Ark

51

By the time they got through the Halivah airlock, Gordo Alonzo’s broadcast from Alma had already begun. Kelly, Venus, Wilson and others sat on T-stools before a big wall screen, along with a handful of other crew, Candidates, gatecrashers and illegals, gathered at all angles around the central group.

Jack Shaughnessy was handcuffed to his brother Paul. Jack had a busted nose and a thickening bruise around his right eye. Rumor had it that he had got those, not from Thomas Windrup, but from Elle Strekalov, Windrup’s partner and the girl on whom Jack had made the move that sparked the whole thing off. Thomas himself was still in Mike Wetherbee’s minuscule infirmary, recovering from a punctured lung.

Alonzo, insulated from interruption by the forty-five-minute each-way time delay, was pontificating on one of his favorite subjects: crew morale. “You guys need to cook up more celebrations. Your Polyakov Day back in February was a good idea.” On the four hundred and thirty-eighth day of the mission, the crew of the Ark had simultaneously beaten the space endurance record, previously held since 1995 by a Russian called Valeri Polyakov. “Trouble is I can’t think of anything much significant in the near future until day eight oh four, when you’ll beat old Sergei Krikalev for most time spent in space total by any human…”

Holle peered at the screen. Gordo himself, seated at a desk, was brightly lit, but other figures were in the shadows behind him. She was fairly sure she saw Thandie Jones there, and Edward Kenzie. If her father was there, she couldn’t make him out. She gazed at the screen, drinking in every pixel, frustrated.

Something landed softly on her neck. She reached back and found a screw, come loose from somewhere. She looked up, and saw a rain of dust gently drifting down over the people, the handcuffed brothers. The slow spin was making all the garbage they had accumulated since engine shutdown drift out of the air. And through the layers of the mesh deck she saw the activity of the hull going on, as always. People were playing zero-gravity Frisbee in the big open space, and an infant gurgled as her mother set her spinning in the air. Good pictures for the live feed, Holle thought. All the Ark’s babies were a year or so old now. How strange that there were already human beings who knew nothing of the universe except the inside of this hull-but for that child’s generation, that wouldn’t seem strange at all. The baby laughed in the air, rotating slowly, its chubby limbs waving.

“For sure, improved morale is the way to stop you turning on each other, as in this Windrup-Shaughnessy case…”

Gordo, in his heavy-handed way, was getting to the substance of the address, and Holle focused her attention.

Gordo put on reading glasses, and looked down at a page of notes. “Now, we’ve carefully considered the evidence you sent down. We being the senior project management. Also we consulted General Joe Morell, who commanded the army group of which Jack Shaughnessy was a part before he absconded. So I hope he and all of you will accept our verdict as being properly considered and having full military authority.”

He took off his glasses and peered out of the screen. “Listen now. I’m not a lawyer, and I won’t talk like one. This is a sorry case, very sorry indeed. Locked up as you are, all young people together in those tin cans, you’re going to get jealousies, tensions. Human nature. But you have got to learn restraint-to respect each other. Shaughnessy, that young woman owed you nothing for your uninvited advances but a polite ‘no.’ Which is what you got, but you had to take it further, you had to take it out on Windrup. Think of the harm you did to the mission as a whole, as well as to Thomas Windrup-incapacitating a member of a crew that’s already under the numbers.

“Now, if you were back on Earth you’d be serving time for what you did. But there’s no jail on a spaceship. Commander Kenzie can’t afford to lose your labor-and she certainly can’t afford the effort and resources it would take to keep you locked up in some damn cupboard doing nothing but jerk off all day. So we tried to come up with a suitable alternative, and this is what we instruct.

“Shaughnessy, you just doubled your workload. From now until Dr. Wetherbee signs off Thomas Windrup as fit to work again, you are going to do his job for him. You’ll cover for Windrup to the best of your technical abilities, and where that breaks down I expect an officer delegated by the commander to find you some suitable alternative. This is in addition to your own chores. And if that leaves you no time to take a shit, I ain’t weeping for you. Is that clear? Finally you’ll wear a tag so the whole damn crew knows who you are and what you’ve done.” He glared into the screen. “That’s how it’s going to be. There’s going to be a rigorous rule of law applied aboard that damn ship, just as on Earth. The only difference is the punishment has to fit the crime and the environment you’re stuck in. I’ll give you a minute to think about that, and see if you got any questions.” He turned away, picking up a tumbler of water.

There was silence in the group. Kelly floated up into the air and turned around, facing them all, before her, above, below. “Well, that’s the verdict. Do you all accept it? You, Elle?” She glared at Masayo and the Shaughnessys. “And you? Will you serve your term? And keep your fists to yourself in the future?”

Jack Shaughnessy looked beaten.

His brother was more defiant. “He ain’t wearing no tag.”

“Yes, he is,” Masayo said firmly. “You heard the man, Paul. Let him serve out his punishment.”

Paul shook his head, but subsided.

It seemed to Holle that the tension was seeping away. She drifted down to join Kelly, before the screen where Gordo was talking to somebody out of shot. “Maybe that’s worked. They seem to accept it.”

“Yeah,” Kelly muttered. “But what are we going to do when something like this comes up when we’re in warp, and we don’t have a panel of old men and generals to tell us how to handle it?”

From the screen Gordo Alonzo coughed theatrically.

“One more thing. About the comet you observed as you were testing your planet-finder gear. Dinosaur Killer Mark II, or not as it turned out. I have some more information about that. As it turns out, it’s no coincidence that thing came wandering in from the dark just as we’re reeling from the flood.” He peered at the camera. “I wonder if Zane Glemp is there. If not, show him this recording later. This relates to testimony from one of your tutors, Magnus Howe-something he remembered Jerzy Glemp said to him before he died…”

In the early years of the flood, Glemp had worked for the Russian government. Russia was hit hard and fast by the flood, losing swathes of territory. As massive refugee populations headed south and east, and war seemed inevitable with China and India over the high land of central Asia, the civilian government struggled to hold the line against hard-line generals.

“Some of the military urged using their surviving nuclear stockpile in an all-out attack against China and the west, while they had the chance. The desperate theory was that Russians might survive in an empty if radioactive world.” Gordo grunted, looking at his notes. “I have a feeling that what they actually did with all those nukes in the end was cooked up by some smart guy in an effort to prevent the generals from making a bad situation even worse.

“In 2024-this was the year Moscow flooded-a significant element of the Russian intercontinental nuclear capability, mostly inherited from the old Soviet regime, was launched, aimed not at any point on the ground but sent off into space. President Peery kindly allowed me to confirm Glemp’s reports about this from old CIA surveillance records. It caused a lot of alarm, you can imagine, but it was immediately clear the birds were not targeted on US territory, possessions or allies. Of course not all of their inventory could be retargeted in this way.

“Then we come to 2036, over a decade later. And we have an anomalous sighting by a telescope in Chile, which by then was dedicated to deep-space planet-finding. This big eye spots a flash, out in deep space. Some time later our surviving interplanetary probes report a trace of anomalous radiation.” He looked into the camera. “You see where I’m coming from. This was the Russian nukes, or those that made it out there, all going off at once. A hell of a bang.

“And we move on to 2043-this year. And you characters detect a comet rushing in toward the sun, all but damn it on a collision course with Earth.

“I think you see that we are drawing a line to connect these three events. We think that the Russians tried to deflect a giant comet nucleus toward the Earth. They actually tried to create an impact.

“There is some logic. In the Earth’s early days, deep global oceans were repeatedly outgassed from the planet’s molten interior, where water had been captured during the world’s formation. But in those days the sky was still full of big rocks. Earth got slammed, and the whole damn ocean was blasted off. This happened time and again, and each time the ocean was refilled by outgassing, or maybe from lesser cometary impacts.

“You see the idea. It’s possible these Russian crazies believed that they could beat the flood by bringing down a comet on all our heads and blasting away the whole global ocean, just like in the good old days of the late bombardment. Maybe they actually thought they were saving the world. The fact that they would have left the Earth a desolate wasteland, devoid of air and water and inhabited only by crusty Russian Strangelove types in deep bunkers, was an unwelcome detail.

“My scientists tell me deflecting a comet is a chancy thing to do. It’s remarkable they managed it at all. Thank God they didn’t get it right.

“So that’s the end of that. What’s next?” He glanced over his shoulder at his team of advisers.