Tekla, Tom, and Bo had then come in, wearing orange vests improvised from survival kits that, since they’d been designed for use on Earth, had no practical utility anymore. These would serve as police uniforms until something else could be stitched together. With any luck, they wouldn’t be needing a lot of cop gear. But Ivy had been clear, and the others in her ad hoc council had agreed, that if they were executing what amounted to a police action, they couldn’t beat around the bush—couldn’t try to palm it off as an informal visit. A new constitution had to be exercised, or it was just words.
“Can you get it back on the SAN?” Ivy asked, over the voice link. “I’d like to see what’s happening.”
“I’ll reboot everything,” Sal said, pulling himself up into the control couch. “But it depends on what Spencer did—whether he broke it permanently, or just entered a temporary command.” He reached around in back of a panel, felt for a connector, pulled it out, and jacked it back in.
“We had estimated that you were going to find ten person-years worth of nonrenewables in that thing,” Ivy said. She meant, not bulk food (which could be grown in the outer hull space of an arklet) or air (which was renewed by the life support system), but generally smaller items like toiletries, vitamins, medicine, and specialty food. “That was based on circumstantial evidence—the amount of stuff that’s gone missing, the number of Flivver trips and EVAs that have touched that arklet. We always knew it was only a guess. But for it to contain nothing at all is . . . odd.”
“More than odd,” Tekla said. “Surprise attack.”
“You think there’s going to be an attack?”
“Maybe not in sense of violent assault,” Tekla said, “but something.”
“And Arklet 98 was a decoy?”
“Obviously.”
A musical tone sounded from the arklet’s PA speakers, and the white LEDs changed their hue to red. “Alert,” said a synthesized voice. “All personnel should now be awake and at stations for urgent swarm maneuver. This is not a drill.”
They’d heard it before. It was a Streaker Alert.
Normally, though, they took it at face value. “Remarkable coincidence,” Tekla said.
“I think you guys had better get back in the Flivver,” Ivy said. “Follow the usual procedures for one of these, but keep your eyes open.”
“STEVE, DO YOU HAVE ANYTHING YET ON THE BOLIDE?” IVY ASKED. They were about five minutes into the alert, which had obliged them to move down into the Banana. As much as Ivy wanted to know what was happening with J.B.F., and what Tekla had characterized as a “surprise attack,” her responsibility in a case like this one was clear: all of her attentions had to be focused on the evasive maneuvers being carried out by the Cloud Ark and their possible consequences. Those might include collisions between arklets or the separation of one or more arklets from the swarm. In dire cases it might be necessary to send out rescue teams, which was why her first act had been to get Tekla and the others into their Flivver. For the normal role of that makeshift police service was not to serve warrants on hoarders; it was to respond to emergencies. As keenly as the space geek in Ivy’s soul wanted to pay attention to the scientific phenomenon of the incoming rock, it was a task she had to delegate; and she’d delegated it to Steve Lake as soon as the alert had sounded.
Thus far, the alert had been proceeding as most of them did, which meant that most network activity had been shut down to leave open bandwidth for Parambulator. That system swung into action without human intervention, calculating courses, making suggestions, and gathering data about what the motes in the data cloud were doing. The Parambulator screens were looking pretty angry, but that was normal as almost every arklet fired its thrusters and shunted into a new trajectory. In time it would get sorted out. It always did. But part of the sorting-out process was refining what they knew about the trajectory of the incoming streaker. The closer it came, the more precisely they could track it. By the time it passed through, or near, the swarm, they’d have its parameters dialed in to high precision. And once it had flashed by, all Parambulator had to do was clean up the mess.
Ivy had asked Steve about the bolide for a couple of reasons. One was that hot rocks, by definition, tended to come and go rapidly. This one had been approaching for several minutes—a long time to wait. Another was that Parambulator looked more chaotic than usual. Normally there would be a spray of red in the first couple of minutes. Presently it would begin to fade as the arklets reported that they were out of harm’s way. But in this case, it never seemed to get any better. “Are we having trouble with bandwidth, or—”
“The rock is weird,” Steve said. “Normally I’d expect to see a stream of packets from SI, refining the params as they gathered more data.” He meant Sensor Integration: the department that managed the radars and telescopes.
“And you’re not?”
“Well, I am—but with different numbers.”
“What do you mean, different numbers?”
“It’s like we have two different Streaker Alerts happening at once. The packets are stepping on each other. There’s some kind of crosstalk going on.” Steve sat back from his screen for a moment and tugged his beard. “Just a sec,” he said. “I think that these packets are coming from different sources.”
“But they should all have the same point of origination,” Ivy said. “SI.”
“They claim to,” Steve said, “but I think that some of them are forgeries.”
Feeling his chair shift subtly beneath him, he reached out involuntarily with one hand and held the edge of the table. Izzy was firing her thrusters, coming about to a new orientation, trying to put Amalthea between herself and the bolide—real or imagined.
“You think this whole alert is them spoofing us?”
“It would fit in with Tekla’s theory of what’s going on,” Steve said.
“I’ll try to voice with Doob,” Ivy said. “Work on that forgery hypothesis.”
“MADAM PRESIDENT,” CAMILA SAID, PULLING A HEADPHONE AWAY from her ear. “As you requested, I am informing you that Ivy has figured it out.”
“She knows?” Julia asked.
“Not quite, but Steve Lake has detected the forged packets and is running further analysis.” Camila’s eyes were big and her voice—which was always somewhat impaired by her facial injuries—was thick and dry.
Julia threw her a shrewd look, then turned to Spencer Grindstaff, who shrugged. “Sooner or later a man of Steve’s talents was bound to—”
“I don’t care about that,” Julia cut in. “I want to know whether our gambit has bought us enough time.”
“There’s—” Camila began.
Spencer ran Camila off the road. “It has bought us enough confusion. We should be in a position to dock this heptad at the Shipyard in twenty seconds.”
“There’s another bolide!” Camila squeaked. “I think.”
Julia shook her off, keeping her focus on Spencer. “Where is the triad?”
“Already there,” Spencer said.
“The spacewalkers?”
“Suited up, out of the airlocks, in position.”
“Still. The assembly. The integration. It will take time.”
“Madam President, if I may,” Paul Freel broke in. “All we need is to slap her together—with zip ties, if that’s what it takes—and achieve separation from the Shipyard. A small thruster burn will do it. Izzy doesn’t have phasers to blast us out of the sky! They could send a Flivver after us, but what are they going to do? All we need is to get clear. Then we can spend days prepping Red Hope before we embark on the mission in earnest.”
“I wouldn’t put anything past that Tekla.”
“Say what you will about her, she’ll follow orders,” Paul said.
“Well, as a stay-behind supporter of your expedition, I will be happy to run interference for you until you can get cleanly away,” Julia said.