“You’ve all thought it too,” Sean said. “Even an Asp-hole like me can see it in your faces.”
“Okay, maybe we’ve all thought it,” Dinah admitted. “How could you not think it? But, Sean, what you might not have seen, being based on the ground, is how serious everyone up here is about making this work. If it were just a Potemkin village, we’d be seeing different stuff.”
Sean held his hands up, palms out, placating her. “Can we just agree that there might be a range of views down on the ground? And that some people, perhaps highly placed, see its primary function as an opiate of the masses? Like the video you pop into your car’s DVD player to keep the kids quiet during a long drive.”
“People like that are not going to be our friends when it comes to getting the resources we need,” Ivy said.
“Their strategy is always going to seem a little off-kilter, a little beside the point. Opaque. Frustrating.”
They were definitely talking about Pete Starling.
Sean continued. “To the extent that such people control launch sites and policy, we have a problem. Fortunately, they don’t control everything.”
They were now talking about Sean Probst, and his loose circle of billionaire friends who knew how to make rockets.
“There’s a lot about this Cloud Ark thing that I, and my associates, don’t know yet. We can’t sit around waiting for perfect knowledge. We have to act immediately on long-lead-time work that addresses what we do know. And what we do know is that we need to bring water to the Cloud Ark. Physics and politics conspire to make it difficult to bring it up from the ground. Fortunately, I own an asteroid mining company. We have already identified some comet cores in easy-to-reach orbits. We’re narrowing down the list. And we’re preparing an expedition.”
Konrad well understood the timing of such missions. “How long, Sean?”
“Two years,” Sean said.
“Well,” Ivy said, “I guess you’d better get on it, then. How can we help?”
“Give me all of your robots,” Sean said. He turned to look at Dinah.
“SINCE WE HAVE DECLARED OPEN SEASON ON BULLSHIT . . .” DINAH began as soon as she had gotten Sean Probst alone in her shop.
Sean held both of his hands up like a fugitive surrendering to the FBI. “Where would you like to begin?”
“You said that you have identified some comets. That you were narrowing down the list. That’s crap. You wouldn’t have come up here without a specific plan.”
“We’re going after Greg’s Skeleton.”
“What?”
“Comet Grigg-Skjellerup. Sorry. Somebody’s offspring called it Greg’s Skeleton and the name stuck.” Sean always referred to children as offspring.
She’d heard of it. “How big is that?”
“Two and a half, three kilometers.”
“That’s a lot of arklet fuel.”
Sean nodded. He crossed his arms over his body and looked around the shop.
“Hard to move something that big.”
Still no answer.
“You’re going to jam a nuke into it and turn it into a rocket, aren’t you?”
He raised his eyebrows briefly. Since this was the only plausible way of moving something that huge, he didn’t consider it worthy of an extended answer.
“We got really lucky on the timing,” he remarked.
“You’re going to fly a radioactive ice ball the size of the Death Star back here just as the shit is hitting the fan—then what?”
“Dinah, I need to share something with you in confidence.”
“Well, it’s about fucking time is all I can say.”
DAY 73