Ark (15 page)

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 laborer or bricklayer or electrician in this line.

She shuffled forward with the rest.

30

T
he construction gang was marched away from the junction and moved down the line of the 470, maybe half a kilometer 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 meters 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, gray with them, a river of humanity pouring along the highway toward Denver, spilling onto the verges and crowding under the battered road signs. This was the invading army all these defenses 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 Honor Corps.”

“What is the Honor 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 gray 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

I
nside, 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 labeled with a disc. Gary’s amateur education program had always heavily favored 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 forever.

“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 chili, 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 neighboring 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 wasn’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 center. 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 vaporization 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.”

“Well, I’m not a cop.” Grace studied Holle. If she was going to survive here she was going to have to work with exotic, alien creatures like this child-woman, this Holle Groundwater. “Look, Holle. You’ve grown up living in a functioning nation, the United States, with a continuity of institutions and laws reaching back to the pre-flood days. For me it’s been different. From the ages of five to twenty I lived in a migrant refugee community. Any law we had we worked out and applied ourselves. I’m not a cop, or a government worker. Gordo Alonzo wants me to solve this crime. Fine. But I don’t have any procedures, or rules. I’ll just get to the truth as fast as I can—or if I fail, I’ll pass it back.”

Holle nodded, interested. “I guess it makes sense in a way. On the Ark, we’ll be a self-governing community. We’ll have to work out our own ways to resolve issues like this. Maybe Gordo is using you as an example of how that might be done.”

Grace felt faintly disgusted. “Somebody died. You’re talking as if it is some kind of training exercise?”

Holle looked embarrassed, but then her natural defiance reasserted itself. “We’ve been training for this our whole lives, since I was six. How else do you expect me to react? Besides, you might find that some of us have got wider experience than you seem to think. And didn’t Gordo set this up as a kind of selection exercise for
you
?”

“Maybe. But I haven’t decided if I’m going to play his game. So can I ask my question again? Who do you think killed Harry Smith?”

“One of three people, all of them Candidates. Zane Glemp. Venus Jenning. Matt Weiss.”

“I need something to make notes.”

“I’ll get you a handheld.”

“You said this Zane discovered the pulse unit had been tampered with. But of course he could have been bluffing, he could have done it himself. What about the others?”

“They were all close to Harry. Closer than the rest of us.”

“Close?” There was something odd in the way Holle said that, a sub-text. “You mean sex?”

“I think so. I don’t
know.
”

“And all three are still up for crew selection?”

Holle shook her head. “Not Zane. He was scrubbed a month ago. You understand we’re only a few months away from the launch target now. That’s our latest revised target—we had a lot of slips—originally we should have flown last year. Anyhow things are getting hectic.” Holle eyed Grace, sideways. “Suddenly lots of people are being nominated for the crew, some we’ve never heard of. Like you. But there are only eighty places. Every time somebody comes on board, somebody else has to go. Even us, the core group who have been training for this since we were children.”

“That’s tough.”

“Of course it is. Even Kelly Kenzie washed out because she had a baby, even though she’s kept up the training program for the sake of the rest of us . . . You’ll meet her. The point is they’re constantly reviewing us, looking for ways to wash us out. Zane went through a psych test and was told he wasn’t emotionally stable enough. It was Harry’s recommendation that did it, actually. Zane took it hard. His father was the main initiator of the whole program. But we had a disaster back in ’36. Jerzy was injured; he was removed from the program and died a couple of years later. So you can see why this was tough for Zane, to be excluded from the final selection pool. He wanted to be part of his father’s legacy.”

“So this Zane could have had a motive. And the means, he worked on these pulse units.”

“Yes, but so did Matt Weiss. Zane’s more a specialist on the warp generator, actually. I’m sure Venus could have messed with the pulse unit trial if she’d wanted to, maybe with help. Any of us could; we’re all familiar with the ship’s systems. But we all have specialisms.”

“So what’s your specialism?”

“The ship’s internal systems. Life support, the power supply. Plumbing,” she said, with a self-deprecating grin. “Right now I’m working on the installation of HeadSpace booths. Virtual reality systems, donated by the corporation that manufactured them. The social engineers think they’ll be a benefit in terms of morale, but they’re demanding in terms of computer resources.”

“And—what was the third name—Venus?”

“She’s a planet-finder. Looking for our destination. But as I said, we all multitask. Any one of the three could have set the charge, I think.”

“I’ll need to speak to these three.”

“Venus and Zane are here at Alma. Matt is over at Gunnison.”

“I thought Zane was off the project.”

“He’s still working as part of the ground support team. That’s what we do, how we are. Look, if you wait here, you can get more coffee or some food, I’ll send Zane or Venus down. Then I’ll organize a drive for you down to Gunnison, if you like.”

“I appreciate your help.”

Holle grinned. “If Gordo Alonzo is setting some kind of test for
me
, I’m determined to pass it.” And she walked away, her colorful uniform bright, striding confidently.