Ark

25

The bus pulled up and the doors hissed open. The Candidates filed off, and stepped down onto stony ground. They had nothing but the suits they stood up in, save for Don who carried a canvas bag.

The bus sealed itself up and pulled away, tailed by the other vehicles. Holle wondered where the surveillance eyes were. They would be watched constantly for security, and backup would never be far away.

The Candidates looked around at the wreckage that littered the ground, the twisted metal and plastic panels and the tangle of cables and pipes. Boxes of supplies, toughened to withstand impact, were strewn about. Somebody had started a fire where plastic popped and melted, creating that pillar of black smoke. Gruesomely, dummies dressed up in environment suits had been thrown over the ground, their plastic limbs broken back in unnatural angles. Some of them were children-sized, like seven- or eight-year-olds perhaps, and there were a couple of bright orange sacks, like holdalls, that were baby shelters. Children being an element of exercises like these was a new thing, and followed the social engineers’ newest pronouncements about breeding and demography which had shaken everybody up.

Don pulled a plastic splint out of his pack, and beckoned to Zane. “Good news, buddy, you’re a casualty.” Resigned, Zane rested one hand on Don’s back as he slipped his leg into the splint, which inflated rapidly.

Don stepped back, leaving Zane on the ground, his “bad” leg stuck out in front of him, and addressed the group. “OK. Your shuttle has crashed, here on Earth II. You can see your gear scattered around. You’re far from the other shuttles and there are no comms; there’s no rescue possible in the short term. Air pressure is normal, gravity is high, but the air is unbreathable-acidic. Keep your suits sealed up. You can see you had casualties, Zane here with a broken limb, some deaths. I was told that the rest of you ought to improvise injuries, and generally remember how beat-up you’d be after a crash.”

Kelly nodded at that. “Sensible enough.” Always eager, she bent down to one of the dummies, used a pocketknife to cut away a strip of environment-suit leg, and wrapped it around her upper body as a sling, improvising a broken arm.

Don said, “That’s all I know. I’m not here. Exercise starts now.”

“Suit integrity check,” Kelly said immediately. “Double up.”

They didn’t need her to say it; the first priority was to keep the living alive. They quickly paired up, Holle with Mel, Kelly with Matt. Susan, Venus and Zane worked together, the two women huddled over Zane down on the ground.

Holle ran a quick visual inspection of Mel’s suit, seeking obvious damage, and checked his chest display. For verisimilitude she slapped some sealant from a tube taken from her own leg pouch over a nonexistent rip at the back of his neck, and topped up his air-scrubber compounds with a sachet drawn from Mel’s own backpack and dropped into a slot over his chest. Mel did the same for her; he faked a remedy for a suspected slow leak by tying off her suit just below the elbow on one arm.

Standing there with her arm in a sling, Kelly looked around, checking they were all done. She naturally assumed the role of leader in situations like this. “OK, so nobody else is going to die in the next ten seconds. Matt, will you take care of that fire? Now the injured. Susan, why don’t you see what you can do for Zane? I see a first-aid pack over there, under that heap of blankets. The rest of you, let’s take a look at the other casualties in the wreckage. Watch out for any injuries you’ve sustained yourself.”

“Yes, mother,” said Venus Jenning, and they laughed.

Holle clambered into the “wreckage” of the shuttle. She had to avoid the pockets of flame, and flinched back from the sharp edges that seemed to have been artfully positioned by the exercise designers to catch an unwary arm or leg. As the Candidates immersed themselves in this latest in a long line of puzzle-exercises Holle heard chatter, subdued laughter. But she found the experience oddly uncomfortable. Sometimes she thought she was plagued with an excess of imagination. She could envisage a scene like this being played out in the first few seconds after arrival on a hostile Earth II, under a lowering alien sky, with all of them badly shocked and loved ones lost, and knowing that death could be seconds away, the consequence of a single careless act. There would be none of the brisk confidence then, no muttered jokes.

She found the body of a woman, lying facedown, impaled on a shard of metal through the belly. Holle checked the woman’s suit monitors, which were mostly functioning but showed no sign of life. She slipped off her outer glove, so that her hand was covered only by a delicate skin-tight inner glove with fine fingertip pads. She dug her fingers into a rip at the woman’s suit neck; she could find no pulse. Then she pulled off the woman’s own glove and tried feeling for a pulse at her wrist.

She stepped back, and tried to roll the woman on her back. The “body” was heavier than she had expected, maybe weighted to simulate the supposedly higher gravity. She dug her hands under the woman’s torso, straightened her back and tried again. This time the woman rolled, and Holle had to jump back as the bit of metal on which the mannequin was impaled swung upwards. The twisted sliver of hull was thrust straight into an obviously pregnant belly. “Oh, Jesus.” Just for one second she felt her throat tighten, a foul-tasting liquid push into the back of her mouth. But she swallowed hard. She took a pocketknife and slit open the suit over that pregnant belly. Then she pressed the palm of her bloodied under-glove to the woman’s undergarment and let the fingertip pads work as a stethoscope.

Kelly was beside her. “You OK?”

“Yeah. Got me for a second.”

“Those sim designers are bastards, aren’t they? Always trying to catch us out. But you seriously do not want to throw up in one of these face masks. I should know; I lost my breakfast yesterday morning, back in the NARC.”

“You did? How so?”

Kelly shrugged. “I guess just something I ate. They shouldn’t give us pregnant women to deal with. There won’t be any pregnant women when we make planetfall.”

Kelly was a stickler for the plan, whatever the plan was at a given moment. It was a strength or a weakness, depending on circumstances. Holle said, “No pregnancies if everybody obeys the rules.”

“OK, OK, you sound like Harry. We have to train for all contingencies. You found a heartbeat in there?”

“No.” And Holle was thankful they wouldn’t have to go through the gruesome procedure of getting the body into a blowup shelter and performing an emergency Caesarean.

“Then you’d better give me a hand with this kid over here. My arm, you know, trust me to break the damn thing…” She led Holle over to another “victim,” one of the child-sized mannequins.

Their exercises had begun to include children because the social engineers had suddenly decreed that women pregnant at launch time would be allowed on board the Ark. The idea was to increase genetic diversity at little additional cost in terms of volume, weight and life support at launch; the births could be handled during the cruise to Jupiter with remote support from doctors on Earth. The net result would be, if they followed the nominal mission plan, a small echelon of seven- or eight-year-olds on their hands when they got to Earth II. This drastic new ruling, coming out of the blue with only a couple of years left until launch date, had led to wild speculation and sexual jockeying among the Candidates.

The dummy child lay over a hull strut, his back surely broken, and his upper body was pinned by a tangled mass of wreckage. “The sim designers went to town on this poor kid,” Kelly said. “They ought to provide a few real-life eight-year-olds in these sims; they won’t all be killed on planetfall.”

Holle laughed. “Who’d entrust their children to us?” She crouched down by the “boy.” His chest was crushed, and his pelvis seemed smashed too. She began the grisly ritual of checking for signs of life.

At length all the bodies had been checked. The corpses were moved out of the wreckage, lined up on the ground a few meters from the main crash site, and covered by a bit of cowling.

This time Mel took the lead. He looked around at a featureless lid of sky. “If the timing here on Earth II matches that on Earth, it’s late afternoon and we ought to think about shelter. In the morning we can strip the bodies and dispose of the remains. Anybody volunteer to speak for the dead?”

“I’ll do that,” Susan Frasier said mildly.

Kelly glanced around. “I’d say we should stay close by the wreck. There’s wind shelter here, and we won’t have to move our gear-the water, the air recycler, the food boxes. Matt, you got that fire out?”

“Yeah. No toxic leaks, no fuel spill-we’re pretty safe here.”

Mel nodded. “So we set up the shelters here. I’ll lead one party-Venus, will you take the other?”

“Sure.”

The rule on the ground, as in space, was always safety through redundancy. So though just one of the big fold-out shelters the shuttle carried would have been more than big enough for the pitiful handful of “survivors” of this simulated crash, they dutifully laid out two, side by side in the faked wreckage, and pulled pins to let their struts inflate, forming roomy, angular domes. The shelters were bright orange, like their pressure suits, and were made of tough Kevlar surrounding an airtight inner hull. The shelters were soon hooked up to power units, air scrubbers and water recyclers, all retrieved from the crash and checked over for damage.

Mel decreed that pitons needed to be driven into the stony ground and guy ropes attached against the threat of wind, but the mocked-up radiation and ultraviolet readings his sensors supplied indicated they didn’t need any more in the way of radiation shielding, such as a layer of dirt over the fabric hulls. And he decided that for the sake of morale the shelters would be physically joined, with single-thickness zip-up panels leading to a connecting airlock between them.

With the crash site safed and the shelters secured, the crew clambered inside, crawling in with parcels of food and spare clothing. Don joined them, strictly breaking the rules of the sim. The two couples, Mel and Holle, Don and Kelly, took Alpha, as Mel had called his dome. Meanwhile Zane, Venus, Susan and Matt took Beta. Because of Zane’s fake leg break he had to be manhandled through the airlock into the shelter.

Holle and Mel crawled around their shelter gleefully, soon losing track of Kelly and Don. The interior was big, roomy, a masterpiece of fold-out architecture, with inflatable panels dividing the shelter up into wedge-shaped sectors, and a central pillar where they could set up a shower room and galley and do some science, investigating the planetary environment within which they were going to have to spend their lives.

But all that could wait. Almost at random Holle and Mel settled on a wedge sector to serve as their own. The sloping roof was just high enough, at the center, to stand. The light came from thick double-paned windows, and a wall panel that glowed brightly.

They threw their bundles of blankets and clothing on the floor and faced each other. With a rasp of Velcro Mel pushed back his hood, pulled his goggles away from his eyes, leaving red panda rims, and pulled his mask away from his mouth; it came off his skin with a sucking sound. He ran his hand over his close-shaved scalp. “Thank Christ for that.”

“You stink.”

“And you do a great slow strip out of an envo-suit.”

“You pervert.” She grabbed his chest panel and pulled; it came away easily, and then she pushed up his vest.

He went to work on her, unzipping zips and opening buckles and clasps and ripping Velcro seals. They were trained to get out of their suits fast, if need be, and were naked in seconds. He was already hard when he reached for her, and she squealed and jumped up at him. It took one lunge for him to be inside her, and then she had her arms around his neck, his strong hands under her thighs, and he walked, flexing his feet, letting gravity draw them together. Then, their lips locked, they fell together to the floor.

As with so many other aspects of their lives, they had practiced their lovemaking assiduously, and they were proficient.

Though she had known Mel since they had both been thirteen, when he and Matt Weiss had been foisted on the Candidate group by Gordo Alonzo, it was only recently, the last few months, that they had hooked up together. Holle still wasn’t sure why it was Mel who had emerged as her partner, out of the swirl of brief, intense relationships that had swept through the Candidate group like a firestorm when they were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. Their relationship had never been obvious, the way Thomas and Elle had been obvious since they were kids, or Mike Wetherbee and Miriam Brownlee, thrown together through their work. And Holle wasn’t a voracious sampler like Cora Robles who, starting with poor, hapless, loyal Joe Antoniadi, had worked her way through most of the unattached men in the cadre. Holle had even had a brief experimental fling with Kelly Kenzie, when they found themselves isolated together on one desert-training exercise on the Uncompahgre Plateau-they’d both enjoyed it, but decided once was enough. Maybe it was because Mel had come from outside, having spent his first dozen years with his air force family in an environment quite unlike the one in which Holle had grown up since the age of six. Maybe something in her longed to be grounded-ironic for a woman who was likely to spend most of her life drifting among the stars.

They lay together under a heap of blankets, and drank a little fruit juice.

And then they began again. This time Holle worked her way on top. She’d discovered a variant of the on-all-fours back-flexing yoga exercise called “cat” that drove him crazy.

Then they pulled on fresh AxysCorp coveralls, grabbed some food packets, and went to find the others.

As Holle had expected Kelly and Don were waiting for them at the transparent airlock, the narrow neck that connected the two shelters. Zane and Venus were there in Beta on the far side, easily visible through the lock’s faintly misty transparent panels. Zane was on a low fold-out chair with his “injured” leg thrust out before him; he was sharing a pack of hot food with Venus. There was no sign of Matt or Susan.

It was obvious that Kelly and Don had been making good of their opportunity just as had Holle and Mel. They sat huddled together, wrapped in blankets, sharing sips from a plastic flask. Kelly raised the flask to Holle. “Malt whiskey. Smuggled it in inside my suit.” Her blond hair was loose, and falling down her neck. Her eyes were sleepy, a half-smile on her lips, and the curve of her bare back showed where the blanket had fallen forward.

Holle smiled at her. “That’s what I call your just-fucked look.”

“Well, you should know.”

Zane and Venus worked doggedly at their food, their eyes lowered, and Holle regretted her remark.

Whenever sex came up among the Candidates, Zane and Venus and Matt always held back, or got out of the way altogether. None of them had been known to have a relationship with anybody in the Academy. Holle had had a whispered conversation about this with Kelly one night. Zane and Venus were both close to Harry Smith. Maybe Matt too. Kelly said bluntly that she thought Harry was running some kind of harem, of both men and women. Holle suspected she might be right. But none of the “harem” were talking. It was up to them to fight their own battles.

Mel asked, “So where’s Matt and Susan?”

“Matt’s off by himself,” Venus said. “Working, I think.”

Kelly frowned. “He spends too much time alone. He’ll be marked down for that.” On the crowded Ark, it mightn’t be possible to go off in isolation; you were supposed to socialize.

“And Susan’s gone out,” Zane said bluntly, around a mouthful of food.

“Out where? Oh, shit,” Don said. “Not to meet Pablo?” Pablo was a kid, a bit younger than Susan, from one of the big IDP camps near Denver. “She should keep away from eye-dees like him.”

Kelly reached out of her blanket and slapped his beefy arm. “Stop using that disgusting word.”

“Well, President Peery uses it,” said Venus, her eyes on Don, provocative. “All your DPD buddies use it-don’t they, Don?”

“What if they do? Just a word.”

“You still hanging around with those Covenanters?”

Don snapped, “That’s my business.”

The Covenanters were a quasi-religious network with a philosophy that justified personal survival. This had come out of the circles of the superrich, safe in their fortress-like gated communities and their vast oceangoing craft. In contrast to his predecessor President Peery endorsed their creed, and was plugging it in his speeches, as a justification for his regime’s treatment of refugees. Holle’s father said that he believed people were reaching for theological justifications for the cruelty they were forced to inflict by circumstance, and that was what Peery was providing. It might be a comfort for somebody like Don.

But Venus said, “Everything the Covenanters say disgusts me.”

Don took a slug of the liquor, unperturbed. “Everything you’ve heard, maybe. You want to come along on a patrol some time?”

“Can it,” Zane said sharply. “We’re going to be too busy to squabble. We just got sent an exercise for tomorrow.” He had a laptop at his feet. “I’ll send the details to your machines.”

Mel groaned. “What exercise?”

“They’re making us go through a root-and-branch review of the launch system, the Orion stage. The engineering decisions made so far. We have to come back with a retrospective report on everything: the use of polyethylene versus aluminum to line the pusher plate, the two-stage shock absorber system, the nonlinear instabilities you get when the plasma flow from one nuclear blast mixes with the turbulent ablation products left over from the previous blast, how we can cut down the AI systems to fit the capacity of the mil-spec radiation-hardened chips we’ll have to use…”

Kelly frowned. “What’s that got to do with the sim? The Orion will have been discarded light-years back by the time we get to Earth II.”

“Yes. But there will be science to be done on Earth II, from the moment we land. The science of how to stay alive, to begin with. I think they wanted to set us some useful academic work to do in these conditions-hard thinking, in surface suits. Oh, and they gave us a swing. An hour per day for each of us, mandatory, in our envo-suits.”

More groans. But a swing, no more elaborate than a child’s garden toy, had been found to be a good sim of the crew’s experience of the Orion in flight, with a surge in acceleration of a few gravities coming every few seconds as each bomb went off under the pusher plate-surge, float, surge, float, just like riding through the bottom of a swing’s arc.

Kelly quickly brought the conversation around to the topic that had been dominating their small world since the social engineers had dropped it on them: the issue of newly pregnant women being allowed into the crew. In her competitive, logical way Kelly had done more hard thinking on the topic than anybody else.

“You see how it affects us? Think of this. You go for it, you see the launch day coming, so two, three months ahead you find some stud at random and get yourself knocked up. You’re increasing your chances, you think. You’ll be just ripe when the launch day comes, so you plan. But then there’s a postponement. Six months, say, nothing drastic. But that’s the end of you because when the Ark flies you will have a belly like a balloon, or, worse yet, a kid in your arms. Wave bye bye, and book your swimming lessons.”

Venus said, “You’re talking about giving birth. About the bond between mother and child. The most primal aspects of our humanity. How can you be so calculating?”

“Because that’s the position the social engineers have put us in,” Kelly said fiercely. “You have to take this seriously, because if you don’t some hardheaded bitch out there is going to play the game better than you and steal your seat.”

“Whatever the soc-eng people say, we don’t have to dance to their tune-”

There was a scream.

Venus shut up immediately. It had been like a bird’s call, muffled by the shelter’s thick layers of fabric.

“Human,” Don said.

“Susan,” said Holle.

Don jumped to his feet, exposing his legs and backside. “Let’s go.”

Zane struggled with the inflated splint that encased his leg. “Wait-the sim protocols-”

Don had a gun in his hand. It must have been under the blanket. “Screw that.” He ran to the wall and pulled a quick-release tag; the panel peeled away. Against a background of mountains and dull early evening sky, Holle saw people, and drifting smoke. Don rushed out, blanket clutched around his waist, gun held out before him.