and shrugged. “What happened?”
“Agriculture crashed.” A?da turned her head and stared off-camera for a few moments. “I mean, I could say many things, but that is basically it. Between the CMEs, algae blights, lack of water . . . very few arklets produce food anymore.”
“What have you been eating?”
A?da snapped her head around, as if surprised by the question, and looked quizzically into the camera. “Each other. Dead people, I mean.”
There was a long silence during which Doob, Bo, Michael, and Steve all exchanged looks.
The terrible thing was that they had considered doing the same thing, many times. Every freeze-dried corpse that they jettisoned was a big collection of protein and nutrients that, from a certain point of view, could seem mouthwatering.
Seeming to read their minds, A?da went on: “And you?”
“You mean, have we resorted to eating dead people? No,” Doob said.
“Tav started it,” A?da said. “He ate his own leg. Soft cannibalism, he called it. Legs are of no use in space. He blogged it. Then it went viral.”
No one had anything to say to that. After a few moments had gone by, A?da continued. “But Endurance is better stocked with MREs and so on. Plenty of water. You would not have gone there.”
“No, we did not go there,” Doob said. He could tell from the body language of the others in the Hammerhead that they were too shocked to be entrusted with speaking at the moment.
“As for us,” A?da said, “you should also know that supplies were conserved. Even as people died and we lost arklets. We moved what we had into the arklets that survived. Our twenty-six arklets are well stocked.”
“With everything except food,” Doob said.
“Yes.”