Stephen Baxter - Ark

Then they came to a slight rise, and Holle was able to see further to the east, along the line of the old I-70 and beyond the limit of the fortifications. As far as she could see the road was full of people, gray with them, a river of humanity pouring along the highway toward Denver, spilling onto the verges and crowding under the battered road signs. This was the invading army all these defenses were intended to repel. She heard the distant pop of rifles, a crump of grenades.

“So you’re the concrete mixer,” a man said, behind her. “I was after you in the line.”

She turned. He wore a patched AxysCorp coverall; he was aged perhaps fifty, but looked strong, like a farmer, with big, dirt-encrusted hands. She said defiantly, “So what, are you going to turn me in?”

“Not me. I don’t know much about construction.” He looked at his big hands. “But I used to run a smallholding, on the east bank of Back Squirrel Creek. I can use my hands. I can dig a ditch or lay a fence, I think. Anyhow sooner here than in the combat units, or the Honor Corps.”

“What is the Honor Corps?”

“Look.” He pointed to blocks of people sitting passively just behind the fortifications on the highway surface. “If they get through the fence our eye-dee friends are going to have to fight their way through that. Could you take a machete to a disabled boy in his wheelchair? It’s a human shield, an old tactic perfected by Saddam Hussein-well, I suppose you’ve never heard of him.”

“Never work,” somebody said, a burly man in a hard hat. “If those eye-dees have fought their way through the National Guard they’ll not stop for that.”

“But they aren’t monsters,” the smallholder said gently. “They are like us. They’re Americans.”

“Tell you what I’d do. Grab those guys in front, give them a gun, and turn them around the other way. That would work, let them grind each other down. Eye-dee bastards…”

“Looks like I found you just in time.”

Holle whirled. Kelly was standing right behind her, in a drab olive green coverall, a rifle in her hand and a phone clamped to her ear. Holle felt a peculiar mixture, of intense emotions and yet a kind of disappointment. She was aware of how the smallholder pulled away, watching her. She hugged Kelly. “You came for me.”

“Well, you did bring me those bags of diapers,” Kelly said. “Come on, Mel is waiting in a jeep back beyond those processing desks. We can catch up to the buses but we’ll have to cut across country.”

They hurried away, back down the line. Kelly had a pass she kept flashing at the supervising soldiers and cops. Holle glanced back, looking for the smallholder, and for Mrs. Green in the shield units, but she couldn’t see them. It was hard to believe how lost she had felt just seconds ago.

“How did you find me?”

“Not easily,” Kelly shouted. “You’d be surprised how many Holle Groundwaters passed through here today. But you made the right choice, to bullshit your way into the construction corps. If you’d been sent out to the front, out to the fucking First World War they’re mounting out there, I couldn’t have got to you. I’d like to have seen you try to mix concrete, though. Hah! Listen, by the way. It worked.”

“What did?”

“The warp test. We saw it. Or rather Venus and the planet-finders in Alma did. The optical distortion-the gravitational lensing as it went past the face of the moon-it was unmistakable. They sent a feed to the buses.”

“My God.” Holle looked up to the sky, trying to imagine the relativistic miracle that had come to pass far above her head, all on the same day as the urban horrors she had gone through. It didn’t seem to fit, as if it wasn’t possible for both these things to be true. One must be false, or the other.

Automatic fire clattered. Kelly dragged her down. Holle fell heavily, old bruises aching.

And a bomb went off, the detonation massive, overwhelming. The ground shook and hot air washed over them. Holle found herself covered in dust, with her ears full of a close ringing noise.

Kelly stirred, and helped Holle get to her feet.

Not everybody had reacted as quickly as Kelly. All around them people had been thrown to the ground. Their mouths moved, but Holle couldn’t hear their voices.

She was distracted by a metallic glinting, off to her right, out along the line of the highway to the east. The attack on the junction seemed to have been the signal for the eye-dee army to mount an advance. They cut their way through the lines of the city’s conscript army, a gray swarm washing through the brown lines, marked by a sparkle of knives and machetes rising and falling in the morning sun, and rising puffs of smoke from the guns.

Kelly was tugging her sleeve, shouting in her face to get her attention. Kelly’s face was dust-coated, blood trickled from her mouth, and her hair was a tangle. Holle couldn’t hear a word she said.

A wall of dust was scouring along the 470, away from the intersection where the bomb had exploded, driving people like cattle.

They turned and ran.

August 2041

Inside, the office block in Alma was corridors and offices and computer rooms, suffused by a hum of air-conditioning. It reminded Grace Gray of facilities aboard Lammockson’s Ark Three, the bridge, the engine room, the ship she’d left only that morning, and would now never return to.

She and Holle Groundwater didn’t meet anybody else until the corridor opened out into a glass-fronted room with banks of chairs, microphones, screens. Through the glass Grace saw a larger chamber, dug some way into the ground so that she was looking down on rows of people before consoles, where screens glowed brightly, text and images flowing. Before them the front wall was covered by two huge screens. One showed a map of the world-continents outlined in blue, surviving high ground glowing bright green-with pathways traced over it. On the second screen concentric circles surrounded a glowing pinpoint, each circle labeled with a disc. Gary’s amateur education program had always heavily favored science. Grace understood that she was looking at a map of the solar system.

Holle was watching her curiously. Grace felt utterly out of place in this technological cave, still in the clothes she had put on that morning on Ark Three, with her pitiful collection of belongings lost forever.

“This is at the heart of what we do,” Holle said.

“What is this place?”

“Mission Control. We’re running a simulation right now-”

“And this?” Grace held up the key-ring globe Gordo had given her.

“Our spaceship.” Holle smiled, a basic humanity shining through the competitiveness. “Come on. You look like you need a coffee. We’ll talk about how Harry Smith got killed. And I’ll tell you how we got started here.”

The restaurant was square, basic, reminiscent of one of Ark Three’s feeding stations. Holle went to fetch coffees, and Grace sat at a plastic-topped table and looked around. You helped yourself to food from big pots and trays, and drinks from dispensers. The food was piled high. The staple seemed to be some kind of chili, made of what looked like real meat, not the processed fish or seaweed Grace had been eating the last few years aboard Ark Three. The smell made her feel hungry, she hadn’t eaten since being taken off Ark Three hours ago, hours that felt like days. And she had her old walker instinct that you should eat what you could, when you could. But her stomach was a knot, and she wondered if the food might be too rich for her.

The walls were bare, unpainted. Everything was functional, nothing decorative. One wall was dominated by a huge clock, counting down:

124 DAYS 6 HOURS 12 MINUTES 14 SECONDS