“A year for sure,” Katherine said. “Beyond that, it becomes a medical question. A statistical question.”

“Statistics,” Julia repeated, and sighed. “I have been hearing a lot about that from Dr. Harris.”

“SO, YOU’RE TELLING ME WE’VE LOST TRACK OF WHO IS EVEN IN J.B.F.’S heptad?” Ivy asked.

There was silence around the big table in the Banana. Ivy had begun to hold important meetings in this old familiar space, closer to the central axis of the Stack and farther forward in Amalthea’s cone of shelter. It wouldn’t do to have the Cloud Ark’s command structure decapitated by a single unlucky bolide strike—a disaster much more likely to happen whenever they met in the big T3 spaces like the Tank and the Farm.

Present for this meeting were Doob, Luisa, Fyodor, and three handpicked members of Markus’s staff who had become a sort of executive troika: Sal Guodian, the one-man judicial system. Tekla, the head of security. And Steve Lake, the dreadlocked ginger who was responsible for network and computer matters.

“The default system for keeping track of who is where,” Sal began, “is based on the assumption that people will actually cooperate with it.”

Ivy held up a hand. “Stop. Before you go into explanations, I need a yes or no.”

“Yes,” Steve Lake said, “we have lost track of who is in J.B.F.’s heptad.”

“Thank you,” Ivy said. “And somehow the SAN isn’t helping us fill in the gaps?”

Steve said, “One of the people who is definitely in that heptad is Spencer Grindstaff.”

Ivy nodded.

Sal said, “Steve, when Markus pulled you into his office, just before the White Sky, and put you in charge of the network—replacing Spencer—you made some remark to the effect that Spencer might know of back doors into Izzy’s systems. Back doors that would be impossible for you to know about until he used them.”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Almost by definition, we can’t find something like that until it’s used. Not without manually reading through every line of code.”

“You think he has a back door into the SAN?”

“We know he’s doing something,” Steve said, “because as soon as he turned up there, the arklets in J.B.F.’s heptad began dropping off the network from time to time. Whenever she’s having a meeting she doesn’t want us to know about, he turns everything off.”

Ivy considered this for a moment, then looked across the table at Tekla and nodded. Tekla rose—carefully, for the gravity was quite weak here—and went to the door. She opened it to reveal Zeke Petersen waiting outside, and waved him in.

“Thanks for joining us,” Ivy said, breaking a silence during which Zeke took a seat at the foot of the table. Ivy was at the head of it. She was looking “up” a long ski jump ramp at him, and he was doing likewise at her.

“Just like old times, Commander Xiao,” Zeke said.

“Well, I appreciate your loyalty,” Ivy said. “I know this must be awkward for you.”

“Not at all, actually,” Zeke said. “The announcement that Markus made, when he called it, at the onset of the Hard Rain—declaring all existing nations to be dissolved—I took that to heart. Julia didn’t hear that announcement. She didn’t get the memo.”

“We’ve been hearing a little about Spencer’s ability to disconnect from SAN.”

Zeke nodded. “Confirmed. I was there for one such incident. We had a very strange conversation. I think they were testing the waters to see whether I might be recruited. She spoke to me as if I were already on her side—as if it were unthinkable that I wouldn’t be. It’s a pretty good persuasive technique—she had me going for a little bit. But once I got out of there and slept on it, I saw how crazy it was.”

“Did you have the sense that this was a one-off? Or was she working her way down a list of possible recruits?”

“If I had to guess, I’d say there was a list,” Zeke said, “but not a long list.”

Ivy nodded. She didn’t have to spell it out: J.B.F. might have recruited some others—others they didn’t know about yet.

“It tallies with what I saw,” Doob said, and glanced at Luisa for a confirming nod. “I think she is just being opportunistic. She reaches out to people, draws them into conversations, drops hints, probes for vulnerabilities.”

“Is she nuts?” Ivy asked Luisa.

“In a sense it doesn’t matter,” Luisa said. “If she’s making trouble, she’s making trouble. Tracing that to a diagnosable psychiatric condition doesn’t really change anything.”

“It might change the approach that we take.”

“She was narcissistic to begin with,” Luisa said. “This isn’t a formal diagnosis, mind you. But according to what we heard from you and Dinah, her trip up to Izzy was pretty traumatic. She lost her husband and her child and blood was spilled along the way. It doesn’t take a trained professional to guess that she is suffering from some level of PTSD. Connected with that we might expect her to have a dark, paranoid vision of the world. But she may have been that way to begin with.”

“She’s cagey,” Ivy said. “As long as all she’s doing is talking to people, there’s not much I can or should do.”

“Agreed,” Luisa said. “She is building a political base among the Arkies. If you take some action against her, with your sole pretext being that she’s talking to a lot of people, then you’ve given her just what she wants. But some outreach on your part to the Arkies might be a good idea.”

Ivy sighed. “The only answer to politics is more politics,” she said, “and that’s where I’m most useless.”

“Deeds, not words,” Zeke said. “That’s what really matters. And when Ymir pulls in, you and Markus will have accomplished something that’s going to make J.B.F. and her clique look puny.”

“I MAY BE OUT OF MY DEPTH HERE,” JULIA SAID, AFTER A LONG AND thoughtful pause, “but we seem to have a striking coincidence that is staring us right in the face.”

“Go on, Madam President,” Camila urged her. “It might be obvious to you, but I for one cannot see it.”

Julia looked at Katherine Quine. “As I understand it, the key elements of the proposed Mars ship are a heptad, for the humans to live in during the voyage, and a triad, for bulk storage of propellants and whatnot. And this matches up quite neatly with our strengths.” She managed a self-deprecating chuckle. “I say ‘our.’ What do I mean by that? I suppose I’m going out on a limb by imagining that there might be some sort of a natural alliance between the Arkie Community and the Martians. A sort of ragtag rebel coalition, if you will. Here in this heptad we have rapidly assembled a social hub for advocacy of concerns relevant to the AC. In a sense we have our own heptad now. And in a like sense, you, Ravi and Jianyu, have developed your triad into an intense focus of Martian advocacy. You have your own triad. So the two largest components of the Mars expedition have already been acquired. They just need to be put together.”

Ravi was nodding. “Two of the engineers on the MIV team are keen on it. They helped build New Caird and are eager to tackle a new problem. Of the two, one might even come with us. Paul Freel. He has been a strong advocate of Mars colonization since long before Zero.”

Katherine had been listening intently, and now broke in: “I don’t mean to sound a skeptical note, Madam President, but in what sense do you really ‘have’ this heptad, or do our friends here ‘have’ the triad where they live? It might be true in the sense of having majority rule. But—”

“But what does ownership really mean in this context? Hmm, yes, it is a very profound question, Dr. Quine, and I’m glad you raised it. So many things we took for granted before, such as property rights and individual liberty, are clouded by Markus’s declaration of PSAPS. Or martial law, if we want to call a spade a spade. But as a first step toward answering your question, I would suggest that the ability to come and go at will is inextricable from ownership—that’s what it would really mean to ‘have’ an arklet, or a triad, or a heptad.”