Ark

46

February 2042

It was a relief for Wilson Argent to drift out of the airlock and into the blackness beyond the hull. A relief to get out of the small chamber where for hours he had been pre-breathing the low pressure pure oxygen that filled his suit. A relief, forty days after launch, to get out of the cramped, noisy environs of Seba and Halivah, the twin hulls of the Ark, that competitive, fractious hothouse. Yet he was still deep within the bowels of the ship, deep within the factory-sized Orion launch stage, and his view of free space was obstructed by struts and tanks and shadows. He could hear nothing but the whirr of the pumps in his backpack, the hiss of static from the comms units in his Snoopy-hat headset, and the rasp of his own breathing.

The latching end of the manipulator arm-formally the Mobile Servicing System-was waiting for him, just as according to the EVA plan, right outside the hatchway. The arm was like an ungainly robot hand, sprouting latches and tool stubs and cameras, swathed in white insulating cloth, bright where it caught the spotlights.

Wilson turned around, grabbed the edge of the hatch with his gloved hands, and launched himself feet first toward the arm’s latching end. His Kevlar tether unrolled behind him. The bulky gloves were a smart design that enabled his fingers to bend easily, but his legs were stiff, stuck inside what felt like an inflated inner tube. His Extravehicular Mobility Unit, his suit, insulated and cooled him and kept him under pressure and even offered some protection from micrometeorites and radiation, but it made him as rigid as a plastic doll. But then he wasn’t planning on walking on the moon today; he was to make an eyeball inspection of the pusher plate, and most of the movements he would be making would be controlled by the arm.

His aim was true, and his booted feet settled gently against the arm’s end. He heard a distant scrape as latches closed around his boot soles. A rail swiveled up to meet him, and he grasped a double handle, so that it was as if he was riding a scooter. He clipped a harness around the stem of the handle. More security: if the arm failed altogether, he could conceivably work his way back to its base hand over hand. He was ready.

“Cupola, Argent,” he said, his voice muffled in his own ears from the enclosure of the helmet. “I’ve interfaced with the arm. I’m good to go. Preparing to release the hull tether.”

“Copy that, Wilson,” Venus called from the cupola. “Your medical signs are a little off. You’re breathing too hard, your heart rate’s above nominal. Take a few seconds.”

He supposed she was right, but she didn’t need to say it out loud. He knew that many of the crew would be following his progress on the internal comms, and he no doubt had an audience Earthside via the continual live feed. “Venus, I know what I’m doing. We practiced this very maneuver for hours back in the Hilton. I could do it in my sleep.”

“That’s what’s worrying me. Take a breath, have a drink, and blip your SAFER again.”

“Damn it.” But as capcom today she was the boss, sort of. He sipped a little water from his in-helmet bag.

And he pressed the button at his waist. His SAFER gave him a subtle kick in the back, and he could feel how the arm assembly rocked and quivered as it absorbed the impulse. His Simplified Aid For EVA Rescue was a cut-down compressed-nitrogen jet that would allow him to steer himself back to the Ark if the worse came to worst and he was cut loose from the hull altogether. Like the arm and his suit, the SAFER was a design relic of the International Space Station. He waited for the arm’s vibrations to damp down.

Sort of the boss. After years of pursuing his specialism in the ship’s external systems he was damn sure he knew a lot better than Venus how to run this routine inspection EVA, which had been scheduled in principle since the Ark had been nothing more than a paper design on a desk in Denver. But there was no point railing at Venus. She was just one link in a chain of command which ran up through the Ark’s nominal onboard commander Kelly Kenzie to Gordo Alonzo, ensconced in Mission Control in Alma, to where the running of the mission had been transferred from Pikes Peak after the Orion engine was shut down. That chain of command would be in place for the next two years, until they had fulfilled their mission at Jupiter and shot off to the stars in a warp bubble. After that the superluminal Ark would not be contactable, and Alma itself, submitting to the flood, would cease to transmit anyhow, and the Ark would be on its own.

But remoteness was already a problem. Earth was five light minutes away, making it impossible for Gordo to manage the EVA hands-on. It wasn’t Venus’s fault. If not for lightspeed Gordo would be chewing him out just the same way. And anyhow, he admitted, he did feel a little better for having rested a few seconds.

“Cupola, Argent. OK, Venus, I’m set.”

“Keep your hands inside the car at all times.”

“Roger that.” That phrase had been the mantra of the sim runners in Gunnison, many of them aging veterans of the pre-flood space program. As every theme park on Earth had shut down before Wilson or Venus had been born, none of the Candidates was clear what it meant. But it felt like good luck to repeat it now.

The arm juddered, Wilson felt a thrum of hydraulics, and then he was swung smoothly away from the hull.

He rose up through a tangle of struts, spars, pipes and cabling. It felt as if he were moving fast, and he passed alarmingly close to some of the heavy struts and tank walls. The arm, too, wobbled and vibrated more than he had expected from the sims, but then he was a heavy mass on the end of a long jointed structure. He concentrated on his breathing, and kept his face expressionless. He didn’t want loops of his face with some bug-eyed scared expression showing on the in-hull screens, and back on Earth.

After only a few seconds he was clear of the Orion superstructure, and the arm lifted him out of shadow. The sun rose, a lantern hanging beyond the ship’s prow, and his visor immediately tinted, blocking out much of the glare. Somewhere out there were stars, the Earth and moon, the planets, but he could see nothing but the sun.

As he rose further he got a good view of the full length of the Ark-the first human to do so with his naked eye since launch, he reminded himself with some pride, although drone robots had been sent out for inspections since the Orion had been shut down. The twin hulls of the ship were still bound up within the components of the Orion launch stage-hulls now called Seba and Halivah, named for the brothers of the biblical Nimrod, all great-grandsons of Noah. He could see the shuttles that would some day take them down to the surface of Earth II, four brilliant white moths clinging to the hulls’ flanks. A constellation of artificial lights was scattered through the Ark’s tangled structure, and the sunlight splashed highlights from polished metal. It looked extraordinarily beautiful, he thought, drifting in interplanetary space like this, and yet odd, not so much a spacecraft as an industrial plant somehow uprooted and flung into the light. All this would be taken apart and rebuilt at Jupiter, as the Orion was discarded and the Ark was readied for its interstellar cruise. But before then the Orion would have to fire up one more time to slow the Ark into Jovian orbit. And as a result Wilson needed to make this inspection of the pusher plate. There had been two misfires of pulse units during the launch sequence, the first only a few seconds after liftoff. The longitudinal jarring delivered to the ship by the missing pulses, and possible damage caused to the pusher plate by any misplaced bombs, needed to be checked for.

When he looked down, beyond his feet, he could make out the dim red lights of the cupola where Venus sat, following his progress. Another space station relic, it was a hexagonal glass blister, the window hatches folded back, stuck to the side of Seba. The cupola was Venus’s domain, and during most of the mission she would be using it to run her astronomy experiments, and the guidance, navigation and control functions of which she was leader. On impulse he waved a hand, and he saw motion inside the cupola, a shadow in the low-level eye-saving illumination.

“We see you, Wilson.”

“Cupola, I see you too, you’re looking good.”

“How’s the ship looking?”

“I can see no obvious damage, from this vantage. No sign of leaks from the wall tanks.” Much of the Ark’s onboard water was stored in fine curving tanks just under the outer skin of each hull; the water, wrapped around the living volume, provided some protection from cosmic radiation. “Scorching around the attitude rockets’ nozzles. Perhaps some scarring of the heat insulation tiles on the nose fairing.”

“The Geiger readings show no relics of the Orion bombs at your position, Wilson. Cosmic background only.”

“That’s reassuring,” he said dryly. The arm swung him away again, bending at its multiple joints. He passed the great limbs of the shock-absorber pistons and approached the base of the ship. The circular rim of the pusher plate was now clearly visible, gleaming in the steady sunlight. “I can see the plate. Will be entering its shadow soon.”

“Roger, Wilson. Don’t take any chances.”

“I won’t.” As the plate’s sharp rim neared he gripped the scooter handles hard, and tried to keep his face still, his breathing regular. “Here I go…” Damn, his voice was a squeak.

The arm dipped down, and the rim of the plate slid up over the glare of the sun and plunged him in shadow. For a few seconds his visor failed to react to the change in light level, stranding him in darkness. The arm stopped, slow vibrations washing along its length. He felt very remote, very fragile, here on the end of this unlikely cherry-picker.

Then the visor cleared, and lamps on the arm lit up, splashing light over the steel gong before him. “I’m there,” he said. “I see the plate.” He reached out with one arm. “Almost close enough to touch.”

“Roger that, Wilson. Take it easy now. Have another break, let your eyes adjust. All your systems are go, your consumables are fine. You could stay out there another twelve hours if you had to. You’ve plenty of time.”

“Copy.”

He deliberately steadied his breathing. He turned, looking back the way he had come. And there were Earth and moon, hanging in space, visible now that the pusher plate eclipsed the sun. Both showed half-discs, separated only by about as much as the moon’s diameter as seen from the surface of the Earth. He held up his thumb, and was able to cover both of the twin worlds. In the first few days, as they had looked back at the receding home planet, they had all been shocked by how little land remained. Even Colorado, which had seemed so extensive when they were down there living on it, was only a scatter of muddy islands, threatened by the huge curdled semipermanent storms that stalked the ocean world. But from here he could see no detail.

They had already come so far. The brief, explosive Orion launch had hurled them directly away from the Earth, without pausing in orbit, and they would cruise with only minor course adjustments all the way to Jupiter, slowing as they climbed out of the sun’s gravity well. But right now they were traveling at an astounding speed: eighty-five thousand feet per second in Gordo’s astronaut units, or twenty-six kilometers a second, or fifty-eight thousand miles per hour. This was more than twice as fast as any human had traveled before; the record had been held by an Apollo crew.

Even at such speeds the whole journey was expected to take them a year. But in their forty days so far they had already traveled around ninety million kilometers-more than two hundred times the distance from Earth to moon, around a tenth of the distance to Jupiter, orders of magnitude further from Earth than any human before them. Even light took a nontrivial time to span such distances. It was astounding to think that the image he saw of Earth was already five minutes old.

Slowly, as he watched, the silent stars came out, filling the sunless sky beyond the bright Earth.

“Argent, cupola. You OK out there, big guy?”

“Yeah. Just taking in the view.”

“You ready to proceed?”

“Roger that.”

“The arm will move you to plate sector one-A…”

The arm juddered into motion again, swinging him closer to the pusher plate. He sighed, and turned away from the Earth.