Stephen Baxter - Ark

Then a warp bubble would be thrown up around the whole unlikely jury-rigged assembly, snipping it out of the universe and sending it flying across the Galaxy at multiples of the speed of light.

Masayo said tightly, “So are we going on now?”

“In a minute.” This was her chance. She dug a lead out of her pocket; she plugged one jack into her own chest console, the other into Masayo’s.

He looked down. “What’s this?”

“Direct suit-to-suit comms. Overrides the radio signal.”

“Oh. Nobody can hear us, right?”

“That’s the idea.”

“So what do you want to talk about?”

She thought it over. “It just seems a good idea for us to communicate. I mean, we’ve been on this Ark over five hundred days now.”

“Five hundred and forty-eight. Paul Shaughnessy crosses it off on the wall by his couch, like he’s in prison. In fact he was once in prison.”

“There you go, I never knew that.”

“And does it do you good to know that the guy responsible for beating up Thomas Windrup has a brother who’s an ex-con?”

“Look, I’m not probing. You’re very defensive.”

“Do you blame me? You know we’re all up on a variety of charges, us illegals, from insubordination to trespassing on federal property to mutiny. The parents of some of the stranded Candidates are suing us in the civil courts. Just as well we can’t turn this Ark around and go home; I’d be in jail myself.”

She said carefully, “I always heard that you never wanted to be here in the first place. That you just got sort of swept up.”

He hesitated. “Well, it was true. I was the lieutenant, remember. The guys pulled a gun on me and frog-marched me up that damn ramp. I thought I’d have time to talk them round, or disarm them, and get us off the Ark again. And then, once we launched, I figured I should stick with them. At least I had a chance of keeping them in order. Not that I did a good job with Jack, I admit. But you got to see their point of view, Holle. Look, on Earth we were on the front line. We were armed responders. Here, we’re scrubbing gunk off the walls.”

“I get the same complaints from the gatecrashers, if you want to know,” she admitted. “Maybe it’s our fault, the Candidates. I know we can be dismissive.”

“Well, hallelujah. A self-aware Candidate. It would also have helped if you hadn’t taken away our weapons.” When the men discovered their weapons had gone there was a near-mutiny, a riot. “My guys all came from tough backgrounds, mostly eye-dee camps or bandit communities. Their weapons are their identity. When Kelly did that it was like an emasculation.”

“Kelly thought it was necessary. That the risk of having weapons on the ship was greater than the risk of any psychological harm of that kind.”

“And you agreed with her?”

Holle thought it over. Kelly was still only twenty-five, only a year older than Holle herself. She had been very young to have to make such decisions. Yet she had made them. “Yes, I agree, looking back. It wouldn’t have occurred to me at the time. I guess I’m not as farsighted as Kelly, or as decisive. But I agree, yeah. And, given what happened between Shaughnessy and Windrup, maybe it’s as well neither of them had access to a gun.”

They rested for a moment, as sun, Jupiter, Ark wheeled grandly around them.

She said at length, “I feel like we just lanced a few boils rather than talked. We need to do this again.”

“Yeah. But not out here, OK?”

“Sure.” She unplugged the lead between them and stowed it away. She reached for the tether attachment at his waist. “You ready?”

“For what?”

“This.” She touched a control, and his attachment swiveled him around the fixed point on his waist, so that his “down” was now toward Halivah, his destination, rather than Seba.

“Oh, shit.”

“The suit! Mind the suit!”

By the time they got through the Halivah airlock, Gordo Alonzo’s broadcast from Alma had already begun. Kelly, Venus, Wilson and others sat on T-stools before a big wall screen, along with a handful of other crew, Candidates, gatecrashers and illegals, gathered at all angles around the central group.

Jack Shaughnessy was handcuffed to his brother Paul. Jack had a busted nose and a thickening bruise around his right eye. Rumor had it that he had got those, not from Thomas Windrup, but from Elle Strekalov, Windrup’s partner and the girl on whom Jack had made the move that sparked the whole thing off. Thomas himself was still in Mike Wetherbee’s minuscule infirmary, recovering from a punctured lung.

Alonzo, insulated from interruption by the forty-five-minute each-way time delay, was pontificating on one of his favorite subjects: crew morale. “You guys need to cook up more celebrations. Your Polyakov Day back in February was a good idea.” On the four hundred and thirty-eighth day of the mission, the crew of the Ark had simultaneously beaten the space endurance record, previously held since 1995 by a Russian called Valeri Polyakov. “Trouble is I can’t think of anything much significant in the near future until day eight oh four, when you’ll beat old Sergei Krikalev for most time spent in space total by any human…”

Holle peered at the screen. Gordo himself, seated at a desk, was brightly lit, but other figures were in the shadows behind him. She was fairly sure she saw Thandie Jones there, and Edward Kenzie. If her father was there, she couldn’t make him out. She gazed at the screen, drinking in every pixel, frustrated.

Something landed softly on her neck. She reached back and found a screw, come loose from somewhere. She looked up, and saw a rain of dust gently drifting down over the people, the handcuffed brothers. The slow spin was making all the garbage they had accumulated since engine shutdown drift out of the air. And through the layers of the mesh deck she saw the activity of the hull going on, as always. People were playing zero-gravity Frisbee in the big open space, and an infant gurgled as her mother set her spinning in the air. Good pictures for the live feed, Holle thought. All the Ark’s babies were a year or so old now. How strange that there were already human beings who knew nothing of the universe except the inside of this hull-but for that child’s generation, that wouldn’t seem strange at all. The baby laughed in the air, rotating slowly, its chubby limbs waving.

“For sure, improved morale is the way to stop you turning on each other, as in this Windrup-Shaughnessy case…”

Gordo, in his heavy-handed way, was getting to the substance of the address, and Holle focused her attention.

Gordo put on reading glasses, and looked down at a page of notes. “Now, we’ve carefully considered the evidence you sent down. We being the senior project management. Also we consulted General Joe Morell, who commanded the army group of which Jack Shaughnessy was a part before he absconded. So I hope he and all of you will accept our verdict as being properly considered and having full military authority.”

He took off his glasses and peered out of the screen. “Listen now. I’m not a lawyer, and I won’t talk like one. This is a sorry case, very sorry indeed. Locked up as you are, all young people together in those tin cans, you’re going to get jealousies, tensions. Human nature. But you have got to learn restraint-to respect each other. Shaughnessy, that young woman owed you nothing for your uninvited advances but a polite ‘no.’ Which is what you got, but you had to take it further, you had to take it out on Windrup. Think of the harm you did to the mission as a whole, as well as to Thomas Windrup-incapacitating a member of a crew that’s already under the numbers.

“Now, if you were back on Earth you’d be serving time for what you did. But there’s no jail on a spaceship. Commander Kenzie can’t afford to lose your labor-and she certainly can’t afford the effort and resources it would take to keep you locked up in some damn cupboard doing nothing but jerk off all day. So we tried to come up with a suitable alternative, and this is what we instruct.