Following Dinah’s general suggestion, Ivy then nudged the ship toward a part of the canyon, several tens of kilometers distant, where the walls converged and the radioactive sky became a narrow, starry slit above. Still she kept pushing onward, occasionally scraping the ship’s outlying modules against the walls, until she reached a place where she could go no deeper.
Looking both directions along the crevasse from this place, they could see spots where the sun was shining in. Here, though, they were protected from rocks and radiation alike. Ivy set Endurance down on the floor of the canyon. Cleft’s gravity was exceedingly faint, but it was enough to give words like that a little meaning, and it was enough to keep the ship lodged in one place until they decided to move it.
Which they never would.
Cleft
ON THE SURFACE OF CLEFT, A HUMAN WEIGHED ABOUT AS MUCH AS three pints of beer would weigh on Earth. Endurance weighed about as much as a couple of semi-trailer rigs.
Ivy lit the ship’s attitude control thrusters one last time and pivoted her tail up until it was vertical. Endurance was standing on her head, the torus aloft, iron Hammerhead nose-down on the iron floor of the crevasse. Dinah sent out some Grabbs to weld the ship to the asteroid. Ivy shut down the thrusters.
Endurance was no longer a ship but a building.
From the Hammerhead, now one piece of metal with Cleft, the Stack ran straight up like the trunk of a tree. Various structures ramified outward from it like boughs. Its widest part was the array of eighty-one arklets that had formerly made up the stern of the ship. These now projected upward like leaves.
Or so they imagined. They couldn’t actually go outside and look at it until they got out of the Hammerhead. During the battle, they had sealed the hatch. By the time they had brought her to rest and welded her down, the rest of Endurance had been quiet for a long time. Finally they opened the hatch and began to explore it one module at a time. They sent Buckies and Siwis out ahead of them to illuminate dark spaces and aim cameras into hidden corners. Tekla then went in, taking point, with Dinah and Ivy watching her back. They were armed with cudgels made from lengths of pipe. But they never had to use them.
It was some combination of crime scene, battleground, and disaster zone. Only about half of the modules were still pressurized. Some of them had become completely isolated and could only be reached by a person in a space suit. It took days to get to them all.
In one of them they found A?da, the only other survivor from the heptad. Two days had passed since she had eaten the last of Tavistock Prowse, so she was very hungry, but otherwise in good shape. After becoming trapped by a combination of combat and bolide strikes, she had holed up in a water-filled storm shelter, then begun drinking its contents as she awaited rescue.
The total number of living humans was now sixteen. Several had suffered injuries from combat or from the consequences of bolide strikes. Anyone who had not taken shelter in the Hammerhead, or in a storm shelter, was suffering from radiation sickness. The healthy ones patched holes, repressurized modules, got the torus spinning again, and turned it into a sick bay, which filled up immediately.
Dinah managed to get Doob out for one last space walk. He had been failing for days. Once they got him into the suit, though, his energy flooded back. Dinah took him out on the floor of the crevasse where he could walk, light-footed, with magnetized Grabbs latched onto his boots to keep him from floating away with every step. They rambled for about a kilometer, turning around every so often to look back at humanity’s new home. Above the spinning torus, where Moira was even now unpacking her genetics lab, Tekla was inspecting the arklets on the top level, learning which were whole, which were beyond repair, and which could be patched up for future occupancy. On the floor of the crevasse, Grabbs and Siwis were at work, rooting Endurance to her final resting place with spreading cables and struts.
Where they walked, it was dark most of the time. That was the price of being sheltered from cosmic rays and coronal mass ejections. Looking up, however, they could see sunlight gilding the edges of the crevasse above them. They talked about how to set up mirrors that would bounce sunlight downward onto the arklets, which could grow food and scrub air in their translucent outer hulls. Doob spoke of Endomement, the idea that, in time, a ceiling could be thrown over the top of the crevasse and walls built to keep in the air, whereupon a whole section of the valley could be given an atmosphere and turned into a place where children could go “outside” without the need for space suits.
Then he walked home and died.