“The Cloud Ark Constitution is now in effect.”

Dinah drew breath, knowing what this meant. Markus spelled it out anyway. “This means that all nation-states of Earth, and their governments and constitutions, no longer exist. Their military and civilian chains of command are no more. Oaths you may have taken to them, allegiances you may have held, loyalties you may have felt, citizenships you may have had are now and forever dissolved. The rights granted you by the Cloud Ark Constitution, no more and no less, are your rights. The laws and responsibilities of the Cloud Ark Constitution now bind you. You are citizens of a new nation now, the only nation. Long may it endure.”

She keyed:

MARKUS IS CALLING IT

WHO SAID HE WAS BOSS?

Rufus’s transmission was getting scratchy. Dinah wiped her eyes and looked out her window to see Earth encircled by a belt of fire. The trails of the incoming meteorites, once a pattern of bright scratches in the air, had merged into a blinding continuum of superheated air that had set fire to anything on the surface capable of burning. Since more of the rocks were coming in around the equator, the belt of radiance and fire was brightest there; but north and south of it, long swaths of the surface were aflame, and the belt was widening to envelop the high latitudes of Canada and South America.

She transmitted:

ABOUT TO LOSE YOU, TELL BOB AND ED AND GT AND REX I LOVE THEM. AND BEV.

ALREADY DID BUT WILL AGAIN. CHRIST IT IS HOT

GET INSIDE DAD

DONT WORRY I AM RIGHT BY THE DOOR. CAN HEAR THEM ALL SINGING BREAD OF HEAVEN.

THEN GO JOIN THE CHORUS DAD

OKAY BOB AND ED ARE COMING OUT TO GRAB ME. BYE HONEY DO US PROUD QRT

QRT QRT QRT QRT

She wasn’t sure how many times she keyed that in.

She pulled herself out of her sobs, later, by imagining what had happened: her brothers, Bob and Ed, dressed in silver fireman suits, rushing out of the mine’s entrance to haul Dad out of the old pickup truck, wrapping him in the space blanket to keep him from being broiled by the sky, and dragging him inside. An inch-thick steel plate being slammed across the doorway, the welders going to work laying down fat fillets made to last five thousand years. Once that was done, the heavy machinery fired up, shoving tons of rock and gravel up against the steel plate to bolster it against any shock waves powerful enough to punch it out of its frame.

Then silence, save maybe for the distant thuds of meteorite strikes, and sitting around the table to say grace and tuck into the first of fifteen thousand or so meals that the MacQuaries and their descendants would have to prepare and eat if they were ever to escape from that tomb. They had five hundred people down there, and, at least on paper, enough food-growing capacity to keep that many alive. Exactly how you made that a sustainable proposition wasn’t clear to Dinah; she hadn’t bothered Rufus for every last little detail of his plan.

Markus’s announcement was continuing. He was telling everyone what they already knew, which was that Earth was over, and that the great dying that they had been expecting for the last two years was now in the past. Everyone knew it, but someone had to say it.

He asked for 704 seconds of silence: one second for each of the days that had passed since Zero. About twelve minutes. All nonessential duties would be suspended during that time, and it would be the sole responsibility of the survivors to think, and remember, and mourn. After that, they must put Earth in the past, as a thing that had once been, and apply their minds to what was now.

Drawn up into a fetal position, Dinah hovered alone in the middle of her shop, listening to weird squeals and hisses coming out of her radio’s speaker. Alone of all the people in the Cloud Ark, she knew that her family was still alive, and might go on being alive for a long time. It was not clear to her whether this was better or worse than simply knowing that they were dead. All she had to go on was DO US PROUD, her father’s final transmission. Morse code didn’t leave a paper trail, or an email thread on the screen of your tablet. She would never be able to scroll back and reread the exchange she’d just had with Rufus. She hoped she’d said the right things and that he’d remember it well, and that he would tell the others about it at dinner this evening.

She tried then to mourn for all the others who had died, but it was too big. Emotionally, it was little different from reading about a great war that had happened a hundred years ago. Which maybe was Markus’s whole point. Even though the dying was still going on, they had to force themselves to think about it like the Irish potato famine, or like what had happened to the peoples of the New World when Columbus had arrived and infected them with a slew of deadly diseases. Regret, even horror were appropriate. But detachment was necessary. They all had 704 seconds in which to effect that detachment.

So Dinah thought about what exactly would be entailed in doing Rufus MacQuarie proud. There was a simple answer, which had to do with doing the right thing, being honorable, upholding a few rough-and-ready ethical standards. A sort of frontier code of conduct. All of which was easy to understand if not always quite so easy to live up to. But Rufus was not a cowboy, and he certainly wasn’t a preacher. He was a miner: a delver, a demolisher, a builder, a businessman. If he lived by a simple code of ethics, it was not an end in itself, but a way to get something done without selling his soul or destroying his reputation. It was a tool to be wielded like a shovel or a stick of dynamite. Tools were for building things; and pride was something you could feel after the fact, when you stood back, looked at what you had built, and passed it on to your children. Dinah could spend the rest of her life living by her word, giving everyone a fair shake, and all of that. Rufus would no doubt approve of all those things. But it was not the charge he had given her. He had told her, though not in so many words, to get busy building a future.

“Are you about finished?”

She turned her head to see Ivy hanging in the SCRUM, looking at Dinah through the hatch.

“We’re only, like, two hundred seconds into the—”

“Markus said I could skip it. He sent me on a mission. I need your help,” Ivy said.

“Bitch.”

“Slut.”

“Shall we?”

“REMEMBER WHEN THE INTERNET WAS NEW, AND SOME PEOPLE IN your life just didn’t get it?” Ivy asked. She was preceding Dinah through the seemingly endless maze of docked modules and hamster tubes, headed toward the periphery of Izzy.

“People in my world got it pretty fast. You don’t know many miners, do you?”

“Not in my world. We had these throwbacks who would do stuff like printing their emails out on paper to read them, or asking you for your goddamn fax number two decades after you had thrown away your fax machine.”

They were hurtling through an otherwise perfectly silent space station, still only about five minutes into the twelve minutes of silence. Faces in open hatches would turn to look at them in shock, then recognize them and go back to mourning, praying, meditating, or whatever it was that they were doing.

Dinah understood that this was terribly important but was secretly pleased that Ivy had given her dispensation to get to work.

“How does that apply to—”

“The system works—Parambulator and all of that—as long as every ship in the Cloud Ark is playing by those rules. Logged on to the system, communicating with the agreed-on protocols, obeying the dictates of the swarm. If even one is just hanging out and doing its own thing, well, it might as well be a meteoroid, in terms of its destructive potential.”