Ark

21

Three days after the accident Gordon James Alonzo hosted a preliminary inquiry in the Capitol building in Denver. To her surprise Holle was summoned, along with Kelly Kenzie and Mel Belbruno.

The walk across town, escorted by Don Meisel, was grim. The city was now surrounded by rings of defensive perimeters, and internally was sliced up into control zones, with barriers between Auraria and LoDo and the Central Business District. The civic center was like a fortress. Don was alert, wary. There was a fear that the Candidates could be a target.

Holle thought the mood was changing, generally. The rising flood had now passed the altitude of the lowest point in Colorado, a place called Holly in the valley of the Arkansas, a symbolic moment. The water was coming, and the inward flow of refugees was intensifying. Invesco Field and Coors Field and the Pepsi Center had become not so much processing as detention centers. A potato blight had drastically worsened the food situation. And now the Byers incident had raised tensions. As the flood went on and on, relentlessly rising, the waters seemed to be washing away any hope, any optimism that this vast convulsion would ever come to an end. For the first time the idea that this really was an end of the world was being taken seriously, absorbed imaginatively. That was what lay under all the stress, she thought. And that tension crackled across the dingy downtown.

Magnus Howe met them at the State Capitol. Once they were through the security barriers he escorted them to a meeting room, and showed where they should take their places at a big conference table.

Holle looked around warily. Gordo himself sat at the head of the table. Behind him was a big interactive whiteboard, and flipcharts summarizing the status of the project’s various aspects. Screens and touch pads were set into the surface of the table before the attendees.

Down one side of the table sat senior air force, NASA and government people. The big names of the old civilian control of the project were lined up along the other side, including Holle’s and Kelly’s fathers. Liu Zheng and more of the technical team sat looking impatient, abashed. Some of the attendees had teams of assistants sitting behind their seniors, backs against the walls, so the room was filling up.

Holle’s father caught her eye and smiled. She hadn’t spoken to him face to face since the accident. Everybody had been running around too much, scrambling to cope with the accident’s aftermath, preparing for reviews like this, and thinking about options for recovery and rescoping. But Holle knew that it was at Patrick’s and Edward’s insistence that the Candidates had representatives here at this crucial meeting. They might not be able to contribute much, but in a sense the whole exercise was for them; they ought to be here. “Even if,” as Kelly had said gloomily, “it’s only to hear the whole show is going to be canceled.”

The air was already hot. The aircon was juddery, even here in the Capitol building. Everything was breaking down. Water jugs stood full on the table, glinting with dew, and Holle longed to pour herself a glass, but she didn’t dare. As the attendees filed in there was silence save for a scraping of chairs, an occasional cough. Everybody seemed so old, save the Candidates and one or two aides.

At last only one space remained at the table, and there was a tense pause. Then the doors opened, held back by an air force orderly, and a paramedic in a bright orange coverall pushed in a wheelchair. Jerzy Glemp sat in the chair, his whole body swathed in a green blanket. A patch covered one eye.

As he was shoved into position at the table, Patrick leaned forward. “Jerzy, you shouldn’t be here. The doctors insisted you stay in the hospital.”

“Fooey. I wouldn’t-” Jerzy broke up in coughing that jerked his body, and Holle could see the pain every movement caused him. The paramedic hovered with an oxygen mask, but Jerzy shook his head minutely, and she backed away. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.” Jerzy looked around, his one good eye glinting. He found Holle. “How’s my boy? They haven’t let him see me.”

“We thought that was for the best,” Magnus Howe said.

Jerzy snapped, “I asked Miss Groundwater.”

“Zane’s fine,” Holle said. “But-” She thought of Zane as he’d been in the hours since the accident, Zane who’d hardly spoken a word to anybody, Zane who seemed to cling to corners, to shadows, Zane pushed in on himself. She said at last, “He’s working. His work is good.”

“Ah. That’s all one can ask, isn’t it? Tell him I’ll see him as soon as I can.”

“I will.”

“So we’re all here,” said Gordo Alonzo, rapping on the tabletop with a fat, old-fashioned fountain pen. Holle wondered vaguely where he got the ink. “I have to face President Vasquez herself later today, and make my recommendations about the future of Project Nimrod. I suspect that in my heart of hearts I’d rather just can this bull session right now, and go do something more productive. Because, you know why? I think I already know what recommendation I’m going to make, no matter what is said today. That we pull the plug on this whole fucking shambles.”

“You don’t have the authority for that,” Patrick said heatedly. “In terms of the command and reporting structure-”

Gordo laughed. “Don’t you guys get it? Command structure! At this minute that’s me, pal. When your magnetic bottle went pop it took everything else down with it.”

Kenzie said, “There’s also the issue of hope, Colonel Alonzo. Of purpose. What would you have the administration do instead? Give the Homeland goons bigger sticks with which to beat back the refugees?”

Gordo said, “The sea is going to cover over us all in a few years or less whatever we do, buddy. I’m not sure if to give false hope is a worse sin than to give no hope at all.” He turned to his charts and boards. “Let’s get back to basics. Tell me how you think you’re going to fly this dumbass mission in the year 2040. Which, let me remind you, is just four years from now.” He stared around. “Who wants to lead off?”

Edward Kenzie spoke up again. “The basics are simple. We need to assemble a starship, with a crew of no less than eighty, in orbit.” He got up stiffly. With age he was getting ever stouter, and according to Kelly he suffered badly from gout. He went to a flipchart and turned pages until he came to a construction schedule. “From scratch, we built a space launch center at Gunnison, Colorado.” He tapped the whiteboard, and up came an image: a single launch gantry, blockhouses around it, mountains in the distance. He sat heavily in an empty seat by the board. “Intended to fly Ares I and V booster stacks, the launch technology designed to take humans back to the moon and to Mars, which of course never happened. We had to procure transport facilities. Fuel manufacture and storage-”

“Yadda yadda,” said Gordo. “You flew one bird out of there so far, didn’t you? One stick, one Ares I, unmanned, to orbit. How many launches you think you’re going to need to assemble your ‘starship in orbit’?”

Liu Zheng answered that. He tapped a touch pad, and the whiteboard lit up with graphics. “Fifteen launches, sir. Five of the heavy-lift Saturn V-class Ares V, unmanned, and ten of the human-rated Ares I sticks, each carrying eight or ten crew. The plan so far has been to reinhabit the abandoned ISS, the space station, and use that as a construction shack to-”

Gordo waved him silent. “Your deadline for completion of on-orbit assembly is still 2040. Right? You’ve managed one launch in the last four years. You imagine you’ll get through fifteen in the next four. Fifteen launches, and that’s without tests and failures, and you haven’t flown a single Ares V out of Gunnison yet. And you’re going to reoccupy the ISS, a station which has been mothballed for sixteen years. My God, at NASA we’d have looked at that alone as an activity that would likely take teams of trained astronauts years. It’s down here as a milestone on your chart-no resources assigned to it-nothing. Who’s gonna do that, the tooth fairy?”

Patrick steepled his fingers. “We’re at a point at which our schedule is expected to accelerate, as significant mission milestones-”

“Bull,” said Gordo simply. “This ain’t the first fucked-up project I’ve been involved with, Mr. Groundwater, and I recognize all the symptoms, and I heard it all before. We screwed up, we missed all the milestones so far, but the future is bright! And you’ll notice I haven’t yet come to the issue of antimatter production. Remind me. How much antimatter are you going to need for your starship?”

Liu Zheng said, “We believe half a kilogram. That may not sound much but such is the energy density of the-”

“Yes, yes. Let’s take a look at your production facility.” Gordo tapped the chart, and brought up live images of the ongoing disaster in the Denver suburb of Byers. The accelerator site was a crater from which protruded odd bits of wall or the skeletal tangle of reinforcing steel cables. Smoke snaked up from a dozen fires, and rescue workers crawled in their bright orange gear through mounds of rubble. In one place a refugee camp had been destroyed, canvas tents blown flat. On the fringe of the disaster zone, ragged protesters faced a line of cops and soldiers and Homeland goons.

“There’s your antimatter factory,” Gordo said. “A hole in the ground, which it would have been a lot cheaper to produce by dropping a fucking nuke. Let me tell you something. No matter what else comes out of this disaster, I don’t believe it’s going to be acceptable to President Vasquez to go back to manufacturing this stuff in the middle of Colorado.”

“Then we’re screwed,” said Jerzy Glemp, his damaged body twitching under his blanket. “Screwed. The whole point of the design is the warp bubble, Colonel. We can’t fly without that. And we can’t create a warp bubble without antimatter.”

“I’m aware of that,” Gordo snapped. “And I’m also aware of the short-cuts you took to get your precious atom-smasher up and running, Dr. Glemp.”

Glemp grew more agitated. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Like hell you don’t. I’ve seen the documentation trail. The asscoverers in your organization kept a record of every time you leaned on them to cut a test, disregard a safety precaution, push a design without a backup. If this was a court of law I’d have a case to prosecute you.”

“It is rich for you to berate us for schedule delays then accuse me of negligence for my attempts to meet targets.”

“It was always out of your reach,” Gordo said. “This dream of star flight. That’s the truth, isn’t it, Dr. Glemp? You always saw that more clearly than these others, and yet you pushed ahead anyhow, as far and as fast as you could, regardless of the risks-”

Edward Kenzie stood up again. “Colonel, it’s four years since President Vasquez made her Nimrod speech, her Kennedy moment. You were involved then, and you’re sure as hell involved now. But none of the problems we’ve faced since have anything to do with you-is that what you’re telling us?” He pointed a fat finger at Gordo. “Is that the game, Colonel? Blame?”

Jerzy struggled. “I want to say-oh, let me speak-” His voice broke up into a coughing jag that left him shaking.

Edward tried to speak again, and Patrick, and others joined in, and Gordo tried to shout them down. It was a room full of old people shouting at each other.

Holle tuned out. She felt stunned, emptied out. She hadn’t suspected that the project was so far behind schedule, or that such risks were being taken to accelerate it. And all for me.

Something in Gordo’s continual emphasis on the dates was working in her head. To her the flood had always been remote, something that happened to other people. Now she felt as if the world was closing in on her. In four years, when the flood waters would be lapping in this very room, she would be just twenty-one. Suddenly it wasn’t some abstracted future version of herself who would have to cope with all this. It was her who would have to face the future, and if the Ark failed it was her who would have to deal with the ultimate nightmare, the washing away of the very ground under her feet. A deep fear bit into her belly, like a fear of falling. She glanced across at her father, wishing she was nearer to him.

Kelly was watching her. “Hey. It’s OK. We’ll get through this. We’ll fly yet.” And she turned back to listen to the arguments, serene, confident, strong. Just for a moment, rivalries put aside, Holle could see why she was so popular with the public who watched the Candidates’ progress, their daily lives.

Gordo folded his arms, and silenced the room. “Then this is the crux. The way you have been progressing this project has led to delay and ultimately disaster. There’s no way I’m going to endorse the kind of launch schedule you put together here. It was always a fucking joke, and it’s certainly unachievable now. Unless you can come up with some new way forward, now, then the Ark don’t fly. So who speaks next?”

“Holle Groundwater,” said Liu Zheng.