deepening ocean. More lengths of cable connected Halivah to the warp generator assembly, so that the components of the Ark were bound up in a kind of spiderweb, lit by externally mounted lights. And beyond the hulls lay the silent, steady stars.
Once aboard Seba, Holle and Paul made their way down to Deck Ten, proceeding by handholds down from the nose of the hull. Kelly had ordered that the sentencing of Thomas Windrup should be held in the very place where his sabotage had started the disastrous fire. Without spin up the hull was without effective gravity, and people swam everywhere, flicking from handhold to handhold. The children, all too young to remember the weightless cruise before Jupiter, loved it, and flying, tumbling, tag-chasing kids had become a minor hazard. But the hull still smelled of smoke and scorched plastic.
At Deck Ten, Kelly was waiting outside a small cabin, its door shut. Despite weeks of cleanup there was no furniture here, not even any intact decking to which furniture could be attached. But ropes had been strung across the deck from wall to blackened wall, and the gathering people hung onto the ropes, or found themselves corners where they could cling to wall fittings.
Holle seemed to be the last of the senior crew to make it here. She saw Wilson, Venus, Mike Wetherbee, Masayo Saito-even Zane, and Holle wondered which of his alternate personalities had shown up for this meeting. Doc Wetherbee was studiously avoiding everybody’s eyes. Wilson, still Kelly’s lover, bore the marks of recent hard work; he wore vest and shorts, and his muscular limbs were streaked with ash.
Jack Shaughnessy wasn’t here. Presumably he was still too feeble from the massive burns he had suffered over his arms and chest to be released by Doc Wetherbee. And Thomas Windrup wasn’t here either, to hear the verdict passed on him. Venus looked wary. As one of her colleagues in GN amp;C and astronomy Thomas Windrup was one of “her” people.
Kelly, subtly isolated from the crowd, checked over notes on her handheld. She was dressed in a grimy coverall. She had shaved her blond hair, and smoke and soot had stained the lines around her mouth and eyes, making her look a lot older than her thirty years. Nearly seven years of leadership had made her tougher, Holle thought, more decisive, more clear-thinking. She had done her job competently enough. But all her hard work and even her relentless search for unanimity, the hours of talking, hadn’t made her popular. Holle sometimes thought the strain was pulling her down.
Kelly glanced around at her silent crewmates. “OK,” she began. “I guess everybody who wants to be here, is here. I suspended all regular duties save the watches. You can watch the session live via the surveillance system, or the recordings we’ll make, and eventually we’ll be shipping transcripts back to Earth too.
“Today I want to draw a line under the fire. The recovery of Seba is going to take us years-we’ll probably be still working on it when we get to Earth II, in three years’ time. But we’ve already done a great deal. We buried our dead.”
Four crew-one Candidate, one gatecrasher, one illegal, and one shipborn baby-had been asphyxiated by the smoke. Four naked bodies had been sent tumbling away from the hull, to be scattered in the ferocious tidal rip of the warp bubble wall-naked because they couldn’t spare resources for coffins or flags or even clothes.
Kelly went on, “We’ve been through the flaws in our practices that led to the seriousness of the incident, once the fire started. The failures in our maintenance routines in particular. The worst contributory factor was a buildup of dust and other flammable junk behind the equipment racks in their frames against the hull walls. Each rack is supposed to be pulled out and its docking bay cleaned once a week, or more in some areas. Some looked as if they hadn’t been shifted since Jupiter.”
Kelly’s ferocious inquiry hadn’t attached any blame to Holle and her internal-systems maintenance team. The failure had been in the laxity of the regular crew, getting worse year on year, in keeping up their daily routine of cleaning out the small spaces they all had to inhabit. Doc Wetherbee had long complained about this, and butts had been kicked after an outbreak of food poisoning caused by poor hygiene in Halivah’s galley. But the spread of the fire had been a much more severe consequence.
“We’re trying to put this right from here on in. But all of us who cut corners in our cleaning routines are going to have to live with some of the responsibility for what happened to Peri and Anne and Nicholas and little Sasha.
“However, only one of us actually started the fire that did so much damage. Only one of us bears the burden of guilt. Thomas Windrup confessed, as soon as the fire was under control, and you’re aware that we ran through the surveillance records to establish that guilt independently. There’s no doubt the arson was his, just as he claimed. He was trying to kill Jack Shaughnessy. He nearly killed us all.”
Holle supposed you could say it was a crime of passion. Here among the crew, stuck on this Ark as the years wore slowly away, obsession and lust and suspicion had a way of putrefying. Thomas had never stopped believing that Jack Shaughnessy still wanted Elle, and that Jack was playing a long game, waiting until they all arrived at Earth II where he would use the new Ship’s Law about multiple fathers to claim her. On the Ark you couldn’t get away from your enemies, or even your friends. Endless chance encounters with Jack had, in the end, driven Thomas crazy-or at least crazy enough to try to kill Jack.
But Thomas hadn’t meant to hurt anybody else, he insisted. He knew Jack was due to overhaul the pressure suit he generally used. Thomas had rigged the suit so that when a test valve on the oxygen inlet was triggered, a spark would ignite a jet of oxygen, and then the materials of the suit; he had poured flammable solvent over the suit’s liner. Thomas had done much of the preparation in the dark, to avoid the ubiquitous gaze of the surveillance cameras. He planned that the fire would eliminate all trace of its own cause, his own guilt. Anyhow his plan had failed. The suit had exploded into flame, too violently. Jack hadn’t been killed but thrown back, badly burned but alive, and the resulting fire had quickly spread beyond the suit itself.
“But now we have to handle the issue of sentencing. This is the most serious crime we’ve seen aboard this Ark since we left Earth-far more serious than anything I expected to have to deal with. I’ve thought long and hard. I’ve come to a decision.” Kelly looked around at them, her face set. “And I’ve implemented that decision, with the aid of Masayo, here, and Doc Wetherbee. You know I’ve always tried to work through consensus, through unanimity if we can get it. But I thought that in this case the choice was too hard, the consequences too grave, to be debated in the open. This decision was mine alone. I bear the responsibility.
“Please hear my logic. Thomas attempted murder. On Earth, while the Denver government was still functioning, he’d have been thrown into jail, or sent to some penal work gang, endlessly building seawalls or processing camps for eye-dees. And if he’d succeeded in killing Jack Shaughnessy he might have been put to death for it. So what are we to do with him here? You Candidates will recall that we debated such issues in the Academy, and then while we were en route to Jupiter and under the auspices of Gunnison. We also have as precedent Gordo Alonzo’s verdict when Jack Shaughnessy assaulted Thomas himself back in ’43. Jack was put back to work.” She glanced at Venus. “As Venus hasn’t ceased to remind me, Thomas is her best astronomer. We need him back in the cupola, checking out Earth II. We can’t even isolate him socially because we need his genes. But this crime, which could have killed us all, is serious, and I don’t believe it can go unmarked. So what do we do?
“I did some research in the archive. We’re not the only society to face this kind of challenge-resource- stretched, yet having to deal with miscreant individuals. Medieval England, for instance, and western Europe. They evolved punishments the criminal would have to live with the rest of his or her life-and a visible deterrent to others-yet that wouldn’t stop him working. And so-” She glanced at Masayo. “You can bring him out now.”
Masayo looked highly uncomfortable, Holle thought. He pulled himself over to the door of the cabin behind Kelly, but before he opened it he glanced around, his arms folded, his chest out. “I don’t want any trouble over this. We all need to deal with it calmly, however you’re feeling. OK?”
Venus looked furious. Wilson was cold-eyed, watchful. Zane looked amused.
Masayo opened the cabin door. The interior was dark. “Come on out.” Holding onto the door frame for balance, he extended an arm into the cabin.
Thomas Windrup emerged into the light. He hung onto Masayo’s arm, and wouldn’t look anybody in the eye. His face was still puffy from the beating he’d received when Paul and a few of his illegal buddies had managed to get hold of him. But Holle thought he looked paler, more sick; he had suffered something worse than a beating.
Kelly said, “Show them.”
Clearly shamed, Thomas lifted one leg. The boot dangled, floating free in the air, and the trouser leg
