Stephen Baxter - Ark

A baby floated by. Naked, its skin so swollen it had become twice its size, it was obviously dead. Holle couldn’t recognize it, didn’t know if it was Magda’s baby, the baby she had failed to save. For a second she froze, guilt and doubt and a kind of hideous self-consciousness pressing down on her.

“Holle.”

Venus, down to her cooling undergarment, was watching her steadily. Venus who’d known her since she was a kid, Venus from the Academy. Holle pushed her way over and grabbed on to a handhold. “You OK?”

Venus laughed. “Me? Hell, yes. Just another EVA for me. What happened in here?”

“A rebellion of the shipborn.”

“They smashed open the hull. It’s a miracle you weren’t all killed. What was it, some kind of suicide pact?”

“No,” said Helen Gray. She came drifting over from the shuttle lock to join them. “I think they were trying to tunnel out.”

“ Tunnel out?”

“Out of the sim… It was all those ideas of Zane’s.”

Holle said, “We never took this stuff seriously enough. Bloody Zane. Well, we took it to Wilson often enough, and he didn’t listen, and it cost him his life.”

“Maybe not,” Venus said. “I saw shuttle A. It detached from the hull, actually undocked. This was before the pressure hull blew out.”

Holle shook her head. “Typical Wilson. He probably had that move planned for years.”

Venus described the sabotage she suspected. “The shuttle was wrecked. But I think Wilson might have survived-I saw him bale out, or anyhow somebody in his pressure suit. If his SAFER holds out he’s probably back at one of the locks already.”

But Holle was only half-listening. “You say the shuttle was destroyed.” One of their two shuttles, gone just like that. All because of Wilson and his incompetence and craven selfishness.

Venus was grave. “We’ll have to figure out how to get by without it.”

That baby corpse drifted across Holle’s eyeline, buffeted by stray breezes in the new air. The loss of a shuttle didn’t matter a damn if they couldn’t get through today.

Helen touched her arm. “Holle? I think my mother’s getting overwhelmed. I’ll go help her.”

Holle nodded. “I’ll come with you. Venus, can you handle the rest?”

For one second Venus held her gaze, and Holle could see the challenge in her eyes. Suddenly this was a key moment, the start of a new chapter. Who was Holle to be giving the orders? But Venus backed off, subtly. “Sure. What ‘rest’?”

“Get together a work crew. We need to nail down the basic systems. Ensure the integrity of the hull around that patch. The explosive decompression might have caused some flaws elsewhere. And check over the ECLSS systems. The hydroponic beds-”

“They ought to be OK,” Helen said. “The plants can stand an hour or so of vacuum; the loss was only a few minutes.”

“All right. Check them anyhow. What else?”

“How about positioning?” Venus said. “We just had an air rocket venting out the side of the hull. The GN amp;C systems should have compensated, but I don’t know if the verniers fired to push us back.”

“If they did, I didn’t hear. Check it out. We don’t want to drift into the warp wall.”

“We’d better have somebody ready to meet Wilson if he does come back.”

Holle shrugged. “Cuff him to a stanchion. We’ll deal with him later. Venus, anything else you can think of, just handle it.”

Venus was down to her underwear. “I’ll grab a coverall and get on it.”

“OK. Oh, and Venus-” She moved closer to her, and murmured, “Get a party and do a sweep through the hull. Collect the dead. These drifting corpses. Shove them somewhere out of sight for now, up on Wilson’s bridge, maybe. And log the survivors. Come on, Helen. Let’s go help your mother.”

The crushing in the cupola had been even worse than in shuttle B. People were emerging clutching their ribs and struggling for breath, and one couple were holding a limp little boy, desperately pummeling his chest and breathing into his mouth.

Among these drifting survivors was Zane, looking cowed, frightened. Holle felt a surge of savage anger. She wondered which of his alters had come out to help him cope with this crisis he had done so much to trigger. And there was Jeb Holden, one of Wilson’s closest associates, a brute of a man now naked and blood-smeared. He pulled away from the rest, evidently looking for a blanket, something to cover his body.

Grace, hanging on to a handrail, was trying to get the apparently unharmed to help her, while she sorted the rest into rough groups according to their injuries. Her coverall front was sprayed by blood and bits of grayish flesh. Chunks of somebody’s lung, Holle suspected. Grace was functioning, but she looked bewildered. Holle always had to remind herself that Grace wasn’t a doctor, even though for sixteen years since the Split she had been trying to fill the hole left by Mike Wetherbee.

Holle grabbed Helen’s hand, and they dived over to Grace’s side. “Grace, we’re here. Tell me how we can help.”

Grace looked at her vaguely. “There were around twenty in the cupola. Twenty! I thought we’d all die in there. I estimate twelve seriously injured.”

Holle nodded. “OK. We had about forty in shuttle B, many injured..”

She didn’t have to complete the arithmetic. Since the Split the crew’s numbers had grown, minus some deaths and plus several births, grown in an unplanned way that would have horrified the social engineers back in Denver. A total of around sixty saved in the shuttle and the cupola together meant they had lost several lives to the decompression. And, glancing around the hull, her first estimate was that maybe a third of the survivors were wounded. A third of the crew of a half-wrecked ship, incapacitated.

One step at a time, Holle. “What about the injured?”

“Some crushing from the crowding in the cupola. The rest, what you’d expect from exposure to vacuum. Cases of hypoxia-we may see some brain damage. There are cases of temporary blindness from neurological effects. A few cases of the bends, caused by air bubbles in the bloodstream. I’d recommend using the cupola as a high-pressure chamber to relieve those symptoms.”

“Do it.”

“The ebullisms-the swelling, caused by the vaporization of water in the tissues-ought to subside in a few hours. They look worse than they are, mostly. Some internal injuries due to gases trapped in the bowels. Damaged eardrums. Anybody with any congestion or catarrh will have suffered. We’ve also got injuries relating to the explosion at Wilson’s bulkhead. Blast injuries, burns, broken bones, hearing loss-”

“There must be damaged lungs.”

Grace nodded. “Two in this group.”

“Yeah,” Helen said. “More in the shuttle group.”

All the crew, and every shipborn child since before they could walk, had been trained to open their mouths wide in the event of a decompression. Try to hold your breath and the expanding gases in your lungs just ripped apart your delicate pulmonary tissues and capillaries, and then trapped air was forced out of the lungs into the thoracic cage, from where it could get directly into the general circulation through ruptured blood vessels. The final result was massive air bubbles moving through the body and lodging in the heart and the brain. But, despite all the training, some people always followed their instincts to hold their breath when the crisis came.

Grace said, “We’re going to have a host of cases of bronchiectasis. Damaged lungs. You’re left vulnerable to infection for the rest of your life. I’m concerned about our stock of antibiotics.”

“We’ll figure that out.”

“Some are worse than that,” Grace said bleakly. “I don’t believe there’s anything we can do for them. I don’t think even a medic with the proper training could-”