Baker, fifteen, skinny, was wrapped in a blanket, looking around with wide eyes. “Shit,” Wilson said, “I don’t fit in this suit anymore. I’m a fat bastard.” He laughed.
Jeb’s jaw was slack. “Boss-where are you going?”
“To the shuttle. Ride out the storm. Best thing-remove the focus, take away the prime target-you can see that. I always saw this day coming, even if you didn’t. Call me when you’ve got the situation under control.”
Jeb’s fists bunched. “And how the fuck do we do that?”
Wilson reached back into his cabin and pulled out a sealed metal box.
He snapped, “Five seven four-open.” The lock opened with a click to reveal a set of handguns. “Been keeping these since the roundup after we launched. Not much ammo, however. And we’re one gun down. Probably stolen by that bitch Steel. Smarter than she looked.” He shoved the box toward Jeb; the guns spilled and drifted in the air, rotating slowly. “Deal with it. Minimum bloodshed. Remember we need those fuckers to keep the ship going. Make an example of Steel, however.” He had his suit intact now, his helmet over his head, his faceplate open. With a gloved hand he pulled a rug off the wall to reveal an airlock. He tapped at a pad, and the lock’s inner door swung open. Beyond, Theo saw the bare interior of one of the hull’s two shuttle gliders, lights snapping on.
“Break-out-break-out-”
Wilson paused at the lock and looked around. “I guess that’s it.” He glanced back at Terese, who stared at him wide-eyed. “Ah, the hell with it.” He grabbed her arm and shoved her through the lock into the shuttle, a tangle of bare limbs. Then he followed head first, wriggling a bit to get through the lock, until his booted feet disappeared. The lock door swung closed, and a red warning band lit up.
“I don’t believe it,” Jeb said. “He’s going to cast off! He could have taken us with him, the prick-”
“Not unless he wanted to lose the hull for good,” Theo said. “Here.” He plucked guns from the air and passed them around to Jeb, the others. He snapped a clip of ammunition into his own weapon. “I don’t know what they’ll try to do. Smoke us out, maybe.”
“Let’s shoot that bitch Steel through the head.”
Theo tried to think. “Yeah. It might deter the rest. But we can’t afford to go putting bullets through the hull. Suppose we spread around the rim of the floor. If we drop through the hatches, say three of us together-fire inwards at Steel-”
There was a roar like thunder. Theo glimpsed blinding light, billowing smoke. The floor opened up like a flower, metal panels hurled into the open space of the bridge. Dan Xavi was caught full in the chest by one panel and was flung back.
Theo heard screaming, like a child, but it was muffled. A ringing sound filled his head. He was stunned; he drifted, unable to move his legs, his head.
Then they came boiling up through the broken barrier, Steel, Max with his wrench, others. Eager hands grabbed Theo, pulled the gun from his hands, and dragged him down.
85
Under the silent stars, Venus was poised in space, inside the warm, clean bulk of her pressure suit, her booted feet strapped to the mobile servicing system, the manipulator arm. She’d been working on basic maintenance of the insulation blanket that, faded, pocked and worn, still coated the bulk of the hull.
She preferred to go EVA only during the night watch. During the day, when Wilson and his boys were awake and active, it paid to be inside the hull and alert. She sometimes thought that the only real purpose she and the other seniors served was to act as a buffer between Wilson and the rest.
Now she ordered the arm to lift her up and away from the ship. As she rose she took a good unencumbered look at the star field that slowly shifted around the ship, and the telescope platforms that still hovered around the hull, faithful companions. Even seventy light-years from Earth, twenty-seven years since the launch from Gunnison, the constellations hadn’t changed drastically. But you did get a sense of motion if you knew what to look for, that faint blueing of the stars ahead of the hull, and of course that eerie disc of emptiness that endlessly pursued them, which Zane creepily called the mouth of Ouroboros.
She surveyed the ship laid out beneath her. Her gaze followed the arm down from her feet along its articulated length to the heavy ball-and-socket joint that attached it to the hull. She studied the ugly, stubby tank of the hull itself with its blankets and sensor platforms and airlocks, the Stars and Stripes ever more faded on its flank, the two remaining shuttle gliders like pinned moths, and the cupola, her own domain, glowing jewel-like near the base. She liked to make this kind of eyeball inspection from time to time, just to see if there was anything obvious the automated systems had missed. And it could happen, especially a multiple fault, such as a leak of some propellant in the precise spot where the pressure sensors were down. The longer the mission went on and as the systems aged-they were now far beyond the Ark’s design envelope-the more such low-probability situations were likely to crop up. It was a habit she had picked up during training sessions with Gordo Alonzo, a seasoned astronaut. Never did any harm to walk around and kick the tires, he used to say..
She saw a kind of ripple around the belly of one of the shuttles-shuttle A, up near the hull’s blunt nose. She’d seen this often enough in simulations. It was a sign of latches releasing, catching the ship’s floodlights as they opened. Then the shuttle shuddered, and with a kind of wrench, as if it was having trouble coming unstuck from a docking interface that hadn’t been broken in decades, it lifted up and away from the Ark. Small attitude rockets squirted sprays of exhaust, fans of crystals that dissipated in the dark.
All this in utter silence.
Venus, shocked, tongued the switch on her comms unit. “Halivah, Jenning. Somebody just launched a shuttle. Control, what’s going on in there?” If this was some kind of exercise, she ought to have heard about it. Damn it, she was out here; if the shuttle snagged on the manipulator arm it could be disastrous. But what kind of exercise would necessitate a physical undocking, such a waste of thruster fuel? They had lost enough to leaks already.
No reply. She tried to recall who should have been on overnight watch tonight. More disturbingly, she didn’t even hear the usual hiss of static. There was a backup. She pulled a toggle from her belt and plugged it into a socket on the arm. This was an alternative comms channel passed through the arm’s own cybernetic control circuitry. “Halivah, Jenning. Some asshole just launched shuttle A. Are any of you even aware that I’m out here? Halivah, this is-”
“Venus?”
“Holle? What the-”
“Thank Christ you called in. Listen. All hell is breaking loose in here. Steel Antoniadi, some of the young ones-they lost their heads. They’re taking on Wilson.”
“Shit.” She’d always known this day would come; it was typical of her luck to be out of the Ark and unable to deal with it. “I’ll come back.” She reached for the manual arm control.
“No. No, Venus- stay out there. I think we might need you. I-”
The line went dead.
Venus toggled the comms switch with her tongue, fiddled with the plug in its socket in the arm. “Holle? Holle!”
Holle pulled off her comms hat. “Damn it, they cut the fiber link too. They know what they’re doing.”
Grace said, “Maybe you said enough.”
“Break out, break out. Helen, you’re sure that was what they were chanting.”
“Yes!” Helen snapped.
“I think they’re coming out of the nose,” Grace murmured, looking up.
Helen, Grace and Holle huddled close together, here on Deck Fourteen, just above the hydroponics banks. This was the base of the hull, about as far as you could get from the bridge. Looking up along the length of the hull Holle could see the smashed-open bridge, still full of a pall of black smoke. Bits of broken floor partitions wheeled around the hull. Some of the crew were still in their cabins, strung out along the pole, peering out in bewilderment. Others were streaming away from the chaos in the nose of the hull, away from the smoke. People cried warnings, a sound like gulls, she thought, an odd fragment of memory surfacing amid the shock. Holle
