Stephen Baxter - Ark

Then he began to snore.

Thandie murmured, “The sub’s ready to take you up, whenever you are.”

“We should wait until grandfather wakes,” Dexter said.

“Yes.” Eddie was falling asleep too. He wriggled on Kelly’s lap, trying to get his head comfortable against her belly. His weight, drawn by the pull of Earth, was huge, precious. “Yes, we’ll wait.”

Kelly wondered where Holle and Wilson and Venus were, right now.

May 2068

Steel Antionadi waited for Max Baker by the wet farm in the base of Halivah, as far down-pole as she could get from Wilson and his thugs. Nobody was around. Nothing stirred except the green things growing in their glop tanks.

She looked up along the length of the hull. She could see up-pole all the way to Wilson’s nest in the dome. In the middle of the day it was bright, the arcs glowing warmly, and people came and went, old folk and kids, and babies gurgling in the air. A work party had taken out the equipment racks from Deck Six and was scrubbing the walls in a spiral pattern.

All this was background to Steel. What she looked for was other shippers like her, shipborn, where they clustered in their little territories, marked by scratchy graffiti signatures on the walls. To her they stood out against the hull’s drab background like stars against the black sky. Every so often you would see one of them glare down at you, making eye contact like a zap from a laser beam. There was information in the way they clustered, information in the way they looked and laughed. Nobody much older than Steel even saw any of this going on.

Max Baker came swimming down. Slim and supple, he was good in the air, and he showed off for her, staying away from the guide ropes and handholds, letting the friction of the air slow him down. He was fifteen, she twenty-three. He somersaulted and landed neatly on a T-stool beside her. “Got ’em,” he said without preamble.

She glanced around. Wilson said he had taken out the cameras, but everybody knew there were cameras and spies. But Wilson didn’t watch the wet farm because shippers didn’t work here mostly, and what he liked to watch was shippers, especially the younger ones. Still, she whispered. “The caps. You got enough?”

“Yeah. Exterior store.”

He was talking about explosive charges intended for such uses as blowing hatches in emergency evacuations, or separating the shuttles from the hull’s main body.

“Hid?”

“Yeah.” He glanced up at Wilson’s nest in the dome. “ He won’t see them.”

“You sure you want to do this?”

He looked back at her, thoughtful, conflicting feelings visible in his face. She could see he was trying to big up in front of her. Well, they had had a relationship. There were so few of them on the hull that everybody had done some kind of fooling with everybody else, on a spectrum of warmth all the way from best buddies to moms ’n’ pops. Every gradation of love and friendship had a name. There were even more names for kinds of enemies. With Max she had got as far as feelie-friends before they backed off. He was too young, or she was too old. Being with him reminded her of her time with Wilson, but sort of upside down, for with Max she had been the old one. Anyhow she liked Max, and respected him. She didn’t want him to get himself killed, which was a strong possibility if they went ahead with their plan.

But he shrugged. “He’s got Terese. Wilson. Cold-fucking her. That’s not right.”

She knew that even the shipborn word, cold-fucking, wasn’t appropriate for what Wilson was doing to Max’s twin. He was using Terese just as he had used Steel, before she grew too old for his taste, her bones too long, her breasts too big. It was a word Max was using for comfort, a lie he told to himself. That was Max’s motive. Hers was deeper.

She grabbed his arm. “We’ll do this, end the lies.”

He nodded, anger and fear warring in his expression. “When?” “You’ll know.”

June 2068

A single gunshot in the night.

Holle sat bolt upright in her bunk, her blanket floating around her in the dark.

A gunshot. A sharp, percussive crack. It was unmistakable. She’d heard enough gunfire in the final years on Earth, but none since the chaos of the launch itself. She’d always suspected that the weapons confiscated from the illegals all those years ago had ended up cached somewhere. By Wilson, probably; he was the kind who would have thought ahead, even back then.

A gunshot in a pressure hull. She forced herself to stay still, to sniff the air, to pay attention to any popping in her ears, to listen for a breeze-any of the signs of a hull breach, of the loss of the air she and her team kept cycling around the ship all day and every day, every molecule of it having passed through human lungs ten billion times, the air that kept them alive. The inner hull was coated with self-sealing compounds, and ought to be able to withstand a single bullet hole. But how likely was it that only one shot was going to be fired today?

Then she heard shouting, a kind of chanting. “Break-out! Break-out!”

She closed her eyes for one heartbeat.

She had always known this day would come. She was forty-nine years old, and, enfeebled by confinement and zero gravity, felt and probably looked older. She didn’t want to face a revolt of the young, however inevitable it was. Maybe she could just lock herself in here, burrow down under the blankets, listen to her Angel and think about her father, and wait until Wilson and his thugs sorted out the mess.

But she couldn’t hide. Somebody was letting off a gun inside the pressure hull- her hull. It had to be stopped.

She moved, grabbing coverall and boots, dressing quickly. She pulled her Snoopy hat over her head, and tried to make contact with Wilson, Venus, anybody. But there wasn’t even static.

It was Steel Antoniadi who had the gun.

When Helen Gray emerged from her cabin it was 0400. The big arc-light panels glowed a dim orange, casting just enough light so the watch crew could see.

And Steel was waving a gun around. Steel was in shadow, but the orange light glittered in her eyes, and reflected from the gun’s metal shaft. The evidence of the one shot she’d fired so far was a crease in the padding that swathed the fireman’s pole. It was an incredible sight. Helen, twenty-six years old, had never even seen a gun before, outside archive pictures, HeadSpace simulations. Now, anchored with one hand to a guide cable, here was Steel, one of Helen’s oldest friends, holding the ugly black thing above her head. And Steel was shouting, rhythmically. “Break-out! Break-out! It’s time, time, our time!”

Helen glanced up. Beyond the fireman’s pole with its string of ragged cabins was a wall of steel that sliced off the upper section of Halivah. Wilson and his henchmen and their catamites now occupied the hull’s upper four decks, barricaded off from those they governed by layers of mesh-floor partitions. It was dark up there, a mass of shadow, and there was no movement, no sign of any of Wilson’s people coming down to take control.

But other crew did come, and were already gathering around Steel-the younger crew, the generation of shipborn. The youngest Helen saw was Max Baker, aged fifteen, brother of Wilson’s latest lover. Steel herself was probably the oldest, at twenty-three. One woman, Magda Murphy, came swimming up with a baby in her arms, a fractious child, tired, a second-generation shipborn. Only Steel had a gun, but the others were armed with spanners and wrenches, knives, bits of piping. They belonged to different clans and gangs, as Helen could tell from their tattoos and dyed hair, coming together for this climactic moment.