Before Sean could explain who the hell he was, he was distracted, to put it mildly, by the appearance of a six-foot-tall Amazon with a shaved head and prominent facial scars, headed for him across H2 as if she had been launched out of a cannon. Tekla drove her shoulder into Sean’s midsection, slamming him back against a bulkhead. A moment later she was on him. She grabbed an outstretched arm and put Sean into a joint lock that looked pretty much inescapable.
By now Dinah had spent enough time with Tekla to know that she was a practitioner of Sambo, a Soviet combat martial art with many similarities to jujitsu. Out of idle curiosity, Dinah had watched a few YouTube videos featuring Sambo practitioners in action. But she had never imagined, until now, that it could be done in zero gravity.
Sean had made his entry through H2 because it had a useful assortment of airlocks and docking ports on its aft end. But, unbeknownst to him, H2 had been doing double duty as the dormitory where the surviving Scouts lived. His arrival had awoken Tekla, who was off shift at the moment and had been sleeping in her bag.
Dinah tried to imagine what this encounter must have looked like from Tekla’s point of view. Sean’s arrival was unannounced. Dinah herself hadn’t really known when, or whether, he was going to arrive until the Drop Top had swum into view outside her little window. So, from Tekla’s point of view, this guy was an intruder. And when she’d heard Ivy say “Who the hell are you?” she had realized that his presence on Izzy was completely unauthorized.
“Oh, this is awkward,” Dinah said.
“Tap! Tap!” Sean kept saying. He was slapping Tekla’s leg with his free hand.
“Commander, would you like me to restrain him?” Tekla asked. “What are your orders?”
“He’s not dangerous,” Dinah put in.
“Let him go, Tekla,” Ivy said.
Somewhat reluctantly, Tekla relaxed her grip and allowed Sean to float free. He drifted away from her, sizing her up with a certain degree of bewilderment.
“Sean,” Dinah said, “you’ve already made Tekla’s acquaintance. I would like you to meet Ivy Xiao, commander of this installation. Ivy, say hello to Sean Probst.”
“Hello, Sean Probst,” Ivy said, then turned to look at Dinah. “Did you know he was coming?”
“I had heard rumors,” Dinah said. “But I did not think them firm enough to distract you by repeating them. I am sorry.”
Ivy looked at Sean long enough to make him uncomfortable. Tekla, hovering almost within reach, did much to help supply the hostile atmosphere that Dinah suspected Ivy was reaching for.
“The closest analogy in the law for what I am here is the captain of a ship,” Ivy said. “Do you know the etiquette, Sean, for coming aboard a ship?”
Sean calculated.
“Commander Xiao,” he said, “I humbly and respectfully request permission to come aboard your ship.”
“Permission granted,” she said. “And welcome aboard.”
“Thanks.”
“But!”
“Yes?”
“If anyone asks, you’ll please tell them a little white lie, which is that you requested permission first, and then came aboard.”
“I’m happy to do that,” he said.
“Later on we’ll evolve some sort of common law, I guess. A constitution for this thing.”
“People are working on that, actually,” Sean offered.
“That’s nice. But right now we have nothing of the sort and so we have to be mindful.”
“It is so noted,” Sean said.
“Now,” Ivy said, “you were saying something about bullshit when I interrupted.”
“Commander Xiao,” Sean said, “I have the utmost respect for your past accomplishments and for the work you have been doing.”
“Do you hear a but coming?” Ivy asked Dinah. “I hear a but coming.”
Sean stopped.
“Go on,” Ivy said. For at the end of the day, to go on was what Sean wanted, so they might as well get it over with.
HE WORKED IT OUT FROM FIRST PRINCIPLES ON THE WHITEBOARD IN the Banana. Beginning with the Tsiolkovskii equation, a simple exponential, he developed some simple estimates, which he then developed into an ironclad proof, that the Cloud Ark was bullshit.
Or at least that it had been bullshit until he, Sean Probst, had shown up to address the problems he had noticed. Problems that could only be handled by him personally.
It occurred to Dinah to ask herself whether Sean was really rich anymore.
Rich people no longer kept their wealth in gold. Sean’s wealth was in stock—mostly stock in his own companies. She hadn’t been following the stock market since the Crater Lake announcement, but she’d heard that it had not so much crashed as basically ceased to exist. The whole concept of owning stock didn’t really mean much anymore, at least if you thought of it as a store of value.
But legal structures, police, government agencies, and so on still existed and still enforced the law. The law stated that Sean, by virtue of majority ownership of Arjuna Expeditions, still controlled it. And through overlapping relationships with other space entrepreneurs, he still had enough pull to get himself launched to Izzy. So that counted as wealth of a sort.