Stephen Baxter - Ark

Don forced a smile, and adjusted his chinstrap. “As much as you’d expect. We’d both rather have sent Dexter, but they ain’t taking two-year-olds. Kelly’s gone on our behalf, to live on a new world as we’ll never be able to. As for me, what the future holds God only knows. At one time I had a career path, you know. Worked in the city, in a CAPs squad under an officer called Bundy. Good man.”

“CAPs?”

“Crimes Against Persons. Homicides and assault. It was regular police work. And I was smart. I was thinking of going into Special Investigations. It was compensation, you know, for being thrown out of the Academy. But we kept being pulled out to go man some barricade or other, or break up another food riot at another eye-dee camp. Now it’s all kind of liquefying, and so much for my career plans.” He looked at Mel. “But there’s still work to be done. If you like I’ll put in a word, and-hey, we’re there.”

The truck growled to a stop. The officer let down the tailgate, and the troopers clambered down. There was a sound of gunfire, a stink of burning, a pall of smoke.

Don beckoned to Mel. Stick with me. They made their way across broken ground, the smashed foundations of some building. The gunfire, the shouting and the screams, got louder. I should be on the Ark right now, Mel thought. Not here.

They came to a trench system, and at the officer’s signal dropped down into it and made their way along in a file, Mel sticking close to Don’s back. This trench had been dug out carefully. It was walled with sheets of plastic, and it twisted this way and that, a snakelike layout to reduce the damage from a grenade blast that would clean out a straight-line ditch. The defense of the Ark launch site, on this ultimate day, had been planned over months and years.

There was a deep, double-barreled thrumming noise. Mel looked to the west, and he saw the unmistakable profile of a Chinook helicopter rise up, huge and ugly, its double rotors turning, silhouetted against the darkling sky. It swept low over the ground, and guns in its nose spat visible fire at the trenches.

“Not one of ours,” Don shouted.

With a thunderous crash two more aircraft roared in, passing north to south and screaming over the Chinook. Mel, an air force brat, was pretty sure they were F-35s, Lightnings. Everybody cowered; the aircraft noise, vast and oppressive, was terrifying. But there was no firing; maybe the Lightnings were short of munitions. He yelled, “Where the hell did they get a Chinook?”

“Some rogue faction in the army or air force. Or maybe it’s the Mormons. I told you it’s a mess-”

There was a muffled boom.

“Mortar!”

“Down!”

The shell looped over them. Mel felt Don’s hand on the back of his neck, pushing him facedown onto a torn plastic sheet. The shell passed over them and detonated, and the ground shook.

Mel got up gingerly. “Somebody got a mortar.”

“Yeah,” Don breathed. “And now they got their range.”

The officer leading them pointed. “You, you, and you two, take out that damn mortar. The rest of you follow me.”

“That’s us,” Don said. The other two picked out by the officer had already scrambled over the trench wall, and were making their way west, the way the mortar had come from. Don squirmed up and out after them.

Mel followed without thinking. He lunged over the perimeter and got down into the dirt, crawling after the other three, trying to keep up, squirming through the mud toward a mortar nest. It’s for you, Holle, he thought. All of it’s for you.

The others got to the mortar pit before Mel could catch up, and rushed it. Mel heard the slam of a grenade, screams, and then a bloody gurgle.

By the time he reached the pit Don was already clambering down into it. The mortar itself, looking antiquated, was ruined, but there was a pile of shells that looked salvageable. Don and the others were pawing through them. There was a butcher-shop stink of blood and burned flesh. There had been two people in the pit, Mel saw. One, a man, had been blown in half by the grenade that had destroyed the mortar, his legs reduced to shreds. But he had a pistol in his hand, and blood ran down his chest. He had evidently resisted his attackers.

The other in the pit was a woman. Bloodied, she wore the ragged remains of a dress. She was holding a baby, Mel saw, astonished. The kid, no more than a few months old, was wrapped in a filthy blanket. He was awake, but seemed too stunned to cry. When the mother saw Mel, she held the baby up to him and stumbled forward. “Please-”

A single shot from one of the soldiers felled her, leaving her sprawled on the broken ground, her back a bloody ruin where the bullet had exited.

An engine roar crashed down from above.

“Down!” Don yelled.

Mel threw himself flat on the ground. He pulled the baby from its mother’s arms, tried to cradle it under his body armor, and tucked his helmet down over his face. The roar overhead grew louder, and light splashed around him. He risked a glance up. That Chinook was directly overhead, barely visible behind the glare of its spotlight. Mel thought he saw figures in an open hatch, aiming some kind of weapon at the ground, like a bazooka.

A plane came screaming in, an F-35, no more than fifty meters off the ground. The Chinook gave up on the trenches. It rose up, dipped its nose and headed east, straight toward the center of the Zone, and the Ark, surely its ultimate target. The F-35 continued its run. Mel waited for it to open up its cannon, or fire an air-to-air missile, or evade. It did none of these. No ammunition, he remembered.

The plane rammed the chopper.

The explosion hammered at the ground, and filled the sky with light. Mel cowered in the broken mud, clutching the baby, and waited for the wreckage to rain down.

The baby started crying.

Wilson lay beside Kelly and Venus in their acceleration couches on the bridge of the Ark’s crew hull B, called Seba. “One minute,” Venus said.

Wilson couldn’t keep from talking. “Jesus. We must be insane. A fucking atom bomb is about to go off, right under my ass.”

Kelly grinned at him. “Too late to bale now.”

Venus said, “And this is going to be Gunnison’s worst day since the Alien fought the Predator.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Everything’s nominal.” Businesslike as ever, she checked the displays before them.

The Ark was very heavy engineering, but it was also very simple, and there were few instruments. Aside from housekeeping displays showing the condition of the air inside the pressurized hulls and the acceleration to which the crew would be exposed, gauges showed the pulse-detonation timing rate, and the levels in the tanks of anti-ablation oil and coolant fluid, and the pressures in the steam lines. The controls were simple too, a manual control of the pulse unit drop rate, a T-handle and stick to adjust the bird’s attitude. These were a last-ditch resort if the automatics failed. However, Wilson knew, nobody had survived a sim in which some faked disaster had made it necessary to use the controls.

And now, in these last seconds, Wilson could feel the beast stir, as the nuclear pulse units in their charge magazines were lined up in the throats of their delivery mechanisms, and the coolant liquids began to pump around the great pistons. He glanced over the monitors that showed the crew in their rows of seats, deep in the bowels of the hull. The bright amber launch-imminent lamps were flashing, and a voice message resounded at every level. But people were still fighting over the couches.

“Twenty seconds,” Kelly said, matter-of-fact.

Wilson felt his anus clench. “Shit, shit.”

“Fixed, damn it,” Matt yelled, and his voice echoed from the metal walls around him.