Ark

64

May 2048

The siren’s guttural blaring almost drowned out the voice alarm: FIRE, SEBA DECK TEN. FIRE, SEBA DECK TEN. FIRE… Holle had been working on a replacement for a failed component in the Primary Oxygen Circuit, figuring out a simplified design that the Ark’s limited machine shop would be capable of turning out. She was listening to Paul Simon’s “Darling Lorraine” on repeat on her Angel, a favorite of her father’s because, he said, it reminded him of his relationship with her mother. And she was daydreaming of seasons on Earth, of autumn. It took her a second to clear her head.

She shut off the Angel and grabbed her Snoopy cap. “Groundwater. Watch, what’s going on?”

Masayo Saito’s voice came on the line. “Holle, get down here, we got a problem.”

She smelled smoke. Maybe that had triggered her dying-leaf dream. She could see smoke seeping under the door of her cabin. She pulled the Snoopy cap on her head and rummaged in a cupboard for a face mask.

Kelly Kenzie’s voice blared over the PA. “This is Kelly. We have a major incident. Seba crew, to your fire stations, we’ve rehearsed this often enough and you know the drill. Halivah, seal up and prep for support operations. Anybody in transit to Seba, go back to Halivah. Let’s move it, people.”

Holle rushed out of her cabin and emerged into chaos.

The fire was a few decks down. A brilliant glow shone up through the mesh flooring, as if she was standing over a furnace. Hot air and smoke billowed up through the length of the hull, gathering in the upper decks and beneath the domed roof. People were running, some shouting. Holle could hear the rush of extinguishers and sprinklers, precious volatiles being expended to fight the fire. Over all this was the clamor of the siren, and Kelly Kenzie’s voice booming out instructions echoing from the metal walls.

Holle saw Grace Gray on the far side of the hull. She was awkwardly climbing the ladders between the decks with little Helen, now six years old, clinging to her back, and with three-year-old Steel Antoniadi in one arm. Grace was evidently fleeing the fire below. But smoke was gathering above, and some of the crew were already climbing back down from the dome, choking. The hull was becoming a closing trap. Grace made a quick decision, ducking into a cabin and slamming shut the door. If she blocked the door with wet towels, she and Helen might be safe.

But Holle was responsible for more than just Grace and her daughter. For heartbeats she just stood there, outside her door, uncertain what to do. Four years after leaving Jupiter, this tiny, fragile hull and its twin Halivah were the only refuge to be had in twelve long light-years. An out-of-control fire was their worst nightmare. Holle was senior, as well trained to handle the situation as anybody else aboard. She sensed she needed to make a quick decision-but to do what?

“Holle!” Paul Shaughnessy came clambering down a ladder. He was wearing the outer layer of one pressure suit and he carried another, like a flayed skin draped over his back. He was following the training she’d given him; the suits were fireproof to an extent, and their oxygen supply would enable their wearers to keep functioning even as the air turned toxic. He looked tense, distracted, distressed.

He handed her the spare suit. She pulled it over her legs. “Paul, are you OK? Do you know how this started?”

“It was Jack. I was up in the nose. My brother was down on Ten, in the maintenance area. He was fixing a rip in his own suit. The suit just exploded! I saw it on a feed. It became a fireball, and then it spread.”

She shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense.” The suits had a pure oxygen air supply, so there was always a risk of fire, but the safety features should have ensured no such accident ever happened.

“It’s what I saw. I have to go down to Jack. Masayo’s down there.”

“Go, go. I need to talk to Kelly and Venus.”

He nodded, snapped closed his faceplate, and carried on down into the furnace.

Holle closed up her own helmet. “Venus, are you there?”

“Groundwater, Jenning. We’re in the cupola.”

“Well, stay put. And start working on contingencies to detach the cupola and fly it over to Halivah.”

“We’re on it, that’s the regular drill.”

Holle imagined the calm twilight of the cupola, the silent, wheeling stars beyond, the screens full of images of devastation within the hull. “Can you see what’s happening in here?”

“Most of the cameras are still functioning, though they’re going down all the time, and the comms lines are fritzing too. Decks Nine through Eleven are gutted. The mesh decking is melting, and dripping down into the hydroponic beds on Fourteen. Countermeasures aren’t working too well. The fire has got in behind the equipment racks. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Casualties unknown, we just can’t see.”

Kelly’s amplified voice suddenly cut out, leaving the hull filled with a cacophony of screams, the roaring of the fire.

“What about the hull temperature?”

“Rising, Holle. I can’t trust these readings, but-”

“Understood.” The greatest danger of all was that the fire would melt its way through the hull altogether, and breach the pressurized compartment. There was a last-resort procedure to avert that final catastrophe, a drastic step. Holle was starting to think there was no choice. She tagged her microphone. “Kelly, are you receiving?”

“We lost her feed, Holle,” Venus reported.

“Venus, I’m thinking of cutting the tether.”

“Kelly’s out of touch. I endorse your decision. Do it.”

Holle started climbing up a ladder away from the fire, into the gathering smoke. “Can you handle the follow-up from in there? Warn Halivah. Run the internal warnings, prepare for microgravity. Take over attitude control-”

“Already on it, Holle. It’ll be fine, it will work, we rehearsed for this.”

Holle said nothing more and pressed on with her climb. Her suit felt heavy and stiff, and her hands tired quickly as she fought the gloves’ stiffness to grasp at the metal rungs. Venus was right. Yes, they had rehearsed on the ground and since launch, simulating situations almost as drastic as this. But all their years of training hadn’t prevented the fire, or stopped the situation from degenerating to this lethal point.

She reached the domed roof of the hull. With an awkward twist she flipped over onto the upside of one of the catwalks that ran beneath the dome, and fixed a safety harness buckle to a rail. She paused, breathing hard. The smoke was dense here, making it almost impossible to see, and she wiped soot away from her faceplate with a suit glove.

She found the panel that covered the tether severance handle. She punched in a security code, and flipped open the panel. The handle itself was surrounded by warnings in huge lettering. She wrapped her gloved fingers easily around the handle.

“The situation’s deteriorating, Holle,” Venus called. “Do it.”

Holle snapped the handle down.

At a junction on the tether between the hulls, close to its central point, a small explosive charge popped, silent in the vacuum. A tiny cloud of debris dispersed quickly. Since Jupiter the two hulls had been rotating about the warp generator at their common central point, completing an orbit once every thirty seconds. Now the cable that connected them was cut, and the hulls drifted apart, the severed tether coiling languidly as hundreds of tonnes of tension was released. When the particles of debris reached the wall of the warp bubble they sparkled briefly, their substance shredded by ferocious tides.

It was as if the whole hull dropped like a falling elevator car. Holle drifted up from the catwalk, and with a stab of panic she grabbed at the rail, even though she was safely anchored.

She peered down through the catwalk at the inferno below. The decks, shocked into zero gravity, were full of clouds of junk lifting into the air, furniture, handhelds, bits of clothing, food fragments, tools, even loose bolts and screws, anything not held down suddenly mobile. But the fire was the crux. She thought she saw an immediate difference in the way the smoke was billowing, and maybe the flames licked a bit less eagerly at the decking and equipment racks.

That was the idea. By cutting the tether Holle had eliminated the artificial gravity from the hull’s interior. Without gravity there was no convection; hot air could not rise, and the processes that had been sustaining the fire, the updraft that drew in fresh oxygen to feed the flames, had been eliminated. The fire still had to be doused, and there were other dangers deriving from zero-gravity fires, which could smolder unseen for days or weeks. But at least with the fire choking on its own products there was a better chance that the hull as a whole would survive.

The alarm tone changed, and now Venus’s voice rang out, relayed from the cupola. “Prepare for vernier fire. All hands prepare for vernier fire…”

This was the next step. Right now both hulls, released from the tether’s grip, had been flung away from the center. They could not afford to fall too far; an encounter with the warp bubble wall would destroy them. So auxiliary rockets would be fired to hold the hulls somewhere close to the bubble’s center, and to still any residual rotation. Some time in the future the hulls could be brought back together, the tether reattached, the assembly spun up again.

If the verniers fired in the first place, Holle thought. If they or their control systems hadn’t been ruined by the fire. If there was the fuel remaining to rejoin the hulls and restore their mutual rotation. If, if, if. Holle had always held in her head an image of the long chain of events that all had to occur precisely as programmed if she were ever to walk safely on the ground of Earth II. Just now she could feel that chain stretching, its weakest links straining.

A small bundle floated below her, wriggling oddly. It was a baby, Holle saw, drifting in open space. Only a few months old, bundled in a diaper, it waved bare arms and legs. With eyes and mouth opened wide, the baby seemed to be enjoying the experience of swimming in the air. But now the hull banged, as if huge fists were hammering on its exterior wall. That was the verniers, firing in hard bursts. Holle, hanging onto her rail, felt the jolts as each impulse was applied. The baby caromed off a deck plate and bounced back up in the air, limbs flailing. It was frightened now, crying. Holle unclipped herself from the catwalk and descended like an angel, folding the baby in charred spacesuit sleeves.