Seveneves

After an intimate encounter, Dinah and Rhys watch a video of Larz Hoedemaker demonstrating a proof-of-concept experiment with Nat robots capable of adhering to ice by drilling into its surface. Although Sean Probst’s fixation on ice remains unclear, his interest shapes their work.

By Day 56, Izzy has expanded. A second Hub, H2, originally planned for space tourism, has been attached and will eventually be the center of a new torus. Scouts have added numerous docking ports, and new arrivals live in space capsules tethered to the station. Due to limited equipment, spacewalkers share suits and rotate shifts. Dinah gains two assistants (Bo and Larz, both from the first wave of Pioneers). Larz, arriving with a suit full of vitamins, quickly proves a valuable collaborator and admires Dinah’s creative use of Amalthea’s scraps to shield her robots. When Dinah again questions Sean’s preoccupation with ice, Larz explains that they plan to capture an icy comet core using nuclear power. Larz’s heavily encrypted communications confirm that Sean intends to come to Izzy independently.

On Day 68, Sean arrives unannounced in a small drop-top craft designed for tourism. He first circles Izzy and then boards, meeting with Dinah and criticizing the current operations as “bullshit” and unsustainable.