Seveneves: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

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 swungit 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