Ark (30 page)

64

May 2048

T
he siren’s guttural blaring almost drowned out the voice alarm: FIRE, SEBA DECK TEN. FIRE, SEBA DECK TEN. FIRE . . . Holle had been working on a replacement for a failed component in the Primary Oxygen Circuit, figuring out a simplified design that the Ark’s limited machine shop would be capable of turning out. She was listening to Paul Simon’s “Darling Lorraine” on repeat on her Angel, a favorite of her father’s because, he said, it reminded him of his relationship with her mother. And she was daydreaming of seasons on Earth, of autumn. It took her a second to clear her head.

She shut off the Angel and grabbed her Snoopy cap. “Groundwater. Watch, what’s going on?”

Masayo Saito’s voice came on the line. “Holle, get down here, we got a problem.”

She smelled smoke. Maybe that had triggered her dying-leaf dream. She could
see
smoke seeping under the door of her cabin. She pulled the Snoopy cap on her head and rummaged in a cupboard for a face mask.

Kelly Kenzie’s voice blared over the PA. “This is Kelly. We have a major incident. Seba crew, to your fire stations, we’ve rehearsed this often enough and you know the drill. Halivah, seal up and prep for support operations. Anybody in transit to Seba, go back to Halivah. Let’s move it, people.”

Holle rushed out of her cabin and emerged into chaos.

The fire was a few decks down. A brilliant glow shone up through the mesh flooring, as if she was standing over a furnace. Hot air and smoke billowed up through the length of the hull, gathering in the upper decks and beneath the domed roof. People were running, some shouting. Holle could hear the rush of extinguishers and sprinklers, precious volatiles being expended to fight the fire. Over all this was the clamor of the siren, and Kelly Kenzie’s voice booming out instructions echoing from the metal walls.

Holle saw Grace Gray on the far side of the hull. She was awkwardly climbing the ladders between the decks with little Helen, now six years old, clinging to her back, and with three-year-old Steel Antoniadi in one arm. Grace was evidently fleeing the fire below. But smoke was gathering above, and some of the crew were already climbing back
down
from the dome, choking. The hull was becoming a closing trap. Grace made a quick decision, ducking into a cabin and slamming shut the door. If she blocked the door with wet towels, she and Helen might be safe.

But Holle was responsible for more than just Grace and her daughter. For heartbeats she just stood there, outside her door, uncertain what to do. Four years after leaving Jupiter, this tiny, fragile hull and its twin Halivah were the only refuge to be had in twelve long light-years. An out-of-control fire was their worst nightmare. Holle was senior, as well trained to handle the situation as anybody else aboard. She sensed she needed to make a quick decision—but to do what?

“Holle!” Paul Shaughnessy came clambering down a ladder. He was wearing the outer layer of one pressure suit and he carried another, like a flayed skin draped over his back. He was following the training she’d given him; the suits were fireproof to an extent, and their oxygen supply would enable their wearers to keep functioning even as the air turned toxic. He looked tense, distracted, distressed.

He handed her the spare suit. She pulled it over her legs. “Paul, are you OK? Do you know how this started?”

“It was Jack. I was up in the nose. My brother was down on Ten, in the maintenance area. He was fixing a rip in his own suit. The suit just exploded! I saw it on a feed. It became a fireball, and then it spread.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense.” The suits had a pure oxygen air supply, so there was always a risk of fire, but the safety features should have ensured no such accident ever happened.

“It’s what I saw. I have to go down to Jack. Masayo’s down there.”

“Go, go. I need to talk to Kelly and Venus.”

He nodded, snapped closed his faceplate, and carried on down into the furnace.

Holle closed up her own helmet. “Venus, are you there?”

“Groundwater, Jenning. We’re in the cupola.”

“Well, stay put. And start working on contingencies to detach the cupola and fly it over to Halivah.”

“We’re on it, that’s the regular drill.”

Holle imagined the calm twilight of the cupola, the silent, wheeling stars beyond, the screens full of images of devastation within the hull. “Can you see what’s happening in here?”

“Most of the cameras are still functioning, though they’re going down all the time, and the comms lines are fritzing too. Decks Nine through Eleven are gutted. The mesh decking is melting, and dripping down into the hydroponic beds on Fourteen. Countermeasures aren’t working too well. The fire has got in behind the equipment racks.
That
wasn’t supposed to happen. Casualties unknown, we just can’t see.”

Kelly’s amplified voice suddenly cut out, leaving the hull filled with a cacophony of screams, the roaring of the fire.

“What about the hull temperature?”

“Rising, Holle. I can’t trust these readings, but—”

“Understood.” The greatest danger of all was that the fire would melt its way through the hull altogether, and breach the pressurized compartment. There was a last-resort procedure to avert that final catastrophe, a drastic step. Holle was starting to think there was no choice. She tagged her microphone. “Kelly, are you receiving?”

“We lost her feed, Holle,” Venus reported.

“Venus, I’m thinking of cutting the tether.”

“Kelly’s out of touch. I endorse your decision. Do it.”

Holle started climbing up a ladder away from the fire, into the gathering smoke. “Can you handle the follow-up from in there? Warn Halivah. Run the internal warnings, prepare for microgravity. Take over attitude control—”

“Already on it, Holle. It’ll be fine, it will work, we rehearsed for this.”

Holle said nothing more and pressed on with her climb. Her suit felt heavy and stiff, and her hands tired quickly as she fought the gloves’ stiffness to grasp at the metal rungs. Venus was right. Yes, they had rehearsed on the ground and since launch, simulating situations almost as drastic as this. But all their years of training hadn’t prevented the fire, or stopped the situation from degenerating to this lethal point.

She reached the domed roof of the hull. With an awkward twist she flipped over onto the upside of one of the catwalks that ran beneath the dome, and fixed a safety harness buckle to a rail. She paused, breathing hard. The smoke was dense here, making it almost impossible to see, and she wiped soot away from her faceplate with a suit glove.

She found the panel that covered the tether severance handle. She punched in a security code, and flipped open the panel. The handle itself was surrounded by warnings in huge lettering. She wrapped her gloved fingers easily around the handle.

“The situation’s deteriorating, Holle,” Venus called. “Do it.”

Holle snapped the handle down.

At a junction on the tether between the hulls, close to its central point, a small explosive charge popped, silent in the vacuum. A tiny cloud of debris dispersed quickly. Since Jupiter the two hulls had been rotating about the warp generator at their common central point, completing an orbit once every thirty seconds. Now the cable that connected them was cut, and the hulls drifted apart, the severed tether coiling languidly as hundreds of tonnes of tension was released. When the particles of debris reached the wall of the warp bubble they sparkled briefly, their substance shredded by ferocious tides.

It was as if the whole hull dropped like a falling elevator car. Holle drifted up from the catwalk, and with a stab of panic she grabbed at the rail, even though she was safely anchored.

She peered down through the catwalk at the inferno below. The decks, shocked into zero gravity, were full of clouds of junk lifting into the air, furniture, handhelds, bits of clothing, food fragments, tools, even loose bolts and screws, anything not held down suddenly mobile. But the fire was the crux. She thought she saw an immediate difference in the way the smoke was billowing, and maybe the flames licked a bit less eagerly at the decking and equipment racks.

That was the idea. By cutting the tether Holle had eliminated the artificial gravity from the hull’s interior. Without gravity there was no convection; hot air could not rise, and the processes that had been sustaining the fire, the updraft that drew in fresh oxygen to feed the flames, had been eliminated. The fire still had to be doused, and there were other dangers deriving from zero-gravity fires, which could smolder unseen for days or weeks. But at least with the fire choking on its own products there was a better chance that the hull as a whole would survive.

The alarm tone changed, and now Venus’s voice rang out, relayed from the cupola. “Prepare for vernier fire. All hands prepare for vernier fire . . .”

This was the next step. Right now both hulls, released from the tether’s grip, had been flung away from the center. They could not afford to fall too far; an encounter with the warp bubble wall would destroy them. So auxiliary rockets would be fired to hold the hulls somewhere close to the bubble’s center, and to still any residual rotation. Some time in the future the hulls could be brought back together, the tether reattached, the assembly spun up again.

If the verniers fired in the first place, Holle thought. If they or their control systems hadn’t been ruined by the fire. If there was the fuel remaining to rejoin the hulls and restore their mutual rotation. If, if, if. Holle had always held in her head an image of the long chain of events that all had to occur precisely as programmed if she were ever to walk safely on the ground of Earth II. Just now she could feel that chain stretching, its weakest links straining.

A small bundle floated below her, wriggling oddly. It was a baby, Holle saw, drifting in open space. Only a few months old, bundled in a diaper, it waved bare arms and legs. With eyes and mouth opened wide, the baby seemed to be enjoying the experience of swimming in the air. But now the hull banged, as if huge fists were hammering on its exterior wall. That was the verniers, firing in hard bursts. Holle, hanging onto her rail, felt the jolts as each impulse was applied. The baby caromed off a deck plate and bounced back up in the air, limbs flailing. It was frightened now, crying. Holle unclipped herself from the catwalk and descended like an angel, folding the baby in charred spacesuit sleeves.

65

June 2048

O
n the morning Thomas Windrup’s sentencing was due to be announced Holle woke in an unfamiliar room, with odd metallic colors and strange smells. This was not her cabin, not Seba, not the hull she had come to think of as home. In the weeks since the fire she had been stationed in Halivah, hot-bunking with Paul Shaughnessy in a tiny cabin improvised from one of their own maintenance lockups. She still hadn’t got used to it.

It didn’t take her long to get dressed.

Paul was outside the cabin with their pressure suits. He waited while she used the bathroom block. Then she led the way to the hull’s nose airlock, where they suited up briskly. Holle didn’t try to engage Paul in conversation. Today he was going over to Seba to see the sentencing of the man who had tried to kill his brother by sabotaging his suit. Paul’s anger had been barely contained since the incident, and it was best to leave him be.

They cycled through the lock and out into the dark, and latched their harnesses to the cable that now linked the hulls. This wasn’t a rotation tether, and wasn’t held rigid; the cable was just a guide strung between the two hulls along which they pulled themselves hand over hand, across the two hundred meters to Seba. Traveling this way was hard work, but it saved fuel.

The hulls drifted, stationary with respect to each other but not side by side, and not even parallel; Halivah was tipped up compared to Seba, so that the two hulls lay like wrecked ships on the bottom of Earth’s ever-deepening ocean. More lengths of cable connected Halivah to the warp generator assembly, so that the components of the Ark were bound up in a kind of spiderweb, lit by externally mounted lights. And beyond the hulls lay the silent, steady stars.

Once aboard Seba, Holle and Paul made their way down to Deck Ten, proceeding by handholds down from the nose of the hull. Kelly had ordered that the sentencing of Thomas Windrup should be held in the very place where his sabotage had started the disastrous fire. Without spin up the hull was without effective gravity, and people swam everywhere, flicking from handhold to handhold. The children, all too young to remember the weightless cruise before Jupiter, loved it, and flying, tumbling, tag-chasing kids had become a minor hazard. But the hull still smelled of smoke and scorched plastic.

At Deck Ten, Kelly was waiting outside a small cabin, its door shut. Despite weeks of cleanup there was no furniture here, not even any intact decking to which furniture could be attached. But ropes had been strung across the deck from wall to blackened wall, and the gathering people hung onto the ropes, or found themselves corners where they could cling to wall fittings.

Holle seemed to be the last of the senior crew to make it here. She saw Wilson, Venus, Mike Wetherbee, Masayo Saito—even Zane, and Holle wondered which of his alternate personalities had shown up for this meeting. Doc Wetherbee was studiously avoiding everybody’s eyes. Wilson, still Kelly’s lover, bore the marks of recent hard work; he wore vest and shorts, and his muscular limbs were streaked with ash.

Jack Shaughnessy wasn’t here. Presumably he was still too feeble from the massive burns he had suffered over his arms and chest to be released by Doc Wetherbee. And Thomas Windrup wasn’t here either, to hear the verdict passed on him. Venus looked wary. As one of her colleagues in GN&C and astronomy Thomas Windrup was one of “her” people.

Kelly, subtly isolated from the crowd, checked over notes on her handheld. She was dressed in a grimy coverall. She had shaved her blond hair, and smoke and soot had stained the lines around her mouth and eyes, making her look a lot older than her thirty years. Nearly seven years of leadership had made her tougher, Holle thought, more decisive, more clear-thinking. She had done her job competently enough. But all her hard work and even her relentless search for unanimity, the hours of talking, hadn’t made her popular. Holle sometimes thought the strain was pulling her down.

Kelly glanced around at her silent crewmates. “OK,” she began. “I guess everybody who wants to be here, is here. I suspended all regular duties save the watches. You can watch the session live via the surveillance system, or the recordings we’ll make, and eventually we’ll be shipping transcripts back to Earth too.

“Today I want to draw a line under the fire. The recovery of Seba is going to take us years—we’ll probably be still working on it when we get to Earth II, in three years’ time. But we’ve already done a great deal. We buried our dead.”

Four crew—one Candidate, one gatecrasher, one illegal, and one shipborn baby—had been asphyxiated by the smoke. Four naked bodies had been sent tumbling away from the hull, to be scattered in the ferocious tidal rip of the warp bubble wall—naked because they couldn’t spare resources for coffins or flags or even clothes.

Kelly went on, “We’ve been through the flaws in our practices that led to the seriousness of the incident, once the fire started. The failures in our maintenance routines in particular. The worst contributory factor was a buildup of dust and other flammable junk behind the equipment racks in their frames against the hull walls. Each rack is supposed to be pulled out and its docking bay cleaned once a week, or more in some areas. Some looked as if they hadn’t been shifted since Jupiter.”

Kelly’s ferocious inquiry hadn’t attached any blame to Holle and her internal-systems maintenance team. The failure had been in the laxity of the regular crew, getting worse year on year, in keeping up their daily routine of cleaning out the small spaces they all had to inhabit. Doc Wetherbee had long complained about this, and butts had been kicked after an outbreak of food poisoning caused by poor hygiene in Halivah’s galley. But the spread of the fire had been a much more severe consequence.

“We’re trying to put this right from here on in. But all of us who cut corners in our cleaning routines are going to have to live with some of the responsibility for what happened to Peri and Anne and Nicholas and little Sasha.

“However, only one of us actually started the fire that did so much damage. Only one of us bears the burden of guilt. Thomas Windrup confessed, as soon as the fire was under control, and you’re aware that we ran through the surveillance records to establish that guilt independently. There’s no doubt the arson was his, just as he claimed. He was trying to kill Jack Shaughnessy. He nearly killed us all.”

Holle supposed you could say it was a crime of passion. Here among the crew, stuck on this Ark as the years wore slowly away, obsession and lust and suspicion had a way of putrefying. Thomas had never stopped believing that Jack Shaughnessy still wanted Elle, and that Jack was playing a long game, waiting until they all arrived at Earth II where he would use the new Ship’s Law about multiple fathers to claim her. On the Ark you couldn’t get away from your enemies, or even your friends. Endless chance encounters with Jack had, in the end, driven Thomas crazy—or at least crazy enough to try to kill Jack.

But Thomas hadn’t meant to hurt anybody else, he insisted. He knew Jack was due to overhaul the pressure suit he generally used. Thomas had rigged the suit so that when a test valve on the oxygen inlet was triggered, a spark would ignite a jet of oxygen, and then the materials of the suit; he had poured flammable solvent over the suit’s liner. Thomas had done much of the preparation in the dark, to avoid the ubiquitous gaze of the surveillance cameras. He planned that the fire would eliminate all trace of its own cause, his own guilt. Anyhow his plan had failed. The suit had exploded into flame, too violently. Jack hadn’t been killed but thrown back, badly burned but alive, and the resulting fire had quickly spread beyond the suit itself.

“But now we have to handle the issue of sentencing. This is the most serious crime we’ve seen aboard this Ark since we left Earth—far more serious than anything I expected to have to deal with. I’ve thought long and hard. I’ve come to a decision.” Kelly looked around at them, her face set. “And I’ve implemented that decision, with the aid of Masayo, here, and Doc Wetherbee. You know I’ve always tried to work through consensus, through unanimity if we can get it. But I thought that in this case the choice was too hard, the consequences too grave, to be debated in the open. This decision was mine alone. I bear the responsibility.

“Please hear my logic. Thomas attempted murder. On Earth, while the Denver government was still functioning, he’d have been thrown into jail, or sent to some penal work gang, endlessly building seawalls or processing camps for eye-dees. And if he’d succeeded in killing Jack Shaughnessy he might have been put to death for it. So what are we to do with him here? You Candidates will recall that we debated such issues in the Academy, and then while we were en route to Jupiter and under the auspices of Gunnison. We also have as precedent Gordo Alonzo’s verdict when Jack Shaughnessy assaulted Thomas himself back in ’43. Jack was put back to work.” She glanced at Venus. “As Venus hasn’t ceased to remind me, Thomas is her best astronomer. We need him back in the cupola, checking out Earth II. We can’t even isolate him socially because we need his genes. But this crime, which could have killed us all, is serious, and I don’t believe it can go unmarked. So what do we do?

“I did some research in the archive. We’re not the only society to face this kind of challenge—resource-stretched, yet having to deal with miscreant individuals. Medieval England, for instance, and western Europe. They evolved punishments the criminal would have to live with the rest of his or her life—and a visible deterrent to others—yet that wouldn’t stop him working. And so—” She glanced at Masayo. “You can bring him out now.”

Masayo looked highly uncomfortable, Holle thought. He pulled himself over to the door of the cabin behind Kelly, but before he opened it he glanced around, his arms folded, his chest out. “I don’t want any trouble over this. We all need to deal with it calmly, however you’re feeling. OK?”

Venus looked furious. Wilson was cold-eyed, watchful. Zane looked amused.

Masayo opened the cabin door. The interior was dark. “Come on out.” Holding onto the door frame for balance, he extended an arm into the cabin.

Thomas Windrup emerged into the light. He hung onto Masayo’s arm, and wouldn’t look anybody in the eye. His face was still puffy from the beating he’d received when Paul and a few of his illegal buddies had managed to get hold of him. But Holle thought he looked paler, more sick; he had suffered something worse than a beating.

Kelly said, “Show them.”

Clearly shamed, Thomas lifted one leg. The boot dangled, floating free in the air, and the trouser leg twisted, empty.

There were gasps, muttered oaths. Zane Glemp laughed out loud.

“Shit,” Venus said. “You took his
foot.
”

Kelly said, “It will make no difference in free fall. Clearly he’ll be impeded under gravity, on the Ark and on Earth II. But the doctor is working on a crutch for him, even an artificial foot. Obviously this won’t make any difference to the work he does for you, Venus—”

Venus turned on Wetherbee. “You did this? You’re a doctor. You mutilated him?”

Holle had never seen Mike Wetherbee more unhappy than right now. “You would say that. Everybody knows Thomas is one of yours. Anyhow it was a direct order. And who would you rather did it? Should I have let Paul Shaughnessy loose with a chain saw?”

“Don’t blame him,” Kelly said, and she drifted down so she came between Venus and Wetherbee. “The decision, the responsibility, were all mine.”

Venus took a deep breath. “I never thought I’d find myself saying this, Kelly. You know I admire you, what you’ve done for us. You’ve held us together through some tough years, especially since we lost contact with Earth. But I can’t accept your judgment over this grotesque mutilation. You maimed a healthy crewman. You compromised the doctor, and Masayo, who you turned into a strong-arm thug.

“Kelly, you hold your position as speaker through consensus. Well, I withdraw from that consensus.”

There was a lethal silence.

Holle was well aware that there had always been heated confrontations behind the scenes as Kelly tried to get decisions made. But this was the first time anybody remotely as senior as Venus had challenged Kelly in public.

Kelly snapped back, “You want the job, Venus?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying
you
need to stand down. And when you’re gone, we’ll deal with the consequences.”

“You’re just pissed because I meddled with your fiefdom. Well, I don’t have to respond to the challenge of a single individual—”

“Venus is right,” Wilson said. He had been sitting on a microgravity T-stool, his legs wrapped around its struts. Now he straightened up so he faced Kelly himself.

Kelly stared. “Wilson? What are you doing?”

“Kelly, you’ve done a great job. But things have been off course for a while. Not keeping to the cleanup rotas—we wouldn’t be in this mess if not for that.” He gestured at Thomas. “And you sure got
this
wrong. This isn’t a road we can go down. You need to let somebody else take this burden off your shoulders.”

“Like who? You?” But he didn’t back down. Kelly’s face worked, her eyes hard yet red-rimmed, as if she might cry. “You bastard, Wilson. You’re betraying me. Did you set this up? Cook it up between you behind my back?”

Wilson spread his hands. “We’re just two crew members expressing an opinion.”

“Fine. If that’s what you want. I stand down.” She folded her arms and pushed herself back, so she drifted between Masayo and Thomas.

There was another long silence. Nobody moved.

Holle realized that Kelly hadn’t just given up her post as speaker, she’d abandoned chairing this meeting too. As an instinctive backroom worker Holle didn’t like to be personally exposed in this kind of charged atmosphere. But she was always prodded by duty, duty. If nobody else shoveled the shit, she would. Even literally, sometimes.

She pulled herself into the space Kelly had vacated. “We need to move on. Anybody object if I chair the meeting from here on in?”