But she already knew the answer. The Pioneers would begin arriving, shiploads of them, in two weeks. All of them would die on arrival if the correct preparations had not been made. No time could be spared. More Scouts were on the way to replace Tekla.
And for once she was glad that the meeting ran long, that Sparky didn’t stick to the agenda, and that Pete Starling exploited it to fill time with more buzzwords. Because an idea was slowly taking shape in her head. She would have to run it by Ivy and Rhys and perhaps Marco, she would want to have Margie Coghlan—the closest thing they had to a doctor—standing by, but she could do it with no help at all from Fyodor or any of the other suits.
Fyodor was typing something with his index fingers. She locked her eyes on his face and kept them there until he was finished. He seemed to have detected her gaze on him, because he then looked up and stared straight into her eyes, maintaining a perfect poker face.
She stared back.
Awareness crept into Fyodor’s expression. Awareness that Dinah knew about the problem. Fyodor knew the layout of Izzy better than anyone. He knew where Dinah spent her time, and that Dinah only had to look out her window to see what was going on. She could see him putting this all together in his head.
He was expecting her to make some emotional appeal. So, it was important for her to stay cool. As soon as she turned on the waterworks, she would lose his respect, and his attention, forever.
“Fyodor,” she said, “I got this.”
He blinked in surprise, then, after some hesitation, made the tiniest of nods.
“Got what?” Pete Starling asked, over the video link. “Am I missing something?”
“No,” Dinah said. “We are just proceeding adaptively to leverage our core competencies.”
BASED ON STATS FROM THE 50 HOTTEST OLYMPIANS WEBSITE, IVY WAS a fairly close match for Tekla physically. Tekla was huskier, but Ivy was an inch taller. So, the first thing they did was to stuff Ivy into the small airlock that Dinah used for her robots. With her head tucked and her knees drawn up to her chest, she fit into it with room to spare. Dinah took a picture, then appended it to an email message with detailed instructions.
Spencer Grindstaff, who, as a young CIA contractor, had cut his teeth hacking into email systems operated by foreign governments, figured out a way to send email to Tekla’s tablet by wrapping it in an envelope that made it look like it came from Fyodor.
Dinah watched Tekla read that email. She looked up from the tablet toward the window, then turned her gaze toward the airlock. Until then, Dinah had worried that Tekla might be losing consciousness, since she hadn’t moved in several hours. She guessed that Tekla was trying to conserve oxygen and reduce thermogenesis by moving as little as possible.
Dinah zip-tied a high-powered LED light to the inner hatch of the airlock, then closed it. She opened the valve that dumped its air into space, allowing it to “fill up” with vacuum, and then actuated the lever—a simple mechanical linkage—that flipped the outer hatch open. She could see the white glow of the LED reflecting against the plastic of Tekla’s Luk bubble a few meters away, and she saw Tekla’s head turn as the light got her attention.
Several robots had to act in concert to move Tekla’s Luk bubble around until it was pressed against the airlock. This was a somewhat maddening process, like trying to grab an inflated balloon with a pair of needle-nosed pliers. Dinah had been trying to do it with Siwis—Sidewinders—of which she now had a dozen in operation. A Siwi could join head-to-tail with another Siwi to double its length, and the process could be repeated indefinitely to construct a sort of smart, instrumented tentacle. By planting the tail of one Siwi against Amalthea, and bolstering the connection by holding it down with a couple of anchored Grabbs, she was able to make another Siwi slither up the first one and connect to its head, which was projecting up into space. A third Siwi climbed up the first two and concatenated itself, and so on and so forth, building a stalk that reached up from the surface of the asteroid and began to curve around the bubble in which Tekla was imprisoned.
So far so good. But the longer the chain grew, the worse it behaved. The Siwis were constructed like caterpillars, consisting of many identical segments connected by flexible joints. The joints were motorized, and the motors were supposed to follow commands embedded in Dinah’s code, and it was all supposed to work in a predictable way. The problem was that each joint had a bit of flexibility, which as far as Dinah was concerned was error. Those errors accumulated as the length of the chain grew, so that by the time she had connected three Siwis together, she found it difficult to know, let alone control, the position of the end of the stalk. And when she tried to apply force by making the chain curve around the slippery, bulgy surface of the Luk, matters only got worse.
Rhys showed up a few hours into the project and watched. He’d be silent for hours, then suddenly ask a question that was strangely off-kilter and yet showed he was thinking about the problem.
“What if you turned all the motors off and let the whole thing go slack?” he asked.
“Aren’t you supposed to be building a torus?” she demanded, and turned around to give him her best attempt at a killing look.
“First we have to solve this problem,” he said gently.
She had more to say, but instead she went silent. Rhys was clowning around with his necklace again. He was in the habit of wearing a chain around his neck—nothing fancy or bulky, just a simple loop of twisted-link jewelry chain in stainless steel, which he used as a way to keep thumb drives and other important small objects from floating away. At the moment, though, he had removed all of that stuff, leaving the chain unencumbered, and he had got it spinning around his neck. It had opened up into a broad, undulating oval that didn’t touch his neck or collar anywhere, so it was just orbiting around him in free space. Dinah had seen him do this before, typically while bored in meetings. He had learned a few tricks for speeding it up and coaxing it into different shapes by blowing on it with a drinking straw or flicking it with a fingernail. It didn’t form a perfect circle, as one might expect. The moving train of links could be molded into almost any shape, and would stay that way until disturbed. When Dinah turned around and noticed he was doing it again, she was about to roll her eyes and say something like For fuck’s sake can’t you do anything useful with that brain, but the look on Rhys’s face suggested that he was up to something more than just playing around.
The chain had been running in an elongated racetrack shape, nearly buzzing his neck on one turn, but he flicked at the straightaways and broadened it into something approaching a circle, then ducked out of it, leaving the loop spinning in midair. “Channeling the wisdom of my ancestors, if you must know,” he said.
“You had ancestors in zero gee?”
“Alas, no. My great-great-great-great-uncle John Aitken was an eccentric Victorian meteorologist with an even more eccentric hobby: studying the physics of moving chains. Unfortunately for him, he had to do it in his drawing room in Falkirk, where there is, I’m sorry to say, gravity. He had to approximate this sort of thing”—Rhys nodded at the whirring loop of chain—“by building exceedingly clever machines.”
“Then he must have been a clever man indeed.”
“Fellow of the Royal Society and friend of Lord Kelvin, since you mentioned it. Do you see where I’m going?”
“Well, a minute ago you gave me a fat clue by suggesting that I turn off all of the motors in the Siwi train. Were I to do that, it would go completely limp and become, for all practical purposes, a length of chain.”