They had replaced her anyway. It was partly a matter of global politics. Placing overall command of the Cloud Ark under a representative of the United States, Russia, or China would have been seen as a provocation by the two countries that had “lost.” So it had to be someone from a small country. Preferably one that was seen as politically independent. This narrowed the list of candidates down to basically one: Markus Leuker. The dark horse being Ulrika Ek, the Swedish Arkitect and project manager, who had been launched up to Izzy at the same time as Markus—but on a different vehicle, in case one of them crashed. No one had ever really expected Ulrika to get picked, however. The choice was explained in terms of Markus’s dynamic leadership style, his charisma, and other such buzzwords that, as everyone understood, boiled down to the fact that he was a man.
Ivy had failed, in the eyes of the Russians and of many in the NASA hierarchy, by not taking a firmer hand with Sean Probst. That wasn’t the only complaint they had about her, but it was the one around which everything else had crystallized. Once everyone had begun to see her as the overly book-smart, well-meaning but week-kneed technocrat, everything she did had been viewed through that lens. Dinah’s rescue of Tekla had been examined under what doctors called “the retrospectoscope” and been deemed a failure on Ivy’s part to enforce necessary discipline. New arrivals to the Cloud Ark, prepped by Internet comment threads and television pundits to see Ivy as a weak leader, began finding ways to make that into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The success of the Bolo One test, which in other circumstances might have bolstered her, came to be viewed as an almost literal handoff of authority from Ivy to Markus. Presented with some choice opportunities to say supportive things about Ivy, Ulrika had declined to do so, and it wasn’t clear whether that was mere absentmindedness or an attempt to cement her position as number two.
In any case it was all squarely in the realm of Politics. Doob had avoided bringing it up around Ivy, not wanting to raise an awkward topic, and so he found it horrifying when Luisa went straight to it, and fascinating when Ivy laughed.
People.
“What is on your docket for today?” Luisa asked.
“Looking at spreadsheets,” Ivy said. “Trying to figure out the consequences of losing Kourou.”
“That is one monkey wrench we didn’t need,” Doob said.
“To be sure,” Ivy said, “but in a weird way, I’m almost . . .” and she trailed off.
“Glad? Relieved?” Luisa guessed.
“It’s like the starting gun finally went off,” Ivy said. “We’ve been prepping for this for almost two years. Awaiting the disaster. Waiting for all hell to break loose. And now it has. Just not in the way we expected.”
“What were you expecting?” Luisa asked.
“That we’d get hit by a bolide and take a lot of casualties,” Ivy said. “Instead something unexpected happened. Which is good training, in a way.”
“How’s your sweetie?” Luisa asked.
Doob shut off his treadmill and unbuckled the padded belt that connected him to the bungee cords. He was the only man in a room where two women were talking about one of their boyfriends. He knew his cue to make himself scarce.
“He went dark on me two days ago,” Ivy said. “Which means he’s probably underwater.”
“I’m sure he’ll pop up for air soon,” Luisa said. “Can he send email when the submarine is submerged? I know nothing about it.”
“There are ways—” Ivy said, but by that time Doob was floating out of the module.
He made his way aft down the Stack to H2, then clambered down a spoke into the rotating torus T2, which Rhys Aitken had been sent up to build. Gravity in it was one-eighth of Earth-normal. Originally designed as a space hotel for tourists, it had never been quite up to the requirements placed on it by the Cloud Ark project, and so Rhys had been put in charge of building a larger one, concentric with T2, and inevitably called T3. Never one to rest on his laurels, he had invented a completely new system for building it. Unsurprisingly to Dinah, this had consisted of assembling a long loop of high-tech chain and setting it in motion around T2, then adding stuff onto it incrementally. It spun around the same hub at the same RPMs, but because it was bigger, its simulated gravity was a little stronger, about equal to that on the moon. It housed the closest thing the Cloud Ark had to a bridge: a segment of T3 about ten meters long, used by Markus as his headquarters. Attempts had been made to dignify it with names such as “command center,” but at the end of the day it was just an upgraded version of the Banana: a conference room with some television screens and power feeds for tablet computers.