Seveneves

She sniffled, suddenly aware that she was a mess. “How long have you been there?”

“Not long.”

She turned her back on him, grabbed a towel, and dried her eyes and nose. Rhys filled the time with some gentle patter. “I couldn’t stand watching the a

“So, I brought you something,” he concluded.

She turned and looked at the bundle under his arm. “A dozen roses?”

“Perhaps next week. Until then—” and he held it out.

She took it from him. Like everything else up here it was, of course, weightless, but she could tell by its inertia that it had some heft.

She peeled back the blanket and heard a crinkling, crackling noise, then saw underneath it a layer of the metallized Mylar sheeting that they used all over Izzy as thermal shielding. The object beneath that was lumpy and irregular. And it was cold. She peeled away the Mylar to reveal a slab of ice. It was oval and lens shaped: a frozen puddle.

“Perfect,” she said.

A few drops of water spun away from it, gleaming like diamonds in the shaft of sunlight spearing in through her little window. She captured them using the same towel she’d just used to dry her face. But not before pausing, just a moment, to admire their brilliance. Like a little galaxy of new stars.

“You’d said something about a cryptic message from Sean Probst.”

“All of his messages are that way,” she said, “even after they’ve been decrypted.” Sean Probst was her boss, the founder and chairman of Arjuna Expeditions.

“Something about ice, anyway,” Rhys went on.

“Hang on, let’s get this in the airlock before it melts any more.”

“Right.” Rhys pushed himself to the far end of the shop, where a round hatch, about half a meter in diameter, was set into the curved wall. “I see green blinkies all about, so I’ll just open this?”

“Fine.”

He actuated a lever that released the latching mechanism, then pulled the hatch open to reveal a little space beyond. This was the airlock that Dinah used when she needed to bring one of her robots inside for maintenance, or send one back out onto Amalthea. Human-rated airlocks were big—they had to accommodate at least one person in a bulky space suit—and complicated and expensive, partly because of safety requirements and partly because they were designed by government programs. This one, by contrast, had been prototyped in a few weeks by a small team at Arjuna Expeditions, and was meant for smaller equipment. It was roughly the dimensions of a big garbage can. To save space on the inside, it protruded from the side of the module, jutting into space like a stubby, oversized fire hydrant. At its far end was a dome-shaped hatch that Dinah could open and close from inside her shop using a mechanical linkage of pushrods and levers straight out of a Jules Verne novel. At the moment, of course, that hatch was closed, and the airlock was full of air that had gone chilly, since the sun had not been shining on its outside until a few minutes ago.

Dinah gave the chunk of ice a gentle push and it glided across the shop to Rhys. “Up and under!” he called, and caught it.

“What?”

“Rugby,” he explained, and slid the ice into the airlock. “Have you got a Grabb or something that can come round and fetch this?”

“In a minute,” she said. “It’ll keep in there for now.”

“Right.” He closed the i

“So water condenses and puddles at this one place in the torus,” she said, “which you can reach by pulling up a deck plate?”

“Yes.”

“And it freezes?”

“Well, normally, no. I may have helped it freeze by fiddling with certain environmental controls.”

“Ah.”

“Just trying to save energy.”

She was floating in the opposite end of the shop, near the hatch where it co

“Now, technically . . .” she began.

“Technically, this is wrong,” he said. She admired the self-aware bluntness. “It is wrong because when you open the outer hatch and put that piece of ice out in space, where your robots can muck about on it, it is going to sublimate.”

Sublimation was essentially the same thing as evaporation, skipping the liquid phase; it just meant a process by which a solid, exposed to vacuum, gradually turned into vapor and disappeared. Ice tended to do this pretty quickly unless it was kept extremely cold.

“So Izzy is going to lose water,” Dinah said, “which is a scarce and valuable resource.”

“It’ll never be missed,” Rhys said blithely. “This isn’t the old days. Now that those people have made that a

“Still, what Sean wants me to do is an Arjuna Expeditions project. A commercial thing. A private thing. And that water is a shared—”

“Dinah.”

“Yes?”

“Snap out of it, love.”

A long silence followed, concluded by a big sigh from Dinah. “Okay.” Rhys was right. Everything was different now.

“Now, what is it he wants, and how does ice enter into it?”

Her mild a

“There’s lots of it on Earth,” Rhys pointed out, “but you never think of it as a mineral.”

She nodded. “It’s an a

“Your colleagues down on the ground? Also working on ice?”

“Judging from email traffic, this is a company-wide directive,” she said. “They’re buying ice by the truckload, dropping it on the floor of the lab, refrigerating the building—fortunately it’s winter in Seattle; they only need to drop the temperature a few degrees. They’re all buying long underwear at REI so that they can work in a refrigerator.”

“What’s it like working for Mr. Freeze?”

“I was going to say the Penguin,” Dinah said, “but people in Seattle don’t carry umbrellas.”

“Nor do they wear top hats, in my experience. No, it’s definitely a Mr. Freeze scenario.”

“Anyway,” Dinah said, “yesterday’s shipment of vitamins contained a few of these.”

She opened a storage cubby next to her workstation and took out a bag made of the metallic gray plastic used to protect sensitive electronics from static electricity. Taped to it was a NASA business card.

“Nice to have friends in high places,” Rhys remarked. He had noticed the name on the card: Scott “Sparky” Spalding, the NASA administrator.

Dinah smiled. “Or low, as the case may be.”

It was a weak joke. Rhys didn’t respond. Dinah felt her face get a little warm. Not so much because of the failed attempt at humor as out of a kind of political defensiveness. “Scott told me a couple of weeks ago that he wouldn’t ditch me out. That he had my back.”

“What does that mean exactly?”

“That the robot work would keep going. That I would have a job. I didn’t believe him. But I guess he’s been talking to Sean Probst. Because Sean FedExed these to Sparky a couple of days ago, and now they’re here.”