Stephen Baxter - Ark

She found the body of a woman, lying facedown, impaled on a shard of metal through the belly. Holle checked the woman’s suit monitors, which were mostly functioning but showed no sign of life. She slipped off her outer glove, so that her hand was covered only by a delicate skin-tight inner glove with fine fingertip pads. She dug her fingers into a rip at the woman’s suit neck; she could find no pulse. Then she pulled off the woman’s own glove and tried feeling for a pulse at her wrist.

She stepped back, and tried to roll the woman on her back. The “body” was heavier than she had expected, maybe weighted to simulate the supposedly higher gravity. She dug her hands under the woman’s torso, straightened her back and tried again. This time the woman rolled, and Holle had to jump back as the bit of metal on which the mannequin was impaled swung upwards. The twisted sliver of hull was thrust straight into an obviously pregnant belly. “Oh, Jesus.” Just for one second she felt her throat tighten, a foul-tasting liquid push into the back of her mouth. But she swallowed hard. She took a pocketknife and slit open the suit over that pregnant belly. Then she pressed the palm of her bloodied under-glove to the woman’s undergarment and let the fingertip pads work as a stethoscope.

Kelly was beside her. “You OK?”

“Yeah. Got me for a second.”

“Those sim designers are bastards, aren’t they? Always trying to catch us out. But you seriously do not want to throw up in one of these face masks. I should know; I lost my breakfast yesterday morning, back in the NARC.”

“You did? How so?”

Kelly shrugged. “I guess just something I ate. They shouldn’t give us pregnant women to deal with. There won’t be any pregnant women when we make planetfall.”

Kelly was a stickler for the plan, whatever the plan was at a given moment. It was a strength or a weakness, depending on circumstances. Holle said, “No pregnancies if everybody obeys the rules.”

“OK, OK, you sound like Harry. We have to train for all contingencies. You found a heartbeat in there?”

“No.” And Holle was thankful they wouldn’t have to go through the gruesome procedure of getting the body into a blowup shelter and performing an emergency Caesarean.

“Then you’d better give me a hand with this kid over here. My arm, you know, trust me to break the damn thing…” She led Holle over to another “victim,” one of the child-sized mannequins.

Their exercises had begun to include children because the social engineers had suddenly decreed that women pregnant at launch time would be allowed on board the Ark. The idea was to increase genetic diversity at little additional cost in terms of volume, weight and life support at launch; the births could be handled during the cruise to Jupiter with remote support from doctors on Earth. The net result would be, if they followed the nominal mission plan, a small echelon of seven- or eight-year-olds on their hands when they got to Earth II. This drastic new ruling, coming out of the blue with only a couple of years left until launch date, had led to wild speculation and sexual jockeying among the Candidates.

The dummy child lay over a hull strut, his back surely broken, and his upper body was pinned by a tangled mass of wreckage. “The sim designers went to town on this poor kid,” Kelly said. “They ought to provide a few real-life eight-year-olds in these sims; they won’t all be killed on planetfall.”

Holle laughed. “Who’d entrust their children to us?” She crouched down by the “boy.” His chest was crushed, and his pelvis seemed smashed too. She began the grisly ritual of checking for signs of life.

At length all the bodies had been checked. The corpses were moved out of the wreckage, lined up on the ground a few meters from the main crash site, and covered by a bit of cowling.

This time Mel took the lead. He looked around at a featureless lid of sky. “If the timing here on Earth II matches that on Earth, it’s late afternoon and we ought to think about shelter. In the morning we can strip the bodies and dispose of the remains. Anybody volunteer to speak for the dead?”

“I’ll do that,” Susan Frasier said mildly.

Kelly glanced around. “I’d say we should stay close by the wreck. There’s wind shelter here, and we won’t have to move our gear-the water, the air recycler, the food boxes. Matt, you got that fire out?”

“Yeah. No toxic leaks, no fuel spill-we’re pretty safe here.”

Mel nodded. “So we set up the shelters here. I’ll lead one party-Venus, will you take the other?”

“Sure.”

The rule on the ground, as in space, was always safety through redundancy. So though just one of the big fold-out shelters the shuttle carried would have been more than big enough for the pitiful handful of “survivors” of this simulated crash, they dutifully laid out two, side by side in the faked wreckage, and pulled pins to let their struts inflate, forming roomy, angular domes. The shelters were bright orange, like their pressure suits, and were made of tough Kevlar surrounding an airtight inner hull. The shelters were soon hooked up to power units, air scrubbers and water recyclers, all retrieved from the crash and checked over for damage.

Mel decreed that pitons needed to be driven into the stony ground and guy ropes attached against the threat of wind, but the mocked-up radiation and ultraviolet readings his sensors supplied indicated they didn’t need any more in the way of radiation shielding, such as a layer of dirt over the fabric hulls. And he decided that for the sake of morale the shelters would be physically joined, with single-thickness zip-up panels leading to a connecting airlock between them.

With the crash site safed and the shelters secured, the crew clambered inside, crawling in with parcels of food and spare clothing. Don joined them, strictly breaking the rules of the sim. The two couples, Mel and Holle, Don and Kelly, took Alpha, as Mel had called his dome. Meanwhile Zane, Venus, Susan and Matt took Beta. Because of Zane’s fake leg break he had to be manhandled through the airlock into the shelter.

Holle and Mel crawled around their shelter gleefully, soon losing track of Kelly and Don. The interior was big, roomy, a masterpiece of fold-out architecture, with inflatable panels dividing the shelter up into wedge-shaped sectors, and a central pillar where they could set up a shower room and galley and do some science, investigating the planetary environment within which they were going to have to spend their lives.

But all that could wait. Almost at random Holle and Mel settled on a wedge sector to serve as their own. The sloping roof was just high enough, at the center, to stand. The light came from thick double-paned windows, and a wall panel that glowed brightly.

They threw their bundles of blankets and clothing on the floor and faced each other. With a rasp of Velcro Mel pushed back his hood, pulled his goggles away from his eyes, leaving red panda rims, and pulled his mask away from his mouth; it came off his skin with a sucking sound. He ran his hand over his close-shaved scalp. “Thank Christ for that.”

“You stink.”

“And you do a great slow strip out of an envo-suit.”

“You pervert.” She grabbed his chest panel and pulled; it came away easily, and then she pushed up his vest.

He went to work on her, unzipping zips and opening buckles and clasps and ripping Velcro seals. They were trained to get out of their suits fast, if need be, and were naked in seconds. He was already hard when he reached for her, and she squealed and jumped up at him. It took one lunge for him to be inside her, and then she had her arms around his neck, his strong hands under her thighs, and he walked, flexing his feet, letting gravity draw them together. Then, their lips locked, they fell together to the floor.