Ark

60

December 2046

Holle was woken by a soft whisper from her Snoopy cap, on the low cupboard beside her bed. The in-suit systems had been adapted by the senior crew as a clandestine communications channel for times of crisis. In the dark, she grabbed the set and pulled it over the pillow. “Groundwater.”

“Holle? Wilson. Could do with some help over here.”

“Over in Halivah?” She was half asleep; her thinking was fuzzy. “Light.” A soft glow filled the room, and she checked her watch. Four a.m., not yet dawn here in Seba or in Halivah, in either of the Ark’s twin hulls. She propped herself up on her elbow. “Go ahead, Wilson. What’s up?”

“We lost a kid.”

“A kid?”

“Meg Robles.”

Now four years old, going on five, Meg was one of the first cadre of babies born on the Ark. Her mother, Cora Robles, had been pregnant on embarkation.

“Wilson, how do you lose a kid?… Never mind.”

“We’re searching. But the kid’s only half my problem.”

My problem, Holle noted. He might be Kelly’s partner, but Wilson did have a way of treating the whole of Halivah as a personal fiefdom. “The mother?”

“Theo can’t get her out of HeadSpace, and he’s worried how she’ll react if he pulls the plug.”

“And you’re calling me because-”

“I need your feminine intuition on this one, Holle.”

“Oh, piss off, Wilson.” But he knew she wasn’t about to refuse a request for help; she never did. “OK. Give me a few minutes.”

“Out.”

In her sleep suit, she stumbled out of her cabin into the cool dim green of nighttime Seba, heading for the deck’s communal bath block. Nobody was around, nobody moving on the decks above or below. She made a mental note to check that whoever was supposed to be on watch tonight wasn’t goofing off asleep or in a HeadSpace booth. When the hull was empty like this it seemed bigger, grander, somehow, almost church-like. You were more aware of the sounds, the smells, the tang of electricity and metal that never let you forget you were in the guts of a big machine-and the lingering staleness, a sewer smell that was the signature of thirty-some people having lived in this tank for nearly five years already, since the launch from Gunnison.

The toilet block was part of a pillar structure that spanned the hull longitudinally from one end to the other; the sinks and showers and toilets on each level connected to a common water and drain system. She used the toilet and washed her face. She derived some satisfaction from the smooth running of her systems, the freshness of the cold water on her face, and the even hum of pumps and fans and filters. This was what she did, she and her apprentices, and she didn’t really care that amid all the politicking and bickering and daily crises nobody ever seemed to notice.

Back in her cabin she pulled on underwear, coverall and boots.

Then she clambered up the series of steel ladders that led to the nose of the hull, and the airlock for the tether transit to Halivah. Wall-mounted cameras swiveled, following her passage incuriously. The paintwork hadn’t been modified from the natural green scheme that had been bequeathed them from the ground, although after five years the paint was chipped, flaking. And there were no particular signs of the upcoming thousand-day festival. Kelly, following a lead from Gordo Alonzo, was keen to promote celebrations whenever there was an excuse, a mission anniversary, a birthday. Given how short they were of such basic materials as paper and fabric, the crew’s artistic leanings were expressed in more ephemeral forms: oral poetry, music, dance. When the festival day came, the thousandth since the warp launch from Jupiter, the hull would briefly be filled with a carnival. But for now the crew’s artistic endeavors slept in their heads with them.

At the nose of the hull she slipped off her boots, pulled her Snoopy comms hat on her head, and clambered into one of the three transit suits stored here, hanging like pupae from the wall. It closed up easily, the joints and seals well lubricated, but it smelled of stale farts. She ran through basic integrity checks. Then she climbed up into the nose airlock and waited for the pumps to drain the precious air from the small chamber.

These cut-down pressure suits were an innovation of Wilson’s, who had grown impatient with the time it took for crew to complete a spacewalk transfer from one hull to another. The most important change was to the suit’s air content, which was an oxygen-nitrogen mix of about the same pressure as within the hulls. The higher pressure made the suit rigid and all but impossible to move around in, but that didn’t matter if all you had to achieve was this simple transfer. Most importantly the higher pressure cut out the need for the hours of prebreathing you had to endure before a full EVA.

The hatch opened. She pushed her way out into space, and found herself standing on the nose of the hull. The insulation blanket was soft under her booted feet, worn by years in space, pocked by micro-meteorite scars, crisped by solar radiation, and stained a faint yellow by the sulfurous compounds emitted by Io. But the Stars and Stripes were still bright in the ship’s lights, and from here she could see the bold black U and N and I of the words UNITED STATES painted down the hull’s flank, the identity of a drowned nation displayed to the stars.

She clipped herself to the winch unit and began her ascent, up through the lessening gravity toward the accelerator ring. Unlike some of the crew she wasn’t troubled by the transit itself, or the peculiar sensations as gravity faded away to zero and then flipped over past the midpoint as she began her descent to Halivah. But she was always disconcerted by the unnatural sight of huge masses of engineering hanging in the sky; some animal part of her was always convinced the whole lot was going to come crashing down.

Only minutes after leaving Seba her booted feet descended toward Halivah’s nose.

“Welcome aboard,” Wilson murmured through the comms. “I’m down on sixth.”

“Copy that. I’ll find you.”