Ark

by Stephen Baxter

  They came to a trench system, and at the officer′s signal dropped down into it and made their way along in a file, Mel sticking close to Don′s back. This trench had been dug out carefully. It was walled with sheets of plastic, and it twisted this way and that, a snakelike layout to reduce the damage from a grenade blast that would clean out a straight-line trench. The defence of the Ark launch site, on this ultimate day, had been planned over months and years.

  There was a deep, double-barrelled thrumming noise. Mel looked to the west, and he saw the unmistakable profile of a Chinook helicopter rise up, huge and ugly, its double rotors turning, silhouetted against the darkling sky. It swept low over the ground, and guns in its nose spat visible fire at the trenches.

  ′Not one of ours,′ Don shouted.

  With a thunderous crash two more aircraft roared in, passing north to south and screaming over the Chinook. Mel, an air force brat, was pretty sure they were F-35s, Lightnings. Everybody cowered; the aircraft noise, vast and oppressive, was terrifying. But there was no firing; maybe the Lightnings were short of munitions. He yelled, ′Where the hell did they get a Chinook?′

  ′Some rogue faction in the army or air force. Or maybe it′s the Mormons. I told you it′s a mess—′

  There was a muffled boom.

  ′Mortar!′

  ′Down!′

  The shell looped over them. Mel felt Don′s hand on the back of his neck, pushing him face down onto a torn plastic sheet. The shell passed over them and detonated, and the ground shook.

  Mel got up gingerly. ′Somebody got a mortar.′

  ′Yeah,′ Don breathed. ′And now they got their range.′

  The officer leading them pointed. ′You, you, and you two, take out that damn mortar. The rest of you follow me.′

  ′That′s us,′ Don said. The other two picked out by the officer had already scrambled over the trench wall, and were making their way west, the way the mortar had come from. Don squirmed up and out after them.

  Mel followed without thinking. He lunged over the perimeter and got down into the dirt, crawling after the other three, trying to keep up, crawling in the mud towards a mortar nest. It′s for you, Holle, he thought. All of it′s for you.

  The others got to the mortar pit before Mel could catch up, and rushed it. Mel heard the slam of a grenade, screams, and then a bloody gurgle.

  By the time he reached the pit Don was already clambering down into it. The mortar itself, looking antiquated, was ruined, but there was a pile of shells that looked salvageable. Don and the others were pawing through them. There was a butcher-shop stink of blood and burned flesh. There had been two people in the pit, Mel saw. One, a man, had been blown in half by the grenade that had destroyed the mortar, his legs reduced to shreds. But he had a pistol in his hand, and blood ran down his chest. He had evidently resisted his attackers.

  The other in the pit was a woman. Bloodied, she wore the ragged remains of a dress. She was holding a baby, Mel saw, astonished. The kid, no more than a few months old, was wrapped in a filthy blanket. He was awake, but seemed too stunned to cry. When the mother saw Mel, she held the baby up to him and stumbled forward. ′Please—′

  A single shot from one of the soldiers felled her, leaving her sprawled on the broken ground, her back a bloody ruin where the bullet had exited.

  An engine roar crashed down from above.

  ′Down!′ Don yelled.

  Mel threw himself flat on the ground. He pulled the baby from its mother′s arms, tried to cradle it under his body armour, and tucked his helmet down over his face. The roar overhead grew louder, and light splashed around him. He risked a glance up. That Chinook was directly overhead, barely visible behind the glare of its spotlight. Mel thought he saw figures in an open hatch, aiming some kind of weapon at the ground, like a bazooka.

  A plane came screaming in, an F-35, no more than fifty metres off the ground. The Chinook gave up on the trenches. It rose up, dipped its nose and headed east, straight towards the centre of the Zone, and the Ark, surely its ultimate target. The F-35 continued its run. Mel waited for it to open up its cannon, or fire an air-to-air missile, or evade. It did none of these. No ammunition, he remembered.

  The plane rammed the chopper.

  The explosion hammered at the ground, and filled the sky with light. Mel cowered in the broken mud, clutching the baby, and waited for the wreckage to rain down.

  The baby started crying.

  44

  Wilson lay beside Kelly and Venus in their acceleration couches on the bridge of the Ark′s crew hull B, called Seba.

  ′One minute,′ Venus said.

  Wilson couldn′t keep from talking. ′Jesus. We must be insane. A fucking atom bomb is about to go off, right under my ass.′

  Kelly grinned at him. ′Too late to bale now.′

  Venus said, ′And this is going to be Gunnison′s worst day since the Alien fought the Predator.′

  ′What?′

  ′Never mind. Everything′s nominal.′ Businesslike as ever, she checked the displays before them.

  The Ark was very heavy engineering, but it was also very simple, and there were few instruments. Aside from housekeeping displays showing the condition of the air inside the pressurised hulls and the acceleration to which the crew would be exposed, gauges showed the pulse-detonation timing rate, and the levels in the tanks of anti-ablation oil and coolant fluid, and the pressures in the steam lines. The controls were simple too, a manual control of the pulse unit drop rate, a T-handle and stick to adjust the bird′s attitude. These were a last-ditch resort if the automatics failed. However, Wilson knew, nobody had survived a sim in which some faked disaster had made it necessary to use the controls.

  And now, in these last seconds, Wilson could feel the beast stir, as the nuclear pulse units in their charge magazines were lined up in the throats of their delivery mechanisms, and the coolant liquids began to pump around the great pistons. He glanced over the monitors that showed the crew in their rows of seats, deep in the bowels of the hull. The bright amber launch-imminent lamps were flashing, and a voice message resounded at every level. But people were still fighting over the couches.

  ′Twenty seconds,′ Kelly said, matter-of-fact.

  Wilson felt his anus clench. ′Shit, shit.′

  ′Fixed, damn it,′ Matt yelled, and his voice echoed from the metal walls around him.

  ′Fifteen seconds,′ called up Liu Zheng, from the ground.

  ′I know. I can hear the coolants flowing,′ Matt glanced around at the mighty metal walls surrounding his own mote of a body. ′Can′t believe I′m here, listening to this.′

  ′Ten … Nine … I suppose we don′t need a countdown.′

  ′No. I finished the job, didn′t I?′

  ′That you did, Matt. Good work.′

  ′Where are you?′

  ′Right under the pusher plate. Where else would I be?′

  ′If it goes wrong you′ll be the first to know, Liu.′

  There was a rush of steam, a clang. That must be the first pulse unit rushing down its launch chute. In this last instant Matt felt a stab of fear. ′Liu, I think—′

  He saw the detonation, lapping around the rim of the pusher plate. He saw it. And then—

  An immense fist slammed into the back of her couch. Holle heard gasps all around her, and an immense groaning, as if the ship itself were being torn apart.

  And yet I′m not dead, she thought. She was only thirty metres above the plasma cloud from a five-kilotonne nuke, and a pusher plate that had been hurled upwards at a thousand gravities. But the suspension system had to be working, the great pistons absorbing the shock. If not she′d be dead by now, the ship destroyed as the thousand-tonne plate, forced up by that first explosion, rose and smashed through the Ark′s gargantuan structure.

  The gravity dipped, sickeningly. The end of the first pulse. Was that only a second?

  And then the next came, another shove, smoother this time, that pushed her back
into her couch. The pressure yielded once more. And then the push came again. And again. It was working. She heard people whooping, applauding.

  She lay back and closed her eyes, and tried to imagine she was on a kid′s swing in the training facilities at Gunnison, harmlessly rocking back and forth. It wasn′t too bad, a G or so of eyeballs-in acceleration, an easy training session. Not so bad to be riding an atomic booster into space.

  But the launch facility, any ground crew who hadn′t got away from the Zone, were already gone, the hapless town of Gunnison flattened like Hiroshima. The journey hadn′t even begun.

  Now she felt the ship judder, shift violently from one side to another, shaking her in her cosy couch. The Ark was mounted with beefy auxiliary rockets, attitude thrusters meant to tweak its trajectory against the brute pushing of the nukes. Swing, swing, swing—

  She was thrown forward against her straps, as if the ship had hit a brick wall. The applause turned to screams.

  Unit failed. They had simulated this.

  She glanced around. Morell looked terrified. ′A pulse unit failed, Theo!′ she yelled. ′Just one unit, out of hundreds. That′s all …′ It was always a chancy business to throw a device as complex as a thermonuclear bomb into the expanding plasma cloud left by another only a second earlier and expect it to detonate. But if the next unit failed, and the next, they would fall back into their own radioactive mess …

  Another surge. God, had that only been a second, once again? Time was elastic.

  And another surge. And another. Now there was some pogoing, longitudinal juddering as the bulk of the Ark soaked up that missed stroke. Then the acceleration dips settled down to that steady swinging once more.

  She felt Theo′s hand flapping, grasping for hers. She took it and held on firmly, wishing that Mel was here, and her father. Swing, swing, swing, the pulsing a little slower than her resting heartbeat, swing, swing, and the carcass of the Ark groaned as it rose like a dark angel from the ashes of its launch pad.

  Something splashed on her face. It was urine, dripping down from the deck above.

  Swing, swing.

  45

  Thandie Jones stood in the control room at Pikes Peak, surrounded by a scene she′d thought she′d never see again, a scene she′d thought lost with so much else of the pre-flood world: a launch control, rows of earnest technicians murmuring into comms links as they monitored the progress of a spacecraft rising from the Earth.

  But what a spacecraft.

  Gordo touched her shoulder. ′Look. We got some image capture from before the first detonation.′ The images had been taken from a camera directly beneath the pusher plate. ′See that?′ Gordo pointed, intent. ′That puff of steam is the injection of the charge. There′s the pulse unit itself …′ A vase-shaped object falling down into the air, from a hole in the great metal roof above it. ′The anti-ablation oil sprays over the pusher. And - bang - the detonation of the bomb itself.′ The sequence ended as the camera was fried.

  Thandie had first worked with Gordo Alonzo twenty-four years ago, when they had gone diving together in a museum-piece submarine, seeking evidence of subterranean seas. Now, having forced her way back to his attention over the issue of Grace Gray, he′d invited her to come here to watch the climax of the project. She would never have dreamed that after all these years she and Gordo would be standing side by side in a situation like this. She′d never even liked the man.

  There were gasps as images from an aircraft just outside the blast zone were fed to the screens. Thandie turned to see.

  A crater, kilometres wide, had been burned into the Earth. Above it rose the familiar sight of a nuclear fireball, a mushroom cloud. But a spacecraft contrail punched astonishingly up and out of that cloud, powered by more detonations, more fireballs, a string of them. Soon the plasma glare from the rising craft outshone the atomic glow on the ground, and cast light across the remnant of the land and the encroaching sea, a lethal sun rising.

  ′What did I start, Gordo? Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut.′

  He grunted. ′You always did take all the credit, you ballsy dyke.′

  THREE

  2042-2044

  46

  FEBRUARY 2042

  It was a relief for Wilson Argent to drift out of the airlock and into the blackness beyond the hull. A relief to get out of the small chamber where for hours he had been pre-breathing the low pressure pure oxygen that filled his suit. A relief, forty days after launch, to get out of the cramped, noisy environs of Seba and Halivah, the twin hulls of the Ark, that competitive, fractious hothouse. Yet he was still deep within the bowels of the ship, deep within the factory-sized Orion launch stage, and his view of free space was obstructed by struts and tanks and shadows. He could hear nothing but the whirr of the pumps in his backpack, the hiss of static from the comms units in his Snoopy-hat headset, and the rasp of his own breathing.

  The latching end of the manipulator arm - formally the Mobile Servicing System - was waiting for him, just as according to the EVA plan, right outside the hatchway. The arm was like an ungainly robot hand, sprouting latches and tool stubs and cameras, swathed in white insulating cloth, bright where it caught the spotlights.

  Wilson turned around, grabbed the edge of the hatch with his gloved hands, and launched himself feet first towards the arm′s latching end. His Kevlar tether unrolled behind him. The bulky gloves were a smart design that enabled his fingers to bend easily, but his legs were stiff, stuck inside what felt like an inflated inner tube. His Extravehicular Mobility Unit, his suit, insulated and cooled him and kept him under pressure and even offered some protection from micrometeorites and radiation, but it made him as rigid as a plastic doll. But then he wasn′t planning on walking on the moon today; he was to make an eyeball inspection of the pusher plate, and most of the movements he would be making would be controlled by the arm.

  His aim was true, and his booted feet settled gently against the arm′s end. He heard a distant scrape as latches closed around his boot soles. A rail swivelled up to meet him, and he grasped a double handle, so that it was as if he was riding a scooter. He clipped a harness around the stem of the handle. More security: if the arm failed altogether, he could conceivably work his way back to its base hand over hand. He was ready.

  ′Cupola, Argent,′ he said, his voice muffled in his own ears from the enclosure of the helmet. ′I′ve interfaced with the arm. I′m good to go. Preparing to release the hull tether.′

  ′Copy that, Wilson,′ Venus called from the cupola. ′Your medical signs are a little off. You′re breathing too hard, your heart rate′s above nominal. Take a few seconds.′

  He supposed she was right, but she didn′t need to say it out loud. He knew that many of the crew would be following his progress on the internal comms, and he no doubt had an audience Earthside via the continual live feed. ′Venus, I know what I′m doing. We practised this very manoeuvre for hours back in the Hilton. I could do it in my sleep.′

  ′That′s what′s worrying me. Take a breath, have a drink, and blip your SAFER again.′

  ′Damn it,′ But as capcom today she was the boss, sort of. He sipped a little water from his in-helmet bag.

  And he pressed the button at his waist. His SAFER gave him a subtle kick in the back, and he could feel how the arm assembly rocked and quivered as it absorbed the impulse. His Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue was a cut-down compressed-nitrogen jet that would allow him to steer himself back to the Ark if the worst came to the worst and he was cut loose from the hull altogether. Like the arm and his suit, the SAFER was a design relic of the International Space Station. He waited for the arm′s vibrations to damp down.

  Sort of the boss. After years of pursuing his specialism in the ship′s external systems he was damn sure he knew a lot better than Venus how to run this routine inspection EVA, which had been scheduled in principle since the Ark had been nothing more than a paper design on a desk in Denver. But there was no point railing at Venus. She was jus
t one link in a chain of command which ran up through the Ark′s nominal onboard commander Kelly Kenzie to Gordo Alonzo, ensconced in Mission Control in Alma, to where the running of the mission had been transferred from Pikes Peak after the Orion engine was shut down. That chain of command would be in place for the next two years, until they had fulfilled their mission at Jupiter and shot off to the stars in a warp bubble. After that the superluminal Ark would not be contactable, and Alma itself, submitting to the flood, would cease to transmit anyhow, and the Ark would be on its own.

  But remoteness was already a problem. Earth was five light minutes away, making it impossible for Gordo to manage the EVA hands-on. It wasn′t Venus′s fault. If not for lightspeed Gordo would be chewing him out just the same way. And anyhow, he admitted, he did feel a little better for having rested a few seconds.

  ′Cupola, Argent. OK, Venus, I′m set.′

  ′Keep your hands inside the car at all times.′

  ′Roger that.′ That phrase had been the mantra of the sim runners in Gunnison, many of them ageing veterans of the pre-flood space programme. As every theme park on Earth had shut down before Wilson or Venus had been born, none of the Candidates was clear what it meant. But it felt like good luck to repeat it now.

  The arm juddered, Wilson felt a thrum of hydraulics, and then he was swung smoothly away from the hull.

  He rose up through a tangle of struts, spars, pipes and cabling. It felt as if he were moving fast, and he passed alarmingly close to some of the heavy struts and tank walls. The arm, too, wobbled and vibrated more than he had expected from the sims, but then he was a heavy mass on the end of a long jointed structure. He concentrated on his breathing, and kept his face expressionless. He didn′t want loops of his face with some bug-eyed scared expression showing on the in-hull screens, and back on Earth.

  After only a few seconds he was clear of the Orion superstructure, and the arm lifted him out of shadow. The sun rose, a lantern hanging beyond the ship′s prow, and his visor immediately tinted, blocking out much of the glare. Somewhere out there were stars, the Earth and moon, the planets, but he could see nothing but the sun.