Stephen Baxter - Ark

“I lost power, in number three elevator.”

“Wait… I can see. We lost power all down that side, a generator broke down. Damn.” Liu sounded desperately tense. What they feared above all was multiple failure, one problem compounding another. “You still on that coolant leak? You fixed it yet?”

“Negative.” Matt resisted the urge to snap; of course he hadn’t, in the couple of minutes since he’d left Liu’s side. Liu was juggling a hundred tasks simultaneously, all as urgent as Matt’s; time must be stretching for Liu, in this last hour of his life. “I’m still on my way up.”

“We can’t get power back until-I don’t know. Matt, can you improvise? Yes, Mary, what is it?…”

Matt snapped off the comms link. Improvise. Well, there was no choice, and there were access ladders fixed all over the ship.

He fixed his tool pack on his back, grabbed the manual handle, and hauled the gate open. The nearest ladder was just outside the cage, and there was a rail to which he clipped a safety attachment to his belt. He got hold of the rail, swung out one foot, and reached the nearest rung. He tugged the safety harness to test it. Then he looked up into the cathedral of gleaming metal forms above him, and began to climb.

As he passed, monitor cameras swiveled to track him.

From the ramp, Holle followed Kelly across a mesh floor and through a brightly lit chamber, before they joined yet another line for access to the higher decks.

Holle looked up through layers of flooring. This crew hull was an upright cylinder. In fact the hull was a remodeling of one of the big propellant tanks of the Ares V booster, and a relic of the project’s dysfunctional design process; when the decision was made to scrap the use of Ares boosters and fly with Orion, the engineers had scrambled to make use of the components of the abandoned Ares technology. The hull was divided into decks by mesh panels that could be disassembled to open up the interior space. For now the decks were set out with the crew’s fold-out acceleration couches. Down through the center of the mesh flooring came a pole, like a fireman’s pole. One by one the crew were climbing metal rungs bolted to the pole’s side.

They reached that central ladder. Kelly went up first, Holle following, climbing up through the hull.

The hull’s interior architecture was modeled on what had been proven to work on the space station, with color schemes and lighting strips designed to help you orient yourself in zero gravity, and a variety of fold-out stores, workstations and consoles. There were Velcro pads and handholds everywhere, in readiness for free fall. For now the only important functionality was on the twin bridges, situated in the nose of each crew hull, and the workstation screens all showed the impassive, reassuring face of Gordo Alonzo, with a blurred view of the Pikes Peak launch control center behind him, and a countdown clock.

But Gordo’s voice was drowned out. On each deck there was chaos. People were in the couches, tightening their harnesses and plugging in comms and waste systems. But Holle saw others arguing over seats, waving tokens in each other’s faces. While most people were in standard-issue flight suits as she was, a significant number weren’t. She didn’t even recognize a good number of the people on board.

She called up to Kelly, “Where’s security? How the hell did these people get aboard?”

“Doesn’t matter,” Kelly called down, climbing the ladder as determinedly as she’d climbed the ramp. “There is no security any more, Holle, not in here. It’s up to us now. We’ll sort it out in space. This is your deck, right?”

“Yes.” Kelly had to go on to the bridge. “Have a good trip, Kel.”

Kelly grinned, exhilarated, fearless. “This is what I waited all my life for. You bet it will be a good one. See you beyond the moon.” She clambered on, heading up out of sight, while Holle stepped off the ladder.

She found her own couch easily enough, one of an empty pair. Your couch was numbered to match your boarding token. The couch was a simple foldaway affair of plastic and foam, but it had been molded to the shape of her body, and she’d got used to it in training; she settled into it now with relief, and tucked her pack into the space underneath.

She saw Theo Morell, the general’s son, trying to climb down the fireman’s pole, moving in a different direction from everybody else, in a coverall too big for him. Holle called over, “Theo. Hey, Theo!”

He looked around, confused by the noise. Then he saw her and came over hesitantly. “Holle?”

“You look lost.”

“Somebody’s in my couch,” he said miserably. “Up on Deck Nine. I showed her my token, the number on it, but she just said-”

“Never mind.” She looked at his anguished face. She ought to hate him; he had taken Mel’s place. “Here. Take this one, beside me.”

“But it doesn’t match my number.” He dug in his pocket. “I have the token-”

“Things have got a bit chaotic. Just sit down, strap in, and if whoever has the number for that seat comes along-well, we can deal with that when it happens. Look, put your pack under the couch. You have your pack, don’t you?”

“I lost it,” he said. “I got knocked off the pole.”

“God, Theo, you’re a clown. Well, you’ve got years to find it before we get to Earth II. Just pray it doesn’t hit somebody on the head when we launch. Come on, sit down and strap in.”

Hesitantly at first, but then with relief, he obeyed her and clicked home his harness. They were lying on their backs, as if in dentists’ chairs, staring at the deck above. Somewhere above their heads, the noise of an argument over a couch grew louder.

Don Meisel took Mel’s arm and pulled him out of the line for the passenger buses that would have taken him out of the blast zone. Don was in combat gear, wearing a heavy bulletproof vest and carrying an automatic weapon. Under his helmet his face was smeared with dark cream, but it was streaked by sweat on his forehead and under his eyes. “You up for a little action?”

“Are you serious? I haven’t fired a gun in years.”

“We need everybody we can get. Although you fly boys never could shoot straight anyhow. Come on.” He set off jogging toward a big, blunt-nosed military truck in bottle green.

Mel had to wait as a bus roared past him, heading down the heavily reinforced corridor away from the Candidate Hilton and out of the blast zone. Then he followed helplessly.

“So,” Don asked as he jogged, “you see Holle off?”

“I chickened out,” Mel admitted. “Seeing her through a wall of glass-what difference would it have made?”

“Fair enough,” Don said, jogging. “Best to keep busy.”

“So what’s going on?”

“Action all around the perimeter. Here.” There was a heap of armor and weaponry by the truck; Don handed Mel police body armor, helmet and gun. “They’re coming in worse from the west just now. We think it’s an abider faction. But it’s hard to tell, everything’s mixed up to hell with eye-dees and rogue elements of cops and military and National Guard running around everywhere. You strapped up? All aboard.” He helped Mel climb up onto the bed of the truck.

There were maybe twenty troopers jammed in here, cops and National Guard and regular army troops. An officer tied up the tailboard, and they rolled off, heading west, with an engine roar and a plume of dust rising up into the evening dark. The truck followed a trail of white rags tied to sticks, evidently leading it through a minefield.

Don stared straight ahead. Mel couldn’t judge his mood. “So-you OK with everything? The launch and stuff.”