The door opened to reveal Dubois Jerome Xavier Harris. The look on his face, combined with the mere fact that he had interrupted Markus during a meeting in his private office, suggested that something serious was happening. Markus’s mind jumped straight to the most obvious explanation: “Is the president nuking people again?”
Dr. Harris looked startled by the suggestion, then shook it off. No, it wasn’t that.
“Does this meeting require privacy?” Markus asked, with a look at Sal. Sal stood up, volunteering to make himself scarce. But Dr. Harris just got a bemused look. “It concerns the least private thing that ever happened, or ever will,” he said. “So no thank you. I have reason to believe that the timetable has just been pushed up very significantly. There is a chance that the White Sky could happen as soon as six hours from now.” He checked his watch. “Call it five.”
Markus’s eye flicked to a display on the wall. “I see no uptick in the BFR.”
“It will be triggered by the passage of an asteroid through the cloud.”
“Does anyone on the ground know?”
“It depends on to what extent this office is under surveillance.”
“So, your information does not come from the ground.”
“No. It comes from deep space.”
“Via encrypted Morse code?” Markus inquired casually. He and Sal exchanged a look. Their conversation had begun, an hour ago, with reading a memo from J.B.F. complaining about such transmissions and demanding that action be taken. It was in discussing how to take such action, and whether the White House had any authority in the matter, that Markus and Sal had wandered into their more general discussion of power. Which was how Markus liked it, for now. Because if someone was sending mysterious encrypted Morse code transmissions from Izzy, it had to be his girlfriend. And he wasn’t going to arrest her. People would howl about conflict of interest: people who would be dead soon, people who had no way to enforce their authority here.
Unless they had planted, among the Arkies or the General Population, fifth columnists with orders to execute a coup d’état if necessary.
“Markus?” Dr. Harris asked. “Are you hearing me? Do you understand what I just said?”
“I beg your pardon, Dr. Harris, I just got distracted thinking about the kind of things that Sal is supposed to think about.”
“Feel free to delegate some of that,” Sal said. “I know it’s not your strong suit, but—”
“Close the door, please,” Markus said.
Dr. Harris did.
“I am reasonably sure of no surveillance in here.”
“Noted.”
“It is Dinah, isn’t it, Doob?” Markus asked.
Doob nodded. “She’s talking to Sean Probst over an encrypted channel.”
Markus shook his head admiringly. “What a girl! My god, she is trouble.”
Doob and Sal were silent. During their silence, Markus thumbed out a one-word text message to Tekla.
“Sal,” Markus said, “I declare PSAPS.”
“I don’t think we are yet authorized to—”
“Who is going to stop us?”
Doob and Sal, again, were silent on the matter.
“Is Julia—I do not call her the president anymore—going to nuke us?” He was continuing to thumb out messages as he talked.
“She, or the Russians, or the Chinese, might have other ways of removing you from your position—”
“I have thought about this,” Markus said. “About the possibility that there are plants. Military guys with Tasers or whatever. Waiting for such an order. I have talked to Fyodor, to Sheng, to Zeke, trying to sound them out, to get a feel for it.”
“Markus,” Doob said, “with respect, I don’t think that this is what you ought to be focusing on right now.”
“Which is why I am delegating the constitutional side of it to Sal and the operational side of it to her.” Markus nodded toward the door, which had swung open without a knock. Tekla glided through and closed it behind her. “We don’t have to announce to the whole world that we are going to PSAPS. We have five hours in which to begin preparations, quietly. I will contact Moira, and tell her that we must begin preparations to disperse the genetic samples to the arklets. I will tell Ulrika that we must pull the trigger on the Surge.” By this, Markus meant a long-planned burst of launches that was supposed to happen in the few days’ grace period between the White Sky and the onset of the Hard Rain. “We can be working on these things quietly. Five hours from now, it will happen or it will not. If it does not, we go back to as we were and consider this a dress rehearsal.”
The door opened again, this time after a knock, and in came a young man named Steve Lake, preceded by his laptop and followed by his dreadlocks. For Steve, in his year and a half aboard Izzy, had not succumbed to the vacubuzzer’s siren song, but he had gotten tired of messing with his long hair and had allowed it to congeal into red ropes. Formerly employed by a consulting firm in northern Virginia that hired hackers to do secret work for intelligence agencies, he had been yanked and sent up to support Spencer Grindstaff, the networks and communications specialist who’d been one of Izzy’s original crew on Zero. Spencer was an NSA man through and through, recruited straight out of MIT to work on spooky crypto stuff. Steve seemed to be an altogether different sort of character. He looked a bit mystified just now.
“Steve,” Markus said. “It is time for us to have a conversation about power.”
Steve’s brow furrowed. “You mean, electrical power or—”
“The other kind.”
“Okay, and is this going to be, like, an abstract philosophical discussion or—”
“No, it is going to conclude with me telling you, under my PSAPS authority, to change all of the passwords and keys for Izzy’s control systems.”
“Wow!” Steve said. “Shouldn’t you be talking to Spencer then? Because he’s above me in the org chart.”
“I am familiar with the org chart,” Markus said. “Under PSAPS I have the authority to change it.”
“What is this PSAPS thing you keep talking about, Markus?”
“Sal will explain it later. For now, we may set it aside. Fundamentally we speak of your loyalty, your allegiance. I think that Spencer is extremely loyal to powers that be on the ground. I do not wish to put him in an impossible bind. He will later come with us, or he will not. You I believe to be a different kind of fellow. I ask you, in effect, to now become loyal to the Cloud Ark and the Cloud Ark alone. Not to Washington. Not to Houston. And to accept the authority of whoever is the boss of the Cloud Ark. Which for now is me.”
“Okay.”
“You’re supposed to think about it first, Steve. Not just say okay.”
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while. But I have to tell you, there might be back doors. I can change all the codes I know about. The ones I don’t know about are a different matter.”
“Then we shall just have to be vigilant.”
White Sky
DOOB COULDN’T GUESS HOW MANY TIMES DURING HIS LIFE HE HAD noted a cottony tuft of cloud in a blue sky, then looked up hours later to discover that it had developed into a bank of clouds that covered the sun and told of a change in the weather. Such phenomena happened too slowly for the mind to discern them as happening at all. During the last hours of A+1.335, something like that occurred in the cloud of lunar debris that had been hanging in the sky for the last seven hundred days. Later they would watch the movies of it in time-lapse, compressing a day’s changes into a minute of video, and it would look like an explosion. Or an epidemic of explosions. If you watched the video carefully enough, frame by frame, you could see it progress from one part of the cloud to the next as the Eight Ball shot through. Like a particle lancing through a cloud chamber, it was invisible save for the trail of consequences it left in its wake. A few months earlier it might have passed through without touching anything, but today the density of rocks in the cloud was such that it could not avoid smashing into some
of them on its way through. Doob, making a crude statistical calculation, put the likely number of collisions at ten, plus or minus five. Not a large number in a cloud that now contained millions of rocks, but enough to push the system, trembling on the precipice of an exponential explosion, over the edge. Around its unseen track the White Sky took form and fury. The cloud bloomed and evoluted like cream in coffee, spreading and paling, though from place to place one could see fresh bursts as rocks hurled out in earlier collisions found distant targets and touched off smaller chain reactions of their own. In places it took on a cellular structure as curved detonation fronts spread, contacted others, and merged into lacy foams of white arcs. It had an austere, monochromatic beauty about it. There was no fire and no light other than what cold sunlight the rocks bounced back to the eye. Later, when they began to enter the atmosphere, there would be fire and plenty of it. But for now the world was ending in a fractal blooming of dust and gravel, an apocalypse in a gravel quarry.
“You pretty much nailed it,” someone told Doob, “when you called it the White Sky.”
“Being right does not always bring satisfaction,” he said.
The Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through all meaningful thresholds within a few hours of the Eight Ball’s arrival and Doob stopped paying attention to it. The number was probably wrong now. It was just an estimate, produced by a consortium of observatories based on the amount and distribution of light coming out of the cloud. All the assumptions that went into its calculation had now become obsolete.
He tried aiming his optical telescope at where PP1 and PP2 and Cleft—the large, metal-rich children of Peach Pit—ought to be, but saw nothing except, possibly, some local highlights in the density of the cloud, perhaps caused by rocks dashing themselves to pieces on the steely surfaces of those dark bolides. He wondered if he would ever see them again.
He no longer had an accurate visual memory of the size of the moon in the sky, and so he could not estimate how many times larger the cloud was. Of course, he could look those numbers up and calculate it. But he didn’t really care what the numbers said. The full moon had always been the same size, but sometimes it looked huge and sometimes it looked small, depending on how close it was to the horizon, and on factors that were purely psychological or aesthetic. To all but a few of the people on the night side of Earth, looking up at the cloud, those factors were the only ones that mattered. He wanted to know how big it looked to them; he wanted to know how it felt. He wanted to see it over the Chino Hills from the courtyard of the Caltech Athenaeum, which was where he had last seen the moon, a few minutes before Zero, and to know how it was to stand there on terra firma and to see it and to know it was death coming.
Like most people, he had drawn up a list of everyone in the world he needed to say goodbye to, then gone through it and ruthlessly weeded out 90 percent of the names, since there wasn’t time. And then, during his last few months on Earth, he had sought out and said goodbye to the ones he needed to see in person. From orbit he had said goodbye to others on videoconferencing links or with carefully written email messages. Once he had said goodbye to a given person, he avoided communicating with them again. It was awkward to go out for a last night of drinking with a colleague, reminisce and cry and hug and say farewell, and then find yourself emailing the same person two months later with a question about their latest observations. Consequently, his scope of acquaintances had steadily narrowed as he had worked his way down the list. By this point he was down to his wife and his children. Reaching them became a lot more difficult after the Eight Ball had done its work. The volume of communications between Izzy and the ground was limited by the total bandwidth of the station’s antennas and radios. Personal communications had lower priority than operations, and operations were peaking as the final surge of launches was prepared. Or, as Dinah called it, the Splurge. Doob sent text messages to Amelia and the kids all the time; they sat in the delivery queue for minutes or hours, and half of them never got sent at all. Just when he was about to give up hope, he’d get a message back from Henry or Hadley or Hesper. Sending those messages, and seeing the responses, became more important than sleeping, so he “broke shift,” as the saying went, and dozed whenever he could, lying on the floor of the Farm or just putting his head down on a table like a kindergarten kid, his phone right next to his face so he’d feel it jump when anything came through.
It finally became clear to him, maybe twenty-four hours after he had given the news about the Eight Ball to Markus, that he was never going to communicate with his loved ones again save through sporadic and unpredictable texts. Anything he needed to say to them directly, he ought to have said before. Which should not have come as news; he had been telling himself for a long time that you had to act as if each conversation might be the last. This did not stop him from reviewing his final video chats with each one of them, on the evening of Day 700, and wishing he’d said certain things.
How does it look from up there? Henry texted him.
Doob checked the time. It was night in Moses Lake. He imagined Henry sitting out on that crappy old couch that they’d moved out of the house in Seattle, drinking a beer between work shifts, watching the White Sky reach out for him like a spectral hand.
Doob didn’t know what to say.
I think I am seeing some spread along the orbital axis—the beginnings of rings, he texted back.
I meant Earth, Henry returned.
Doob went looking for a place where he could look down at Earth through a real window—not one of those damned Situational Awareness Monitors. This ended up being the Woo-Woo Pod. It was pretty crowded. Izzy was about to swing over the terminator from day into night. Even over the brightly lit Pacific they could see what looked like hairline scratches in the pellucid shell of the atmosphere: the white trails left by incoming bolides. Above the dark side of the Earth these became arcs of blue fire that sometimes forked, and sometimes ended in red bursts when they made it all the way to the ground. In other words, it looked the way it had looked the day before, and the day before that. This level of meteorite activity would have been the most amazing astronomical event in human history had it happened suddenly, two years ago. But beginning with the first big rock that had plowed into Peru just a few days after Zero, the ambient level of bolide strikes had steadily crept upward. People had adjusted to it. Some had posted red-faced self-portraits after suffering “bolide burn,” meaning an acute case of sunburn caused by exposure to the ultraviolet light emitted by meteor trails in the nearby sky.
Looking down at you now, Doob texted. He wanted to add Wish I was there but it would have been stupid. Looks like a big one coming in over southern BC.
I see it, Henry returned. Feeling its heat.
Busy there?
You know it. Racking and stacking the big boys, getting ready for the Surge.
Doob wondered how it worked. What was to prevent desperate people from rushing the launch pads, trying to cram themselves aboard the last of those big boys? Like the last chopper out of Saigon, people dangling from the skids as soldiers punched them in the face. Or was he underestimating human nature? Maybe it was all perfectly orderly down there.
I need you here. That one was from Markus.
Reluctantly, Doob pushed himself away from the window and got turned toward the tube that would conduct him back to the Stack. From there he would make his way back to T3, where Markus was presumably hanging out in the Tank—
Markus Leuker was hovering directly in front of him, face illuminated by the blue light of a phone. He turned it off and slid it into his pocket.
“I don’t mean that I need you in the same room as I,” he said. “I mean that I need your brain here, in space, on the Cloud Ark, not down there. Your family is dead, Dr. Harris.”
“Dead. But still talking,” Doob said, feeling the start of a slow burn that might lead to him punching Markus in the nose, if only he could get to a place with gravity.
“What is it you think they
would most like to hear back from you?” Markus asked. “Lovey-dovey stuff? They know you love them. Were I in their position, you know what I would like to hear? I would like to hear ‘Sorry, my darling, but I am very busy just now ensuring the survival of our species.’ May I suggest you text something in that vein and then join me in the Tank; we have matters to discuss.”
And Markus Leuker, using one of the ropes that were strung across the Woo-Woo Pod as handholds, propelled himself toward the exit. As he passed through into the tube, Doob saw his silhouette against the circle of light, a Da Vinci Man, just for a moment. Then two others swung in behind him and spoiled the effect. That detail caught his attention. Markus now had an entourage. Or perhaps a bodyguard.
Hard Rain
LIKE ANY GOOD STORM, THE HARD RAIN BEGAN WITH A SUDDEN thunderclap: a kilometer-wide rock that lit up eastern Europe with eerie, silent flashes as it skidded in across the upper atmosphere before digging into thick air somewhere around Odessa. Its trail set fire to dry leaves and combustible litter in the Crimea, then painted a long brushstroke of burning buildings and forests across the northeast rim of the Black Sea, ending with a long elliptical crater in the steppe between Krasnodar and Stavropol. The former city was first set on fire by radiant heat from the sky and then flattened by a blast wave. The latter got only the blast, followed by a rain of ejecta. Both disappeared from human ken.
After a few hours’ respite, smaller bolides began to come down. They landed all over the world, but most often in the lower latitudes, close to the equator. Having been told, long in advance, that this would be the case, many people had moved toward the poles in recent months, prompting Rufus MacQuarie and his friends, family, and associates to establish a defensive perimeter around their works in the Brooks Range. That was a terrible place in November. The only refugees likely to make it up that far would be well equipped and well prepared, but those were exactly the kinds of uninvited visitors that Rufus didn’t want creeping around. Unencumbered by the limits on bandwidth that applied to all the other radios in the Cloud Ark, Rufus and Dinah had kept up their Morse code correspondence during the three-day “grace period” between the White Sky and the Hard Rain. Rufus was still transmitting from his truck, which he had parked before the entrance to the mine. He had considered erecting a larger antenna on the top of the mountain and hooking it up to an underground transmitter via armored cables, but Dinah, after surveying the predicted effects of the Hard Rain, had told him not to waste his time.
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