Stephen Baxter - Ark

Mel Belbruno felt as uncomfortable as everybody else. His boots were a major problem, misshapen from a dunking in salt water when in the care of some previous unfortunate owner; he had padded them with layers of filthy socks. But this morning he was distracted by the unpleasant possibilities of the new assignment.

Alma was surrounded by a system of concentric fortifications. The best place to serve was inside the Buckskin Street compound itself, at the heart of the old town, a fortress improvised from a triangle of land where three roads intersected, South Main Street, South Pine, and Buckskin Street running down from the gulch to the west. The Ark’s Mission Control had been relocated into the center of this fortified area. Outside the compound there was little left of the quaint old mining town, with its embattled claim to be the highest in America. It had been pretty much dismantled by labor crews, first to provide raw materials for the fortifications, and then to build rafts, big buoyant structures of oil tanks and plastic sheeting and tarpaulin that for now sat ominously on the open ground, ready for the final evacuation.

Failing an assignment inside the compound itself, you were best off running patrols into the hinterland, as the commanders called it, a broad area a few kilometers across centered on Alma, a patchwork of high ground and flooded-out valleys. Here, high ground once colonized by pine trees was stripped of lumber and was being turned into farmland, a thousand tiny, scratched-out farms on the poor soil. They were farming even all the way to the summit of Mount Bross, the highest point hereabouts, breaking the poor land with human muscle, for there was no oil left to run tractors and pull plows, not even any horses left. Mel had once heard Patrick Groundwater say that Americans were having to revive methods of subsistence farming once used in medieval Europe.

Today was the first time Mel had been sent further out still, beyond the hinterland to one of the eye-dee processing camps that blocked the valleys and gulches that led into Alma. He didn’t know what to expect at the camp, up Highway 9. He tried not to listen to the shit from the veterans, of the things they’d seen and had to do, but their words wormed their way into your head, as they were meant to.

He wished he didn’t have to face this distraction, this upheaval, today of all days.

He looked up at a murky, cloud-scattered sky, wondering where Jupiter was-Jupiter, where the Ark crew had almost completed their fifteen-month-long stay. It was now less than twenty-four hours before the next phase of the Ark’s mission was due to begin, when the ship would cloak itself in a warp bubble and hurl itself at the stars. These last few hours, after which Holle wouldn’t even be inside the same solar system as Mel, were not a time he wanted to be away from Mission Control, and news of the stupendous events unfolding in the sky. But he didn’t have a choice.

In March 2044, with the global flood nearing three kilometers above the old sea-level datum, not many people got choices.

At the processing camp the unit was siphoned off to a tent city, their billet for the next few nights. Another unit of battered-looking, weary young people was forming up to be marched south in turn. They were silent, sullen.

Don Meisel was waiting at the side of the road, a lieutenant now in a relatively crisp and clean Denver PD uniform. When he spotted Mel he called him over. His right cheek bore a deep scar, a wound badly cleaned out and amateurishly stitched, and thick sunglasses hid his eyes. His red hair was speckled gray. At twenty-six, Don was a year older than Mel. Mel thought he looked a lot older than that.

Mel forced a grin. “I wish I could say I was glad to see you.” “Yeah. Not in these circumstances. The Ark-”

“Everything’s on track, last I heard.” Which had been last night, when Patrick Groundwater had called him at the barracks.

“Nothing we can do about that now.” Don glanced around. “Your unit will be working with mine today. Listen, the first day’s the worst. I got through it-just remember that. If a sap like me can make it, you sure can too. Go take your boots off for a few minutes. I think there’s some hot food.” Don touched an earpiece, and nodded absently. “Catch you later.” He strode away.

Mel followed his buddies into the tent city, where the men had already begun arguing over bunks that were still warm from the bodies of their last occupants. The respite was half an hour, long enough for them to grab some food and drink, to take a dump, to massage feet that were already sore from the hike out of Alma in their ill-fitting boots. Despite the complaints, the food wasn’t so bad, a kind of rabbit stew. Cops and troopers got to eat better than almost anybody else-better, even, than the engineers and scientists in Mission Control, which was why it was the ambition of most able-bodied eye-dees to join a military detachment.

Then they were formed up again and marched the last few hundred meters north along the highway, to the processing camp.

As they neared the security perimeter Mel tried to take in what he saw.

He was approaching a fence, a complex of barbed wire and watch towers and earthworks that spanned the old highway. He could see the fence reaching high up into the hills to either side, cutting across the brown, exposed ground, passing through the rough rectangles of the scrubby new farms. The highway itself was straddled by a massive steel and concrete gateway, bristling with watchtowers and spotlights. The fence was manned by soldiers or National Guard or Homeland or cops, who could be seen walking the wire or sitting in their towers.

This was the boundary of the territory, centered on Alma, that was still under the protection of the federal government, with Colonel Gordo Alonzo, the most senior surviving commander of Project Nimrod, named by the President himself as military governor. The boundary between order and governance within, and the chaos without. There were rumors that this was about the only significant enclave left under federal government control, outside seaborne assets like the surviving Navy ships and submarines. But few people were in a position to know if that was true.

The refugee-processing center had been set up where the fence crossed the highway. A couple of buildings, rough concrete blocks, were set back behind the line itself, connected to the gate by a kind of corridor of barbed wire, the walls at last three meters tall and patroled inside and out by armed soldiers. There was a small industrial facility set up here, like a chemical factory with tanks and drums and gleaming

pipework. A sign over the door read: ALMA, CO. RESPITE CENTER US FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PROPERTY

To his amazement Mel saw that flowers bloomed at the doorway of this unit, in pots hanging from metal brackets.

At the gate itself Mel saw a row of desks, manned by soldiers and civilians, with laptops and electronic notepads. These were interviewing eye-dees, one at a time. A queuing system, a line beyond the gate itself, stretched back, rows of ragged, dirty, scrawny people working their way through a zigzag of metal barriers. Further out, soldiers in pairs were roughly gathering people into preliminary lines.

And beyond that, Mel saw more people, a crowd of them sitting or standing in the dust. Just in that first glimpse there must have been thousands of them.

“Shit,” he murmured to Don, who stood at his side. “If that crowd lost patience-”

“Don’t think like that,” Don murmured. “It’s our job to see that they don’t.” He stepped before the unit he commanded today, his veterans and Mel’s rookies from Alma. “OK, listen up. We’ll break you up into squads, two, three or four at a time, veterans paired with rookies. For today you’ll be rotated through the various elements of what we do here, so you see the bigger picture. Training on the job, you follow? After that, beginning tomorrow, we’ll fix you up with permanent assignments.” He grinned, fiercely. “I’ll say to you what I said to my buddy here. The first day’s the worst. But if I got through it, you can. And just remember how important the work is. This is where we hold the line-not back in the Buckskin Street compound, not in those scrubby farms in the hinterland. Everything depends on how well you do your jobs, right here. OK, fall out and buddy up; B Company have been given the names of the inductees they’re to supervise.”