The paramedic who monitored Jerzy had been following the discussion. Holle had never seen such bewilderment, such shock, on any human face, as they discussed spaceships driven by nuclear fire. Holle wondered if they had all gone insane.
23
Holle had grown up with the flood. She had no memories of life before, how politics used to be. But even so she was surprised by the speed of President Vasquez′s decision-making.
Just two days after Gordo′s session, Vasquez appeared on TV and the web. Once the funerals and proper commemorations were done, she said, Project Nimrod would continue. The Ark would fly, if it was humanly possible to make that happen. That was her promise to the crew and those who were working on the project. And she promised further that there would be no repeat of the Byers accident, that the safety of the public would be paramount. (′Until launch day,′ Kelly Kenzie muttered cynically.)
But there was a price to pay. It seemed that the President had had to make considerable concessions to win over dissenters about Project Nimrod within her own administration. She, Vasquez, would not stand for a further re-election at that fall′s election. It would have been her sixth term. She would step aside and endorse her vice president as a candidate.
And Jerzy Glemp would be removed from the project he had initiated, and face charges relating to his culpability for the Byers accident.
In the Academy, Holle was oblivious to the reaction of the students, their whooping celebrations, the way Harry Smith pushed through the crowd to get to a stunned Zane Glemp. All she could think was that the project was on, that the Ark would be built. That she might yet get to fly.
24
DECEMBER 2038
After one last night in the Boulder training centre they were bundled into the chunky biofuelled bus that was to take them up into the Wilderness for the shuttle crash sim: Holle, Kelly, Susan, Venus, Mel, Zane, Matt, and DPD officer Don, here in his semi-regular role as unofficial shotgun. Don took his place up front, at the driver position, though the bus was automated and knew its own way to the training site. Kelly sat up front beside Don.
Holle made her way to the back of the bus, where Mel was waiting for her. She shuffled down the bus, clumsy in her bright orange environment suit. They had already been in the suits for three days in the training centre set up in the old National Center for Atmospheric Research, with hoods up and face masks and goggles in place throughout. They looked like medics heading for a plague zone, she thought vaguely. Even Don had volunteered to live in a suit for the duration of the exercise, even though he was never going to have to wear such a thing in anger. As she sat down Mel grinned and took her hand. His face was all but invisible behind his breathing mask and scuffed plastic goggles, and his human warmth didn′t penetrate the glove layers.
The massive door closed with a hiss of hydraulics. The bus pulled out of the NCAR parking lot, flanked by a couple of light armoured vehicles. Like most government vehicles, the heavy bus was plated with armour heavy enough to absorb a small artillery shell, and the bullet-proof windows were so thick they turned the outside world blue.
The little convoy headed up Table Mesa Drive and turned left onto Broadway, the old Highway 93, past the refugee-processing centre on the University of Colorado campus. Holle saw threads of camp-fire smoke lifting to the sky from the area of the Pearl Street Mall. Now nineteen years old, she sometimes wished she could have seen cities like this as they had been before she was born, the way they were in Friends and Frasier. They turned left again onto Arapahoe Avenue, heading west out of the city. Rough wire barriers, already rusting, had been thrown up along the sides of the main roads, for otherwise the highways, now little used by traffic, would have long ago been colonised by the lean-tos and tents of the dispossessed, and the city would have ground to a halt.
As they drove by, Holle saw people pressed up to the fences, rows of faces, children dressed in clothes faded to the colour of the mud, or the grey of the overcast December sky. Kelly Kenzie had the nerve to wave a gloved hand. The Candidates were still celebrities. A couple of children waved back. But the adults stared back, as if the Candidates in their environment suits were visitors from some other star. Some held up improvised placards, a single name scrawled on bits of card or plastic or cloth: VASQUEZ. After withdrawing from the 2036 election former President Vasquez had become an outspoken champion of the nation′s dispossessed. Conspiracy theories had been proliferating since Vasquez′s assassination in her home, just a week ago.
There had recently been a new influx of eye-dees. When the sea-level rise had topped twelve hundred metres the flood had at last started to impinge on Colorado itself in a serious way. The waters had got as far as Burlington on the I-70 and Lamar on the I-50, and the great rivers, the South Platte and the Arkansas, were now tidal in their lower reaches. There was salt-poisoning in the aquifers, and, it was said, of some trees and crops even in Denver. A fresh, panicky relocation was going on, as eye-dees in the sod-house communities on the plains were moved up to the higher, poorer land of Monument Ridge or the Rockies. But anybody who could break out of the official corridors made for the sanctuary of the cities. And meanwhile, some of the Project Nimrod workers were drifting away, making an early claim for a place on the remnant high ground.
The result was all these faces, all anonymous, more and more all the time, and if you listened to their voices you could hear accents that hailed from across America and even from abroad, from South America, Europe, people from all over driven by the flood to wash up against these cold fences. Holle never forgot that if not for a chance of fate, if her father hadn′t been smart or fortunate in the choices he′d made in his life, she could have been on the other side of the fences too. She was relieved when they passed out of the old town limits and the press of faces let up.
They rolled along Canyon Boulevard, a twisting, rock-rimmed track into the mountains. Maybe a dozen kilometres out they came to a community called Boulder Falls, where a twenty-metre cascade spilled onto the rocks. Even here the IDP camps crowded the streets, right up to the hog-wire barrier that protected the road. Don said loudly that some of the eye-dees had to pitch their shanties so close to the waterfall they got sprayed on day and night. He laughed at this, and Kelly snapped at him. Don rarely spoke about his work, but Holle knew he had been reassigned from urban policing duties to border control and IDP processing, and she could guess what that was doing to his soul. But he never showed any bitterness, even when he was forced to spend so much time with the Candidate corps from which he′d been excluded. The bus with its escort rolled through the town without stopping.
The canyon opened out into a wider plain. They were heading for the town of Nederland, and would go further still, up into the mountain country of the Indian Peaks Wilderness.
Holle tried to concentrate on the country outside, and ignore the chafing of her suit. The idea of the sim was to get them used to how they might have to live and work in the first days and months after their landing on Earth II. Their yet-to-be-decided destination was expected to be Earthlike, otherwise there would be no point going there in the first place, enough that you would be able to walk around outdoors without a pressure suit. But you would almost certainly need a sealed environment suit. The partial pressure of oxygen might be too low or too high, there might be various toxins floating around, and even, conceivably, some biohazard that might target your utterly alien system.
But Holle detested her suit. Supposedly manufactured by AxysCorp in its high-tech base in the Andes before it was overrun by rebels, the suit was made of a smart material designed to let her skin sweat normally, while filtering out any nasties from the environment. The mask over her mouth secreted a moisturiser and mild anaesthetic to ease the friction with her skin. There were light packs on her chest and shoulders containing supplies for the suit scrubbers, and fresh water and food. Her goggles were self-cleaning and demisting, which was fine until they broke down.
She ought to be able to survive without replenishment sealed
up in this thing for twenty-four hours, and with replenishment indefinitely - the manufacturers′ lower limit was a month. She understood the necessity of learning how to live and work in such conditions. But after a few hours in the suit she always began to feel like a pale, desiccating worm, as the joints chafed and the thing filled up with her own stink. On sim days you had the additional irritation of medical sensors taped to your skin, and the unnerving presence of miniature cameras on your shoulder and helmet - even inside your helmet, so your face could be watched at all times.
Most of the Candidates didn′t mind enclosure, or even the continual surveillance. They talked quietly, pulling absently at cramping folds in the suits. They had all been raised in enclosed, heavily monitored environments since they had joined the programme, for most of them, for most of their lives. But Holle hoped that Earth II would be benign enough for her to be able to take her gloves and boots off, to soothe her feet in running water and run her fingers through alien soil, and maybe feel the breeze on an exposed cheek.
They passed through Nederland, an old mining camp that had become a hippyish tourist magnet, and then, like everywhere else, a camp and processing centre for the dispossessed. They headed on west towards Brainard Lake. From here the views of the Wilderness mountains opened up, and the Candidates leaned towards the bus′s small windows to see. The scenery was spectacular, and it was unusual to take in a view that had no humans in it; these rocky slopes were too steep for the most desperate of refugees to cling to. But the mountains were bare of life, safe for withering trees; the shifting climate zones had made the slopes unviable. Though it was December there was no snow save on the highest slopes. There had been no snow at all in Denver, not for a couple of years.
As they neared the sim site, Holle saw smoke climbing into the air, black and oily. At last they approached what looked like a tangle of wreckage, scattered across a rocky plain.
25
The bus pulled up and the doors hissed open. The Candidates filed off, and stepped down onto stony ground. They had nothing but the suits they stood up in, save for Don who carried a canvas bag.
The bus sealed itself up and pulled away, tailed by the other vehicles. Holle wondered where the surveillance eyes were. They would be watched constantly for security, and back-up would never be far away.
The Candidates looked around at the wreckage that littered the ground, the twisted metal and plastic panels and the tangle of cables and pipes. Boxes of supplies, toughened to withstand impact, were strewn about. Somebody had started a fire where plastic popped and melted, creating that pillar of black smoke. Gruesomely, dummies dressed up in environment suits had been thrown over the ground, their plastic limbs broken back in unnatural angles. Some of them were children-sized, like seven-or eight-year-olds perhaps, and there were a couple of bright orange sacks, like holdalls, that were baby shelters. Children being an element of exercises like these was a new thing, and followed the social engineers′ newest pronouncements about breeding and demography which had shaken everybody up.
Don pulled a plastic splint out of his pack, and beckoned to Zane. ′Good news, buddy, you′re a casualty.′ Resigned, Zane rested one hand on Don′s back as he slipped his leg into the splint, which inflated rapidly.
Don stepped back, leaving Zane on the ground, his ′bad′ leg stuck out in front of him, and addressed the group. ′OK. Your shuttle has crashed, here on Earth II. You can see your gear scattered around. You′re far from the other shuttles and there are no comms; there′s no rescue possible in the short term. Air pressure is normal, gravity is high, but the air is unbreathable - acidic. Keep your suits sealed up. You can see you had casualties, Zane here with a broken limb, some deaths. I was told that the rest of you ought to improvise injuries, and generally remember how beat-up you′d be after a crash.′
Kelly nodded at that. ′Sensible enough.′ Always eager, she bent down to one of the dummies, used a pocket knife to cut away a strip of environment-suit leg, and wrapped it around her upper body as a sling, improvising a broken arm.
Don said, ′That′s all I know. I′m not here. Exercise starts now.′
′Suit integrity check,′ Kelly said immediately. ′Double up.′
They didn′t need her to say it; the first priority was to keep the living alive. They quickly paired up, Holle with Mel, Kelly with Matt. Susan, Venus and Zane worked together, the two women huddled over Zane down on the ground.
Holle ran a quick visual inspection of Mel′s suit, seeking obvious damage, and checked his chest display. For verisimilitude she slapped some sealant from a tube taken from her own leg pouch over a non-existent rip at the back of his neck, and topped up his air-scrubber compounds with a sachet drawn from Mel′s own backpack and dropped into a slot over his chest. Mel did the same for her; he faked a remedy for a suspected slow leak by tying off her suit just below the elbow on one arm.
Standing there with her arm in a sling, Kelly looked around, checking they were all done. She naturally assumed the role of leader in situations like this. ′OK, so nobody else is going to die in the next ten seconds. Matt, will you take care of that fire? Now the injured. Susan, why don′t you see what you can do for Zane? I see a first-aid pack over there, under that heap of blankets. The rest of you, let′s take a look at the other casualties in the wreckage. Watch out for any injuries you′ve sustained yourself.′
′Yes, mother,′ said Venus Jenning, and they laughed.
Holle clambered into the ′wreckage′ of the shuttle. She had to avoid the pockets of flame, and flinched back from the sharp edges that seemed to have been artfully positioned by the exercise designers to catch an unwary arm or leg. As the Candidates immersed themselves in this latest in a long line of puzzle-exercises Holle heard chatter, subdued laughter. But she found the experience oddly uncomfortable. Sometimes she thought she was plagued with an excess of imagination. She could envisage a scene like this being played out in the first few seconds after arrival on a hostile Earth II, under a lowering alien sky, with all of them badly shocked and loved ones lost, and knowing that death could be seconds away, the consequence of a single careless act. There would be none of the brisk confidence then, no muttered jokes.
She found the body of a woman, lying face down, impaled on a shard of metal through the belly. Holle checked the woman′s suit monitors, which were mostly functioning but showed no sign of life. She slipped off her outer glove, so that her hand was covered only by a delicate skin-tight inner glove with fine fingertip pads. She dug her fingers into a rip at the woman′s suit neck; she could find no pulse. Then she pulled off the woman′s own glove and tried feeling for a pulse at her wrist.
She stepped back, and tried to roll the woman on her back. The ′body′ was heavier than she had expected, maybe weighted to simulate the supposedly higher gravity. She dug her hands under the woman′s torso, straightened her back and tried again. This time the woman rolled, and Holle had to jump back as the bit of metal on which the mannequin was impaled swung upwards. The twisted sliver of hull was thrust straight into an obviously pregnant belly. ′Oh, Jesus.′ Just for one second she felt her throat tighten, a foul-tasting liquid push into the back of her mouth. But she swallowed hard. She took a pocket knife and slit open the suit over that pregnant belly. Then she pressed the palm of her bloodied under-glove to the woman′s undergarment and let the fingertip pads work as a stethoscope.
Kelly was beside her. ′You OK?′
′Yeah. Got me for a second.′
′Those sim designers are bastards, aren′t they? Always trying to catch us out. But you seriously do not want to throw up in one of these face masks. I should know; I lost my breakfast yesterday morning, back in the NARC.′
′You did? How so?′
Kelly shrugged. ′I guess just something I ate. They shouldn′t give us pregnant women to deal with. There won′t be any pregnant women when we make planetfall.′
Kelly was a stickler for the plan, whatever the plan was at a given moment. It wa
s a strength or a weakness, depending on circumstances. Holle said, ′No pregnancies if everybody obeys the rules.′
′OK, OK, you sound like Harry. We have to train for all contingencies. You found a heartbeat in there?′
′No.′ And Holle was thankful they wouldn′t have to go through the gruesome procedure of getting the body into a blow-up shelter and performing an emergency Caesarean.
′Then you′d better give me a hand with this kid over here. My arm, you know, trust me to break the damn thing …′ She led Holle over to another ′victim′, one of the child-sized mannequins.
Their exercises had begun to include children because the social engineers had suddenly decreed that women pregnant at launch time would be allowed on board the Ark. The idea was to increase genetic diversity at little additional cost in terms of volume, weight and life support at launch; the births could be handled during the cruise to Jupiter with remote support from doctors on Earth. The net result would be, if they followed the nominal mission plan, a small echelon of seven-or eight-year-olds on their hands when they got to Earth II. This drastic new ruling, coming out of the blue with only a couple of years left until launch date, had led to wild speculation and sexual jockeying among the Candidates.
The dummy child lay over a hull strut, his back surely broken, and his upper body was pinned by a tangled mass of wreckage. ′The sim designers went to town on this poor kid,′ Kelly said. ′They ought to provide a few real-life eight-year-olds in these sims; they won′t all be killed on planetfall.′
Holle laughed. ′Who′d entrust their children to us?′ She crouched down by the ′boy′. His chest was crushed, and his pelvis seemed smashed too. She began the grisly ritual of checking for signs of life.
At length all the bodies had been checked. The corpses were moved out of the wreckage, lined up on the ground a few metres from the main crash site, and covered by a bit of cowling.
This time Mel took the lead. He looked around at a featureless lid of sky. ′If the timing here on Earth II matches that on Earth, it′s late afternoon and we ought to think about shelter. In the morning we can strip the bodies and dispose of the remains. Anybody volunteer to speak for the dead?′
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