Stephen Baxter - Ark

“Roger that, Wilson. Take it easy now. Have another break, let your eyes adjust. All your systems are go, your consumables are fine. You could stay out there another twelve hours if you had to. You’ve plenty of time.”

“Copy.”

He deliberately steadied his breathing. He turned, looking back the way he had come. And there were Earth and moon, hanging in space, visible now that the pusher plate eclipsed the sun. Both showed half-discs, separated only by about as much as the moon’s diameter as seen from the surface of the Earth. He held up his thumb, and was able to cover both of the twin worlds. In the first few days, as they had looked back at the receding home planet, they had all been shocked by how little land remained. Even Colorado, which had seemed so extensive when they were down there living on it, was only a scatter of muddy islands, threatened by the huge curdled semipermanent storms that stalked the ocean world. But from here he could see no detail.

They had already come so far. The brief, explosive Orion launch had hurled them directly away from the Earth, without pausing in orbit, and they would cruise with only minor course adjustments all the way to Jupiter, slowing as they climbed out of the sun’s gravity well. But right now they were traveling at an astounding speed: eighty-five thousand feet per second in Gordo’s astronaut units, or twenty-six kilometers a second, or fifty-eight thousand miles per hour. This was more than twice as fast as any human had traveled before; the record had been held by an Apollo crew.

Even at such speeds the whole journey was expected to take them a year. But in their forty days so far they had already traveled around ninety million kilometers-more than two hundred times the distance from Earth to moon, around a tenth of the distance to Jupiter, orders of magnitude further from Earth than any human before them. Even light took a nontrivial time to span such distances. It was astounding to think that the image he saw of Earth was already five minutes old.

Slowly, as he watched, the silent stars came out, filling the sunless sky beyond the bright Earth.

“Argent, cupola. You OK out there, big guy?”

“Yeah. Just taking in the view.”

“You ready to proceed?”

“Roger that.”

“The arm will move you to plate sector one-A…”

The arm juddered into motion again, swinging him closer to the pusher plate. He sighed, and turned away from the Earth.

Grace Gray found Kelly Kenzie at her station on Seba’s fourth deck, a few minutes before the crew council meeting was due to start. Grace hauled herself up from Deck Five along one of the cables that had been strung between the decks to help with mobility during this weightless cruise, and swiveled around to arrive legs first. She carried a handheld, and now sent it spinning through the air.

Kelly caught it easily and began to inspect it. Kelly, alongside Holle Groundwater and Zane Glemp, sat with her legs wrapped around her T-stool’s restraint bar. She had handhelds and scratch pads scattered on the tabletop in front of her, held in place with Velcro pads, though a couple of styluses floated in the air. Kelly looked stressed, sleepless. Grace knew that she had found the first couple of months of her command of this trans-Jupiter mission tougher than she’d expected. But then, she faced problems none of them had planned for.

Holle smiled at Grace, and poured her a coffee. This involved injecting the liquid from a flask into a mug with a nozzle like a baby’s first cup.

“Thanks.” Grace sipped the coffee cautiously. It was pretty foul, and was likely to get fouler once they started running low on the compressed, freeze-dried ingredients in a few years’ time. She settled in place, with her back against a wall.

Kelly thumbed the handheld, scrolling through Grace’s report, occasionally muttering expletives under her breath. “This is the complete census?”

“I spoke to everybody, in both hulls,” Grace said. “I checked their boarding tokens, if they had them, and biometric ID. I even got their names independently verified, and checked their claims about their skill sets and genetic background with Gordo on the ground.”

Holle asked, “You didn’t have any trouble getting the data?”

Grace shrugged. “It was fine. I guess the fact that I don’t belong to any one faction was an advantage. Everybody distrusts me equally.”

Holle eyed Grace’s belly. “You’re nine months gone, but you’ve taken to weightlessness better than some of us Candidates. Life in space is a pain in the arse, isn’t it? All the little things. You can’t wash or shower like you can on the ground. You can’t even use toothpaste without it floating into your eye…”

Grace smiled carefully. Holle was about the most open of the Candidates, and she’d always been friendly since Gordo had foisted gatecrasher Grace on her last year. But even Holle struck Grace as spoiled. The Candidates constantly carped about their lot, and rarely empathized with the plight of those millions, maybe even still billons, suffering on the drowning Earth. She patted her belly. “This doesn’t seem so bad to me. The spacesickness was no worse than morning sickness. And zero G helps me carry this lump around, I guess.” Though there were other side-effects. Sometimes her body emitted alarming gurgling noises, as it tried to compensate for the lack of the gravity field that every other baby since Cain and Abel had been born into. But at least she would not be the first to give birth, out here in space; two of the Candidates, pregnant on boarding, had already delivered successfully in the expert if overworked hands of Doc Wetherbee, and the crew’s genetic diversity had therefore increased.

“Here they come,” Kelly said. “Time to get your body armor on, gang.”

Grace glanced around. People were converging on Kelly’s station, coming down the fireman’s pole through the decks, or swimming through the connecting tunnel from the second hull.

Kelly had her closest allies with her already, Zane and Holle, Venus reporting in via a screen from the cupola where she was supervising Wilson Argent’s spacewalk. Other Candidates showed up, Joe Antoniadi looking wide-eyed as ever, as if the world was a continual surprise, and Thomas Windrup and Elle Strekalov clinging to each other, and Cora Robles looking petulant and bored, a party girl five light minutes from the nearest club. Doc Wetherbee arrived too, bringing a handheld of his own, and with a thunderous expression on his face.

Now here came a few of the “gatecrashers,” as the Candidates dismissively called those like Grace herself who had been foisted onto the crew by special interest groups late in the selection process. Theo Morell looked even more nervous than usual. And, even more insultingly labeled, some of the “illegals” arrived-rogue elements from the security forces, supposedly charged with guarding the ship, who had stormed their way on board themselves during the last moments. Grace knew their names by now, such as the Shaughnessy brothers, and Jeb Holden and Dan Xavi, two tough-looking former eye-dees. The illegals were led, informally, by Masayo Saito, a young Japanese-American lieutenant and the most senior of the military people. Masayo claimed he wasn’t here by choice, but had just got swept along with the rest. Grace actually believed him; she had seen pictures of the wife and baby he had left behind on the ground, and would now presumably never see again.

After the Orion engines died and they had started to move freely around the ship and through the transfer tunnel between the two hulls, Grace had been amazed at the sight of the illegals, in their dirtied, blood-stained remnants of military uniforms. She didn’t even recognize half the gatecrashers. So many people had made it onto the ship who she’d never laid eyes on before. But everybody was young, almost all of them younger than Grace at twenty-six. Well, most front-line military personnel were young, so maybe that was no surprise.