Ark (26 page)

54

W
ith Don, Mel shadowed an old couple, maybe late sixties, as they were interviewed by a sympathetic woman at the processing terminal.

They were called Phyllis and Joe Couperstein. They had children, and they believed there was a grandchild, but they’d heard nothing from their kids for years. They both had bloodied, swollen feet. They had started walking in Omaha, years ago. They weren’t sure, in fact, where they were now; they had just followed the crowds from one scrap of high ground to the next, working wherever they could, at whatever they could. The woman had once been a civil engineer, the man a chef, highly qualified, but there wasn’t much call for either now. Even up to a couple of years ago they had been able to work in the fields, but now arthritis, and a mild heart attack for the man, had put paid to that.

The Alma official was sympathetic. Alma had all the cooks and engineers it needed. Besides, she said gently, their skills were most likely out of date. But they might be reconsidered if they’d like to wait a while—meaning days, a few weeks—in a holding area?

Don murmured, “Which is just another corner of the shantytown. They never get called back, but they wait patiently.”

The Coupersteins didn’t even seem disappointed. But they were very tired, just from standing in this line for hours. They didn’t ask for anything specific. They lingered a moment before the smiling woman.

The official seemed to relent. She handed them a slip of paper. They looked as if they were in need of respite, she said. A break, somewhere to sit, a place to bathe and clean your clothes and get a good meal, a quiet place to sleep for a night. The city had the resources to offer that, on a strictly discretionary basis. How did that sound?

The Coupersteins looked at the ticket, and at each other, and at the long line behind them. They smiled. It sounded wonderful.

“That’s our cue,” Don murmured. He stepped forward. “Mr. and Mrs. Couperstein, was it? Come this way.” Don escorted them through the security barrier. “Yes, you need to give me the paper.” He handed it to Mel. It was grubby, well fingered, much used. “No, you don’t need to show me any more ID . . . This way. Come on, Mel.”

Mel passed the paper slip back to the woman at the desk, who glanced at him cursorily, and stuffed the slip in a drawer. She was already busy with the next applicant.

Mel hurried after Don and the old couple. They were heading up the lane of barbed wire that led to the Respite Center. From this vantage the building’s ugly concrete bulk and that industrial plant were hidden, and the doorway looked attractive, welcoming, with some kind of plastic veneer over the door, and the sign and the flowers. Even the path under their feet had gravel laid down, Mel saw. It was like walking in a park, the Coupersteins said to each other, and they walked slowly as they approached the doorway, hand in hand, as if relishing these few seconds.

At the door Don entered a security code into a keypad and submitted to a retinal exam. Heavy locks opened with a clatter, and the door swung back. Mel glimpsed a corridor within, softly lit. Music played, a wash of some gentle, almost melody-free ambient sound. Over that there was a distant murmur of voices—soft, as if sleepy. He was expecting some staff member to come forward, a nurse in a crisp white uniform, but nobody came.

Don, apologetically, ordered Mel to search the couple before they went any further. He found no weapons, not so much as a kitchen knife.

“Mr. and Mrs. Couperstein, you can just go ahead,” Don said. “You’ll find a bathroom, a coffee machine, a reading room with books . . . Others are waiting there. Somebody will be with you shortly.”

Mr. Couperstein hesitated for one second, a complex expression crossing his dirty, gnarled face, and he shook the dust from his roughly cut gray hair. But Mrs. Couperstein sighed. This would be fine. This was just like a hotel, like the one they stayed in once at Aspen where they had gone skiing, and now you’d scarcely believe they had ever been young enough to do that. She kicked off her battered shoes and stepped through the door. Her feet left blood on the floor. The door slid softly shut behind them.

Don stepped back, and checked his watch. “It’s only half an hour to the next cleanup. We’ll stick around here. Come on.” He led the way back to the processing barrier.

In the next thirty minutes two more offers were made of a stay in the Respite Center. One was to a man who pushed an elderly lady in an impossibly battered wheelchair; he must have been fifty, she eighty, and suffering from dementia. A foul stink of ordure came from beneath her dirty blanket. The other went to a young father with a child aged about three, a collection of skin and bones with a head that lolled, too heavy for her body. The mother had run away that morning, taking their packs and the last of their food with her. Yes, the man longed for a break. Mel and Don escorted the son with his mother, the young father and his daughter, to the Respite Center, which they entered with as much relief as the Coupersteins had shown.

Don checked his watch again. “One p.m. Almost time.”

There was a whistle from a Homeland officer. Soldiers and cops came trotting up, and Don led Mel to join a rough perimeter around the center. An engineer approached, and showed his credentials to the senior officer. He checked the door to the center was sealed, and worked a handheld.

“Have your weapon ready,” Don murmured to Mel, hefting his own AK-47.

The engineer pressed one last key on his handheld, and stood back. Mel heard a whir of pumps, a hiss of some gas. And he smelled a strange, elusive smell, something like almonds.

The sun was breaking through the cloud. None of this seemed real. Mel said, “I guess the gas pipelines run underground.”

“Be a bit obvious if they didn’t.”

“Why the perimeter?”

“Sometimes the respite patients change their minds at the last minute. Try to break out.”

“And we shoot them.”

“If we don’t contain them we get a hell of a security mess, and a health hazard.” Don glanced at Mel. “I know what you’re thinking. They taught us about the Nazis in the Academy, didn’t they? We aren’t Nazis, Mel. Hang on to that. This is an American government doing all it can for its people. We’ve got nothing else left to offer them.”

“They think they’re going in there for a break. Not to die—”

“No. They
know,
on some level, even if they wouldn’t admit it to themselves. It’s OK. I know how this feels. It’s only a few more minutes.”

Mel saw it all now. This was the very essence of the engine that had protected him, and the Ark, for years, an engine that ran on flesh and blood and false hope.

It seemed a long time before the hiss of gas stopped. A man in a pale blue NBC suit approached now, and a trooper came along the line of the soldiers, handing out more suits.

Mel took his numbly. “What now?” he asked Don.

“Cleanup,” Don said. He put his weapon on the ground and began pushing his legs into the suit trousers. “Just a precaution. The gas has been pumped away.”

“I can’t.”

“You must. It’s your duty. One job we can’t delegate to the eye-dees. Come on, man, help me zip up this damn thing.”

That was how it went for the rest of the day for Mel, until his watch ended at around eight p.m.

Don walked him back to the tent city, and helped him find his bunk, his stuff. Mel’s mind seemed to have shut down. The other bunks around his were full of sleeping troopers, men and women, most still clothed, their boots on the ground under their bunks. Officers moved silently between the rows, offering quiet words when a soldier stirred.

Mel drank some water, but found he didn’t want to eat.

“That’s fine,” Don said. “Just sleep. That’s what you need above all. Sleep.” He had a flask, a plastic cup. He poured a golden fluid out of the flask. “Drink this.”

Mel took a sip. It was strong, flavorful, and as he swallowed a mouthful he felt a kick at the back of his head. “Wow.”

“Alma’s finest.” Don grinned. “And there’s something in it, a powder from the medics. It will help you sleep.”

“I don’t want to sleep. It’s too early. Eight o’clock—”

“It’s an order,” Don said gently. “Go ahead, finish this, lie down. Go right to sleep now and the memories won’t get a chance to form, and it won’t feel so bad in the morning. You know, the guilt.”

Mel hesitated. But he was too exhausted to argue. He sat on his bunk and pulled off his heavy boots. His feet stank, after sweating all day inside the layers of socks. He rolled onto his bunk and pulled his blanket over him. “Where did we learn these procedures? Maybe this is how the Nazis enabled their death squads to function.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Don said grimly. “If not, I guess we had to figure it out for ourselves.”

“Holle—the Ark. I don’t want to miss seeing that.”

“I’ll wake you.” Don glanced at the roof of the tent. “Holle and Kelly will never know how lucky they are, to have ascended from all this.”

“Don’t forget to wake me,” Mel whispered.

“I promise. Sleep now.”

When Don did wake Mel, in the small hours, it was to the sounds of shouting, and a stink of burning.

55

E
ven inside the Buckskin Street compound there was chaos, with troops and civilians running everywhere.

Patrick Groundwater checked his watch as he ran, his coat flapping around him. He’d meant to be at Mission Control by now. The warp bubble fire up was only minutes away—or rather, off in the orbit of far Jupiter, it had or had not already happened, his only daughter was on her way to the stars, or not. And the news of that terrific event was limping its way at mere light speed across the solar system, with no regard for the anxious beating of a human heart. He looked up, but the sky was full of broken cloud, and pillars of smoke rose up to obscure it even more. If the eclipsed moon was risen, he couldn’t see it.

He was fifty-nine years old. He couldn’t run any faster. Damn, damn.

By the time he reached Mission Control the smell of burning was looming close, the crackle of gunfire closing in. He found troops ringing the building. Even in the urgency of the moment he had to show an ID and submit his retina to a laser-flash test. As he fumbled for his papers a great beating, as of huge wings, descended on him from above. He ducked, and some of the soldiers around him flinched and raised their weapons. It was a Chinook, maybe the last one flying anywhere in the world, its dual rotors roaring over the battered township, and playing its lights down in dusty beams to assist the ground operations.

When at last Patrick got inside the Mission Control building, Gordo Alonzo was making a speech. He was standing on a table at the front of the room, before the rows of consoles with their glowing screens. At his back a map of the solar system glimmered, the dark swoop of the Ark’s orbit like a loose signature. Thandie Jones stood beside him, enigmatic.

Alonzo was saying, “In the generations to come, in the long centuries that will unfold on Earth II, what we have achieved together in this place, and in Gunnison and Denver, will always be remembered.
You
will be remembered. You know, Alma, the town, was named for the daughter of the guy who ran the grocery store when the town was incorporated in 1873. But I’m told that ‘alma’ is also the word for ‘soul.’ in Spanish. And that’s what you have been here—the soul of the grandest mission in human history . . .”

Patrick scanned the room. The technicians still manned their stations, and data chattered in scrolls of numbers and in graphic forms across the screens. But, short of a catastrophic failure, there was nothing more these people could do to influence the Ark’s fate, its stupendous flight across twenty-one light-years to the planet of a star in the constellation of the river. The ship had either gone, or it had not. He checked his watch again. There was still no confirmation.

Edward Kenzie came bustling up to him. Even now he wore a suit and tie, though his shirt hung out of his pants and his hair was mussed. “Patrick. Thank God you’re here.”

“You can’t stop Gordo Alonzo making speeches.”

“At least he’s keeping these people calm. After all, if there has been some disaster up there, we need to keep the technicians in their seats as long as we can.”

“And how long is that?”

“Take a look,” Kenzie said grimly. He offered Patrick a handheld.

The screen showed a map of the area, of the military assets in green, the deployment of hostiles in angry red. The outer cordon had been broken to the north and south along Highway 9, and to the west from up Buckskin Gulch. Elements of the mob coming in from all three directions were already closing on the bright green triangle that marked the Buckskin Street compound, and the glowing yellow jewel of Mission Control itself.

“Shit,” Patrick said. “This looks organized.”

“Precisely. Abider agitators, that’s what I’m told. Weapons caches and radios. I heard the military saying it was a mistake to time the launch to that lunar eclipse. They were right.”

Gordo had finished his speech. Seventy-three years old, he jumped down off his table with an almost arrogant athleticism, and the controllers applauded. But a rattle of gunfire, clearly audible through the walls of the building, drowned them out. Tailed by Thandie Jones, Gordo came striding up to Patrick and Edward. “You guys see a Chinook hovering outside? That’s our ride out of here.”

Patrick felt oddly betrayed. “But the project isn’t over—we don’t even know about the warp bubble—”

Kenzie said, “You know, Gordo, I always thought you’d be the last man to leave the bridge.”

“That’s the fucking Navy,” Gordo said. “And anyhow we did all we could. We kept the lamps burning in Alma, Colorado, we didn’t let those kids go off into the dark alone. But our job’s done now.”

“And he really does have his orders,” Thandie Jones said. Here she was at the end of it all, Patrick thought, as she had been at the very beginning, when she had spoken to the IPCC as another, earlier disaster unfolded around New York, back in the days when Holle the interstellar astronaut hadn’t even been conceived. “President Peery has ordered that the continuity of the nation should be preserved. According to the Presidential Succession Act the line runs through the Vice President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the President Pro Tem of the Senate, and then selected members of the Cabinet—”

“And at last me,” Gordo said, “as governor of this fucking fortified mountaintop. Peery wants us out, dispersed, safe.”

“Safe?” Kenzie asked wildly. “Where?”

“Into whatever assets are available.”

“In our case the USN
New Jersey,
” Thandie said. “Of which I’m an informal crew member, and I have orders to make sure Gordo here gets his ass on the sub.”

Kenzie said, “And then, maybe, Ark Two, which—”

There was a boom, like a huge door slamming. The building shook, and the screens fritzed, flickering on and off, while plaster rained down from the ceiling. Smoke started pouring in through the aircon.

Troopers formed up around Gordo. “Time to go,” he said. “Get behind me.” Thandie Jones stayed with him, and Edward Kenzie.

Patrick longed to stay in Mission Control, to wait for news of the Ark, but the screens were failing anyhow, and he submitted when Edward grabbed his arm.

The troopers formed a flying wedge and pushed through the crowd. The main doors were forced open, and smoke billowed out around them as they staggered into the open air. Patrick was briefly overwhelmed by the screams, the gunfire, the smoke-filled air, and another immense crash that seemed to shake the very ground. He saw a line of troops not fifty meters from where he stood, trying to hold their position against a mob of eye-dees, who bayed, throwing bits of rubble and waving glinting machetes.

Over their heads, hovering in the air, the Chinook waited. An airman dangled a rope ladder from an open hatch. Two troopers ran up, clutching the base of the rope ladder. Patrick’s heart thumped when he recognized Don Meisel and Mel Belbruno, his daughter’s lover. But Mel’s face was hard, pinched, his eyes hollow.

They shoved forward, to the ladder.

“This isn’t going to be glamorous,” Thandie shouted.

Gordo growled, “I just hope none of those ragged assholes have got a surface-to-air.”

A woman broke out of the melee and hurled herself at the ladder. She was young, no more than twenty, twenty-one. She was dressed in rags, and she had a baby in a kind of improvised papoose on her chest. Don and Mel fielded her. She started struggling. “Let me on that thing!” The baby was wriggling, screaming. Don and Mel were reluctant to deal with the woman, Patrick saw, for fear of harming the baby.

Gordo stepped forward, a knife in his hand. Briskly he cut the papoose harness, plucked the baby off its mother, and hurled it away into the crowd. The woman instantly gave up her struggle and followed it. Gordo said, “And I will see that woman’s face on my deathbed.” He tucked his knife into a sheath in his sleeve.

Don was all business. He handed the ladder to Gordo. “Sir, there are four places on the chopper. We can’t take everybody.”

Thandie pushed Gordo forward. “Up you go, Colonel. Orders, remember.”

“And you,” Gordo snapped, and grabbed her hand.

Edward Kenzie dragged Patrick forward by the arm. “Come on, Patrick, we’ve been in on this from the beginning. Without our money the Ark wouldn’t have got built—and that’s our kids flying the bird. We’re owed.”

But Patrick pulled his arm away.

The chopper dipped and bucked; some sniper was getting his range, and a round pinged off the hull.

Don said, “Sir, this bird is lifting in one second.”

Edward Kenzie was on the ladder. He yelled down, “Groundwater, what the fuck?”

“Not me, Edward. We had our time.” And just as the chopper lifted Patrick lunged forward and shoved Mel against the ladder.

Mel grabbed on to keep from falling, and was immediately borne away, raised up from the ground like an angel. Patrick could see Mel’s open mouth, his shocked expression.

Patrick said grimly, “That’s for Holle.”

Don Meisel just laughed. “Nice timing, Mr. Groundwater.”

A trooper faced Don, a woman, her face hard, a frizz of gray hair loose under her helmet. “Sir. The position is lost. Some of us are going to try to break out to higher ground.”

Don nodded. “Stay close to me, sir,” he said to Patrick.

“I’m no soldier, son.”

Don thrust an AK-47 into Patrick’s arms. “You are now.”

The Chinook had gone, its roar receding into the sky, its lights a dying constellation. And over Patrick’s head the sky was clearing, to reveal a bloody eclipse light.