Ark (23 page)

Holle tapped her own handheld, searching for figures. “You know that the two hulls are based on Ares propellant tanks—in turn derived from the old space shuttle external tank. Each is a cylinder about eight meters in diameter, and fifty meters long. We lose some of that diameter to the water tanks under the hull, the equipment racks, and so on. We’re left with about forty-seven hundred cubic meters of living space, in the habitable hulls. That’s around three times the pressurized volume in a Boeing 747. About five times the pressurized volume available in the ISS—”

“But thirteen times the crew size,” Kelly said.

“And actually the space available to us right now is less than the maximum, because we’ve had to stow the warp-generator components in the lower third of each hull.

“We’re going to have to work hard to keep such a small volume habitable. Masayo, we’ll run some education on spaceflight basics for you guys. For example, all the stuff that falls to the ground under gravity, the dust that settles, well, it won’t in microgravity, and so the air we breathe is full of garbage—including bits of us. We’re going to have to scrub down the walls every day, if we’re not to pick up algal growth and mold. Also we have fuel cells to purge, batteries to charge, waste water to collect, carbon dioxide scrubber canisters to change, drinking water to be chlorinated, and so on. We need to draw up rotas. I’ll post drafts to the ship’s archive when we’re done.”

Masayo folded his arms. “You want us to be cleaners. That’s what you’re saying.”

Kelly leaned forward. “If you’ve got skills more appropriate to this interstellar spacecraft right now, let me know. In the longer term, with help from the ground, we can work out how to make the most of the skills and experience that each of us brings. But for now, yes, you’re going to be cleaning. And so am I, so are we all. Holle, when you draw up your rotas, put me and Lieutenant Saito at the head of the wall-scrubbing detail for the first period.”

Holle nodded.

Kelly looked around at them all, at the table, suspended at various angles in the air around her. “OK, I guess this meeting has been productive. But it’s only a start. We’re just going to have to learn to get along with each other. And
work
for each other, and for the good of the ship. Whatever else we differ on, I hope we can agree on that much. AOB? No? Then we’re done here.”

But as the meeting broke up, Kelly motioned Holle and Grace to stay behind.

Once Masayo and his boys were out of earshot, she murmured, “What about weapons? That gang of soldier boys must have come aboard armed. Grace, you got any hint of where they stashed their guns?”

Grace shook her head. “Didn’t occur to me to ask. You need to talk to Masayo.”

Kelly looked absent. “No,” she said. “I can’t afford a confrontation over this. Holle, I want you to round up some people. Make it two, at least, for every one of the illegals. Mount a raid. Pin them down and get their damn guns off them. Use some muscle you can trust. Wilson, for instance.”

Holle looked doubtful. “That will cause problems long term.”

“Let Masayo squawk. Better that than arms inside the pressurized hulls. Get it done.” She checked a clock. It was set to Alma time, as were all the clocks on the ship. “I need to go check how Wilson is progressing with his EVA.”

48

G
race Gray’s favorite part of each day on the Ark was the end of it.

Mission Control back at Alma had imposed a three-shift system on the crew in their twin hulls, so that Seba slept one shift, then Halivah, then both were awake. That way at least half the crew was awake and functioning at any given moment, increasing the chances of the Ark as a whole surviving any sudden calamity.

But there was no real privacy in either hull, aside from doors on the lavatories, though some kind of partitioning-off of the big volumes had been promised for the long interstellar cruise phase. That meant that you had to learn to sleep as if in a huge dormitory, with others above and below you—their groans and snores all too audible, their couches visible through the mesh of the deck—and you would see ghostly figures swimming back and forth, silent and weightless as bubbles.

But still Grace had learned to relish the moments when she strapped herself loosely in her couch, inside a cocoon of sleeping bag and blanket. This was the best of microgravity, away from the petty irritations of the day when you would find yourself drifting through other people’s garbage, or clouds of loose stuff, screws and plastic scraps and bits of sealant, all evidence of the hasty construction of the ship. In your couch you floated, as if you were in the most comfortable bed on Earth.

And just as the sleep period began the ubiquitous cameras, mounted on wall stanchions, turned themselves away. Earth didn’t need to watch you sleep, either Mission Control or the wider public who, Gordo assured them, otherwise watched their every move, as if the ship was a reality show designed to distract them from the awful truth of the flood. The ratings were high, Gordo said. Grace believed the surveillance was inhibiting conflict aboard the ship, so she didn’t object to it, but it was pleasant when the electronic eyes turned away.

And then Kelly Kenzie would make her final round, a visual inspection that all was well. This was a good instinct by Kelly, Grace thought, a way for her to bond with her crew. Maybe it would make up for rash actions like her planned gun raid. As she passed, Kelly had the ship’s systems dip the hull lights down to their emergency settings, one by one. Thus the hull grew dark in sections as she floated by.

Once, when Grace was with Walker City, she had been no older than twelve or thirteen, the okies had stayed for six months working on a construction project near Abilene, Texas. One of her companions, an English-man called Michael Thurley, had grown up a Catholic, and when he had discovered a small, pretty Catholic church in the city he had taken to attending Mass there. A few times Grace had sat with him. She particularly liked the end of the service, when an altar boy would go around the church snuffing out candles. That was what Kelly’s quiet daily procession was like, as if they were children sleeping in a vast church where the lights were snuffed out one by one. Grace drifted off to sleep thinking of those days, of Michael and Gary Boyle, and their tents and their portable gadgets and all the walking, and the church in Texas where the lights went out one by one.

She was woken by a stab of pain in her belly, and a surge of dampness between her legs. Her waters had broken. It was three a.m., Alma time.

49

June 2043

G
ordo Alonzo, his words limping across the forty-five-light-minute gulf to Jupiter, announced that he would deliver the verdict of the interservice tribunal on Jack Shaughnessy’s misdemeanor to the senior crew on the control deck of Halivah.

Masayo Saito hadn’t been out of Seba since they had reached Jupiter and the hulls had been separated and the connecting tunnel broken. But now, to attend Gordo’s session in Halivah, Masayo was going to have to cross in a spacesuit, the astronaut’s way. You always crossed in pairs, and Holle volunteered to accompany him. She saw a chance to build some metaphorical bridges with Masayo, as they crossed the real bridge between the hulls.

Masayo was ahead of her when she got to the pre-breathing chamber, a domed room in the tip of Seba’s nose. You had to pre-breathe for hours to prepare yourself for the lower-pressure pure-oxygen air of a pressure suit; otherwise you risked the bends. Masayo didn’t have much to say as she entered. Already in his suit save for helmet and gloves, he sat with his legs locked around a T-stool while he worked through crew assignment rotas on his handheld. She guessed he was fighting his nervousness.

And also the whole Windrup-Shaughnessy affair had inflamed tensions between illegals and Candidates. You couldn’t keep a secret aboard the Ark, that was one lesson they had all learned in the early days in the always combustible atmosphere of a crowded ship. Even if what you said didn’t get passed on in crew gossip, there was a good chance that the Earthbound fan of some star crewperson such as Kelly or Cora, glued to the live feed, would upload your comments back to her heroine in a piece of fan mail. Holle hoped to be able to talk to Masayo in the privacy of space, and was prepared to wait.

She had brought along some work to fill these hours too, and it was more interesting than Masayo’s wall-scrubbing rotas. After seven months in orbit around Jupiter, the first results of Venus Jenning’s planet-finding survey had been published.

Venus’s survey derived from data from over forty years of work by Earth-based instruments and planet-finder space telescopes, supplemented by observations made by telescopes deployed from the Ark. A greater precision had been possible because to some extent two telescopes at Earth and Jupiter could serve as components of a single instrument nearly a billion kilometers wide.

Because it had been anticipated that better data about nearby exoplanets was going to be acquired after the Ark reached Jupiter, no firm decision about the Ark’s target had been made before launch. But, according to the nominal mission plan, the current phase in Jupiter orbit should come to an end in another nine months—provided they completed the reconfiguring of the Ark, the construction of the warp generator, and the collection of antimatter from Io. They were going to need a decision before they left Jupiter because a warp journey, uncontrolled from within the spacecraft, was point and shoot; once they launched, they would be committed. So they had nine months to decide.

Hundreds of exoplanets had been cataloged. The difficulty was, which to choose?

The sun was a G-class star, compact, yellow, with a stable lifespan of billions of years. But G-class stars were comparatively rare, making up only one in thirty of the Galaxy’s population. Of the hundreds of billions of stars in the Galaxy, the most common, two-thirds of the total, were red dwarfs, small, cool, so parsimonious with their hydrogen fuel that they were very long-lived, lasting hundreds of times as long as a G-class like the sun. The astronomers labeled these M-class stars.

The interstellar cruise was planned for a nominal duration of seven years. Inside its warp bubble the Ark would be able to reach velocities of around three times light speed, so that put a limit on the journey of some twenty light-years. There were around seventy star systems within that radius, most of them systems of multiple stars. But among those seventy targets there were only five G-class stars, excluding the sun.

The nearest was in fact Alpha Centauri A, ten percent more massive than the sun, the senior partner of the triple system that was the closest to Sol, just four light-years away. It had long been concluded that there were no worlds remotely Earthlike to be found in that system: only remotely orbiting gas giants, labeled “cold Jupiters,” and swarms of asteroids that might be the relic of failed planetary formations. The next closest G-class was a star called Tau Ceti, in the constellation of the whale, nearly twelve light-years from Sol. But no suitable candidates had been found there either. The nearest analogies to Earth—worlds of about the right mass, in stable orbits, and orbiting at just the right distance from the parent star, so neither too hot nor too cold—had in fact been found orbiting the “wrong” stars, either dimmer or brighter than Sol, even some of the many M-class candidate planets.

Fueled by all this data, arguments raged both on the Ark and down at Alma. A strong faction led by Gordo Alonzo insisted that the G-class stars had to be the priority, with a risk taken over the planet’s precise analogy to Earth conditions. A different lobby, led vocally by Venus herself, argued for world first, star second. It was a passionate debate; after all, what was under discussion was the selection of Earth II, of a new home for mankind. But it seemed to Holle to be devolving into an almost theological argument, a question of whether you would want your descendants to grow up under a wrong-colored sun.

To complicate this discussion further had been Venus’s accidental discovery of an immense comet nucleus, swimming out of the trans-Jupiter dark and heading on what had looked like a collision course with the Earth. The sudden threat, piled on top of the ongoing calamity of the flood, had felt unbearable, the coincidence monstrous. “Proof that the devil exists,” Gordo Alonzo had growled, “if not God.” According to Venus’s report, more data and analysis had now shown that the comet would pass close to the Earth but would not impact; it would provide a dramatic spectacle when it reached the inner solar system in a few years’ time, but no more. Holle thought the strange incident had brought the fractious planet-spotters on Earth and Ark closer together for a while. But they had soon resumed their arguments.

Masayo’s timer chimed. Holle closed down the report.

Masayo, already suited up, helped Holle put on the layers of her suit, the tight-fitting liquid-cooled undersuit, her pressure garment, and then the bright white micrometeorite outer cover. To do this Masayo had to get up close and personal to Holle in her underwear. Contact between the sexes could be awkward on a ship where there was an imbalance of men over women, a legacy of the chaotic final boarding process. And, in the open hulls, it was too easy to watch your neighbor all day and all night, and work up fantasies. This, in fact, had led to the assault that had got Jack Shaughnessy into so much trouble. But Masayo was brisk, professional, showing no particular interest in Holle beyond getting the work done.

She strapped her personal identification band around her leg, a color code with a crew number, so she could be recognized on visuals once outside the ship. For good measure she slapped an “EVA One” disc on her chest, and a number two on Masayo’s. Then they pulled on their Snoopy-hat comms gear, helped each other with helmet and gloves, and checked over the display consoles on their chests.

When they were done, Holle raised a thumb to a watching camera, and called up to Zane, the duty officer today. “OK, Zane, this is EVA One, both EVA One and Two are good to go.”

Zane’s voice crackled in her ear. “Copy, Holle. Let me run through my checks of the lock.”

They stood and waited. Zane sounded absent, as always. Maybe he was absorbed on some project of his own—the warp assembly was demanding enough. But it seemed to Holle that he increasingly disappeared into the dark places inside his own head. He would lie in his couch, or just float, hanging from some bracket like an empty suit. She’d tried to persuade Mike Wetherbee to take a look at him, but the doctor had protested he was no psychiatrist, and anyhow he was in a tremendous sulk about Miriam’s stranding and wouldn’t consider psychiatric cases. Holle, still smarting herself over her separation from Mel, could sympathize with that. Mike had tried to get Zane to talk to specialists on Earth by the downlink, but the time delay had destroyed any chance of empathy.

However, Zane was on the ball today, it seemed. After a couple of minutes an indicator over the airlock door flashed from red to green. Holle turned to Masayo. “You want to lead?”

“What, a jarhead like me? You go ahead.”

“This is your first EVA of any kind, right?”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“Just don’t throw up inside that suit, there are only five that fit me and that’s one of them. Let’s go.”

She pulled down a handle and the door slid open, revealing the gleaming airlock chamber, and a small window showing the blackness of space beyond.