A blue screen appeared on the lightweight monitor stretched above one end of the long table, and was replaced by a NASA logo. “Okay, got it,” muttered Jibran, who made a sideways bound toward a chair.
Then they were looking at the familiar environs of the ISS Flight Control Room, which was at Johnson Space Center in Houston. The director of mission operations was sitting in front of the camera stroking his iPad. He didn’t seem to be aware that the camera was on. A few moments later they heard a door open off camera. The DMO, who was ex-military, stood up out of habit. He reached out and shook hands with a woman who entered from stage right: NASA’s deputy administrator, the number two person in the whole org chart and a rare sight at such meetings. She was a retired astronaut named Aurelia Mackey, dressed for business in the environment of D.C., where she spent most of her time.
“Are we on?” she asked someone off camera.
“Yes,” said several people in the Banana.
Aurelia looked a little startled by that. Both she and the DMO were looking a little stunned to begin with, of course.
“How are you all today?” Aurelia said, in an absolutely rote, businesslike voice, as if nothing had happened. Running on autopilot while her brain caught up with events.
“Fine,” said some people in the Banana, mixed in with a few nervous chuckles.
“I’m sure you are all aware of the event.”
“We have a good view of it,” Dinah said. Ivy shot her a warning look.
“Of course you do,” Aurelia admitted. “I would love to have an extended conversation with you all about what you have seen and what you are experiencing. But this is going to have to be brief. Robert?”
The DMO peeled his eyes off the iPad and sat forward in his chair. “We’re expecting an increase in the number of rocks floating around up there.” He meant loose chunks of the moon. “Not huge because most will be gravitationally bound. But some may have escaped. So other missions are suspended while you batten down the hatches. Make preparations for impacts.”
Everyone in the Banana listened silently, thinking about what that would mean for them. They would tighten precautions, dividing Izzy up into separate compartments so that damage to one wouldn’t suck the air from all. They would review procedures. Lina’s biology experiments might take a hit. Dinah’s robots would enjoy a holiday.
Aurelia spoke into the camera. “All spaceflight operations are suspended until further notice. No one is coming up and no one is going down.”
Everyone in the Banana looked at Ivy.
AS SOON AS THEY GOT INTO IVY’S TINY OFFICE, WHERE SHE FELT IT was okay to let tears come into her eyes, they slipped into their Q code.
Q codes were ham radio slang. Dinah had learned them from Rufus. They were three-letter combinations, beginning with Q. To save time in Morse code transmissions, they were substituted for frequently used phrases such as “Would you like me to change to a different frequency?”
Dinah and Ivy’s Q codes didn’t actually begin with Q. But some of them were three-letter combinations.
Uppity Little Shitkicker was a name that had been hung on Dinah when she had first arrived at private school and, during a soccer scrimmage, intercepted a pass meant for a girl from New York.
Straight Arrow Bitch had been bestowed on Ivy at Annapolis when she had declined to take part in a drinking game during a tailgate party.
The ULS/SAB dynamic was a thing that Dinah and Ivy exploited in meetings, even having meetings-before-meetings to plan how to use it.
Good Looks Wasted had found its way to Dinah in the aftermath of her new haircut, as the result of an improbable chain of “Reply to All” mishaps. She had brought it to Ivy, breathless with excitement, and they had enshrined “GLW” in their private codebook.
“I forgot,” when spoken in a breathy, little-girl voice, was a shorthand way of saying “I forgot to put on my makeup,” quoted verbatim from a NASA PR flack.
SAR was from a tart exchange between Ivy and a NASA administrator who, upon reading one of her reports, had criticized her for having an “almost pathological predilection for unnecessary abbreviations.” This had struck Ivy as a bit odd, given that every other word in NASA prose was an acronym. When Ivy had asked for clarification, she had been told that her abbreviations were “schoolgirlish and recondite.”
Space Camp (which both Ivy and Dinah had attended as teens, though at different times) was what they called not just Izzy, but the whole subculture of NASA manned spaceflight.
“What are you going to say to the Maternal Organism?” Dinah asked, as Ivy rummaged in the back of a storage bin for her bottle of tequila.
Ivy stiffened for a moment, then pulled out the bottle and swung it toward Dinah’s head like a club. Dinah didn’t flinch, just watched it glide to a halt above her head. “What?”
“I can’t believe that the Morg has so taken over my wedding that the first thing that comes into your mind is how she’s going to react.”
Dinah looked mildly sick.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ivy said, “you forgot.” To put on your makeup.
“Sorry, baby. I was just thinking … you and Cal are still going to get married, and have a great life, no matter what.”
“But the Morg is going to take the hit,” Ivy said, nodding, as she poured tequila into a pair of small plastic cups. “Having to reschedule everything.”
“Sounds like she’s kind of in her element doing that, though,” Dinah said. “Not to minimize it or anything.”
“Totally.”
“To the Morg.”
“The Morg.” Dinah and Ivy tapped their plastic cups together and sipped at the tequila. One of the fringe benefits that came of being in the torus was that you could drink normally instead of sucking everything through tubes. The lower gravity took some getting used to, but they were old hands at it by now.
“What’s up with your family? Did you hear from Rufus?” Ivy asked.
“My father desires raw data files from Konrad’s Wide-Field Infrared Observation Platform, which he has read about on the Internet, so that he can satisfy his personal curiosity about the thing that hit the moon.”
“You going to Morse code those down to him?”
“His Internet is working. He has already created an empty Dropbox folder. As soon as I provide him with the files, he’ll go back to his usual grousing about how his taxes are too high and the federal government needs to be scaled back to a size where he can personally stomp it to death with steel-toed boots.”
WHAT ASTRONOMERS DIDN’T KNOW OUTWEIGHED, BY AN ALMOST infinite ratio, what they did. And for persons used to a more orderly system of knowledge, with everything on Wikipedia, this created a certain perception of incompetence, or at least failure to perform, on the part of the astronomical profession whenever weird things happened in the sky.
Which was every day, actually. But most of them could be seen only by astronomers and so they were able to keep them a sort of trade secret. Blatantly obvious events such as meteorite strikes caused Doc Dubois’s phone to sing. The singing usually portended a series of appearances on talk shows where, among other things, he would be asked to explain why astronomers hadn’t predicted this. Why hadn’t they seen the meteor coming? Wasn’t it just the case that they were a bunch of good-for-nothing propellerheads?
A little bit of humility seemed to go a long way, and if the pundits didn’t cut him off too soon he was frequently able to work in a plea for more