Ark (22 page)

47

G
race 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 swiveled 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 empathized 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 armor 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 labeled, 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, blood-stained remnants of military uniforms. She didn’t even recognize 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 meters 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 canceled 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 centers. 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 house? 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.”

“What a screw-up,” Kelly said. “What else, Grace? How about first-aid skills?”

“There we’re better off. All the Candidates have decent first-aid or first-response training. So do Masayo and some of his boys.”

“Well, there you go,” Masayo said. “You need us after all.”

“But,” Kelly said, “we’re heavily dependent on Doc Wetherbee here. Gordo Alonzo will come down hard on us to find some way to back him up. Look, Mike, I don’t mean to put you under any extra pressure. But maybe you could work with Grace and pick out the most promising paramedic-type candidates we have. Figure out some kind of training program. For now we have remote support from the ground; for anything less than surgery or trauma cases I guess that’s going to be a help.”

“But we will lose the ground once we go to warp,” Zane said coldly. “And when the waves close over Alma.”

“I know that, Zane,” Kelly snapped. “We’ve got time to come up with solutions before then. Grace, what about genetic diversity? The social engineers tried to stick to their selection parameters even with the gatecrashers.”

Grace said, “We’ll have to run a DNA analysis for a full answer. But only one of the military people is female. And two are actually brothers, the Shaughnessys.”

“Brothers.” Mike Wetherbee barked a laugh. “Christ! We even fouled that up.”

Masayo said heavily, “Is this how it’s going to be all the way to fucking Jupiter?”

Kelly folded her arms. “I don’t like you, or the way you got yourself aboard. But we’re all stuck in this tub together, for the rest of our lives. And we don’t have room for passengers, Masayo.”

“Fine,” Masayo said. “We want to work.”

“Good. Holle?”

Holle smiled around at the group, looking as if she was actually enjoying the meeting. The tension palpably lessened. Grace admired her unobtrusive skill. “We urgently need to establish a maintenance routine. There are seventy-eight of us, crammed into a small space.”

“Yes, and it seems a damn small space to me,” Masayo said. “How much room do we actually have?”