Stephen Baxter - Ark

“Shaughnessy, you just doubled your workload. From now until Dr. Wetherbee signs off Thomas Windrup as fit to work again, you are going to do his job for him. You’ll cover for Windrup to the best of your technical abilities, and where that breaks down I expect an officer delegated by the commander to find you some suitable alternative. This is in addition to your own chores. And if that leaves you no time to take a shit, I ain’t weeping for you. Is that clear? Finally you’ll wear a tag so the whole damn crew knows who you are and what you’ve done.” He glared into the screen. “That’s how it’s going to be. There’s going to be a rigorous rule of law applied aboard that damn ship, just as on Earth. The only difference is the punishment has to fit the crime and the environment you’re stuck in. I’ll give you a minute to think about that, and see if you got any questions.” He turned away, picking up a tumbler of water.

There was silence in the group. Kelly floated up into the air and turned around, facing them all, before her, above, below. “Well, that’s the verdict. Do you all accept it? You, Elle?” She glared at Masayo and the Shaughnessys. “And you? Will you serve your term? And keep your fists to yourself in the future?”

Jack Shaughnessy looked beaten.

His brother was more defiant. “He ain’t wearing no tag.”

“Yes, he is,” Masayo said firmly. “You heard the man, Paul. Let him serve out his punishment.”

Paul shook his head, but subsided.

It seemed to Holle that the tension was seeping away. She drifted down to join Kelly, before the screen where Gordo was talking to somebody out of shot. “Maybe that’s worked. They seem to accept it.”

“Yeah,” Kelly muttered. “But what are we going to do when something like this comes up when we’re in warp, and we don’t have a panel of old men and generals to tell us how to handle it?”

From the screen Gordo Alonzo coughed theatrically.

“One more thing. About the comet you observed as you were testing your planet-finder gear. Dinosaur Killer Mark II, or not as it turned out. I have some more information about that. As it turns out, it’s no coincidence that thing came wandering in from the dark just as we’re reeling from the flood.” He peered at the camera. “I wonder if Zane Glemp is there. If not, show him this recording later. This relates to testimony from one of your tutors, Magnus Howe-something he remembered Jerzy Glemp said to him before he died…”

In the early years of the flood, Glemp had worked for the Russian government. Russia was hit hard and fast by the flood, losing swathes of territory. As massive refugee populations headed south and east, and war seemed inevitable with China and India over the high land of central Asia, the civilian government struggled to hold the line against hard-line generals.

“Some of the military urged using their surviving nuclear stockpile in an all-out attack against China and the west, while they had the chance. The desperate theory was that Russians might survive in an empty if radioactive world.” Gordo grunted, looking at his notes. “I have a feeling that what they actually did with all those nukes in the end was cooked up by some smart guy in an effort to prevent the generals from making a bad situation even worse.

“In 2024-this was the year Moscow flooded-a significant element of the Russian intercontinental nuclear capability, mostly inherited from the old Soviet regime, was launched, aimed not at any point on the ground but sent off into space. President Peery kindly allowed me to confirm Glemp’s reports about this from old CIA surveillance records. It caused a lot of alarm, you can imagine, but it was immediately clear the birds were not targeted on US territory, possessions or allies. Of course not all of their inventory could be retargeted in this way.

“Then we come to 2036, over a decade later. And we have an anomalous sighting by a telescope in Chile, which by then was dedicated to deep-space planet-finding. This big eye spots a flash, out in deep space. Some time later our surviving interplanetary probes report a trace of anomalous radiation.” He looked into the camera. “You see where I’m coming from. This was the Russian nukes, or those that made it out there, all going off at once. A hell of a bang.

“And we move on to 2043-this year. And you characters detect a comet rushing in toward the sun, all but damn it on a collision course with Earth.

“I think you see that we are drawing a line to connect these three events. We think that the Russians tried to deflect a giant comet nucleus toward the Earth. They actually tried to create an impact.

“There is some logic. In the Earth’s early days, deep global oceans were repeatedly outgassed from the planet’s molten interior, where water had been captured during the world’s formation. But in those days the sky was still full of big rocks. Earth got slammed, and the whole damn ocean was blasted off. This happened time and again, and each time the ocean was refilled by outgassing, or maybe from lesser cometary impacts.

“You see the idea. It’s possible these Russian crazies believed that they could beat the flood by bringing down a comet on all our heads and blasting away the whole global ocean, just like in the good old days of the late bombardment. Maybe they actually thought they were saving the world. The fact that they would have left the Earth a desolate wasteland, devoid of air and water and inhabited only by crusty Russian Strangelove types in deep bunkers, was an unwelcome detail.

“My scientists tell me deflecting a comet is a chancy thing to do. It’s remarkable they managed it at all. Thank God they didn’t get it right.

“So that’s the end of that. What’s next?” He glanced over his shoulder at his team of advisers.

March 2044

Not long after dawn Mel’s National Guard detachment was rousted out of its barrack, an abandoned, rat-infested liquor store in Alma’s small town center.

To brisk orders from the sergeants they formed up in the dim morning light, a few dozen men and women in rough but orderly ranks. Then they began their march along Main Street, heading out of the Buckskin Street compound gate and north through the picked-over ruins of the town toward the outer perimeter. The tarmac surface of the highway was rutted and cracked by the passage of tanks and other heavy armored vehicles. It wasn’t so bad to walk on, but you had to watch you didn’t turn your ankle in some pothole. Weeds flourished, green and vigorous, grabbing their opportunity in this short interval between the ending of the dominance of humankind and the coming of the flood.

The air was full of the stink of the night’s smoke. The eye-dees burned shit these days, human excrement dried and compressed, the hillsides long having been stripped of their lumber. And, under all that, there was a faint tang of salt in the air, of ozone, the smell of the global ocean reaching even here to the heights of the Rockies.

The troopers were laden with their packs. This assignment was going to last several days, how long was unspecified. As they walked they checked over their elderly weapons-mostly Kalashnikov AK-47s, probably manufactured before the flood, and many of them liberated from survivalist types during a raid into the higher ground a couple of years back. The troopers were a mixture, everything from veterans with genuine combat experience to healthy-looking rookies plucked out of the eye-dee streams, to relics with a more complex past, like Mel, who had been a USAF cadet before being diverted into the Ark Candidate corps, and then left abandoned on the ground at the last minute. For all their raggedness they were probably as disciplined a military unit as existed anywhere on the planet. But they grumbled as they marched, their voices rising in the still air. Everybody grumbled all the time, about the lousy food and the broken toilets in their billets and the state of their hand-me-down combat gear.