Seveneves

The only thing that kept Dinah from screaming like a little girl was her gorge rising up into her throat. Bo drew in a long breath and began muttering something.

Tekla’s hands unfolded and gripped the rim of the chamber. The lanyard of the knife was still wound around her right wrist. The handle of the knife trailed after it. Dinah supposed that its blade had been snapped off until she understood that the whole thing had become embedded in Tekla’s forearm.

Tekla pulled herself out a few inches, then stopped. Her head was now projecting into the room.

An eye opened. A bloodshot eye in a bloody face. But a normal, working eye.

Dinah’s ears began working again and she realized that she was hearing a loud hissing noise. It was the sound of air escaping from the International Space Station, not through a huge leak but through small gaps in the airlock’s outer seal. The air was flowing past Tekla’s body, creating a vacuum behind her, a vacuum she had to fight in order to advance into the room.

She felt embarrassed then, in the manner of a hostess who forgets to properly welcome a guest, and she reached down and grabbed one of Tekla’s hands. Margie got the other and with a final sucking, squelching noise they dragged Tekla’s blood-lubricated form out of the airlock chamber and into the space station.

Dinah half closed the inner hatch of the airlock. The Big Hoover, as old-school astronauts referred to the vacuum of space, took care of the rest, and slammed it closed with frightening violence.

They’d lost a measurable percentage of the atmosphere in this module. Not enough to cause oxygen deprivation but more than enough to set off alarms all over Izzy, and all the way down to Houston.

Maggie got to work on Tekla’s arm, which was bleeding quite a lot, while Ivy and Bo, now blue-gloved, cleaned off her face with towelettes. The picture was getting clearer. The basic idea had worked. Tekla’s knife work had been true and well aimed, and perhaps more effective than was really good for her. She had been spat out of the Luk’s outermost layer, and into the airlock chamber, with great force, slamming her face into a metal fitting along the way and opening up big lacerations above and below the eye. These had bled profusely. In the same moment the blade of her knife had caught on something and turned back on her and been jammed into her forearm. She had lain dazed for a moment, one leg hanging out the open hatch as Dinah had tried to close it on her, then had come to and drawn herself up as planned. For a few moments during all of this she had been exposed to vacuum, which hadn’t done her bleeding wounds any favors, but air had rushed into the lock and equalized the pressure before irreparable damage could be inflicted.

As Dinah had worried, scraps of plastic had gotten caught in the outer hatch’s gasket, accounting for those hissing air leaks. But most of them drifted off into space when she swung the hatch back open again, and the remaining bits, stuck to the gasket by Tekla’s freeze-dried blood, she was able to pick clean using a programmed swarm of Nats. She ended up leaving that project as an exercise for Bo, who was climbing the robot learning curve with remarkable speed.

She drifted down the length of Izzy to the Hub and thence out to the torus, where Maggie, getting advice from trauma surgeons down in Houston, was working on Tekla’s arm. This was a lot easier in the weak gravity of the torus—no globules of blood drifting around. Lina Ferreira and Jun Ueda, both also life scientists, were filling in as assistants.

Ivy was in her office fielding a shit storm of angry reaction from people down in Houston.

They were doing the surgery under local anesthesia, so Tekla was awake. They’d cleaned her up, and closed the lacerations around her eye socket with butterfly bandages and Krazy Glue. The silvery-blond stubble that covered her scalp was still darkened with coagulated blood along that side. The whites of her eyes were red, and she had thousands of tiny red marks all over her face. Dinah had been warned to expect those. They were called petechiae: broken capillaries just under the skin, caused by exposure to vacuum. But from the way her eyes moved in their sockets and focused on things, Dinah could see that her vision was basically intact.

“That was uncalled for,” Tekla said to her.

“True,” Dinah said.

“I shall be in trouble.”

“So are we,” Dinah said, nodding in the direction of Ivy’s office. “We are all in trouble … with a bunch of dead people.”

Tekla reacted very little, but among Margie and Lina and Jun there was a collective intake of breath, a momentary halt in the proceedings.

“Margie,” said a Texan voice from the ground, “this dead surgeon would like you to clamp off that arteriole before it starts bleedin’ again.”

“Those of us who are going to live,” Dinah said, “have to start living by our own lights.”

Pioneers and Prospectors (#ulink_f3e964aa-9ba4-54dc-af8d-661353524d62)

“THE ICEMAN COMETH.”

“Ah.” Rhys sighed. “I was wondering which of us would be first to go there.” He pulled out, drifted away, and did a peel-and-knot on the condom so expertly that it created dark stirrings of jealousy in Dinah’s heart. But at least he didn’t let anything get loose in Dinah’s shop.

“This may have been your last delivery,” Dinah said. “Of ice, that is.”

“You’ve got your freezer?”

“Coming up on tomorrow’s launch from Kourou.”

“Any chance of getting them to send up a martini shaker with it?”

“We use plastic bags for that.”

“Well, I hope that my deliveries—of ice, that is—have contributed something to whatever the hell you’ve been doing.”

“Check this out,” she said. She’d already wrapped herself in a blanket, but now she prodded the wall with a toe and drifted over to her workstation. With a bit of clicking around she brought up a video. The opening shot was stark: a cube of ice in a black chamber, lit up by bright but cold LEDs.

“From Arjuna HQ, I presume?” Rhys, still naked, came up behind her and wrapped an arm around her waist. She liked to think of it as an affectionate gesture. In part it was. But she’d been in zero gee long enough to understand that he also just didn’t want to drift away while watching the movie.

“Yes.”

A bearded strawberry-blond man entered the frame carrying a sheet of corrugated cardboard—the lid of a pizza box.

“That’s Larz Hoedemaeker, I think—one of the guys I’ve been working with a lot.”

Larz angled the pizza lid slightly toward the camera. It was mostly covered by iridescent fingernail-sized objects, like silicon beetles. Hundreds of them.

“That’s a lot of Nats,” Rhys remarked.

“Well … the whole point is to make a swarm.”

“I understand. But it seems they’ve found a way to ramp up production.”

Larz folded the cardboard diagonally to make it into a crude trough and then angled it down toward the block of ice. The Nats avalanched down and tumbled onto it in a heap. Quite a few of them skittered off and tumbled onto the floor. Larz exited the frame for a moment, then returned, pushing a wheeled swivel chair. He arranged this behind the block of ice, then disappeared again, then came back carrying a clock that he had apparently just taken down from the wall of an office. He balanced this on the seat of the swivel chair, leaning back against its lumbar support, so that it was clearly visible in the frame of the video. Then he departed.

A few moments later the lights got much brighter. “Simulating solar radiation,” Dinah explained. “The Nats are solar powered, so the only way to test them is to have a light source as bright as the sun.”

The clock’s minute hand now began to sweep forward. “Time lapse?” Rhys asked.

“Yeah. This stuff happens slowly, as you’ve seen.”

The Nats that had scattered to the floor scurried around aimlessly for a bit, then seemed to find the block of ice, and scaled its vertical sides. “Pretty good adhesion, you’ll note,” Dinah said.

Meanwhile the heap of Nats on top spread out like a pat of butter softening on a pancake, distributing themselves in a somewhat random but basically even layer atop the ice block. A few of them appeared to sink into the ice. “Melting their way in?” Rhys asked.

“No. Uses too much energy—and wouldn’t work in zero gee. They are mechanically tunneling. See the piles forming?” She pointed to the top of the ice block, where mounds of white had begun to form around the exits of the tunnels. “That is spoil being carved out and ejected by the tunneling Nats.”

“You can’t make mounds in zero gee either,” Rhys pointed out.

“One thing at a time!” she said, elbowing him. “The other guys are working on it, see?” She used the cursor to point out another Nat that was making its way along the surface. It seized hold of some little ice grains from a mound, then backed away and headed toward the edge of the ice block.

“How’s it doing that?” Rhys asked.

“You know how when your hand is wet and you reach into the freezer and pick up an ice cube, it’ll stick to your skin? That’s all there is to it,” Dinah said. “And that is also how they crawl around on the ice without falling off.”

The minute hand on the clock began moving faster, and even the hour hand could be seen sweeping around now. The surface of the ice block became pitted and then began to sink toward the floor as material was removed. But at the same time, one edge of the block developed a bulge that grew into a cantilevered prong, like the horn on an anvil.