Ark

by Stephen Baxter

  Everywhere Holle saw troops in action, National Guard and army and Homeland and police, shepherding orderly streams of civilians west, or rounding up more discards like her own companions, and engaging pockets of resistance in firefights. In one place she saw snowploughs, brought down from mountain roads where snow no longer fell, driving people along urban streets. And in abandoned districts she saw fires being set, mines laid. In Sandown, near the rail track, she saw the blunt profile of a tank.

  Mary Green, the older woman who′d helped her, thought she knew what the government planned. ′They′ve abandoned Denver now, and everybody′s gone west, and the city′s only remaining use is to block those refugee streams from the east, who will otherwise chase after us and overwhelm everything, like locusts.′

  ′So they′re setting mines? Killing people?′

  ′Well, they shouldn′t be here, should they?′ Mrs Green said reasonably. ′This isn′t their place, wherever they came from; it never was. We wouldn′t have to move, not for months yet, if not for all this. No, they should have stayed home and built rafts.′

  ′Where are we going?′

  ′I think we′ll soon find out, dear.′

  The truck reached a slip road for the I-70 and turned, heading east. There was some military traffic on the one lane kept open. On the other lanes more flows of walkers headed steadily west, supervised by troops and cops in cars and trucks.

  They reached the intersection of the I-70 with the 470, Denver′s patchwork beltway. But the intersection had been dynamited, the flyovers collapsed, the roadways blocked with rubble. A wire fence with gun towers was strung north and south along the length of the 470, along which no traffic moved. Beyond the fence Holle saw more strings of barbed wire, and moving figures silhouetted against the eastern sky, and she heard distant shouting.

  The trucks stopped, and they were made to climb down.

  ′Help me, dear, I′m stiff after standing all that way.′

  The people from the trucks were formed up into a line, and were shepherded towards a kind of stockade, constructed of girders and concrete panels, thrown across the highway. It was almost like a toll gate. Holle saw that after a quick assessment they were being sorted into four lines. The people walked forward meekly, submitting to the verdict passed on them.

  Holle and Mary Green lined up with the rest. ′Why didn′t you go west with the others, Mrs Green?′

  ′We all have our part to play. Didn′t you hear the President′s last speech? You have to walk, you know, walk all the way to the Rockies. Then you have to help build new cities and so forth. There′s no way I can do that, not at my age. But I couldn′t sit at home either, could I? So here I am, doing what I can to protect the others. The President has promised to help us once the crisis has passed.′

  ′Protect others? How?′

  ′There′s more than one way to fight a war.′ Mary Green eyed her, the dust from the road clinging to a face coated with anti-sun cream, and her voice became stern. ′You don′t know anything about this, do you? Maybe you really are a Candidate. I′ve always thought they weren′t teaching those Candidates anything worthwhile. I don′t know what they have planned for you, nobody does. But what′s the point of surviving if you don′t know anything about what matters?′

  They neared the desks. Listening in to the brief interviews Holle got a sense of what was happening. Each person was grilled by a police officer, and what sounded like a doctor. Your name was taken, your skills assessed, your basic health checked over quickly. There was no screening for bio, retinal or other idents. If you had papers of any kind you showed them. The very old, the very young, the disabled were taken off down one stream, to a set of huts by the road side. Special Processing, maybe. The relatively young and healthy were sorted into two groups. One set were taken away to a kind of compound, where Holle could see they were being handed weapons - just clubs, pikes and knives, no guns - and put through rudimentary fight training. The others were led away down the blocked highway, towards the improvised fortifications. A construction crew?

  Mrs Green went ahead of Holle, and was judged to be too old for building or fighting. So she was assigned to the fourth stream - the ′Honour Corps′, the police officer called it. She was given a badge to wear. She smiled back at Holle. ′Look at that, my own little badge. It′s even got a Stars and Stripes on it.′

  ′Be careful, Mrs Green.′

  ′I think it′s too late for that, dear. Good luck.′

  Holle stepped up to the desk. The police officer eyed her. Aged maybe forty, he had a livid scar on one cheek. He wore a uniform but had no badge, no identification. ′Name?′

  ′Holle Groundwater.′

  He just laughed. ′Fourth today. You have papers?′

  ′No.′

  ′Step over for your medical.′

  She considered resisting, demanding her rights. She was surrounded by people with guns and nightsticks. She stepped a metre to the left, where the woman who looked like a doctor, no older than thirty, smiled at her. She rolled back Holle′s sleeve, took her pulse and blood pressure and a pinprick blood sample, and made her blow into a bag.

  The cop kept talking. ′I guess you′re going to tell me you got left behind while all your buddies flew off in Air Force One, right?′

  Holle thought it over. ′No.′

  ′Then what do you do?′

  ′I mix concrete.′

  ′Really?′ He laughed, then looked at her more soberly. ′Where did you work?′

  ′Last, on the ramparts around the Academy. I mean, the Museum of Nature and Science. In the park, you know?′ She forced a grin. ′I saw the Candidates every day. Stuck-up assholes. Can′t blame me for trying.′

  ′OK.′ He made a tentative tick in a box on his list. ′You going to tell me your real name now?′

  ′Maybe not. There are people I′d rather didn′t know I was here.′

  He made another tick. ′OK, Jane Doe, that′s up to you. Line three, behind me.′

  She saw with relief that that was the line she′d tentatively pegged as the construction workers. Most of those here were young men. Some even carried hard hats and sets of tools. She got a few sideways glances, but nobody called her back. She guessed she wasn′t the only bogus labourer or bricklayer or electrician in this line.

  She shuffled forward with the rest.

  30

  The construction gang was marched away from the junction and moved down the line of the 470, maybe half a kilometre to the south.

  Holle caught glimpses of the tangle of fortifications that lay beyond the perimeter of the road, further east. A swathe of properties had been demolished or bulldozed, leaving a scar a hundred metres wide in the landscape. This open ground was populated by rows of barbed-wire fencing and big concrete blocks, each of them as tall as she was, set out in rough lines like tank traps. There were people everywhere, some in uniform, standing or sitting in silent blocks, or marching purposefully. The most impressive single fortification was a ditch big enough to contain whole digging machines, with a sharp slope on the near side and a shallower slope on the other. Groups of machine-gunners and snipers had been drawn up on the lip of the ditch. She saw the idea; coming from the east you′d tumble in easily enough, and would be exposed to the guns all the way down the slope, but you would have a tough time climbing out up that sharp western slope, into the teeth of the guns. It was like an earthwork out of the Iron Age.

  Then they came to a slight rise, and Holle was able to see further to the east, along the line of the old I-70 and beyond the limit of the fortifications. As far as she could see the road was full of people, grey with them, a river of humanity pouring along the highway towards Denver, spilling onto the verges and crowding under the battered road signs. This was the invading army all these defences were intended to repel. She heard the distant pop of rifles, a crump of grenades.

  ′So you′re the concrete mixer,′ a man said, behind her. ′I was after you in the line.′

>   She turned. He wore a patched AxysCorp coverall; he was aged perhaps fifty, but looked strong, like a farmer, with big, dirt-encrusted hands. She said defiantly, ′So what, are you going to turn me in?′

  ′Not me. I don′t know much about construction.′ He looked at his big hands. ′But I used to run a smallholding, on the east bank of Back Squirrel Creek. I can use my hands. I can dig a ditch or lay a fence, I think. Anyhow sooner here than in the combat units, or the Honour Corps.′

  ′What is the Honour Corps?′

  ′Look.′ He pointed to blocks of people sitting passively just behind the fortifications on the highway surface. ′If they get through the fence our eye-dee friends are going to have to fight their way through that. Could you take a machete to a disabled boy in his wheelchair? It′s a human shield, an old tactic perfected by Saddam Hussein - well, I suppose you′ve never heard of him.′

  ′Never work,′ somebody said, a burly man in a hard hat. ′If those eye-dees have fought their way through the National Guard they′ll not stop for that.′

  ′But they aren′t monsters,′ the smallholder said gently. ′They are like us. They′re Americans.′

  ′Tell you what I′d do. Grab those guys in front, give them a gun, and turn them around the other way. That would work, let them grind each other down. Eye-dee bastards …′

  ′Looks like I found you just in time.′

  Holle whirled. Kelly was standing right behind her, in a drab olive-green coverall, a rifle in her hand and a phone clamped to her ear. Holle felt a peculiar mixture, of intense emotions and yet a kind of disappointment. She was aware of how the smallholder pulled away, watching her. She hugged Kelly. ′You came for me.′

  ′Well, you did bring me those bags of diapers,′ Kelly said. ′Come on, Mel is waiting in a jeep back beyond those processing desks. We can catch up to the buses but we′ll have to cut across country.′

  They hurried away, back down the line. Kelly had a pass she kept flashing at the supervising soldiers and cops. Holle glanced back, looking for the smallholder, and for Mrs Green in the shield units, but she couldn′t see them. It was hard to believe how lost she had felt just seconds ago.

  ′How did you find me?′

  ′Not easily,′ Kelly shouted. ′You′d be surprised how many Holle Groundwaters passed through here today. But you made the right choice, to bullshit your way into the construction corps. If you′d been sent out to the front, out to the fucking First World War they′re mounting out there, I couldn′t have got to you. I′d like to have seen you try to mix concrete, though. Hah! Listen, by the way. It worked.′

  ′What did?′

  ′The warp test. We saw it. Or rather Venus and the planet-finders in Alma did. The optical distortion - the gravitational lensing as it went past the face of the moon - it was unmistakable. They sent a feed to the buses.′

  ′My God.′ Holle looked up to the sky, trying to imagine the relativistic miracle that had come to pass far above her head, all on the same day as the urban horrors she had gone through. It didn′t seem to fit, as if it wasn′t possible for both these things to be true. One must be false, or the other.

  Automatic fire clattered. Kelly dragged her down. Holle fell heavily, old bruises aching.

  And a bomb went off, the detonation massive, overwhelming. The ground shook and hot air washed over them. Holle found herself covered in dust, with her ears full of a close ringing noise.

  Kelly stirred, and helped Holle get to her feet.

  Not everybody had reacted as quickly as Kelly. All around them people had been thrown to the ground. Their mouths moved, but Holle couldn′t hear their voices.

  She was distracted by a metallic glinting, off to her right, out along the line of the highway to the east. The attack on the junction seemed to have been the signal for the eye-dee army to mount an advance. They cut their way through the lines of the city′s conscript army, a grey swarm washing through the brown lines, marked by a sparkle of knives and machetes rising and falling in the morning sun, and rising puffs of smoke from the guns.

  Kelly was tugging her sleeve, shouting in her face to get her attention. Kelly′s face was dust-coated, blood trickled from her mouth, and her hair was a tangle. Holle couldn′t hear a word she said.

  A wall of dust was scouring along the 470, away from the intersection where the bomb had exploded, driving people like cattle.

  They turned and ran.

  31

  AUGUST 2041

  Inside, the office block in Alma was corridors and offices and computer rooms, suffused by a hum of air-conditioning. It reminded Grace Gray of facilities, aboard Lammockson′s Ark Three, the bridge, the engine room, the ship she′d left only that morning, and would now never return to.

  She and Holle Groundwater didn′t meet anybody else until the corridor opened out into a glass-fronted room with banks of chairs, microphones, screens. Through the glass Grace saw a larger chamber, dug some way into the ground so that she was looking down on rows of people before consoles, where screens glowed brightly, text and images flowing. Before them the front wall was covered by two huge screens. One showed a map of the world - continents outlined in blue, surviving high ground glowing bright green - with pathways traced over it. On the second screen concentric circles surrounded a glowing pinpoint, each circle labelled with a disc. Gary′s amateur education programme had always heavily favoured science. Grace understood that she was looking at a map of the solar system.

  Holle was watching her curiously. Grace felt utterly out of place in this technological cave, still in the clothes she had put on that morning on Ark Three, with her pitiful collection of belongings lost for ever.

  ′This is at the heart of what we do,′ Holle said.

  ′What is this place?′

  ′Mission Control. We′re running a simulation right now—′

  ′And this?′ Grace held up the key-ring globe Gordo had given her.

  ′Our spaceship.′ Holle smiled, a basic humanity shining through the competitiveness. ′Come on. You look like you need a coffee. We′ll talk about how Harry Smith got killed. And I′ll tell you how we got started here.′

  The restaurant was square, basic, reminiscent of one of Ark Three′s feeding stations. Holle went to fetch coffees, and Grace sat at a plastic-topped table and looked around. You helped yourself to food from big pots and trays, and drinks from dispensers. The food was piled high. The staple seemed to be some kind of chilli, made of what looked like real meat, not the processed fish or seaweed Grace had been eating the last few years aboard Ark Three. The smell made her feel hungry, she hadn′t eaten since being taken off Ark Three hours ago, hours that felt like days. And she had her old walker instinct that you should eat what you could, when you could. But her stomach was a knot, and she wondered if the food might be too rich for her.

  The walls were bare, unpainted. Everything was functional, nothing decorative. One wall was dominated by a huge clock, counting down:

  124 DAYS 6 HOURS 12 MINUTES 14 SECONDS

  124 DAYS 6 HOURS 12 MINUTES 13 SECONDS

  124 DAYS 6 HOURS 12 MINUTES 12 SECONDS

  And there was that slogan again, that she′d seen over the external door:

  Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Genesis 11,6.

  Under the clock and slogan was a big animated map, showing the North American archipelago. Grace had seen the same sort of display aboard Ark Three, though the ship′s elderly processors had not been able to project an image of this quality. Sitting here in Colorado, she was in fact on the largest surviving contiguous island, dominated by the Rockies, with peninsulas extending into the old high ground of the neighbouring states, Idaho and Wyoming to the north, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico to the south and west.

  On the ocean to the east, deceptively featureless on the restaurant map, the ship on which she had lived for six years of her life might be burning, sinking, the people she had lived with fighting and dying right now. She was
n′t sure how she felt about that. It hadn′t been her choice to be on the ship in the first place, any more than she′d chosen to leave it to come here today.

  It was all irrelevant. Here was the flood, gathering around this last remnant of America. And here she was, with her baby growing inside her. It was as Gordo Alonzo had said. No matter how she had got here she had to consider her own survival, and her baby′s.

  Holle brought her coffee in a chipped mug. When Grace sipped the coffee it tasted richer than any she could remember.

  ′So I′m investigating a murder. Tell me who died,′ she said bluntly.

  Holle leaned her elbows on the table, clasped her hands, and faced her frankly. ′A man called Harry Smith. He was one of our tutors.′

  ′What did he teach?′

  ′He had a general role. Personal development. He was a kind of overall guide.′

  ′How did he die?′

  ′There was an accident at Gunnison. The launch centre. A pulse unit test went wrong. There was an explosion.′

  Grace was going to have to find out what a ′pulse unit′ was. ′So this Smith got killed in the blast? Why is it thought to be murder?′

  ′Because the unit was tampered with. The test was with conventional explosives, not nuclear. But the detonation products were supposed to be shaped as in a full-scale Orion pulse unit.′ She mimed a cylindrical form with her hands. ′You get a concentration of vaporisation products axially, which facilitates momentum transfer to the pusher plate—′

  ′Who figured out that this unit was tampered with?′

  ′Zane Glemp. He′s one of us, one of the Candidates. He has special areas of study - well, we all do. We learn about aspects of the project′s development, and monitor their progress. Zane′s includes the pulse units.′

  ′OK. So Smith was murdered. Who do you think might have killed him?′

  Holle looked shocked. ′Why would you ask me a question like that? A cop wouldn′t.′