“We’ve got one of those?”
“A few of them. But one in particular that is causing havoc.”
“Any collisions yet, or—”
“No, but every time it draws near it triggers an explosion of red in Parambulator and a hundred arklets have to burn fuel to alter their courses. It’s like the whole Cloud Ark is turning somersaults around the movements of this one ship.”
“What is it?”
“Optically it’s an X-37.”
“Fits,” Dinah said.
“Yeah,” Ivy said.
Translation: someone had looked at the craft through a telescope and thought it looked like a Boeing X-37 Orbital Test Vehicle, which resembled a miniature Space Shuttle. It was so miniature, in fact, that it couldn’t carry any crew; it had a cargo bay that accounted for most of its fuselage. It had been developed by DARPA in the late 1990s and early 2000s when it had become obvious that the Space Shuttle was going to be phased out and they needed a small, easily launched vehicle that could go up and, by remote control, perform maintenance tasks on the United States’ fleet of military satellites. Since then it had come in for very little actual use, but when it was used, it was for black-budget spook stuff that Dinah and Ivy wouldn’t know about. It was a footnote in history, obsolescent, not designed for the requirements of the Cloud Ark. It had probably been launched into orbit by some trigger-happy launch crew that just wanted to send up everything they could. With a sufficient amount of sifting through old emails they might be able to find some record of who had launched it, and what, if any, cargo was aboard; but for now it was easier to just go and look at the damned thing. Nearly all the engineering that had gone into it had been devoted to the problem of reentry. Most of its proudest features were therefore useless to them.
Approaching the end of a side-stack, they were able to see through the round orifice of a port into the vehicle docked to its far side: a Flivver, or Flexible Light Intracloud Vehicle. These had begun showing up a few months ago; they were the jeeps of the Cloud Ark, the small utility vehicles used to move people and valuable stuff from one arklet to another, or between an arklet and Izzy. Because they didn’t have to operate in the atmosphere, they had the same general utilitarian look as the arklets. But the pressure hull was smaller in diameter, and instead of an inflatable outer hull the Flivver had more practical stuff: two different styles of docking ports, an airlock big enough to accommodate a human in an Orlan, a robot arm, lights, thrusters. At Dinah’s suggestion they had studded the pressure hull with attachment points that a Grabb could latch on to; this made it possible for each Flivver to carry its own complement of Grabbs, Siwis, Buckies, and Nats, which swarmed all over it like crabs, remoras, and sea lice. Instead of being limited by the hard-engineered capabilities of the robot arm, the Flivver was constrained only by the imagination and ingenuity of the programmer inside, telling the robots what to do.
The silvery burr of Tekla’s head poked out in front of them; apparently she’d been dispatched to assist with closing the hatch and undocking the Flivver. She’d been waiting in the adjacent DC, or docking compartment, which was just a small side module tacked on to serve as an airlock and provide a little extra space for personnel in cases like this. She drew her head back in to make space as Ivy and then Dinah cruised by her. As soon as those two were inside the Flivver, Tekla emerged and exchanged a nod with Ivy.
“Lamprey is in airlock and is functioning,” Tekla said, and closed the hatch. Dinah had some ambivalent feelings about Tekla, but there was no one she’d rather work with in a case like this. She was all business; she got the job done without useless conversation or touch-feely stuff. Dinah closed the Flivver’s hatch and began going through the undocking sequence while Ivy, strapped into the vehicle’s pilot seat, ran down the preexcursion checklist. Befitting a craft that had been designed in a hurry to be Flexible and Light, this wasn’t that lengthy, and so Flivver 3—one of a fleet of eight—was under way before Markus’s 704 seconds of silence had quite expired. Dinah strapped into a jump seat beside Ivy’s. The Flivver’s front end dome consisted largely of windows, bolstered by a sturdy web of curved aluminum struts, so from behind Ivy looked like a bombardier seated in the glass nose of a World War II bomber. She touched the controls and made the craft rotate in a way that caused Earth to pass beneath them, and then the resemblance became stronger. Dinah was reminded of a painting Rufus had shown her, depicting a bomber flying over a burning city, red light flooding into the plane from below. The same effect held now, save that the firestorm covered most of the surface of the Earth.
“I can feel the warmth on my face,” Ivy said.
Dinah couldn’t think of anything useful to say to that. During their passage from her shop to the Flivver she had forgotten about the fact that the Earth was burning, and she didn’t enjoy being reminded of it. Instead she tried to focus on the red light emanating coolly from the screen of her tablet, which was running Parambulator. Flivver 3 had been picked up on the swarm’s collective sensorium and identified as a bogey that might potentially collide with as many as a hundred different arklets if it stayed on its current course. Rather than controlling its thrusters directly, which would lead at best to confusion and at worse to a chain-reaction disaster, Ivy was negotiating a solution with the rest of the Cloud Ark, telling it where she wanted to go and finding a way of getting there that would minimize the amount of maneuvering demanded of all the others.
It was not a speedy way of getting around, and indeed ran at right angles to the fighter-jockey ethos of many of the ex-military types who had come up here in the astronaut and cosmonaut corps. But as they got farther away from Izzy they were able to move into orbits that caused minimal consternation to the rest of the cloud, and move in a more direct way to rendezvous with the wayward X-37.
This had been placed, by whoever the hell had launched it, in an orbit with the same period and plane as the Cloud Ark, but with somewhat greater eccentricity. The orbit of Izzy, and hence of the Cloud Ark, was almost perfectly circular. The X-37’s was more oval, meaning that about half of the time it was “beneath” the Cloud Ark and the rest of the time it was “above,” but twice during each ninety-three-minute orbit it crossed through, each time touching off the havoc that was wasting so much propellant and causing so much annoyance to Markus. Right now it was “above” and due to cross over in another twenty minutes.
“Any bolides we need to worry about before I focus on this?” Ivy asked her.
“Nothing in particular,” Dinah said, meaning that there was nothing so big as to force the entire Cloud Ark to make a course change.
“Let’s make this fast then,” Ivy said, and went over to manual control. For they were now far enough away from the Cloud Ark that she could execute solo maneuvers without making Parambulator screens turn solid red. “Can you scope it?”
Dinah spent a minute refamiliarizing herself with the user interface for the optical telescope mounted to the Flivver’s nose; this was an electronic eyeball about the size of an orange. The controls were intuitive, but getting it to aim at a particular bogey took a bit of doing. Soon enough, though, she was able to see something white and bright. She locked on to it and zoomed in.
From longer zoom it was clearly a winged craft with a black nose, like the Shuttle of old, but it seemed to have taken on added parts. Zooming in further she was able to see that the cargo bay doors that constituted most of the X-37’s “back” had been opened at some point after it had reached orbit. Its payload had then been lifted out of the bay using the built-in robotic arm, which was still holding it, frozen in position. The payload was almost as big as the X-37 itself; it was yet another dome-ended cylinder. But unlike a Flivver or an arklet, it lacked thrusters or any sort of visible power source. It was just a burnished aluminum capsule, gleaming white on one side from sunshine, red below where it reflected the planetary firestorm.