Ark (20 page)

41

“T
he leak is here.” Liu Zheng unfolded a big paper schematic, and with a pointing finger showed Matt a feed leading from a secondary coolant reservoir. His hand was gloved; they both wore lightweight NBC suits. He had to shout to make himself heard over the hiss of vapor, the roar of engines as buses and trucks raced around the base of the Ark, the urgent yelling of voices, and an ominous clatter of gunfire. “See? Just above this O-ring.”

“Why can’t the automated systems handle it?”

“They froze,” Liu said. “A multiple failure. Shit happens. Well, that’s why we’re here. The leak has to be fixed; without coolant, if one of those suspension pistons overheats and seizes in flight, the Ark will fall out of the sky. You have your tools?”

Matt hitched a pack on his back.

“OK. Take elevator three.” Liu grinned. “This is your moment, Mr. Weiss.” He stuffed the schematics into Matt’s pack. “Go, go!”

Matt ran to the elevator cage, one of a dozen that allowed access to the Ark for maintenance. He slammed shut the gate and grabbed the dead man’s handle that sent the cage rising up into the shadowed innards of the ship. He rose past the curving flank of one of the crew hulls. A wall of white insulation blanket rushed past his face, pocked with maintenance hatches, safety warnings, valve sockets—and handhelds, labeled with upside-down stencils, for use by spacewalking astronauts in the extraordinary future when this ship would be taken apart at the orbit of Jupiter, and reassembled for interstellar flight. He felt light-headed, unreal. He hadn’t slept much in the last week. Since his liberation from jail a week ago he had dedicated all his time to memorizing every aspect of the systems to which he was going to be assigned. He figured he could catch up on his sleep when he was dead. And with the Ark launch being brought back, he had, of course, suddenly lost twelve hours of his life. Quite a big percentage when you only had a day left anyhow.

He looked up, trying to spot the problematic feed. The Ark’s interior was as brightly lit as the exterior, a mass of gleaming metal, pipes, vast tanks connected by ducts and cabling, all contained within the mighty struts of the frame. He saw cameras swiveling, and, clambering over the wall of one of the big crew hulls, a maintenance robot, a thing like a spider armed with a camera for a head, sucker feet so it could climb vertical walls, and a waldo arm with a Swiss Army knife selection of tools.

Still rising, he looked down the flank of the crew hull, and saw, down below, through gaps in the cluster of tanks and pipes, the impassive bulk of the pusher plate itself. An inverted dish of hardened steel, it was itself a beautiful piece of engineering, forty meters across and just ten centimeters thick. The bombs would be detonated below the plate, a weapon five times the strength of the Hiroshima bomb detonating one every one and one tenth of a second. The bombs would be fired into place by the simplest method imaginable, by shooting them down out of a cannon set square in the middle of the pusher plate. The propellant produced by each pulse unit would bounce off the pusher plate, transferring momentum but evaporating too quickly to damage the plate, which would be further protected by a screen of anti-ablation oil, constantly renewed. The resulting thrust would be soaked up by the shock absorber system, immense pistons that rose up above his head, each with a stroke of eleven meters and with a complex dual action that protected the vulnerable parts of the ship from rebound in case a pulse unit failed.

After studying the technical issues from scratch themselves, the Ark’s designers had reverted to something close to what had become the standard design for much of the duration of the original Cold War Project Orion: a four-thousand-ton brute with that mass split evenly between the pusher plate, the ship’s structure, the bombs, and a full thousand tons of payload. By comparison the Saturn V, the booster that had launched Apollo to the moon driven by chemical energies alone, had weighed in at three thousand tons, of which only forty tonnes was payload. It was hard to grasp the reality, even now. When the ship was in flight this whole space would be the scene of huge engineering activity, with splashes of blinding atomic glare coming from all around the rim of the pusher plate, and those pistons shuddering with each mighty stroke.

Looking up now, Matt could see he was approaching the huge tanks of coolant fluid and ablation oil suspended in their frame, and the complex network of pipes that connected one to the other. That was where his leak was. In flight, an ammonia compound was used to cool the pistons after each stroke. The resulting high-temperature compressed gas was then used to power the pumps that squirted a sheet of anti-ablation oil out over the pusher plate before the next detonation, and to thrust the next pulse unit from the charge magazine. Using the products of one stroke to prepare for the next was pleasing for an engineer, a process that reeked of thermodynamic efficiency. But that complexity led to many failure modes.

The light in his elevator cage died, and the cage jolted to a halt.

“Shit.” Matt squeezed his dead man’s switch, and rattled at the cage door. All power to the cage and the pulleys that had been hauling it had been lost. Matt flicked a microphone at his throat. “Liu, it’s Matt.”

As the link came active, Matt heard Liu Zheng break off another conversation. “Go ahead.”

“I lost power, in number three elevator.”

“Wait . . . I can see. We lost power all down that side, a generator broke down. Damn.” Liu sounded desperately tense. What they feared above all was multiple failure, one problem compounding another. “You still on that coolant leak? You fixed it yet?”

“Negative.” Matt resisted the urge to snap; of course he hadn’t, in the couple of minutes since he’d left Liu’s side. Liu was juggling a hundred tasks simultaneously, all as urgent as Matt’s; time must be stretching for Liu, in this last hour of his life. “I’m still on my way up.”

“We can’t get power back until—I don’t know. Matt, can you improvise? Yes, Mary, what is it? . . .”

Matt snapped off the comms link.
Improvise.
Well, there was no choice, and there were access ladders fixed all over the ship.

He fixed his tool pack on his back, grabbed the manual handle, and hauled the gate open. The nearest ladder was just outside the cage, and there was a rail to which he clipped a safety attachment to his belt. He got hold of the rail, swung out one foot, and reached the nearest rung. He tugged the safety harness to test it. Then he looked up into the cathedral of gleaming metal forms above him, and began to climb.

As he passed, monitor cameras swiveled to track him.

42

F
rom the ramp, Holle followed Kelly across a mesh floor and through a brightly lit chamber, before they joined yet another line for access to the higher decks.

Holle looked up through layers of flooring. This crew hull was an upright cylinder. In fact the hull was a remodeling of one of the big propellant tanks of the Ares V booster, and a relic of the project’s dysfunctional design process; when the decision was made to scrap the use of Ares boosters and fly with Orion, the engineers had scrambled to make use of the components of the abandoned Ares technology. The hull was divided into decks by mesh panels that could be disassembled to open up the interior space. For now the decks were set out with the crew’s fold-out acceleration couches. Down through the center of the mesh flooring came a pole, like a fireman’s pole. One by one the crew were climbing metal rungs bolted to the pole’s side.

They reached that central ladder. Kelly went up first, Holle following, climbing up through the hull.

The hull’s interior architecture was modeled on what had been proven to work on the space station, with color schemes and lighting strips designed to help you orient yourself in zero gravity, and a variety of fold-out stores, workstations and consoles. There were Velcro pads and handholds everywhere, in readiness for free fall. For now the only important functionality was on the twin bridges, situated in the nose of each crew hull, and the workstation screens all showed the impassive, reassuring face of Gordo Alonzo, with a blurred view of the Pikes Peak launch control center behind him, and a countdown clock.

But Gordo’s voice was drowned out. On each deck there was chaos. People were in the couches, tightening their harnesses and plugging in comms and waste systems. But Holle saw others arguing over seats, waving tokens in each other’s faces. While most people were in standard-issue flight suits as she was, a significant number weren’t. She didn’t even recognize a good number of the people on board.

She called up to Kelly, “Where’s security? How the hell did these people get aboard?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kelly called down, climbing the ladder as determinedly as she’d climbed the ramp. “There is no security any more, Holle, not in here. It’s up to us now. We’ll sort it out in space. This is your deck, right?”

“Yes.” Kelly had to go on to the bridge. “Have a good trip, Kel.”

Kelly grinned, exhilarated, fearless. “This is what I waited all my life for. You bet it will be a good one. See you beyond the moon.” She clambered on, heading up out of sight, while Holle stepped off the ladder.

She found her own couch easily enough, one of an empty pair. Your couch was numbered to match your boarding token. The couch was a simple foldaway affair of plastic and foam, but it had been molded to the shape of her body, and she’d got used to it in training; she settled into it now with relief, and tucked her pack into the space underneath.

She saw Theo Morell, the general’s son, trying to climb down the fireman’s pole, moving in a different direction from everybody else, in a coverall too big for him. Holle called over, “Theo. Hey, Theo!”

He looked around, confused by the noise. Then he saw her and came over hesitantly. “Holle?”

“You look lost.”

“Somebody’s in my couch,” he said miserably. “Up on Deck Nine. I showed her my token, the number on it, but she just said—”

“Never mind.” She looked at his anguished face. She ought to hate him; he had taken Mel’s place. “Here. Take this one, beside me.”

“But it doesn’t match my number.” He dug in his pocket. “I have the token—”

“Things have got a bit chaotic. Just sit down, strap in, and if whoever has the number for that seat comes along—well, we can deal with that when it happens. Look, put your pack under the couch. You have your pack, don’t you?”

“I lost it,” he said. “I got knocked off the pole.”

“God, Theo, you’re a clown. Well, you’ve got years to find it before we get to Earth II. Just pray it doesn’t hit somebody on the head when we launch. Come on, sit down and strap in.”

Hesitantly at first, but then with relief, he obeyed her and clicked home his harness. They were lying on their backs, as if in dentists’ chairs, staring at the deck above. Somewhere above their heads, the noise of an argument over a couch grew louder.

43

D
on Meisel took Mel’s arm and pulled him out of the line for the passenger buses that would have taken him out of the blast zone. Don was in combat gear, wearing a heavy bulletproof vest and carrying an automatic weapon. Under his helmet his face was smeared with dark cream, but it was streaked by sweat on his forehead and under his eyes. “You up for a little action?”

“Are you serious? I haven’t fired a gun in years.”

“We need everybody we can get. Although you fly boys never could shoot straight anyhow. Come on.” He set off jogging toward a big, blunt-nosed military truck in bottle green.

Mel had to wait as a bus roared past him, heading down the heavily reinforced corridor away from the Candidate Hilton and out of the blast zone. Then he followed helplessly.

“So,” Don asked as he jogged, “you see Holle off?”

“I chickened out,” Mel admitted. “Seeing her through a wall of glass—what difference would it have made?”

“Fair enough,” Don said, jogging. “Best to keep busy.”

“So what’s going on?”

“Action all around the perimeter. Here.” There was a heap of armor and weaponry by the truck; Don handed Mel police body armor, helmet and gun. “They’re coming in worse from the west just now. We think it’s an abider faction. But it’s hard to tell, everything’s mixed up to hell with eye-dees and rogue elements of cops and military and National Guard running around everywhere. You strapped up? All aboard.” He helped Mel climb up onto the bed of the truck.

There were maybe twenty troopers jammed in here, cops and National Guard and regular army troops. An officer tied up the tailboard, and they rolled off, heading west, with an engine roar and a plume of dust rising up into the evening dark. The truck followed a trail of white rags tied to sticks, evidently leading it through a minefield.

Don stared straight ahead. Mel couldn’t judge his mood. “So—you OK with everything? The launch and stuff.”

Don forced a smile, and adjusted his chinstrap. “As much as you’d expect. We’d both rather have sent Dexter, but they ain’t taking two-year-olds. Kelly’s gone on our behalf, to live on a new world as we’ll never be able to. As for me, what the future holds God only knows. At one time I had a career path, you know. Worked in the city, in a CAPs squad under an officer called Bundy. Good man.”

“CAPs?”

“Crimes Against Persons. Homicides and assault. It was regular police work. And I was smart. I was thinking of going into Special Investigations. It was compensation, you know, for being thrown out of the Academy. But we kept being pulled out to go man some barricade or other, or break up another food riot at another eye-dee camp. Now it’s all kind of liquefying, and so much for my career plans.” He looked at Mel. “But there’s still work to be done. If you like I’ll put in a word, and—hey, we’re there.”

The truck growled to a stop. The officer let down the tailgate, and the troopers clambered down. There was a sound of gunfire, a stink of burning, a pall of smoke.

Don beckoned to Mel.
Stick with me.
They made their way across broken ground, the smashed foundations of some building. The gunfire, the shouting and the screams, got louder. I should be on the Ark right now, Mel thought. Not here.

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 ditch. The defense of the Ark launch site, on this ultimate day, had been planned over months and years.

There was a deep, double-barreled 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 facedown 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, squirming through the mud toward 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 armor, 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 meters off the ground. The Chinook gave up on the trenches. It rose up, dipped its nose and headed east, straight toward the center 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.