Ark

53

As they neared the security perimeter Mel tried to take in what he saw.

He was approaching a fence, a complex of barbed wire and watch towers and earthworks that spanned the old highway. He could see the fence reaching high up into the hills to either side, cutting across the brown, exposed ground, passing through the rough rectangles of the scrubby new farms. The highway itself was straddled by a massive steel and concrete gateway, bristling with watchtowers and spotlights. The fence was manned by soldiers or National Guard or Homeland or cops, who could be seen walking the wire or sitting in their towers.

This was the boundary of the territory, centered on Alma, that was still under the protection of the federal government, with Colonel Gordo Alonzo, the most senior surviving commander of Project Nimrod, named by the President himself as military governor. The boundary between order and governance within, and the chaos without. There were rumors that this was about the only significant enclave left under federal government control, outside seaborne assets like the surviving Navy ships and submarines. But few people were in a position to know if that was true.

The refugee-processing center had been set up where the fence crossed the highway. A couple of buildings, rough concrete blocks, were set back behind the line itself, connected to the gate by a kind of corridor of barbed wire, the walls at last three meters tall and patroled inside and out by armed soldiers. There was a small industrial facility set up here, like a chemical factory with tanks and drums and gleaming

pipework. A sign over the door read: ALMA, CO. RESPITE CENTER US FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PROPERTY

To his amazement Mel saw that flowers bloomed at the doorway of this unit, in pots hanging from metal brackets.

At the gate itself Mel saw a row of desks, manned by soldiers and civilians, with laptops and electronic notepads. These were interviewing eye-dees, one at a time. A queuing system, a line beyond the gate itself, stretched back, rows of ragged, dirty, scrawny people working their way through a zigzag of metal barriers. Further out, soldiers in pairs were roughly gathering people into preliminary lines.

And beyond that, Mel saw more people, a crowd of them sitting or standing in the dust. Just in that first glimpse there must have been thousands of them.

“Shit,” he murmured to Don, who stood at his side. “If that crowd lost patience-”

“Don’t think like that,” Don murmured. “It’s our job to see that they don’t.” He stepped before the unit he commanded today, his veterans and Mel’s rookies from Alma. “OK, listen up. We’ll break you up into squads, two, three or four at a time, veterans paired with rookies. For today you’ll be rotated through the various elements of what we do here, so you see the bigger picture. Training on the job, you follow? After that, beginning tomorrow, we’ll fix you up with permanent assignments.” He grinned, fiercely. “I’ll say to you what I said to my buddy here. The first day’s the worst. But if I got through it, you can. And just remember how important the work is. This is where we hold the line-not back in the Buckskin Street compound, not in those scrubby farms in the hinterland. Everything depends on how well you do your jobs, right here. OK, fall out and buddy up; B Company have been given the names of the inductees they’re to supervise.”

The company broke up, the troopers milling around, the new arrivals looking for the veterans who would shepherd them through this first day.

Don again beckoned Mel over. “It’s you and me for today, buddy.” He glanced over the new troopers mildly. “There’s generally a couple who crack, even on the first day. Maybe not with this bunch, they look solid enough. Come on. I need to troubleshoot.”

Don led Mel up the stub of highway toward the gate. Waving a pass at a guard, he pushed out past the row of desks and toward a kind of access alley that ran alongside the queuing system. Armed troopers patroled the alley. Glancing up, Mel saw watchtowers looming, more troopers with binoculars scanning the lined-up crowd.

Mel got a chance to see the processing clerks in action. Some of them were doctors or nurses, or anyhow they wore prominent red cross armbands over the sleeves of their uniforms. They took down basic details from the eye-dees standing before them.

“It’s a screening,” Mel said. “I didn’t think Alma was still taking in eye-dees.”

“It looks like a screening,” Don murmured. “Don’t jump to conclusions. Just watch, listen, learn. And keep your weapon to hand.”

The two of them walked out, beyond the big perimeter fence, and along a broken highway surface kept reasonably clear but crowded to either side with eye-dees waiting to join the lines for the processing system. They weren’t the only troopers out here, but, outside the fence, Mel felt exposed, unreasonably nervous.

Beyond the queuing crowd they reached a kind of shantytown, which was set out in rough squares, each about the area of an old city block. Each zone had drains cut into the ground, trenches leading to sewers that ran down the sides of the highway. There were few tents, but here and there stood the remnants of buildings, and the eye-dees had constructed shacks and lean-tos of sods and whatever debris they could get hold of. It was still only mid-morning. Fires burned and smoke rose up, and pots had been set out to catch rainwater from an increasingly cloudy sky. Babies cried, a multitude of tiny voices. There were even children playing, with battered toys or deflated soccer balls, but none of them ran about, and in faded rags they were stick-thin, the skulls prominent under their faces. Some had the swollen bellies of malnutrition.

Mel saw agents from the Alma protectorate, identifiable in relatively bright AxysCorp durable coveralls and accompanied by armed troops, working through the camp. Some wore medics’ armbands. They spoke patiently to the eye-dees and handed out leaflets.

The leaflets surprised Mel the most. “Where do they get the paper from?”

Don dug into his pocket, produced a folded scrap, and handed it to Mel. It was densely printed on both sides, and the only color was a tiny red, white, and blue Stars and Stripes in one corner. It turned out to be a kind of primer on how to construct a plow, meant to be drawn by humans. Don said, “Feel the paper, that glossy sheen? It’s made from sea-shells.”

“I didn’t know the government was still supporting eye-dee camps so far out.”

“It’s not. Supervising, maybe. Advising. But not supporting. Look around. The drainage ditches, the shanties-all constructed by the eye-dees themselves, using whatever tools and resources they could find, their bare hands if they have to. These leaflets we give them-hints on farming, on hunting-all to be achieved without material support from the center. Even the doctors give out more advice than medicine. We just don’t have the resources for any more.” He glanced around, making sure they weren’t overheard by any eye-dees. “We don’t even police out here. We encourage them to set up their own security structure, under the nominal authority of Alma. We give out paper badges-that doesn’t cost much. Usually it devolves pretty fast into the dominance of some warlord, but we don’t care about that so long as there’s order. Oh, and we always shut down the brothels. Gordo says we’re fighting against human nature with that one, but the commanders have made it a priority, and we try.”

“It’s all a kind of illusion,” Mel blurted. “They think they’re under the government’s protection. In fact-”

“It keeps people quiet. Sedated. It works because people want to believe they’re safe, that somebody is thinking about their welfare, just as it has been all their lives, at least for the older folk who remember how it was before the flood. Things are relatively stable here.” He pointed further out, to the north, where the highway arced away through stripped hillsides. “There are more out there, thousands. We mount punitive raids, we mine the roads, trying to keep them out. But they would have to get through this zone of settlement first, before they can get to us. There are camps like this all around Alma, in a ring.”

Mel saw it. “You’re using all these people as a screen. A human shield.”

Don eyed him. “Look-the flood just keeps on coming, the water pushes on up the valleys, the Platte and the Blue river and the rest, warm, frothy, salty water all poisoned with the mess from the drowned towns, and the corpses floating like corks. I’ve seen it. We’re losing places like Leadville and Hartsel and Grant now. And it drives people on ahead, like cattle.

“Everybody knows there’s an enclave at Alma. So they come in search of sanctuary, wave after wave. We don’t know how many there are out there, in the hills around Alma. Some think it might be as many as a million. We just can’t cater for them all, not for one percent of that number. And we can’t run away, like when we evacuated Denver. All we can do is keep them at bay, until the job at Mission Control is done. To do that we’ve had to figure out how to use every resource we have left against the eye-dee flow. And the most significant of those resources is the eye-dees themselves.”

Mel glanced at Don’s face, expressionless behind the mask of his scar, the sunglasses, the layer of stubble over his dirty face. Mel thought he saw nothing left of the boy he had met in the Academy. “We’re going to win, aren’t we?”

“If you want the truth, I ain’t sure,” Don said bleakly. He glanced at the cloudy sky. “This stunt of timing the warp launch to coincide with the lunar eclipse-I don’t know whose dumb idea that was. My guess is that when the moon goes red all the crazies out here will start howling, even if they haven’t heard any specific rumors about the Ark. Well, we only need to hold the line for twenty-four more hours. So do you think it’s worth it-all that you’ve seen today-worth it if it gives the Ark the best chance of getting away to the stars?”

“Holle and Kelly are aboard. Relying on us. Yes, it’s worth it.”

“OK, kid. I think you’re ready to see the rest of it.”

“What ‘rest’?”

For answer, Don led him back through the shantytown to the security gate, and the patient line of applicants.