Ark (25 page)

52

March 2044

N
ot long after dawn Mel’s National Guard detachment was rousted out of its barrack, an abandoned, rat-infested liquor store in Alma’s small town center.

To brisk orders from the sergeants they formed up in the dim morning light, a few dozen men and women in rough but orderly ranks. Then they began their march along Main Street, heading out of the Buckskin Street compound gate and north through the picked-over ruins of the town toward the outer perimeter. The tarmac surface of the highway was rutted and cracked by the passage of tanks and other heavy armored vehicles. It wasn’t so bad to walk on, but you had to watch you didn’t turn your ankle in some pothole. Weeds flourished, green and vigorous, grabbing their opportunity in this short interval between the ending of the dominance of humankind and the coming of the flood.

The air was full of the stink of the night’s smoke. The eye-dees burned shit these days, human excrement dried and compressed, the hillsides long having been stripped of their lumber. And, under all that, there was a faint tang of salt in the air, of ozone, the smell of the global ocean reaching even here to the heights of the Rockies.

The troopers were laden with their packs. This assignment was going to last several days, how long was unspecified. As they walked they checked over their elderly weapons—mostly Kalashnikov AK-47s, probably manufactured before the flood, and many of them liberated from survivalist types during a raid into the higher ground a couple of years back. The troopers were a mixture, everything from veterans with genuine combat experience to healthy-looking rookies plucked out of the eye-dee streams, to relics with a more complex past, like Mel, who had been a USAF cadet before being diverted into the Ark Candidate corps, and then left abandoned on the ground at the last minute. For all their raggedness they were probably as disciplined a military unit as existed anywhere on the planet. But they grumbled as they marched, their voices rising in the still air. Everybody grumbled all the time, about the lousy food and the broken toilets in their billets and the state of their hand-me-down combat gear.

Mel Belbruno felt as uncomfortable as everybody else. His boots were a major problem, misshapen from a dunking in salt water when in the care of some previous unfortunate owner; he had padded them with layers of filthy socks. But this morning he was distracted by the unpleasant possibilities of the new assignment.

Alma was surrounded by a system of concentric fortifications. The best place to serve was inside the Buckskin Street compound itself, at the heart of the old town, a fortress improvised from a triangle of land where three roads intersected, South Main Street, South Pine, and Buckskin Street running down from the gulch to the west. The Ark’s Mission Control had been relocated into the center of this fortified area. Outside the compound there was little left of the quaint old mining town, with its embattled claim to be the highest in America. It had been pretty much dismantled by labor crews, first to provide raw materials for the fortifications, and then to build rafts, big buoyant structures of oil tanks and plastic sheeting and tarpaulin that for now sat ominously on the open ground, ready for the final evacuation.

Failing an assignment inside the compound itself, you were best off running patrols into the hinterland, as the commanders called it, a broad area a few kilometers across centered on Alma, a patchwork of high ground and flooded-out valleys. Here, high ground once colonized by pine trees was stripped of lumber and was being turned into farmland, a thousand tiny, scratched-out farms on the poor soil. They were farming even all the way to the summit of Mount Bross, the highest point hereabouts, breaking the poor land with human muscle, for there was no oil left to run tractors and pull plows, not even any horses left. Mel had once heard Patrick Groundwater say that Americans were having to revive methods of subsistence farming once used in medieval Europe.

Today was the first time Mel had been sent further out still, beyond the hinterland to one of the eye-dee processing camps that blocked the valleys and gulches that led into Alma. He didn’t know what to expect at the camp, up Highway 9. He tried not to listen to the shit from the veterans, of the things they’d seen and had to do, but their words wormed their way into your head, as they were meant to.

He wished he didn’t have to face this distraction, this upheaval, today of all days.

He looked up at a murky, cloud-scattered sky, wondering where Jupiter was—Jupiter, where the Ark crew had almost completed their fifteen-month-long stay. It was now less than twenty-four hours before the next phase of the Ark’s mission was due to begin, when the ship would cloak itself in a warp bubble and hurl itself at the stars. These last few hours, after which Holle wouldn’t even be inside the same solar system as Mel, were not a time he wanted to be away from Mission Control, and news of the stupendous events unfolding in the sky. But he didn’t have a choice.

In March 2044, with the global flood nearing three kilometers above the old sea-level datum, not many people got choices.

At the processing camp the unit was siphoned off to a tent city, their billet for the next few nights. Another unit of battered-looking, weary young people was forming up to be marched south in turn. They were silent, sullen.

Don Meisel was waiting at the side of the road, a lieutenant now in a relatively crisp and clean Denver PD uniform. When he spotted Mel he called him over. His right cheek bore a deep scar, a wound badly cleaned out and amateurishly stitched, and thick sunglasses hid his eyes. His red hair was speckled gray. At twenty-six, Don was a year older than Mel. Mel thought he looked a lot older than that.

Mel forced a grin. “I wish I could say I was glad to see you.” “Yeah. Not in these circumstances. The Ark—”

“Everything’s on track, last I heard.” Which had been last night, when Patrick Groundwater had called him at the barracks.

“Nothing we can do about that now.” Don glanced around. “Your unit will be working with mine today. Listen, the first day’s the worst. I got through it—just remember that. If a sap like me can make it, you sure can too. Go take your boots off for a few minutes. I think there’s some hot food.” Don touched an earpiece, and nodded absently. “Catch you later.” He strode away.

Mel followed his buddies into the tent city, where the men had already begun arguing over bunks that were still warm from the bodies of their last occupants. The respite was half an hour, long enough for them to grab some food and drink, to take a dump, to massage feet that were already sore from the hike out of Alma in their ill-fitting boots. Despite the complaints, the food wasn’t so bad, a kind of rabbit stew. Cops and troopers got to eat better than almost anybody else—better, even, than the engineers and scientists in Mission Control, which was why it was the ambition of most able-bodied eye-dees to join a military detachment.

Then they were formed up again and marched the last few hundred meters north along the highway, to the processing camp.

53

A
s they neared the security perimeter Mel tried to take in what he saw.

He was approaching a fence, a complex of barbed wire and watch towers and earthworks that spanned the old highway. He could see the fence reaching high up into the hills to either side, cutting across the brown, exposed ground, passing through the rough rectangles of the scrubby new farms. The highway itself was straddled by a massive steel and concrete gateway, bristling with watchtowers and spotlights. The fence was manned by soldiers or National Guard or Homeland or cops, who could be seen walking the wire or sitting in their towers.

This was the boundary of the territory, centered on Alma, that was still under the protection of the federal government, with Colonel Gordo Alonzo, the most senior surviving commander of Project Nimrod, named by the President himself as military governor. The boundary between order and governance within, and the chaos without. There were rumors that this was about the only significant enclave left under federal government control, outside seaborne assets like the surviving Navy ships and submarines. But few people were in a position to know if that was true.

The refugee-processing center had been set up where the fence crossed the highway. A couple of buildings, rough concrete blocks, were set back behind the line itself, connected to the gate by a kind of corridor of barbed wire, the walls at last three meters tall and patroled inside and out by armed soldiers. There was a small industrial facility set up here, like a chemical factory with tanks and drums and gleaming pipework. A sign over the door read:

ALMA, CO.
RESPITE CENTER
US FEDERAL GOVERNMENT PROPERTY

To his amazement Mel saw that flowers bloomed at the doorway of this unit, in pots hanging from metal brackets.

At the gate itself Mel saw a row of desks, manned by soldiers and civilians, with laptops and electronic notepads. These were interviewing eye-dees, one at a time. A queuing system, a line beyond the gate itself, stretched back, rows of ragged, dirty, scrawny people working their way through a zigzag of metal barriers. Further out, soldiers in pairs were roughly gathering people into preliminary lines.

And beyond that, Mel saw more people, a crowd of them sitting or standing in the dust. Just in that first glimpse there must have been thousands of them.

“Shit,” he murmured to Don, who stood at his side. “If that crowd lost patience—”

“Don’t think like that,” Don murmured. “It’s our job to see that they don’t.” He stepped before the unit he commanded today, his veterans and Mel’s rookies from Alma. “OK, listen up. We’ll break you up into squads, two, three or four at a time, veterans paired with rookies. For today you’ll be rotated through the various elements of what we do here, so you see the bigger picture. Training on the job, you follow? After that, beginning tomorrow, we’ll fix you up with permanent assignments.” He grinned, fiercely. “I’ll say to you what I said to my buddy here. The first day’s the worst. But if I got through it, you can. And just remember how important the work is.
This
is where we hold the line—not back in the Buckskin Street compound, not in those scrubby farms in the hinterland. Everything depends on how well you do your jobs, right here. OK, fall out and buddy up; B Company have been given the names of the inductees they’re to supervise.”

The company broke up, the troopers milling around, the new arrivals looking for the veterans who would shepherd them through this first day.

Don again beckoned Mel over. “It’s you and me for today, buddy.” He glanced over the new troopers mildly. “There’s generally a couple who crack, even on the first day. Maybe not with this bunch, they look solid enough. Come on. I need to troubleshoot.”

Don led Mel up the stub of highway toward the gate. Waving a pass at a guard, he pushed out past the row of desks and toward a kind of access alley that ran alongside the queuing system. Armed troopers patroled the alley. Glancing up, Mel saw watchtowers looming, more troopers with binoculars scanning the lined-up crowd.

Mel got a chance to see the processing clerks in action. Some of them were doctors or nurses, or anyhow they wore prominent red cross armbands over the sleeves of their uniforms. They took down basic details from the eye-dees standing before them.

“It’s a screening,” Mel said. “I didn’t think Alma was still taking in eye-dees.”

“It looks like a screening,” Don murmured. “Don’t jump to conclusions. Just watch, listen, learn. And keep your weapon to hand.”

The two of them walked out, beyond the big perimeter fence, and along a broken highway surface kept reasonably clear but crowded to either side with eye-dees waiting to join the lines for the processing system. They weren’t the only troopers out here, but, outside the fence, Mel felt exposed, unreasonably nervous.

Beyond the queuing crowd they reached a kind of shantytown, which was set out in rough squares, each about the area of an old city block. Each zone had drains cut into the ground, trenches leading to sewers that ran down the sides of the highway. There were few tents, but here and there stood the remnants of buildings, and the eye-dees had constructed shacks and lean-tos of sods and whatever debris they could get hold of. It was still only mid-morning. Fires burned and smoke rose up, and pots had been set out to catch rainwater from an increasingly cloudy sky. Babies cried, a multitude of tiny voices. There were even children playing, with battered toys or deflated soccer balls, but none of them ran about, and in faded rags they were stick-thin, the skulls prominent under their faces. Some had the swollen bellies of malnutrition.

Mel saw agents from the Alma protectorate, identifiable in relatively bright AxysCorp durable coveralls and accompanied by armed troops, working through the camp. Some wore medics’ armbands. They spoke patiently to the eye-dees and handed out leaflets.

The leaflets surprised Mel the most. “Where do they get the paper from?”

Don dug into his pocket, produced a folded scrap, and handed it to Mel. It was densely printed on both sides, and the only color was a tiny red, white, and blue Stars and Stripes in one corner. It turned out to be a kind of primer on how to construct a plow, meant to be drawn by humans. Don said, “Feel the paper, that glossy sheen? It’s made from sea-shells.”

“I didn’t know the government was still supporting eye-dee camps so far out.”

“It’s not. Supervising, maybe. Advising. But not supporting. Look around. The drainage ditches, the shanties—all constructed by the eye-dees themselves, using whatever tools and resources they could find, their bare hands if they have to. These leaflets we give them—hints on farming, on hunting—all to be achieved without material support from the center. Even the doctors give out more advice than medicine. We just don’t have the resources for any more.” He glanced around, making sure they weren’t overheard by any eye-dees. “We don’t even police out here. We encourage them to set up their own security structure, under the nominal authority of Alma. We give out paper badges—that doesn’t cost much. Usually it devolves pretty fast into the dominance of some warlord, but we don’t care about that so long as there’s order. Oh, and we always shut down the brothels. Gordo says we’re fighting against human nature with that one, but the commanders have made it a priority, and we try.”

“It’s all a kind of illusion,” Mel blurted. “They think they’re under the government’s protection. In fact—”

“It keeps people quiet. Sedated. It works because people want to believe they’re safe, that
somebody
is thinking about their welfare, just as it has been all their lives, at least for the older folk who remember how it was before the flood. Things are relatively stable here.” He pointed further out, to the north, where the highway arced away through stripped hillsides. “There are more out there, thousands. We mount punitive raids, we mine the roads, trying to keep them out. But they would have to get through this zone of settlement first, before they can get to us. There are camps like this all around Alma, in a ring.”

Mel saw it. “You’re using all these people as a screen. A human shield.”

Don eyed him. “Look—the flood just keeps on coming, the water pushes on up the valleys, the Platte and the Blue river and the rest, warm, frothy, salty water all poisoned with the mess from the drowned towns, and the corpses floating like corks. I’ve seen it. We’re losing places like Leadville and Hartsel and Grant now. And it drives people on ahead, like cattle.

“Everybody knows there’s an enclave at Alma. So they come in search of sanctuary, wave after wave. We don’t know how many there are out there, in the hills around Alma. Some think it might be as many as a million. We just can’t cater for them all, not for one percent of that number. And we can’t run away, like when we evacuated Denver. All we can do is keep them at bay, until the job at Mission Control is done. To do that we’ve had to figure out how to use every resource we have left against the eye-dee flow. And the most significant of those resources is the eye-dees themselves.”

Mel glanced at Don’s face, expressionless behind the mask of his scar, the sunglasses, the layer of stubble over his dirty face. Mel thought he saw nothing left of the boy he had met in the Academy. “We’re going to win, aren’t we?”

“If you want the truth, I ain’t sure,” Don said bleakly. He glanced at the cloudy sky. “This stunt of timing the warp launch to coincide with the lunar eclipse—I don’t know whose dumb idea that was. My guess is that when the moon goes red all the crazies out here will start howling, even if they haven’t heard any specific rumors about the Ark. Well, we only need to hold the line for twenty-four more hours. So do you think it’s worth it—all that you’ve seen today—worth it if it gives the Ark the best chance of getting away to the stars?”

“Holle and Kelly are aboard. Relying on us. Yes, it’s worth it.”

“OK, kid. I think you’re ready to see the rest of it.”

“What ‘rest’?”

For answer, Don led him back through the shantytown to the security gate, and the patient line of applicants.