“You and Sean Probst made great sparring partners,” Ivy said.
“He was so fucking obnoxious! He needed someone to—” Dinah cut herself short then, because Ivy had gotten a sort of sad, wry look on her face and held up one hand to stop her.
“Agreed! Yes. Thanks for doing it,” Ivy said. “He needed someone like you around. Sometimes it almost looked like a comedy act between you two. And the way that the Russians reacted to him—Tekla first of all, of course, but later Fyodor proposing to place all Arjuna personnel under arrest and confiscate everything they’d brought up with them—that was great drama. Tabloid stories and comment threads galore down on the surface. But I barely survived it.”
“What do you mean, you barely survived?”
“You wouldn’t believe some of the conferences I had with Baikonur and Houston. People down there wanted me to take a very hard line. To do what Fyodor wanted.”
“But you didn’t,” Dinah pointed out.
Ivy met her gaze again. Then, after a moment, she gave a little nod.
“So you won,” Dinah went on.
“I won a Pyrrhic victory,” Ivy said. “I negotiated a less draconian solution. The Ymir expedition went on its way with no obvious hard feelings.”
“And how is that Pyrrhic?”
“I don’t want to make my problems yours,” Ivy said.
“Who else are you going to talk to?”
“Maybe no one,” Ivy returned, showing a flash of something like anger. “Maybe that’s what a leader is, Dinah. The one person who can’t—who shouldn’t—share her problems with anyone else. It’s sort of an old-fashioned idea. But the human race might need such people going forward.”
Dinah just stared back at her. Finally, Ivy relented, and spoke in tones almost devoid of feeling: “My position as the head of the space station came under serious challenge. It made me aware of politics on the ground that have been going on for some time—but that were invisible to me until the Sean Probst controversy surfaced them. Since then, I believe that my authority has been further undermined by people on the ground, leaking things to the press, saying things in meetings.”
“Pete Starling.”
“No comment. Anyway, I think I am going to be replaced before long.”
Ivy’s eyes had reddened slightly. She made another glance at the ceiling, but the expression on her face suggested she didn’t care who might have heard her. Then she looked at Dinah and smiled. “How have you been doing, sister?” she asked in a weak voice.
“I’ve been pretty good,” Dinah said.
“Really? That’s music to my ears.”
“Bo, Larz, the others who’ve come up to work in my crew, they seem to respect what I’ve done,” Dinah said.
“I think it’s because of what you did for Tekla,” Ivy said.
“Oh really? Not just my amazing natural competence?”
“There are a lot of people on the ground who are competent in the way you mean,” Ivy said, “and we are going to be seeing a lot of them up here in the next few weeks. Believe me. I’ve read their CVs.”
“I’m sure you have.”
“But everyone kinda senses now that some other qualities are going to be needed besides just pure competence. That’s why people are deferring to you.”
Another awkward silence. Ivy seemed to be suggesting that she, Ivy, was no longer being given that kind of respect.
“That, and your amazing competence,” Ivy added.
Consolidation
EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE DIDN’T JUST STOP. IT PETERED OUT UNTIL IT became indistinguishable, by most measuring devices, from a perfect vacuum. Below about 160 kilometers of altitude, the air was still thick enough to rapidly drag down anything placed in orbit, so those altitudes were used only for short-term satellites like the early space capsules. The higher the altitude, the thinner the air and the more slowly orbits decayed.
Izzy was four hundred kilometers up. Its acres of solar panels and radiators made it extremely draggy in comparison to its mass. Or at least that had been the case until Amalthea had been bolted onto it, suddenly making it far heavier.