Ark

35

November 2041

Holle woke in an empty bed. She could feel it, feel the cold of a pushed-back duvet, even before she began to move. Seven days. That was her first thought. Just seven days to launch, after a lifetime of training, of friendship and rivalry, triumphs and breakdowns, wonder and tragedy. But first she had to get through today.

She opened her eyes slowly. The room was filled with gray light, the light of another murky November morning; the weather had been lousy, depressing for weeks. She rolled on her back, feeling the aches in her stiff muscles, her body’s memory of the hours she’d spent on the centrifuge yesterday. She’d been too exhausted even to make love with Mel. When they’d rolled into the room they shared here in the crew hostel at Gunnison they’d spent an hour on massage, working out the knots of pain in each other’s body, before succumbing to sleep.

Now Mel stood before the window, naked save for a pair of boxer shorts. His body was silhouetted against the sky, and she could see the hard outline of his waist, his muscled arms. After these final intensive months of training, they were all super-fit.

“Mel? Come back to bed.”

He didn’t stir.

She clambered out of bed, wrapped a blanket over her shoulders, and shuffled to the window. They were on the tenth story of this residential facility, a concrete block hastily thrown up to house the Candidates, and the engineers, managers, trainers and other ground-support staff who outnumbered the potential crew many times over. Glancing down she made out the triple fence, ditches, gun towers and patroling dogs that walled her off in this particular haven from the rest of a crumbling world.

And looking out, as the eastern sky brightened over to her right, she had a grand view of the Gunnison valley, cradled by the bulk of the Rockies. Her eye was drawn to the Orion launch stack itself, a complex block bathed in spotlights. She was ten kilometers away from the ship, and she made out the cluster of support facilities around it, ugly, functional concrete buildings with the gleam of gravel roads snaking between them. That was the Zone, as they had come to call it, the two-kilometer-wide launch center with the monstrous spacecraft at its heart. The old town of Gunnison itself was to the east, off to the right of the launch facility. All this was contained by a wider secured perimeter within which lay what the military planners called the Hinterland, a concentration of industrial facilities sixteen kilometers across. Traffic crawled everywhere, the lights of the convoys like strings of jewels, and if she pressed her ear to the glass she could hear the rumble of vast machines. The work went on twenty-four seven, and it had been that way for months.

Mel only had eyes for the Ark itself. “Look at that bird.”

Holle wrapped her arms around his waist. “And it’s all ours.”

“Or will be, in a week.”

It wasn’t like Mel to be up like this. He generally slept like a log; he’d been in the military long enough to learn the trick of grabbing sleep whenever he could. She asked, “You OK this morning?”

“I guess so. Just the tension closing in, I guess.”

“Those damn clocks ticking down everywhere.”

“And something else. Don’t you feel it?”

“What?”

“Euphoria,” he said. “I guess that’s the word. It feels like we’re the center of the whole world. We’re young, fit, ready to go and do what we’ve trained all our lives for. I can’t imagine ever feeling better than this. Gordo Alonzo talks about how it was for a shuttle crew before a spaceflight. Some things don’t change, I guess.”

He was right. Everything was heightened, as if it was all more real-even now, the warmth of Mel’s flesh against her cheek, the prickle of the rough carpet under her feet, the twinkling lights of the sleepless industrial landscape before her. “Yeah. We’re running on adrenaline. I’ll probably sleep for a week once we’re on the damn ship.”

He turned and took her in his arms, his face shadowed as he looked down at her. “Do you have any regrets?”

“Like what?”

“You aren’t sorry we didn’t try for a pregnancy?”

Many of the female Candidates had done so, getting themselves knocked up in the final weeks. Some had succeeded, including Susan Frasier, who was bearing the child of her long-term boyfriend Pablo Mason, an eye-dee who had turned out to be a math whiz and, through Susan’s persuasion of Gordo, got himself a place on the project ground crew. But there were others who had ended up getting too sick to complete the training program, and had washed themselves out.

“It might have boosted your chances.”

“No,” Holle said firmly. “We’ve been through this.” If she had got pregnant with Mel’s kid, his genes would have become redundant. “I wasn’t about to leave you behind. We can have kids on Earth II.”

“Not for eight years.”

She shrugged. “I can wait.”

A wall panel flashed, bleeping softly.

They broke their hug. Holle called, “On.”

The screen lit up with Alonzo’s craggy, deeply tanned face. “-is a loop recording. The final crew selection commences at 0800.” An hour from now. “If you believe yourself to be eligible for selection, get yourself to the crew center on time. If you ain’t there, even if your name is Neil Armstrong, you wash out. I hope that’s clear. Bring only what you need.” He glanced down at a note. “That’s all.” There was a flicker, as the recording restarted. “This is a loop recording. The final crew selection process commences at 0800…”

Mel and Holle looked at each other for one second. There had been no warning of this. “Move,” he said.

“Yeah.”

Mel ran for the shower.

Holle grabbed their underwear from the closets, and their red and blue Candidates’ uniforms. “What do you think he meant, ‘Bring only what you need’?”

“That we’re not coming back,” Mel called from the shower.

“Shit.” But she should have expected something like this. So the end game begins, she thought. She grabbed backpacks and started ransacking the room, seeking what was most precious to her-books, diaries, data sticks, hardcopy images, letters from her father, her Angel. What could she not bear to leave behind?

She heard a growl of heavy engines, carrying even through the thick window glass. Looking down she saw armored buses pulling up, ready to take them to the launch facility. She glanced at a clock. Five past seven. She threw stuff arbitrarily into the backpacks. “Will you hurry up in that damn shower?”