Ark

by Stephen Baxter

  As he rose further he got a good view of the full length of the Ark - the first human to do so with his naked eye since launch, he reminded himself with some pride, although drone robots had been sent out for inspections since the Orion had been shut down. The twin hulls of the ship were still bound up within the components of the Orion launch stage - hulls now called Seba and Halivah, named for the brothers of the biblical Nimrod, all great-grandsons of Noah. He could see the shuttles that would some day take them down to the surface of Earth II, four brilliant white moths clinging to the hulls′ flanks. A constellation of artificial lights was scattered through the Ark′s tangled structure, and the sunlight splashed highlights from polished metal. It looked extraordinarily beautiful, he thought, drifting in interplanetary space like this, and yet odd, not so much a spacecraft as an industrial plant somehow uprooted and flung into the light. All this would be taken apart and rebuilt at Jupiter, as the Orion was discarded and the Ark was readied for its interstellar cruise. But before then the Orion would have to fire up one more time to slow the Ark into Jovian orbit. And as a result Wilson needed to make this inspection of the pusher plate. There had been two misfires of pulse units during the launch sequence, the first only a few seconds after lift-off. The longitudinal jarring delivered to the ship by the missing pulses, and possible damage caused to the pusher plate by any misplaced bombs, needed to be checked for.

  When he looked down, beyond his feet, he could make out the dim red lights of the cupola where Venus sat, following his progress. Another space station relic, it was a hexagonal glass blister, the window hatches folded back, stuck to the side of Seba. The cupola was Venus′s domain, and during most of the mission she would be using it to run her astronomy experiments, and the guidance, navigation and control functions of which she was leader. On impulse he waved a hand, and he saw motion inside the cupola, a shadow in the low-level eye-saving illumination.

  ′We see you, Wilson.′

  ′Cupola, I see you too, you′re looking good.′

  ′How′s the ship looking?′

  ′I can see no obvious damage, from this vantage. No sign of leaks from the wall tanks.′ Much of the Ark′s onboard water was stored in fine curving tanks just under the outer skin of each hull; the water, wrapped around the living volume, provided some protection from cosmic radiation. ′Scorching around the attitude rockets′ nozzles. Perhaps some scarring of the heat insulation tiles on the nose fairing.′

  ′The Geiger readings show no relics of the Orion bombs at your position, Wilson. Cosmic background only.′

  ′That′s reassuring,′ he said dryly. The arm swung him away again, bending at its multiple joints. He passed the great limbs of the shock-absorber pistons and approached the base of the ship. The circular rim of the pusher plate was now clearly visible, gleaming in the steady sunlight. ′I can see the plate. Will be entering its shadow soon.′

  ′Roger, Wilson. Don′t take any chances.′

  ′I won′t.′ As the plate′s sharp rim neared he gripped the scooter handles hard, and tried to keep his face still, his breathing regular. ′Here I go …′ Damn, his voice was a squeak.

  The arm dipped down, and the rim of the plate slid up over the glare of the sun and plunged him in shadow. For a few seconds his visor failed to react to the change in light level, stranding him in darkness. The arm stopped, slow vibrations washing along its length. He felt very remote, very fragile, here on the end of this unlikely cherry-picker.

  Then the visor cleared, and lamps on the arm lit up, splashing light over the steel gong before him. ′I′m there,′ he said. ′I see the plate.′ He reached out with one arm. ′Almost close enough to touch.′

  ′Roger that, Wilson. Take it easy now. Have another break, let your eyes adjust. All your systems are go, your consumables are fine. You could stay out there another twelve hours if you had to. You′ve plenty of time.′

  ′Copy.′

  He deliberately steadied his breathing. He turned, looking back the way he had come. And there were Earth and moon, hanging in space, visible now that the pusher plate eclipsed the sun. Both showed half-discs, separated only by about as much as the moon′s diameter as seen from the surface of the Earth. He held up his thumb, and was able to cover both of the twin worlds. In the first few days, as they had looked back at the receding home planet, they had all been shocked by how little land remained. Even Colorado, which had seemed so extensive when they were down there living on it, was only a scatter of muddy islands, threatened by the huge curdled semi-permanent storms that stalked the ocean world. But from here he could see no detail.

  They had already come so far. The brief, explosive Orion launch had hurled them directly away from the Earth, without pausing in orbit, and they would cruise with only minor course adjustments all the way to Jupiter, slowing as they climbed out of the sun′s gravity well. But right now they were travelling at an astounding speed: eighty-five thousand feet per second in Gordo′s astronaut units, or twenty-six kilometres a second, or fifty-eight thousand miles per hour. This was more than twice as fast as any human had travelled before; the record had been held by an Apollo crew.

  Even at such speeds the whole journey was expected to take them a year. But in their forty days so far they had already travelled around ninety million kilometres - more than two hundred times the distance from Earth to moon, around a tenth of the distance to Jupiter, orders of magnitude further from Earth than any human before them. Even light took a non-trivial time to span such distances. It was astounding to think that the image he saw of Earth was already five minutes old.

  Slowly, as he watched, the silent stars came out, filling the sunless sky beyond the bright Earth.

  ′Argent, cupola. You OK out there, big guy?′

  ′Yeah. Just taking in the view.′

  ′You ready to proceed?′

  ′Roger that.′

  ′The arm will move you to plate sector one-A …′

  The arm juddered into motion again, swinging him closer to the pusher plate. He sighed, and turned away from the Earth.

  47

  Grace Gray found Kelly Kenzie at her station on Seba′s fourth deck, a few minutes before the crew council meeting was due to start. Grace hauled herself up from Deck Five along one of the cables that had been strung between the decks to help with mobility during this weightless cruise, and swivelled around to arrive legs first. She carried a handheld, and now sent it spinning through the air.

  Kelly caught it easily and began to inspect it. Kelly, alongside Holle Groundwater and Zane Glemp, sat with her legs wrapped around her T-stool′s restraint bar. She had handhelds and scratch pads scattered on the tabletop in front of her, held in place with Velcro pads, though a couple of styluses floated in the air. Kelly looked stressed, sleepless. Grace knew that she had found the first couple of months of her command of this trans-Jupiter mission tougher than she′d expected. But then, she faced problems none of them had planned for.

  Holle smiled at Grace, and poured her a coffee. This involved injecting the liquid from a flask into a mug with a nozzle like a baby′s first cup.

  ′Thanks.′ Grace sipped the coffee cautiously. It was pretty foul, and was likely to get fouler once they started running low on the compressed, freeze-dried ingredients in a few years′ time. She settled in place, with her back against a wall.

  Kelly thumbed the handheld, scrolling through Grace′s report, occasionally muttering expletives under her breath. ′This is the complete census?′

  ′I spoke to everybody, in both hulls,′ Grace said. ′I checked their boarding tokens, if they had them, and biometric ID. I even got their names independently verified, and checked their claims about their skill sets and genetic background with Gordo on the ground.′

  Holle asked, ′You didn′t have any trouble getting the data?′

  Grace shrugged. ′It was fine. I guess the fact that I don′t belong to any one faction was an advantage. Everybody distrusts me equally.′

 
Holle eyed Grace′s belly. ′You′re nine months gone, but you′ve taken to weightlessness better than some of us Candidates. Life in space is a pain in the arse, isn′t it? All the little things. You can′t wash or shower like you can on the ground. You can′t even use toothpaste without it floating into your eye …′

  Grace smiled carefully. Holle was about the most open of the Candidates, and she′d always been friendly since Gordo had foisted gatecrasher Grace on her last year. But even Holle struck Grace as spoiled. The Candidates constantly carped about their lot, and rarely empathised with the plight of those millions, maybe even still billons, suffering on the drowning Earth. She patted her belly. ′This doesn′t seem so bad to me. The spacesickness was no worse than morning sickness. And zero G helps me carry this lump around, I guess.′ Though there were other side-effects. Sometimes her body emitted alarming gurgling noises, as it tried to compensate for the lack of the gravity field that every other baby since Cain and Abel had been born into. But at least she would not be the first to give birth, out here in space; two of the Candidates, pregnant on boarding, had already delivered successfully in the expert if overworked hands of Doc Wetherbee, and the crew′s genetic diversity had therefore increased.

  ′Here they come,′ Kelly said. ′Time to get your body armour on, gang.′

  Grace glanced around. People were converging on Kelly′s station, coming down the fireman′s pole through the decks, or swimming through the connecting tunnel from the second hull.

  Kelly had her closest allies with her already, Zane and Holle, Venus reporting in via a screen from the cupola where she was supervising Wilson Argent′s spacewalk. Other Candidates showed up, Joe Antoniadi looking wide-eyed as ever, as if the world was a continual surprise, and Thomas Windrup and Elle Strekalov clinging to each other, and Cora Robles looking petulant and bored, a party girl five light minutes from the nearest club. Doc Wetherbee arrived too, bringing a handheld of his own, and with a thunderous expression on his face.

  Now here came a few of the ′gatecrashers′, as the Candidates dismissively called those like Grace herself who had been foisted onto the crew by special interest groups late in the selection process. Theo Morell looked even more nervous than usual. And, even more insultingly labelled, some of the ′illegals′ arrived - rogue elements from the security forces, supposedly charged with guarding the ship, who had stormed their way on board themselves during the last moments. Grace knew their names by now, such as the Shaughnessy brothers, and Jeb Holden and Dan Xavi, two tough-looking former eye-dees. The illegals were led, informally, by Masayo Saito, a young Japanese-American lieutenant and the most senior of the military people. Masayo claimed he wasn′t here by choice, but had just got swept along with the rest. Grace actually believed him; she had seen pictures of the wife and baby he had left behind on the ground, and would now presumably never see again.

  After the Orion engines died and they had started to move freely around the ship and through the transfer tunnel between the two hulls, Grace had been amazed at the sight of the illegals, in their dirtied, bloodstained remnants of military uniforms. She didn′t even recognise half the gatecrashers. So many people had made it onto the ship who she′d never laid eyes on before. But everybody was young, almost all of them younger than Grace at twenty-six. Well, most front-line military personnel were young, so maybe that was no surprise.

  The space began to fill up. The crew members crowded around Kelly′s table, or they found struts on the wall or ceiling, hanging like bats, and they messed about, passing coffees to each other. There was a constant hubbub of noise coming from the decks above and below, easily visible through the mesh partitions. The hull was only eight metres across from wall to curving wall. The available volume was reduced further by the curved-back racks that were crammed against every wall, repositories for the equipment and stores that contained everything needed to run a starship for a nominal ten years. Grace had seen enough of the hull′s design to accept it was a miracle of packing, of space and storage efficiency. There just wasn′t enough damn room. She sometimes thought it was like living on a vast, crowded staircase, or maybe in a prison.

  As booted feet waved around in front of her face, Grace huddled in on herself, dreaming of walking over empty plains.

  At last they were convened, and Kelly rapped a stylus on the tabletop to call them to order.

  ′OK, this is the ship′s council, held today, fourteenth February 2042, Kelly Kenzie presiding.′

  ′Happy Valentine′s, sweet cheeks,′ called one of Masayo′s boys, and there was a ripple of laughter.

  Kelly ignored this, stony-faced. ′The discussion is being beamed back to Alma for comments and guidance later. We′ll start with section reports. Zane, you want to go first?′

  Zane nominally led a team that covered the more exotic engineering. He reported that the Orion drive had been shut down and safed for now, with no major defects reported, and pending completion of inspections like Wilson′s there seemed no reason the drive shouldn′t serve them just as well when they arrived at Jupiter. ′We′re likely to finish with a cargo of spare nukes,′ he said.

  Meanwhile the Prometheus reactors should soon come online. These were advanced engines based on designs for a cancelled unmanned spacecraft called the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. When brought into operation the pressure would be taken off the fuel cells. And the warp-bubble equipment, stowed for now in the hulls′ lower sections and to be assembled in Jovian orbit, showed no signs of damage from the launch events.

  Venus, calling in from the cupola, reported that her planet-finding project was under way on a trial basis. The idea was to make observations that would supplement those made from Earth-orbit telescopes like the Hubble and the surviving ground-based instruments such as in Chile. The most useful work would be achieved in the months they would spend in Jovian orbit, at a stable distance from Earth, and the work of selecting the Ark′s destination would begin in earnest. Meanwhile Venus also had responsibility for GN&C, a NASA-TYPE acronym for guidance, navigation and control. She gave the results of her most recent course-correction vernier burn, in terms of the accuracy of their trajectory on three axes: ′Minus one, plus one, plus one. You don′t get much better than that.′

  ′OK. Holle?′

  Holle Groundwater ran a team responsible for more prosaic aspects of the ship′s systems, but she gabbled out acronyms with the best of them. ′Comms′ Grace grasped easily enough. ′EPS′ was the electrical power system. ′ECLSS′ was the environmental control and life support system, complicated mechanisms devoted to the air scrubbing and water cycling on which all their lives depended. The target was ambitious. There would always be leaks and wastage, but they were aiming to keep the loops of air and water and other essentials closed tight enough to last for years. Right now Holle was leading her team through a complex series of configurations and tests, bedding down her systems for flight. These tasks included establishing a hydroponic garden on Seba′s lower deck. So far, she reported, things were going well.

  The gatecrashers and illegals listened silently to all this. All the section heads were, of course, Candidates, and had been trained for the job. That alone made a point about the divisions in the crew.

  Doc Wetherbee was the last to report. Only twenty-four years old he was a Candidate too. As well as his formal education he had served in general practice in Denver, in hospital emergency rooms, and on triage teams in eye-dee camps and processing centres. With one eye on his handheld he ran through a brief survey of the general health of the crew, of whom only three were still suffering from spacesickness, another two had fluid balance problems, and the woman who broke her leg when her couch collapsed during the launch was recovering - as was an illegal who had cracked a knuckle while beating up a Candidate. Depletion of his various medical stores was actually less than had been expected.

  ′Our two new mothers and their babies are doing fine,′ he finished up. ′Which leaves me with one question. Is there a doctor in the h
ouse? Aside from this one.′

  There was a general stir; the crux of the meeting approached. Wetherbee was understandably furious about the outcome of the launch, because among those who hadn′t made it on board had been Miriam Brownlee, qualified psychiatrist and surgeon, and Wetherbee′s lover.

  Kelly said, ′Grace, you ran your census.′ She flipped back the handheld. ′You want to field that one?′

  Grace caught the handheld. ′OK. You all know the boarding process on launch day was a mess. At Kelly′s request I′ve been running a simple check of who′s actually on board this boat - who you are, what skills you have, what sicknesses or inherited disorders, all the rest. I asked you all for data, and also asked you to confirm what your buddies told me.

  ′Here′s the summary results. I′ll download the detail to the ship archive if the council approves. The nominal crew was eighty adults. There are actually seventy-eight adults on board. Well, the head count we did on the first day told us that.′

  Kelly said, ′So the mutiny actually caused us to leave Earth with two wasted berths. Go on.′

  ′Of the seventy-eight, forty-nine are ex-Candidates. Of the remainder, twenty-one are late additions to the crew, but formally approved by the command team under Gordo Alonzo on the ground. That includes myself. And that leaves eight, who got on board in those last moments before the ramp came up.′

  Masayo Saito said, ′Just use the word. We′ve all heard what you call us. Illegals.′

  ′As for medical staff,′ Grace said, unperturbed, ′the original crew plan was to have three doctors on board, with specialisms in surgery, psychiatry, child care, other fields.′

  Wetherbee asked, ′And after your careful survey, the number of trained doctors who actually made it on board is—′

  ′One. You, Mike. It′s just bad luck, I guess. I′m sorry.′

  He laughed bitterly. ′Well, it′s not your fault.′