Ivy had failed, in the eyes of the Russians and of many in the NASA hierarchy, by not taking a firmer hand with Sean Probst. That wasn’t the only complaint they had about her, but it was the one around which everything else had crystallized. Once everyone had begun to see her as the overly book-smart, well-meaning but week-kneed technocrat, everything she did had been viewed through that lens. Dinah’s rescue of Tekla had been examined under what doctors called "the retrospectoscope" and been deemed a failure on Ivy’s part to enforce necessary discipline. New arrivals to the Cloud Ark, prepped by Internet comment threads and television pundits to see Ivy as a weak leader, began finding ways to make that into a self-fulfilling prophecy. The success of the Bolo One test, which in other circumstances might have bolstered her, came to be viewed as an almost literal handoff of authority from Ivy to Markus. Presented with some choice opportunities to say supportive things about Ivy, Ulrika had declined to do so, and it wasn’t clear whether that was mere absentmindedness or an attempt to cement her position as number two.