Ark

44

Wilson lay beside Kelly and Venus in their acceleration couches on the bridge of the Ark’s crew hull B, called Seba. “One minute,” Venus said.

Wilson couldn’t keep from talking. “Jesus. We must be insane. A fucking atom bomb is about to go off, right under my ass.”

Kelly grinned at him. “Too late to bale now.”

Venus said, “And this is going to be Gunnison’s worst day since the Alien fought the Predator.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Everything’s nominal.” Businesslike as ever, she checked the displays before them.

The Ark was very heavy engineering, but it was also very simple, and there were few instruments. Aside from housekeeping displays showing the condition of the air inside the pressurized hulls and the acceleration to which the crew would be exposed, gauges showed the pulse-detonation timing rate, and the levels in the tanks of anti-ablation oil and coolant fluid, and the pressures in the steam lines. The controls were simple too, a manual control of the pulse unit drop rate, a T-handle and stick to adjust the bird’s attitude. These were a last-ditch resort if the automatics failed. However, Wilson knew, nobody had survived a sim in which some faked disaster had made it necessary to use the controls.

And now, in these last seconds, Wilson could feel the beast stir, as the nuclear pulse units in their charge magazines were lined up in the throats of their delivery mechanisms, and the coolant liquids began to pump around the great pistons. He glanced over the monitors that showed the crew in their rows of seats, deep in the bowels of the hull. The bright amber launch-imminent lamps were flashing, and a voice message resounded at every level. But people were still fighting over the couches.

“Twenty seconds,” Kelly said, matter-of-fact.

Wilson felt his anus clench. “Shit, shit.”

“Fixed, damn it,” Matt yelled, and his voice echoed from the metal walls around him.

“Fifteen seconds,” called up Liu Zheng, from the ground.

“I know. I can hear the coolants flowing.” Matt glanced around at the mighty metal walls surrounding his own mote of a body. “Can’t believe I’m here, listening to this.”

“Ten… Nine… I suppose we don’t need a countdown.”

“No. I finished the job, didn’t I?”

“That you did, Matt. Good work.”

“Where are you?”

“Right under the pusher plate. Where else would I be?”

“If it goes wrong you’ll be the first to know, Liu.”

There was a rush of steam, a clang. That must be the first pulse unit rushing down its launch chute. In this last instant Matt felt a stab of fear. “Liu, I think-”

He saw the detonation, lapping around the rim of the pusher plate. He saw it. And then-

An immense fist slammed into the back of her couch. Holle heard gasps all around her, and a groaning, as if the ship itself were being torn apart.

And yet I’m not dead, she thought. She was only thirty meters above the plasma cloud from a five-kilotonne nuke, and a pusher plate that had been hurled upwards at a thousand gravities. But the suspension system had to be working, the great pistons absorbing the shock. If not she’d be dead by now, the ship destroyed as the thousand-ton plate, forced up by that first explosion, rose and smashed through the Ark’s gargantuan structure.

The gravity dipped, sickeningly. The end of the first pulse. Was that only a second?

And then the next came, another shove, smoother this time, that pushed her back into her couch. The pressure yielded once more. And then the push came again. And again. It was working. She heard people whooping, applauding.

She lay back and closed her eyes, and tried to imagine she was on a kid’s swing in the training facilities at Gunnison, harmlessly rocking back and forth. It wasn’t too bad, a G or so of eyeballs-in acceleration, an easy training session. Not so bad to be riding an atomic booster into space.

But the launch facility, any ground crew who hadn’t got away from the Zone, were already gone, the hapless town of Gunnison flattened like Hiroshima. The journey hadn’t even begun.

Now she felt the ship judder, shift violently from one side to another, shaking her in her cozy couch. The Ark was mounted with beefy auxiliary rockets, attitude thrusters meant to tweak its trajectory against the brute pushing of the nukes. Swing, swing, swing-

She was thrown forward against her straps, as if the ship had hit a brick wall. The applause turned to screams.

Unit failed. They had simulated this.

She glanced around. Morell looked terrified. “A pulse unit failed, Theo!” she yelled. “Just one unit, out of hundreds. That’s all…” It was always a chancy business to throw a device as complex as a thermonuclear bomb into the expanding plasma cloud left by another only a second earlier and expect it to detonate. But if the next unit failed, and the next, they would fall back into their own radioactive mess…

Another surge. God, had that only been a second, once again? Time was elastic.

And another surge. And another. Now there was some pogoing, longitudinal juddering as the bulk of the Ark soaked up that missed stroke. Then the acceleration dips settled down to that steady swinging once more.

She felt Theo’s hand flapping, grasping for hers. She took it and held on firmly, wishing that Mel was here, and her father. Swing, swing, swing, the pulsing a little slower than her resting heartbeat, swing, swing, and the carcass of the Ark groaned as it rose like a dark angel from the ashes of its launchpad.

Something splashed on her face. It was urine, dripping down from the deck above.

Swing, swing.