She decided not to tell him anything further. Entombed in Ymir’s boiler room, simultaneously freezing to death while being cooked alive by radiation, he didn’t need to hear a description of what Dinah was seeing through the telescope.

They had been calling this the Cloud Ark for two years. The name had been meant somewhat poetically. Today, however, it really did look like a cloud. Her view of Izzy, which usually was so crisp and sharp in the high-contrast light of outer space, was cloaked in a glinting and winking shroud of what might be clinically described as particulate matter.

It went without saying that Izzy had taken a direct hit from a bolide. Beyond that, it was difficult to make out details.

Ymir’s final burn—for Jiro, a suicide mission—had settled her in an orbit quite similar to Izzy’s: the same plane, the same average altitude. The only difference was that it was a little bit more oval, calculated to cross Izzy’s path twice during each revolution around the Earth. They were approaching one of those crossings, and so from Dinah’s point of view the space station kept getting closer, filling the window on her computer screen, obliging her to zoom out, giving her a progressively sharper, more detailed picture. As minutes ticked by, she was able to piece together a guess as to what had happened.

The rock must have come in from an angle, missed Amalthea cleanly, and struck somewhere near H2, the hub that anchored Tori 2 and 3. Both of the tori had huge bites taken out of them, and both had stopped rotating. Aft of that point, Izzy’s spine—her central Stack—was actually bent. The spreading wings of the Shipyard were still attached to the Caboose, but they were askew, and leaking debris. The original torus—the one that contained the Banana—was still rotating, and looked whole, but as she drew closer she saw it had taken damage, perhaps from shrapnel.

A faint thud resounded through the ice hull. They’d probably struck a piece of jetsam. No matter, it wouldn’t be moving very fast. Ymir could nuzzle her way through a cloud of that stuff and never feel it.

One of the windows on her screen flashed up a video feed, triggered by the motion detector on a Grabb’s camera, and she saw a human body drifting away into space. She swallowed against a sharp contraction of her throat.

Part of her wondered if she would find Izzy a ghost ship—if she were the only human remaining alive. For Vyacheslav had stopped communicating with them yesterday. Before then, he had mentioned that he had been suffering from diarrhea. If this was caused by radiation exposure, it was a death sentence. He might simply have committed suicide rather than wait for the inevitable.

Alone at the controls of Ymir, she coasted toward Izzy, silent and adrift in the cosmos, and entertained the thought, just for a while, that she might be the only human being left in the universe.

Then a red light—a laser, aimed right at her—began to flash from the Mining Colony, and her mind began to pick out Morse code.

SENDING FLIVVERS TO EFFECT FINAL MANEUVERS

DISREGARD STRAY ARKLETS

WELCOME HOME

Lacking any way to respond, she waited, and watched. Shreds of insulation, scraps of structural material, spilled vitamins, and the occasional body tumbled across the window as she panned and zoomed over various details. Everything forward of Zvezda looked pretty good. The Mining Colony and Moira’s stash of genetic equipment appeared to be unscathed. Good.

Three Flivvers had separated themselves from the cloud and established trajectories that would bring them to Ymir within a few minutes. She guessed that they would act as tugboats, butting their heads against the shard and using their main engines to effect the final delta vee needed to achieve rendezvous. So, the first part of the transmission made sense. DISREGARD STRAY ARKLETS, however, was something of a mystery. Why would there be such a thing? And what did it mean, anyway, for an arklet to be “stray”? And yet as Dinah panned the telescope across the arc of space forward and aft of Izzy—the realm where most of the arklets normally parked themselves—she found it curiously underpopulated. It was just a general visual impression. She couldn’t verify it scientifically without access to a Parambulator screen.

It occurred to her, then, that all she needed to do was switch on her tablet’s connection to the mesh network. Shortly after New Caird’s departure from Izzy, she had turned it off because, once they got out of range, it was a useless battery drainer. And indeed the tablet soon brought up the little icon announcing it had found a connection, perhaps relayed through one of those Flivvers. A minute or two went by as the device downloaded all of the email and message traffic that had been piling up in her inbox during her “vacation.”

She passed the time playing with the telescope. A detail caught her eye as she panned across the scene, and she went back and zoomed in on it for a closer look.

It was a MIV, an unusually big one. Basically a five-layer stack, wasp-waisted. The bottom layer was an engine of the most powerful class in the MIV toolkit. Above that was a fat cluster of propellant tanks. The third layer—the narrow waist—was a single arklet with an airlock on its side—a command module, she guessed, similar to New Caird’s. Above that was a triad, and on top, forming the fat head of the vehicle, was a heptad. All of it was shrouded in structural webbing. Snared like little bugs in the edges of that web were small modules that she recognized as attitude control thrusters. The most notable thing about the vehicle was her outsized propellant tanks, hinting at a long journey—to where? The thing was keeping station several kilometers forward of Izzy, in a region that had been largely denuded of arklets.

Her tablet finally finished downloading messages, most of which were long out of date by this point. She sorted them by age, newest first, and scanned the headings. Very few had come through in the last several hours. That stood to reason, given that the Cloud Ark had other things on its mind. But close to the top was one that caught her eye: OPEN COMMUNIQUÉ FROM PRESIDENT JBF TO THE PEOPLE OF THE CLOUD ARK.

Merely seeing those words gave her a feeling as if she’d been socked in the solar plexus. She tapped it anyway, and read it:

Today’s shocking tragedy has left us all bereaved, and seeking answers. I was in a Shipyard module when it happened, having just bid farewell and godspeed to the brave explorers of the Red Hope expedition. Thanks to the automatic closure of a hatch, I experienced only minor injuries and discomfort from partial decompression. As we all know, many members of the General Population were not so lucky. I join with all humanity in mourning their sacrifice. By its nature, the Arkie Community was less affected by this disaster. As I had envisioned from the very beginnings of the Cloud Ark project, the distributed architecture of the swarm prevented serious damage. We did lose three arklets, I am sorry to say, and several more sustained damage from minor collisions or debris impacts. But overall the system worked as we had planned from the beginning. Many members of the AC are now, quite naturally, asking themselves whether it is safe to remain in low Earth orbit, clustered around a heavy, aging space station that lacks the ability to maneuver out of harm’s way. The open vista of clean space beckons above us. Red Hope will soon fire its main engine and begin its trek across that unexplored frontier to a planet that will one day have room for us all. The Cloud Ark cannot follow her—yet. But as all members of the AC know, having gone through extensive training in space operations and orbital mechanics, it is well within the capability of any arklet to raise its orbit substantially by making use of its engines and its onboard propellant supplies. Alone, a single arklet, triad, or heptad will not long endure. As part of a swarm, however, it has a fighting chance. Many members of the Arkie Community who have been watching the desperate trials and tribulations of the Ymir expedition, and who have now witnessed the damage inflicted upon Izzy by a single bolide, are now asking themselves whether it is safe to remain, and to trust themselves to the agonizingly slow climb toward clean space envisioned by the partisans of the Big Ride faction. I am a politician, not a scientist, and so I cannot pretend to render a technical opinion. Some may question whether I should be making a public announcement at all. The simple fact of the matter is that my past career as President of the United States has given me prominence in the Arkie Community, whether or not I deserve it. Many have been asking me what I shall do now. Rather than wait for rumor to sow confusion, I am therefore issuing this communiqué. For what it is worth, I have, with the assistance of some loyal friends, escaped from the wreckage of Izzy and found safe haven aboard Arklet 37, currently part of a triad. Shortly after I transmit this message, we will initiate a burn of our main propulsion that will lift us clear of the drifting debris that surrounds what once was the International Space Station, and move us in the direction of clean space. Our orbital parameters will be posted openly on the network so that like-minded members of the AC may join us in creating a swarm-based solution to the acute problems currently imposing themselves on the human race. From a safe position in higher orbit, we will look for ways to extend a helping hand to our surviving friends marooned in the General Population. Working together as a community, we will preserve what we have and build a stable way of life in the sky as we await with breathless anticipation the results of Red Hope’s inspiring venture to the welcoming surface of Mars.