“Like what?”
“You aren’t sorry we didn’t try for a pregnancy?”
Many of the female Candidates had done so, getting themselves knocked up in the final weeks. Some had succeeded, including Susan Frasier, who was bearing the child of her long-term boyfriend Pablo Mason, an eye-dee who had turned out to be a math whiz and, through Susan’s persuasion of Gordo, got himself a place on the project ground crew. But there were others who had ended up getting too sick to complete the training program, and had washed themselves out.
“It might have boosted your chances.”
“No,” Holle said firmly. “We’ve been through this.” If she had got pregnant with Mel’s kid, his genes would have become redundant. “I wasn’t about to leave you behind. We can have kids on Earth II.”
“Not for eight years.”
She shrugged. “I can wait.”
A wall panel flashed, bleeping softly.
They broke their hug. Holle called, “On.”
The screen lit up with Alonzo’s craggy, deeply tanned face. “-is a loop recording. The final crew selection commences at 0800.” An hour from now. “If you believe yourself to be eligible for selection, get yourself to the crew center on time. If you ain’t there, even if your name is Neil Armstrong, you wash out. I hope that’s clear. Bring only what you need.” He glanced down at a note. “That’s all.” There was a flicker, as the recording restarted. “This is a loop recording. The final crew selection process commences at 0800…”
Mel and Holle looked at each other for one second. There had been no warning of this. “Move,” he said.
“Yeah.”
Mel ran for the shower.
Holle grabbed their underwear from the closets, and their red and blue Candidates’ uniforms. “What do you think he meant, ‘Bring only what you need’?”
“That we’re not coming back,” Mel called from the shower.
“Shit.” But she should have expected something like this. So the end game begins, she thought. She grabbed backpacks and started ransacking the room, seeking what was most precious to her-books, diaries, data sticks, hardcopy images, letters from her father, her Angel. What could she not bear to leave behind?
She heard a growl of heavy engines, carrying even through the thick window glass. Looking down she saw armored buses pulling up, ready to take them to the launch facility. She glanced at a clock. Five past seven. She threw stuff arbitrarily into the backpacks. “Will you hurry up in that damn shower?”
36
There was a corridor of photographers, held back by lines of military, waiting to greet the Candidates as they came out of the building in pairs or threes, clutching their bags, their gaudy uniforms bright against the drab military shades. Flashes and spots glared in their faces. There was even a ripple of applause. Kelly, ever the show-man, threw a handful of Ark key rings from her gloved hand. People jumped to catch them. Holle, dazzled by the flashes, was aware of a sullen watching crowd beyond the well-wishers.
The bus moved off from the foot of the building at seven thirty precisely, a tank-like vehicle with caterpillar treads and minuscule windows. It joined a convoy that rolled briskly out of the compound’s security fence, then along a short stretch of road lined with troops, shadowy in the uncertain morning light, heading for Gunnison.
They slowed at a checkpoint at the Hinterland’s outer perimeter, a great circle of fences, ditches and watchtowers some eight kilometers in radius drawn around Gunnison. More spectators were waiting here, some applauding, mostly just staring. The security was heavy-handed, ferocious.
Even once they were inside the Hinterland they bowled along a road lined with wire fencing and more armed troops. Beyond the roadside fence civilian workers were laboring, scraping holes and ditches in the open spaces and planting ugly metal eggs in the ground. They were laying mines, Holle saw, seeding death into the ground, presumably all across the Hinterland. Maybe even the road she traveled on would be mined once she had passed. Nobody else was to come in after them. That was the meaning of these preparations. She had the sense of great doors slamming closed behind her one by one.
A kilometer from the Ark they were halted at another security fence around the Zone, the inner ground zero that contained the launch facility itself and the infrastructure that supported it. This time the buses were boarded, the occupants’ cards and biometric ID signatures checked over, and the buses moved on with armed troops aboard.
It was five to eight by the time the buses rolled to a halt outside the big doors of the Candidate Hilton. Holle had spent so much time in this big training center the last couple of years that it had come to feel like home. And here, in a few days, they would undergo their final preparations for launch. Now, as the Candidates spilled from their buses, chattering and nervous in their bright costumes, she longed only to get inside, to meet Gordo’s deadline. But even here the security clamped down hard, and they had to line up for yet another ID check before being allowed in.
The light was brightening now. As Holle waited to be processed she looked around. It was remarkable to remember that within the last few years this whole launch facility had been set out from scratch, including manufacturing plants, propellant stores, test, assembly and integration facilities, this crew training and preparation building, the control centers. And all of it was focused on the ship itself, picked out by its spotlights and looming over the blocky buildings that surrounded it.
This morning there was much activity around ramps that led up from the ground to the gaping doors of the twin hulls’ holds. Holle knew that the Svalbard vault was being loaded. This was a seed vault, containing around two billion seeds, established around forty years earlier deep inside a mountain on some Norwegian island-the seed that would help build a new world, on Earth II, once it was selected and reached. It was rumored that the seed vault had been the price paid by Grace Gray’s sponsor, Nathan Lammockson, to get her aboard the Ark. There were already banks of zygotes stored deep in the Ark’s hold-the frozen embryos of animals, of dogs, cats, horses, cows, sheep, pigs, a variety of fish, and of a whole range of critters drawn from across the rich living tapestry of Earth, all loaded in not quite two by two. And Holle knew that equally precious but less tangible treasures were also being loaded aboard the ship today, via fiber-optic connections and tight beams: millions of books going back to the first Sumerian scratchings, music in sheet form and recordings, Library of Congress records, even the big genetic libraries the Mormons had built up-digital vaults containing the wisdom and collective memory of mankind, flowing into the Ark’s radiation-hardened memory stores.
Even as the loading went on, cranes pecked at the huge structure like birds, spotlights glinted, welding torches sparked, and vapor hissed from valves, flaring bright white in the spotlights. It was said that the engineers wouldn’t stop building the ship until the moment it took off. It was impossible to believe that such a thing could fly at all.
And it was also impossible to believe that of everything in her field of view, only the Ark itself would survive a microsecond after the very first of the thermonuclear detonations that would lift her into space.
She and Mel got through the final security checks at two minutes to eight, and, following a sign, hurried to the Hilton’s big assembly hall.
Gordo Alonzo stood on the stage, before a contraption of glass and plastic that looked like a lottery machine. Edward Kenzie was up there with him, and Liu Zheng, Magnus Howe and other instructors. Holle couldn’t see her father.
The floor before the stage, cleared of the usual clutter of chairs and desks, was crowded with Candidates, swarming in their bright uniforms. She and Mel worked into the crowd, looking for their friends. There were plenty of strangers here too, young people of around Holle’s age, some in the uniforms of military, Homeland, police or National Guard, and some in civilian clothes, in AxysCorp coveralls or even just plain jeans. She spotted Grace Gray standing alone, looking detached from the rest; she must be one of the oldest here, and her pregnancy was clearly visible through the loose coveralls she wore.