Stephen Baxter - Ark

The company broke up, the troopers milling around, the new arrivals looking for the veterans who would shepherd them through this first day.

Don again beckoned Mel over. “It’s you and me for today, buddy.” He glanced over the new troopers mildly. “There’s generally a couple who crack, even on the first day. Maybe not with this bunch, they look solid enough. Come on. I need to troubleshoot.”

Don led Mel up the stub of highway toward the gate. Waving a pass at a guard, he pushed out past the row of desks and toward a kind of access alley that ran alongside the queuing system. Armed troopers patroled the alley. Glancing up, Mel saw watchtowers looming, more troopers with binoculars scanning the lined-up crowd.

Mel got a chance to see the processing clerks in action. Some of them were doctors or nurses, or anyhow they wore prominent red cross armbands over the sleeves of their uniforms. They took down basic details from the eye-dees standing before them.

“It’s a screening,” Mel said. “I didn’t think Alma was still taking in eye-dees.”

“It looks like a screening,” Don murmured. “Don’t jump to conclusions. Just watch, listen, learn. And keep your weapon to hand.”

The two of them walked out, beyond the big perimeter fence, and along a broken highway surface kept reasonably clear but crowded to either side with eye-dees waiting to join the lines for the processing system. They weren’t the only troopers out here, but, outside the fence, Mel felt exposed, unreasonably nervous.

Beyond the queuing crowd they reached a kind of shantytown, which was set out in rough squares, each about the area of an old city block. Each zone had drains cut into the ground, trenches leading to sewers that ran down the sides of the highway. There were few tents, but here and there stood the remnants of buildings, and the eye-dees had constructed shacks and lean-tos of sods and whatever debris they could get hold of. It was still only mid-morning. Fires burned and smoke rose up, and pots had been set out to catch rainwater from an increasingly cloudy sky. Babies cried, a multitude of tiny voices. There were even children playing, with battered toys or deflated soccer balls, but none of them ran about, and in faded rags they were stick-thin, the skulls prominent under their faces. Some had the swollen bellies of malnutrition.

Mel saw agents from the Alma protectorate, identifiable in relatively bright AxysCorp durable coveralls and accompanied by armed troops, working through the camp. Some wore medics’ armbands. They spoke patiently to the eye-dees and handed out leaflets.

The leaflets surprised Mel the most. “Where do they get the paper from?”

Don dug into his pocket, produced a folded scrap, and handed it to Mel. It was densely printed on both sides, and the only color was a tiny red, white, and blue Stars and Stripes in one corner. It turned out to be a kind of primer on how to construct a plow, meant to be drawn by humans. Don said, “Feel the paper, that glossy sheen? It’s made from sea-shells.”

“I didn’t know the government was still supporting eye-dee camps so far out.”

“It’s not. Supervising, maybe. Advising. But not supporting. Look around. The drainage ditches, the shanties-all constructed by the eye-dees themselves, using whatever tools and resources they could find, their bare hands if they have to. These leaflets we give them-hints on farming, on hunting-all to be achieved without material support from the center. Even the doctors give out more advice than medicine. We just don’t have the resources for any more.” He glanced around, making sure they weren’t overheard by any eye-dees. “We don’t even police out here. We encourage them to set up their own security structure, under the nominal authority of Alma. We give out paper badges-that doesn’t cost much. Usually it devolves pretty fast into the dominance of some warlord, but we don’t care about that so long as there’s order. Oh, and we always shut down the brothels. Gordo says we’re fighting against human nature with that one, but the commanders have made it a priority, and we try.”

“It’s all a kind of illusion,” Mel blurted. “They think they’re under the government’s protection. In fact-”

“It keeps people quiet. Sedated. It works because people want to believe they’re safe, that somebody is thinking about their welfare, just as it has been all their lives, at least for the older folk who remember how it was before the flood. Things are relatively stable here.” He pointed further out, to the north, where the highway arced away through stripped hillsides. “There are more out there, thousands. We mount punitive raids, we mine the roads, trying to keep them out. But they would have to get through this zone of settlement first, before they can get to us. There are camps like this all around Alma, in a ring.”

Mel saw it. “You’re using all these people as a screen. A human shield.”

Don eyed him. “Look-the flood just keeps on coming, the water pushes on up the valleys, the Platte and the Blue river and the rest, warm, frothy, salty water all poisoned with the mess from the drowned towns, and the corpses floating like corks. I’ve seen it. We’re losing places like Leadville and Hartsel and Grant now. And it drives people on ahead, like cattle.

“Everybody knows there’s an enclave at Alma. So they come in search of sanctuary, wave after wave. We don’t know how many there are out there, in the hills around Alma. Some think it might be as many as a million. We just can’t cater for them all, not for one percent of that number. And we can’t run away, like when we evacuated Denver. All we can do is keep them at bay, until the job at Mission Control is done. To do that we’ve had to figure out how to use every resource we have left against the eye-dee flow. And the most significant of those resources is the eye-dees themselves.”

Mel glanced at Don’s face, expressionless behind the mask of his scar, the sunglasses, the layer of stubble over his dirty face. Mel thought he saw nothing left of the boy he had met in the Academy. “We’re going to win, aren’t we?”

“If you want the truth, I ain’t sure,” Don said bleakly. He glanced at the cloudy sky. “This stunt of timing the warp launch to coincide with the lunar eclipse-I don’t know whose dumb idea that was. My guess is that when the moon goes red all the crazies out here will start howling, even if they haven’t heard any specific rumors about the Ark. Well, we only need to hold the line for twenty-four more hours. So do you think it’s worth it-all that you’ve seen today-worth it if it gives the Ark the best chance of getting away to the stars?”

“Holle and Kelly are aboard. Relying on us. Yes, it’s worth it.”

“OK, kid. I think you’re ready to see the rest of it.”

“What ‘rest’?”

For answer, Don led him back through the shantytown to the security gate, and the patient line of applicants.

With Don, Mel shadowed an old couple, maybe late sixties, as they were interviewed by a sympathetic woman at the processing terminal.

They were called Phyllis and Joe Couperstein. They had children, and they believed there was a grandchild, but they’d heard nothing from their kids for years. They both had bloodied, swollen feet. They had started walking in Omaha, years ago. They weren’t sure, in fact, where they were now; they had just followed the crowds from one scrap of high ground to the next, working wherever they could, at whatever they could. The woman had once been a civil engineer, the man a chef, highly qualified, but there wasn’t much call for either now. Even up to a couple of years ago they had been able to work in the fields, but now arthritis, and a mild heart attack for the man, had put paid to that.