This Aïda person must understand Doob’s plan. She knew what was at stake now. If the remnants of the Swarm could rejoin Endurance in the next ten days, before she disappeared into the maelstrom of the debris cloud, they had a hope of reaching the comparative safety of Cleft. Otherwise they were condemned to circle Earth in some relatively clean and safe orbit as their population and their water supply dwindled.
Doob swam into the Hammerhead. Three other people were in here: Bo, Steve Lake, and Michael Park, a former Arkie, a gay Korean-Canadian from Vancouver who had found six different ways to make himself indispensable.
“Aïda Ferrari, according to our records,” Bo said, before he asked. “A leader of the anti-J.B.F. faction. Sounds like J.B.F. lost.”
Steve seemed busy. It was good to see him active. He had come down with some kind of long-running bowel complaint, an imbalance in the bacteria that lived in his gut. He had kept the dreadlocks, but they were now bigger than he was. He must weigh less than a hundred pounds. But his fingers still flew over the keys of his laptop.
Bo had already turned her attention back to the business of running the ship, but Michael explained, “Steve’s getting a video feed going. No one’s done it in years.”
He meant that no one had recently been doing it over the old-school S-band radios used for long-range communication between space vehicles. Of course, on the short-range mesh network that the Arkitects had set up to knit the Cloud Ark together, people did it all the time using Scape. But depending on where they were in their orbit, the remnants of the Swarm might be hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from Endurance, far out of mesh range, and so they had to use the same sort of pre-Internet technology that the Apollo astronauts had used to send television signals back from the moon.
Eventually Steve did get it going, and then they were treated to a full-face image, in blocky pixels, of a dark-eyed woman with a fine-featured head that had been buzz-cut a few weeks ago and little tended since.
Once Steve did him the favor of throwing it up on a big screen where he could actually see it, Doob saw the obvious signs of malnutrition that had been affecting everyone on Endurance. He was mildly surprised by that. They had tantalized themselves by imagining the Swarm as a cornucopia of agriculture. But maybe it was low on water. The woman’s gaze was downcast, which, as everyone understood, meant that she was focusing on the screen of a tablet below the camera. Once she understood that the link was up and running, she raised her chin and seemed to stare directly into the Hammerhead with a pair of huge dark eyes. The low quality of the video made these seem pitch black, with no distinction between iris and pupil, and starvation had given them a sort of hot gleam.
“Aïda,” the woman said, by way of self-introduction. “I see you, Dr. Harris.” She began to smile, offering a glimpse of bad teeth, then thought better of it. Her eyes changed direction momentarily to someone or something off-camera, then came back to them. She raised her tablet up closer to the camera so that she could look at the feed from Endurance. Her hand passed briefly in front of the lens and they caught a glimpse of dirty, ragged fingernails, the frayed and shiny cuff of a sleeve. Faint murmurs in the background suggested that other people were in the same arklet with her, off-camera. She was in zero gee, therefore, not part of a bolo. Her eyes were exploring the feed on her tablet, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. The Hammerhead had not existed at the time of the Break, so it was a new thing to her. “Steve Lake,” she muttered, as she recognized him.
“Bo,” Bo said.
“Michael,” Michael said.
“Who is in charge?” Aïda asked. “Is Ivy . . .”
“Ivy’s still alive and she is still the commander as per CAC,” Doob said. “She’s off shift. We can wake her up if you need to speak to her urgently.”
“No. Not necessary,” Aïda said, recoiling slightly and narrowing the eyes just a bit. The distance between her and Endurance introduced a time lag in the video, which made conversation halting and awkward.
“How many do you have?” Doob asked.
“Eleven.”
Doob, accustomed to working professionally with extremely large numbers, couldn’t quite process one so small. Eleven. One plus ten.
A thought came to him. “Do you mean eleven arklets?” That would imply scores, maybe a hundred people.
Aïda looked amused. “Oh no, of arklets we have many more. We have twenty-six.”
“Ah. So what is it you have eleven of?”
“People,” Aïda said.
“Aïda,” Bo said, “just to be clear. So there is no misunderstanding. You are speaking for the entire Swarm. And you are saying that, of the entire Swarm, there are eleven survivors.”
“Yes. Plus one . . .”
“One what?”
A look of amusement came over Aïda’s face. She broke eye contact. It almost seemed that she rolled her eyes a little. Doob was reminded, hardly for the first time, that the Arkies had been sent up as teenagers. “It is complicated. Let’s just say there is one more who might as well be dead.”
Those in the Hammerhead still could not quite process it. Something occurred to Michael: “We know that the Swarm broke up into two factions. One led by J.B.F. You were part of the opposing group?”
“Yes.” Aïda laughed. Again she reminded Doob of a teenager going through the pretense of talking to a clueless parent about something they would never understand.
Michael, a little wrong-footed, went on haltingly: “And so when you say that there are eleven . . . plus one who is, I take it, in a bad way . . . anyhow, are you referring just to the anti-J.B.F. faction?”
“They were defeated a long time ago. Months.”
“When you say that, do you mean that there was some kind of a conflict? A war?” Doob asked.
Aïda shrugged. “There was some fighting.” She didn’t see it as important. “Call it a war if you wish. More like some brawls. The real battle was, you know, on the Internet. Social media.”
Silence ensued. Aïda waited for them to respond. When no one did, she shrugged. “What were we going to do? Smash our arklets into each other? There is no way to have, like, actual violence in this setting! So we just had a war of words.” She held her hands up in front of her, making them into little pantomime mouths, aimed at each other, thumb-jaws flapping up and down. “Trying to, you know, persuade others to join our side. Trying to make the other side look bad. Just like the Internet always was.” She chuckled, put one hand to her cheek, rubbed her eye. “Look, it is very complicated and I cannot explain everything right now—how it all came out.”
“But you said that J.B.F.’s faction was defeated,” Michael said. Of all the people in the Hammerhead, he seemed most committed to the proposition that there was a reasonable and logical explanation for all of this.
“Her and Tav, yes.”
“By which you mean, you defeated them with words. Ideas. A social media campaign.”
“We were more persuasive,” Aïda said. “I was more persuasive. Arklet by arklet, they came over to my side. The White Arklet held out for a while, then they gave up.”
“What became of them?”
“J.B.F. is fine. Tav, not so good.”
“He’s the one you mentioned. The twelfth one who might as well be dead.”
“I am afraid so, yes.”
“So getting back to the earlier question,” Doob said, “the number you quoted is for the entire Swarm. Both factions.”
Aïda, finally seeming to understand what they were getting at, sat up straighter and got a more serious look on her face. “Yes. There are no other survivors whatsoever. Of the eight hundred, eleven remain.”
There was a long silence as the four in the Hammerhead took this in. They had all harbored fears that the Swarm might go terribly wrong, but this was worse than anything they had imagined.