Stephen Baxter - Ark

Steel laughed as they gathered around her. When she opened her mouth you could see the gaps in her teeth, a legacy of the beating Wilson had given her when he’d finally thrown her out of his bed. Steel had clearly planned all this. Planned this moment, put together this ragtag rebellion, uniting the warring factions, entirely out of sight even of Helen, who thought she knew most of what was going on in the hull.

Helen was bleary with sleep, confused in the dark. This had to stop, before people got hurt-or worse. She pushed forward. “Steel!” she hissed. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Ending it,” Steel said, loudly enough for the rest to hear. “Ending this farce!” She was wild, manic, her gestures uncontrolled.

Helen considered grabbing her arm, then looked at the gun and thought again. “What farce?”

“We’re wasting our lives in this tank, our whole lives. Whatever this mission is, whatever it’s for, we’re just prisoners.” She gestured at the woman with the baby. “Now we’re having children of our own, more babies born into this cage. Do we want our kids taught the way we were? Do we want them to be punished for being smart?”

There was a rumble of support, and some of the crew hefted their weapons.

Helen understood the resentment. She was one of this middle generation herself, a generation for whom the ship was turning out to be a prison. She would be nearly forty when, if, the ship got to Earth III-old! Her life half used up, her youth gone. But she also understood that now they were under way, there was no choice but to go on. That was the hard, inhuman truth.

Now she did grab Steel’s arm. “Steel, for God’s sake, you’ll get us all killed. We’re in a spacecraft seventy light-years from Earth. It’s not big enough for a revolution!”

Steel shook her off. “You’ve swallowed the lies,” she said coldly. “You and those other fools who let Venus Jenning fill your head with rubbish. You go back to your cupola and your telescopes and your learning, you’re a traitor to your own kind-”

“What lies? You can’t mean the rubbish Zane talks.”

“Rubbish, is it? You think you’re a scientist, don’t you? What’s more likely, that we’re in a spacecraft hurled between the stars, or we’re in some HeadSpace tank in Denver or Alma or Gunnison?” She waved her hand. “They’re out there, standing behind walls of glass, making notes, watching us the way we watch the plants in the glop tanks-looking on our useless lives, and they’re laughing at us. And when our children start to grow, the prettiest and brightest will be picked out by Wilson’s men. Taken up there to his palace of shit. Are we going to bow down to that? Are we?”

That, Helen suspected, was what this was all about, whether Steel realized it or not. This was Steel taking revenge on Wilson for the way he’d treated her.

But whatever Steel’s real motive, she was hitting a raw nerve. The ragged chanting started again: “Break-out. Break-out.” The crew were agitated, fired up, shouting, and they shook their blunt tools and bits of pipe. Helen shrank back, fear clenching her gut. And, as Steel waved her gun to lead them, the mob started to move, pulling themselves up toward the bridge.

Helen looked around. She thought she saw her mother at the hull’s other extreme, by the hydroponic beds near the base. She swiveled in the air and threw herself that way.

With an audible hum the big arc lights flickered to their full brightness, and the hull was flooded with their glare.

On Wilson’s bridge, as he called it, it had been Theo Morell who had pulled the big emergency handle that had fired up the arc lamps. Clinging to the fireman’s pole he drifted down to the floor, cleared blankets and rugs out of the way, and tried to peer through the protective layers of mesh partitions to see what was going on.

This “bridge,” in the hull’s nose, was like a big domed room. Its walls had been draped with blankets and rugs, hand-made by the crew from scraps of worn-out uniforms. Wilson and his inner team had their own private sub-cabins, lashed to the floor and wall brackets. Venus had once said this was like Genghis Khan’s yurt. On a rack attached to the fireman’s pole were the remains of last night’s feast, plates sticky with the remains of a mushroom risotto, an empty bottle of rice wine. Clothes, discarded carelessly, drifted in the air, and the private lavatory had its door open, and a fetid smell hung around it. Ordinarily the mess would have been cleaned up by servants, a detachment of the crew coming up through the floor hatches, before Wilson woke to begin his day. But-Theo checked his watch, it was only a little after 0400-nobody would be cleaning up tonight, or doing any more sleeping.

As the noise level rose Wilson’s men started to push their way out of their cabins. There were four more aside from Theo and Wilson, all men, all about Wilson’s own age of forty-nine, all illegals. They were all naked or dressed only in shorts, as Theo was. Other faces peered out of two of the cabins behind them, small, frightened, one boy, one girl, both about fourteen. Theo wasn’t sure of their names.

Jeb Holden pushed his way over to Theo. “What the fuck you doing, soldier boy? Why you turn the damn lights on?”

“Didn’t you hear the gunshot, asshole?”

“What gunshot?”

Theo heard a rumbling of voices, that distant chanting. “Break-out-break-out…” Not so distant anymore. He peered down through the mesh, and glimpsed some kind of group climbing up the fireman’s pole, around the dangling cabins, toward the barrier. Steel Antoniadi was in the lead. Some of them were just kids. There was Max Baker beside Steel. Theo knew Max’s twin sister was in Wilson’s bed right now.

“Break-out-break-out-”

Jeb snapped, “What the fuck?”

“Just kids,” Theo said, uneasy.

“Kids with fucking weapons. Steel’s got a gun.” Jeb lay flat on the floor and yelled through the mesh, his spittle splashing against the metal. “Steel, you fucking whore! This all because Wilson passed you over to the Pig, isn’t it? Steel, you worn-out slut, put that fucking gun down now!” A descendant of Iowans, Jeb had actually been born on a raft, but when he was fourteen he had fought his way onto dry land and joined a local militia to fight off those who might have followed him. Then luck had left him in the right place at the right time to steal a place on the Ark, when it launched from Gunnison.

Steel and the rest were only a couple of meters beneath the floor now. She pointed her weapon at the partition. “The game’s up, Jeb, you bastard. Open up the floor or it will be the worse for you.”

“Oh, will it?” He laughed, and he spat at her, but most of the gob of phlegm stuck to the mesh, and Theo could see his fear in the way he clung to the partition, his fingers locked in the holes. “Whore! Fucking whore.” He threw himself away from the partition and looked around. The others, including Dan Xavi who the catamites called “the Pig,” were pulling on their pants. “Where’s Wilson?”

“Right here.” Wilson came floating out of his own cabin. Theo stared, amazed. Wilson already wore a cooling garment, and he was pulling the heavy outer layers of a pressure suit around him. Behind him Terese Baker, fifteen, skinny, was wrapped in a blanket, looking around with wide eyes. “Shit,” Wilson said, “I don’t fit in this suit anymore. I’m a fat bastard.” He laughed.

Jeb’s jaw was slack. “Boss-where are you going?”

“To the shuttle. Ride out the storm. Best thing-remove the focus, take away the prime target-you can see that. I always saw this day coming, even if you didn’t. Call me when you’ve got the situation under control.”

Jeb’s fists bunched. “And how the fuck do we do that?”