Stephen Baxter - Ark

Holle tried to concentrate on the country outside, and ignore the chafing of her suit. The idea of the sim was to get them used to how they might have to live and work in the first days and months after their landing on Earth II. Their yet-to-be-decided destination was expected to be Earthlike, otherwise there would be no point going there in the first place, enough that you would be able to walk around outdoors without a pressure suit. But you would almost certainly need a sealed environment suit. The partial pressure of oxygen might be too low or too high, there might be various toxins floating around, and even, conceivably, some biohazard that might target your utterly alien system.

But Holle detested her suit. Supposedly manufactured by AxysCorp in its high-tech base in the Andes before it was overrun by rebels, the suit was made of a smart material designed to let her skin sweat normally, while filtering out any pasties from the environment. The mask over her mouth secreted a moisturizer and mild anaesthetic to ease the friction with her skin. There were light packs on her chest and shoulders containing supplies for the suit scrubbers, and fresh water and food. Her goggles were self-cleaning and demisting, which was fine until they broke down.

She ought to be able to survive without replenishment sealed up in this thing for twenty-four hours, and with replenishment indefinitely-the manufacturers’ lower limit was a month. She understood the necessity of learning how to live and work in such conditions. But after a few hours in the suit she always began to feel like a pale, desiccating worm, as the joints chafed and the thing filled up with her own stink. On sim days you had the additional irritation of medical sensors taped to your skin, and the unnerving presence of miniature cameras on your shoulder and helmet-even inside your helmet, so your face could be watched at all times.

Most of the Candidates didn’t mind enclosure, or even the continual surveillance. They talked quietly, pulling absently at cramping folds in the suits. They had all been raised in enclosed, heavily monitored environments since they had joined the program, for most of them, for most of their lives. But Holle hoped that Earth II would be benign enough for her to be able to take her gloves and boots off, to soothe her feet in running water and run her fingers through alien soil, and maybe feel the breeze on an exposed cheek.

They passed through Nederland, an old mining camp that had become a hippyish tourist magnet, and then, like everywhere else, a camp and processing center for the dispossessed. They headed on west toward Brainard Lake. From here the views of the Wilderness mountains opened up, and the Candidates leaned toward the bus’s small windows to see. The scenery was spectacular, and it was unusual to take in a view that had no humans in it; these rocky slopes were too steep for the most desperate of refugees to cling to. But the mountains were bare of life, safe for withering trees; the shifting climate zones had made the slopes unviable. Though it was December there was no snow save on the highest slopes. There had been no snow at all in Denver, not for a couple of years.

As they neared the sim site, Holle saw smoke climbing into the air, black and oily. At last they approached what looked like a tangle of wreckage, scattered across a rocky plain.

The bus pulled up and the doors hissed open. The Candidates filed off, and stepped down onto stony ground. They had nothing but the suits they stood up in, save for Don who carried a canvas bag.

The bus sealed itself up and pulled away, tailed by the other vehicles. Holle wondered where the surveillance eyes were. They would be watched constantly for security, and backup would never be far away.

The Candidates looked around at the wreckage that littered the ground, the twisted metal and plastic panels and the tangle of cables and pipes. Boxes of supplies, toughened to withstand impact, were strewn about. Somebody had started a fire where plastic popped and melted, creating that pillar of black smoke. Gruesomely, dummies dressed up in environment suits had been thrown over the ground, their plastic limbs broken back in unnatural angles. Some of them were children-sized, like seven- or eight-year-olds perhaps, and there were a couple of bright orange sacks, like holdalls, that were baby shelters. Children being an element of exercises like these was a new thing, and followed the social engineers’ newest pronouncements about breeding and demography which had shaken everybody up.

Don pulled a plastic splint out of his pack, and beckoned to Zane. “Good news, buddy, you’re a casualty.” Resigned, Zane rested one hand on Don’s back as he slipped his leg into the splint, which inflated rapidly.

Don stepped back, leaving Zane on the ground, his “bad” leg stuck out in front of him, and addressed the group. “OK. Your shuttle has crashed, here on Earth II. You can see your gear scattered around. You’re far from the other shuttles and there are no comms; there’s no rescue possible in the short term. Air pressure is normal, gravity is high, but the air is unbreathable-acidic. Keep your suits sealed up. You can see you had casualties, Zane here with a broken limb, some deaths. I was told that the rest of you ought to improvise injuries, and generally remember how beat-up you’d be after a crash.”

Kelly nodded at that. “Sensible enough.” Always eager, she bent down to one of the dummies, used a pocketknife to cut away a strip of environment-suit leg, and wrapped it around her upper body as a sling, improvising a broken arm.

Don said, “That’s all I know. I’m not here. Exercise starts now.”

“Suit integrity check,” Kelly said immediately. “Double up.”

They didn’t need her to say it; the first priority was to keep the living alive. They quickly paired up, Holle with Mel, Kelly with Matt. Susan, Venus and Zane worked together, the two women huddled over Zane down on the ground.

Holle ran a quick visual inspection of Mel’s suit, seeking obvious damage, and checked his chest display. For verisimilitude she slapped some sealant from a tube taken from her own leg pouch over a nonexistent rip at the back of his neck, and topped up his air-scrubber compounds with a sachet drawn from Mel’s own backpack and dropped into a slot over his chest. Mel did the same for her; he faked a remedy for a suspected slow leak by tying off her suit just below the elbow on one arm.

Standing there with her arm in a sling, Kelly looked around, checking they were all done. She naturally assumed the role of leader in situations like this. “OK, so nobody else is going to die in the next ten seconds. Matt, will you take care of that fire? Now the injured. Susan, why don’t you see what you can do for Zane? I see a first-aid pack over there, under that heap of blankets. The rest of you, let’s take a look at the other casualties in the wreckage. Watch out for any injuries you’ve sustained yourself.”

“Yes, mother,” said Venus Jenning, and they laughed.

Holle clambered into the “wreckage” of the shuttle. She had to avoid the pockets of flame, and flinched back from the sharp edges that seemed to have been artfully positioned by the exercise designers to catch an unwary arm or leg. As the Candidates immersed themselves in this latest in a long line of puzzle-exercises Holle heard chatter, subdued laughter. But she found the experience oddly uncomfortable. Sometimes she thought she was plagued with an excess of imagination. She could envisage a scene like this being played out in the first few seconds after arrival on a hostile Earth II, under a lowering alien sky, with all of them badly shocked and loved ones lost, and knowing that death could be seconds away, the consequence of a single careless act. There would be none of the brisk confidence then, no muttered jokes.