Stephen Baxter - Ark

Grace said, “We’ll have to run a DNA analysis for a full answer. But only one of the military people is female. And two are actually brothers, the Shaughnessys.”

“Brothers.” Mike Wetherbee barked a laugh. “Christ! We even fouled that up.”

Masayo said heavily, “Is this how it’s going to be all the way to fucking Jupiter?”

Kelly folded her arms. “I don’t like you, or the way you got yourself aboard. But we’re all stuck in this tub together, for the rest of our lives. And we don’t have room for passengers, Masayo.”

“Fine,” Masayo said. “We want to work.”

“Good. Holle?”

Holle smiled around at the group, looking as if she was actually enjoying the meeting. The tension palpably lessened. Grace admired her unobtrusive skill. “We urgently need to establish a maintenance routine. There are seventy-eight of us, crammed into a small space.”

“Yes, and it seems a damn small space to me,” Masayo said. “How much room do we actually have?”

Holle tapped her own handheld, searching for figures. “You know that the two hulls are based on Ares propellant tanks-in turn derived from the old space shuttle external tank. Each is a cylinder about eight meters in diameter, and fifty meters long. We lose some of that diameter to the water tanks under the hull, the equipment racks, and so on. We’re left with about forty-seven hundred cubic meters of living space, in the habitable hulls. That’s around three times the pressurized volume in a Boeing 747. About five times the pressurized volume available in the ISS-”

“But thirteen times the crew size,” Kelly said.

“And actually the space available to us right now is less than the maximum, because we’ve had to stow the warp-generator components in the lower third of each hull.

“We’re going to have to work hard to keep such a small volume habitable. Masayo, we’ll run some education on spaceflight basics for you guys. For example, all the stuff that falls to the ground under gravity, the dust that settles, well, it won’t in microgravity, and so the air we breathe is full of garbage-including bits of us. We’re going to have to scrub down the walls every day, if we’re not to pick up algal growth and mold. Also we have fuel cells to purge, batteries to charge, waste water to collect, carbon dioxide scrubber canisters to change, drinking water to be chlorinated, and so on. We need to draw up rotas. I’ll post drafts to the ship’s archive when we’re done.”

Masayo folded his arms. “You want us to be cleaners. That’s what you’re saying.”

Kelly leaned forward. “If you’ve got skills more appropriate to this interstellar spacecraft right now, let me know. In the longer term, with help from the ground, we can work out how to make the most of the skills and experience that each of us brings. But for now, yes, you’re going to be cleaning. And so am I, so are we all. Holle, when you draw up your rotas, put me and Lieutenant Saito at the head of the wall-scrubbing detail for the first period.”

Holle nodded.

Kelly looked around at them all, at the table, suspended at various angles in the air around her. “OK, I guess this meeting has been productive. But it’s only a start. We’re just going to have to learn to get along with each other. And work for each other, and for the good of the ship. Whatever else we differ on, I hope we can agree on that much. AOB? No? Then we’re done here.”

But as the meeting broke up, Kelly motioned Holle and Grace to stay behind.

Once Masayo and his boys were out of earshot, she murmured, “What about weapons? That gang of soldier boys must have come aboard armed. Grace, you got any hint of where they stashed their guns?”

Grace shook her head. “Didn’t occur to me to ask. You need to talk to Masayo.”

Kelly looked absent. “No,” she said. “I can’t afford a confrontation over this. Holle, I want you to round up some people. Make it two, at least, for every one of the illegals. Mount a raid. Pin them down and get their damn guns off them. Use some muscle you can trust. Wilson, for instance.”

Holle looked doubtful. “That will cause problems long term.”

“Let Masayo squawk. Better that than arms inside the pressurized hulls. Get it done.” She checked a clock. It was set to Alma time, as were all the clocks on the ship. “I need to go check how Wilson is progressing with his EVA.”

Grace Gray’s favorite part of each day on the Ark was the end of it.

Mission Control back at Alma had imposed a three-shift system on the crew in their twin hulls, so that Seba slept one shift, then Halivah, then both were awake. That way at least half the crew was awake and functioning at any given moment, increasing the chances of the Ark as a whole surviving any sudden calamity.

But there was no real privacy in either hull, aside from doors on the lavatories, though some kind of partitioning-off of the big volumes had been promised for the long interstellar cruise phase. That meant that you had to learn to sleep as if in a huge dormitory, with others above and below you-their groans and snores all too audible, their couches visible through the mesh of the deck-and you would see ghostly figures swimming back and forth, silent and weightless as bubbles.

But still Grace had learned to relish the moments when she strapped herself loosely in her couch, inside a cocoon of sleeping bag and blanket. This was the best of microgravity, away from the petty irritations of the day when you would find yourself drifting through other people’s garbage, or clouds of loose stuff, screws and plastic scraps and bits of sealant, all evidence of the hasty construction of the ship. In your couch you floated, as if you were in the most comfortable bed on Earth.

And just as the sleep period began the ubiquitous cameras, mounted on wall stanchions, turned themselves away. Earth didn’t need to watch you sleep, either Mission Control or the wider public who, Gordo assured them, otherwise watched their every move, as if the ship was a reality show designed to distract them from the awful truth of the flood. The ratings were high, Gordo said. Grace believed the surveillance was inhibiting conflict aboard the ship, so she didn’t object to it, but it was pleasant when the electronic eyes turned away.

And then Kelly Kenzie would make her final round, a visual inspection that all was well. This was a good instinct by Kelly, Grace thought, a way for her to bond with her crew. Maybe it would make up for rash actions like her planned gun raid. As she passed, Kelly had the ship’s systems dip the hull lights down to their emergency settings, one by one. Thus the hull grew dark in sections as she floated by.

Once, when Grace was with Walker City, she had been no older than twelve or thirteen, the okies had stayed for six months working on a construction project near Abilene, Texas. One of her companions, an English-man called Michael Thurley, had grown up a Catholic, and when he had discovered a small, pretty Catholic church in the city he had taken to attending Mass there. A few times Grace had sat with him. She particularly liked the end of the service, when an altar boy would go around the church snuffing out candles. That was what Kelly’s quiet daily procession was like, as if they were children sleeping in a vast church where the lights were snuffed out one by one. Grace drifted off to sleep thinking of those days, of Michael and Gary Boyle, and their tents and their portable gadgets and all the walking, and the church in Texas where the lights went out one by one.

She was woken by a stab of pain in her belly, and a surge of dampness between her legs. Her waters had broken. It was three a.m., Alma time.