The reunion of Endurance and the Swarm began, as it turned out, with a collision. It was not a catastrophic high-speed collision, but it certainly was no orderly and controlled rendezvous. Aïda had the presence of mind to give them about thirty seconds’ warning. Until then it had all been going well. The heptad had approached, using its thrusters to kill most of its velocity relative to the larger ship, and executed some little burns intended to bring it home to the docking port. Then Aïda announced, in a barely controlled tone of voice, that one of the thruster modules had run out of propellant and could no longer perform its function.
“It’s too heavy,” Zeke muttered. “They loaded in too much cargo; the thrusters are eating too much fuel trying to push all of that crap around.”
The heptad came in too fast and at the wrong angle and crashed into Caboose 2, which was a module, recycled from the wreckage of the Shipyard three years ago, that they had plugged into the back of H1 to serve as the aft-most thing in the Stack. They saw it happen on their screens, they felt it in their bones, and they heard the three spacewalkers exclaiming and cursing. A little storm of debris emerged from a hole that had evidently been torn in the skin of Caboose 2.
“C2 depressurized,” Tekla reported. “Sealed off from Stack.”
The debris cloud included one large object that had two arms, two legs, and a head. The limbs were flailing. Everyone watched silently.
“We lost Michael Park,” one of the other spacewalkers announced.
“We need more people back there,” Ivy announced to the crew in the Hammerhead.
Ivy’s message was clear. Later we will mourn for Michael. Now we have other things to worry about.
“Moira, you stay,” Ivy added.
Moira hadn’t even moved. She was accustomed to being treated, against her own will and instincts, like a cherished and fragile child.
“Maybe you could talk to Michael on the radio. He’ll be alive for a while.”
Moira nodded, swallowed hard, and focused on her laptop, entering the commands needed to establish a private voice link to Michael.
“Dinah, you stay here—run the robots. We are going to have to do some improvising. Bo, go back. Steve too. Luisa, deal with Aïda over voice—for me it’s too much stress and distraction. Stay in the Hammerhead and make that problem go away for me. Doob, stay here. Zeke, go back.”
Ivy looked around. “If I haven’t mentioned your name yet, go back and see what you can do. Doob, you’re the weatherman. Your job is to make announcements about the storm and when it’s going to hit.”
“Half an hour,” Doob said. “But yes. I will do that.”
Moira, headphones on, had retreated into the quietest corner of the Hammerhead and was engaging in a murmured conversation with Michael. She was holding a cloth over her eyes to absorb tears before they broke loose in the cabin. Luisa had already gone into her assigned role and had been listening to a voice transmission from Aïda. “She says she is going to try again.”
“I thought her thrusters were empty,” Ivy said.
“She can transfer propellant from some of the other thruster modules to the empty one. It’ll take a few minutes. She requests instructions on where to make the next attempt, since the docking port on Caboose 2 has been rendered unusable.”
With a bit of deliberation they agreed that the heptad should make its next attempt on a docking port in the old Zvezda module.
Dinah, who had spent most of the last couple of days preparing for the docking to occur on Caboose 2, sent her robots scrambling forward along the outside of the Stack, bringing their cables with them. That caught her up in a stew of minor complications that more than filled the time it took for the heptad to get its dead thruster up and running again.
They watched the second approach, and the docking, in silence. It took about ten minutes. Doob interrupted once to give an update on the approaching radiation storm.
Unexpectedly, it was Moira who broke the silence. “Don’t let them dock,” she said.
“What?!” Ivy said.
“It’s a trap.”
Zeke’s voice came over the PA: “Positive docking achieved. Getting ready to open the hatch.”
Moira added, “Michael figured it out.”
“Fifteen minutes before the storm breaks,” Doob announced.
Dinah had entered into a state of intense focus on the problem to be solved, seeing through the eyes of ten different robots performing ten different tasks, occasionally blurting out terse requests to the two surviving spacewalkers, asking them to shake a stuck cable loose or pull a wriggling Grabb out of trouble. She tried to filter out the conversation between Moira and Ivy.
“What do you mean, it’s a trap?”
“Aïda’s heptad joined the mesh network as soon as it got within range,” Moira said. “If you check your email right now, or your Spacebook, you’ll see stuff flooding into it. Terabytes of old messages and posts that have been bottled up in the Swarm. Mailing list traffic that’s three years old.”
“So?” Ivy asked.
“Michael saw some weird stuff just now, and drew my attention to it.”
“He’s floating in space!”
“He’s floating in space and checking his email.”
“What weird stuff did he notice?”
“They’re cannibals, Ivy.”
“We already know that.”
“A few hours ago,” Moira said, “they slaughtered Tav and ate what was left of him.”
Dinah was having difficulty focusing on her work.
“They wanted to be well fed for today.”
The time was approaching when the spacewalkers would have to go to their airlocks and get indoors ahead of the storm. Dinah had to focus on them. There was nothing she could do about what Moira was saying. She began speaking to one of them but was interrupted when Zeke came over the PA again: “Ten survivors aboard. Waiting for J.B.F. to emerge from the hatch.”
“Zeke, be on your toes,” Ivy said. “We have indications they may be up to no good.”
“Get inside,” Dinah said to the spacewalkers. “Head for the nearest airlock. Stay away from the new people, we don’t trust them.”
“Ditching the rock,” Ivy announced. A sharp hiss came through the walls as compressed air flooded the hair-thin gap between the outer surface of the Hammerhead and the surrounding cavity of Amalthea. “Plug your ears.” Then, before anyone could comply, a shattering, sickening bang as Dinah’s demolition charges went off, destroying the structural connections that joined Amalthea to Endurance. They felt a sharp jostle—more acceleration than they had experienced in three years—as the Hammerhead sprang free, pushing the rest of Endurance along with it.
“Three minutes before the storm hits,” Doob said.
“J.B.F. is aboard,” Luisa announced. She was on voice to Zeke and the rest of the crew aft, relaying what they said to the others in the Hammerhead. Her brow wrinkled. “Something’s wrong with her—I don’t quite follow.”
“Burning hard,” Ivy announced. Meaning that they were near their apogee, entering the fringe of the main lunar debris cloud, and that all the surviving engines had just come on full force. She had inaugurated the big burn that would, with a delta vee of some twelve hundred meters per second, inject them into the debris cloud.
Every loose object in the Hammerhead dropped to what was now the floor. At the same time they could hear all manner of percussion, from all over Endurance.
Zeke’s voice came in over the voice link. “We are in combat,” he said.
“Combat?” Ivy asked.
“They shot Steve Lake.”
“We are now experiencing very high levels of high-energy proton radiation from the CME,” Doob announced. “Everyone who is not in the Hammerhead should be getting into a storm shelter.”
“Shot him?” Ivy asked.
“With J.B.F.’s revolver. I suggest you try to lock down the network, they are trying to backdoor it.”
After that, commu
nications were hectic and confused for a minute, and seemed to suggest that adversaries in different parts of the ship were all trying to use the same channel.
Then their communications went dead. The equipment still worked; they’d simply been locked out of the network. Ivy could still fly the ship, but none of them could talk to people outside the Hammerhead.
They were startled by a metallic rapping on the hatch that sealed the Hammerhead off from the SCRUM. Dinah’s ears soon read it as Morse code.
“‘Chocolate,’” she said. “That’s kind of a code word between me and Tekla. I think we should open the hatch.”
They did so, not before arming themselves with whatever makeshift weapons they could find, and found Tekla, suffering from a knife wound to the hand; Zeke, looking flustered but unharmed; and a woman, barely recognizable as Julia Bliss Flaherty given that most of her hair was gone and she had both of her hands firmly clamped over her mouth. Tekla vaulted into the Hammerhead and pulled Julia along behind her.
“What is going on?” Ivy demanded.
Zeke held up both hands. “I got this,” he said. “We have killed four of them already. Two more are casualties. We have them outnumbered. We just have to keep fighting.”
“You need to get into a storm shelter,” Ivy said.
Tekla, unaccustomed to working in even weak gravity, had gotten her footing enough to drag Julia into a corner of the Hammerhead and sit her down on the floor. She then turned back toward the hatch. Dinah had never seen Tekla in this state before, and feared her greatly in that moment. Moira had a different reaction; peeling off her headphones, she lurched across the space and threw her arms around Tekla’s neck. It looked like a greeting but soon developed into something else as Tekla began dragging Moira toward the hatch and Moira began trying to prevent her from returning to the fray.
“Sweet one,” Tekla was mumbling into Moira’s ear, “you want me to use wrestling moves on you? Then you should let me go, because I am going to kill that bitch Aïda.”
“Zipping into storm shelters is exactly what they wanted us to do,” Zeke explained. “Their plan was to take the ship as soon as we did so. Good thing you warned us.”
Tekla by now had peeled herself loose from Moira’s grip and advanced toward the hatch with a full stride.
Zeke, waiting for her, reached out with one hand. He was holding a small black plastic box. He pressed it against Tekla’s thigh and pulled a little trigger on its side. The device erupted with a sharp ticking, buzzing noise. Tekla’s leg collapsed and she floated to the floor, glassy-eyed.
“Sorry, Tekla,” Zeke said. “You stay here. Get your hand fixed. Keep Moira company—she needs you. And if you have a little boy, name it Zeke.”
Then, before any of them could respond, he slammed the hatch shut.
In the silence that followed, a sharp crack resounded through the structure of Endurance. Everyone knew the sound: they’d just taken a hit from a bolide.
“Aren’t you supposed to be flying the ship?” Doob shouted to Ivy.
Wordlessly, Ivy went back to her screen.
Dinah rounded on Julia. “What the hell is going on?” she demanded.
Julia’s hair had been cropped. In the last three years it had gone silvery. Her hands still obscured the lower half of her face. Her eyes were clearly recognizable, though without benefit of cosmetics they seemed to be staring out of a face two decades older.
Slowly she removed her hands.
She was sticking her tongue out. It looked like a piece of metal was caught in her teeth.
On a closer look, it was clear that J.B.F. now had a pierced tongue. It had been done cleanly and professionally; there was no bleeding, no apparent signs of infection or discomfort. A stainless steel bolt about two inches long had been inserted vertically through the piercing, fixed in place with nuts and washers above and below the tongue. It was too long to fit into Julia’s mouth, so it kept her tongue stretched out. Above and below, the rod pressed against her lips.
“Oh Jesus Christ,” Dinah said.
Julia tapped at the bolt with one finger, then made screwing and unscrewing gestures with both hands. The nuts had been doubled, and torqued tightly against each other. Dinah took a multitool from a holster on her belt and unfolded its needlenosed pliers, then borrowed Ivy’s. By twisting gently in opposite directions she was able to loosen the nuts. Julia pushed her away and unscrewed the nuts with her fingertips, then gently extracted the bolt. Her tongue retracted into her mouth. She put one hand over her lips and leaned back against a bulkhead for a few moments, moving her jaw to work up some saliva and get limbered up.
When she finally spoke, Julia sounded weirdly normal, as if delivering remarks from the White House briefing room. “When we surrendered,” she said, “they took my gun, and they tortured Spencer Grindstaff until he spilled everything he knew about the IT systems here. All the passwords, all the back doors, all the details as to how it all works. Exactly what they would need in order to take the place over. Then they killed him, and . . .”
“Ate him?”
Julia nodded. “They have a sort of hacker type among their group. When he came on board just now, he went to a terminal and began to execute this plan. Steve Lake tried to stop him. One of the others had the gun—shot Steve to death. That was always part of their plan. They knew that only Steve could stop them.”
“How many bullets are left in that thing?”
“I’m sure it is empty now. Most of them are using knives and clubs. They didn’t expect a real fight, because . . .”
“Because they thought we’d all be zipped up in our storm shelters,” Dinah said, “like lambs to the slaughter.”
THE BIG BURN LASTED FOR THE BETTER PART OF AN HOUR. BY THE end of it, they’d consumed so much propellant and made Endurance so light that acceleration made the blood fall out of their heads and pool in their feet. Ivy piloted the ship lying flat on her back, lest she lose consciousness. The journey was punctuated by a few terrific bangs, and those who could stand to watch Endurance’s status readouts could observe various modules turning yellow, then red, then black as they succumbed to damage. Dinah watched through the eyes of several cameras as a ten-mile-long piece of the moon tumbled past them, overtaking them and zooming by just a few hundred meters to their starboard side. Nor was that the last such encounter; but with Doob acting as her wing man, calling out the biggest threats, and with Dinah making such use as she could of Parambulator, Ivy was able to steer them clear of the big stuff.
They had no way of knowing the progress of the combat aft. Zeke had spoken optimistically of their odds, but there was no telling how the damage they’d taken from bolides might have swung the course of the battle to one side or the other. Endurance’s automatic sealing off of damaged parts of the ship had now partitioned her into a number of separate zones between which movement was impossible.
Zero gee returned, meaning that the engines had shut off. They were now traveling as fast, on average, as the rest of the debris cloud. Dinah had only just adjusted to the steady acceleration of the big burn and now felt a wave of sickness come over her as the inner ear readjusted. Her eyes closed and she sank into a sort of catnap, floating loosely around the Hammerhead, thudding gently against a wall every so often when Ivy used the thrusters to avoid a rock.
Then she realized she’d been fully asleep for a time.
Part of her wanted to stay that way. But she knew that big things were happening, so she opened her eyes, half expecting to find herself alone, the last person alive.
Ivy was the only person awake, her face lit up by her screen. And for the first time in a long time, it looked the way it had used to when she’d been on the track of some fascinating science problem: alive, intent, fiercely joyful.
“Why’s it so quiet?” Dinah asked. For it seemed to her that it had been a long time since she had heard the crack of a bolide or sensed the thrust of one of Endurance’s engines.
“We’re in the shadow,” Iv
y said. “A new Cone of Protection. C’mere.” She tossed her head.
Dinah came around behind and hooked her chin over her friend’s shoulder. The monitor had several windows open. Ivy enlarged one of them to fill most of the screen. A legend superimposed at the bottom identified it as AFT CAMERA.
The field of view was entirely filled by a close-up image of a huge asteroid.
Dinah was an asteroid miner. She had looked at many pictures of asteroids in her day. She had learned to recognize them by their shapes and their textures. She had no difficulty in identifying this one. “Cleft,” she said.
Ivy reached out and touched the screen. Red crosshairs appeared beneath her fingertip, which she dragged across the big rock’s surface until centered on a vast black crevasse that looked like it nearly split the asteroid in two: the canyon that had given this rock its name. She pulled her finger away, leaving the crosshairs in the middle of the cleft. “I was thinking there,” she said.
“How about a little below, where it gets wider?”
“I don’t think we want a wide place. Too much exposure.”
“Go there, then,” Dinah suggested, reaching out and dragging the crosshairs to a slightly different location. “Then we can snuggle into the narrow part once we’ve gotten inside.”
“You ladies enjoying yourselves?” Doob rasped.
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