Ark

52

March 2044

Not long after dawn Mel’s National Guard detachment was rousted out of its barrack, an abandoned, rat-infested liquor store in Alma’s small town center.

To brisk orders from the sergeants they formed up in the dim morning light, a few dozen men and women in rough but orderly ranks. Then they began their march along Main Street, heading out of the Buckskin Street compound gate and north through the picked-over ruins of the town toward the outer perimeter. The tarmac surface of the highway was rutted and cracked by the passage of tanks and other heavy armored vehicles. It wasn’t so bad to walk on, but you had to watch you didn’t turn your ankle in some pothole. Weeds flourished, green and vigorous, grabbing their opportunity in this short interval between the ending of the dominance of humankind and the coming of the flood.

The air was full of the stink of the night’s smoke. The eye-dees burned shit these days, human excrement dried and compressed, the hillsides long having been stripped of their lumber. And, under all that, there was a faint tang of salt in the air, of ozone, the smell of the global ocean reaching even here to the heights of the Rockies.

The troopers were laden with their packs. This assignment was going to last several days, how long was unspecified. As they walked they checked over their elderly weapons-mostly Kalashnikov AK-47s, probably manufactured before the flood, and many of them liberated from survivalist types during a raid into the higher ground a couple of years back. The troopers were a mixture, everything from veterans with genuine combat experience to healthy-looking rookies plucked out of the eye-dee streams, to relics with a more complex past, like Mel, who had been a USAF cadet before being diverted into the Ark Candidate corps, and then left abandoned on the ground at the last minute. For all their raggedness they were probably as disciplined a military unit as existed anywhere on the planet. But they grumbled as they marched, their voices rising in the still air. Everybody grumbled all the time, about the lousy food and the broken toilets in their billets and the state of their hand-me-down combat gear.

Mel Belbruno felt as uncomfortable as everybody else. His boots were a major problem, misshapen from a dunking in salt water when in the care of some previous unfortunate owner; he had padded them with layers of filthy socks. But this morning he was distracted by the unpleasant possibilities of the new assignment.

Alma was surrounded by a system of concentric fortifications. The best place to serve was inside the Buckskin Street compound itself, at the heart of the old town, a fortress improvised from a triangle of land where three roads intersected, South Main Street, South Pine, and Buckskin Street running down from the gulch to the west. The Ark’s Mission Control had been relocated into the center of this fortified area. Outside the compound there was little left of the quaint old mining town, with its embattled claim to be the highest in America. It had been pretty much dismantled by labor crews, first to provide raw materials for the fortifications, and then to build rafts, big buoyant structures of oil tanks and plastic sheeting and tarpaulin that for now sat ominously on the open ground, ready for the final evacuation.

Failing an assignment inside the compound itself, you were best off running patrols into the hinterland, as the commanders called it, a broad area a few kilometers across centered on Alma, a patchwork of high ground and flooded-out valleys. Here, high ground once colonized by pine trees was stripped of lumber and was being turned into farmland, a thousand tiny, scratched-out farms on the poor soil. They were farming even all the way to the summit of Mount Bross, the highest point hereabouts, breaking the poor land with human muscle, for there was no oil left to run tractors and pull plows, not even any horses left. Mel had once heard Patrick Groundwater say that Americans were having to revive methods of subsistence farming once used in medieval Europe.

Today was the first time Mel had been sent further out still, beyond the hinterland to one of the eye-dee processing camps that blocked the valleys and gulches that led into Alma. He didn’t know what to expect at the camp, up Highway 9. He tried not to listen to the shit from the veterans, of the things they’d seen and had to do, but their words wormed their way into your head, as they were meant to.

He wished he didn’t have to face this distraction, this upheaval, today of all days.

He looked up at a murky, cloud-scattered sky, wondering where Jupiter was-Jupiter, where the Ark crew had almost completed their fifteen-month-long stay. It was now less than twenty-four hours before the next phase of the Ark’s mission was due to begin, when the ship would cloak itself in a warp bubble and hurl itself at the stars. These last few hours, after which Holle wouldn’t even be inside the same solar system as Mel, were not a time he wanted to be away from Mission Control, and news of the stupendous events unfolding in the sky. But he didn’t have a choice.

In March 2044, with the global flood nearing three kilometers above the old sea-level datum, not many people got choices.

At the processing camp the unit was siphoned off to a tent city, their billet for the next few nights. Another unit of battered-looking, weary young people was forming up to be marched south in turn. They were silent, sullen.

Don Meisel was waiting at the side of the road, a lieutenant now in a relatively crisp and clean Denver PD uniform. When he spotted Mel he called him over. His right cheek bore a deep scar, a wound badly cleaned out and amateurishly stitched, and thick sunglasses hid his eyes. His red hair was speckled gray. At twenty-six, Don was a year older than Mel. Mel thought he looked a lot older than that.

Mel forced a grin. “I wish I could say I was glad to see you.” “Yeah. Not in these circumstances. The Ark-”

“Everything’s on track, last I heard.” Which had been last night, when Patrick Groundwater had called him at the barracks.

“Nothing we can do about that now.” Don glanced around. “Your unit will be working with mine today. Listen, the first day’s the worst. I got through it-just remember that. If a sap like me can make it, you sure can too. Go take your boots off for a few minutes. I think there’s some hot food.” Don touched an earpiece, and nodded absently. “Catch you later.” He strode away.

Mel followed his buddies into the tent city, where the men had already begun arguing over bunks that were still warm from the bodies of their last occupants. The respite was half an hour, long enough for them to grab some food and drink, to take a dump, to massage feet that were already sore from the hike out of Alma in their ill-fitting boots. Despite the complaints, the food wasn’t so bad, a kind of rabbit stew. Cops and troopers got to eat better than almost anybody else-better, even, than the engineers and scientists in Mission Control, which was why it was the ambition of most able-bodied eye-dees to join a military detachment.

Then they were formed up again and marched the last few hundred meters north along the highway, to the processing camp.