An immense fist slammed into the back of her couch. Holle heard gasps all around her, and a groaning, as if the ship itself were being torn apart.
And yet I’m not dead, she thought. She was only thirty meters above the plasma cloud from a five-kilotonne nuke, and a pusher plate that had been hurled upwards at a thousand gravities. But the suspension system had to be working, the great pistons absorbing the shock. If not she’d be dead by now, the ship destroyed as the thousand-ton plate, forced up by that first explosion, rose and smashed through the Ark’s gargantuan structure.
The gravity dipped, sickeningly. The end of the first pulse. Was that only a second?
And then the next came, another shove, smoother this time, that pushed her back into her couch. The pressure yielded once more. And then the push came again. And again. It was working. She heard people whooping, applauding.
She lay back and closed her eyes, and tried to imagine she was on a kid’s swing in the training facilities at Gunnison, harmlessly rocking back and forth. It wasn’t too bad, a G or so of eyeballs-in acceleration, an easy training session. Not so bad to be riding an atomic booster into space.
But the launch facility, any ground crew who hadn’t got away from the Zone, were already gone, the hapless town of Gunnison flattened like Hiroshima. The journey hadn’t even begun.
Now she felt the ship judder, shift violently from one side to another, shaking her in her cozy couch. The Ark was mounted with beefy auxiliary rockets, attitude thrusters meant to tweak its trajectory against the brute pushing of the nukes. Swing, swing, swing-
She was thrown forward against her straps, as if the ship had hit a brick wall. The applause turned to screams.
Unit failed. They had simulated this.
She glanced around. Morell looked terrified. “A pulse unit failed, Theo!” she yelled. “Just one unit, out of hundreds. That’s all…” It was always a chancy business to throw a device as complex as a thermonuclear bomb into the expanding plasma cloud left by another only a second earlier and expect it to detonate. But if the next unit failed, and the next, they would fall back into their own radioactive mess…
Another surge. God, had that only been a second, once again? Time was elastic.
And another surge. And another. Now there was some pogoing, longitudinal juddering as the bulk of the Ark soaked up that missed stroke. Then the acceleration dips settled down to that steady swinging once more.
She felt Theo’s hand flapping, grasping for hers. She took it and held on firmly, wishing that Mel was here, and her father. Swing, swing, swing, the pulsing a little slower than her resting heartbeat, swing, swing, and the carcass of the Ark groaned as it rose like a dark angel from the ashes of its launchpad.
Something splashed on her face. It was urine, dripping down from the deck above.
Swing, swing.
45
Thandie Jones stood in the control room at Pikes Peak, surrounded by a scene she’d thought she’d never see again, a scene she’d thought lost with so much else of the pre-flood world: a launch control, rows of earnest technicians murmuring into comms links as they monitored the progress of a spacecraft rising from the Earth.
But what a spacecraft.
Gordo touched her shoulder. “Look. We got some image capture from before the first detonation.” The images had been taken from a camera directly beneath the pusher plate. “See that?” Gordo pointed, intent. “That puff of steam is the injection of the charge. There’s the pulse unit itself…” A vase-shaped object falling down into the air, from a hole in the great metal roof above it. “The anti-ablation oil sprays over the pusher. And- bang — the detonation of the bomb itself.” The sequence ended as the camera was fried.
Thandie had first worked with Gordo Alonzo twenty-four years ago, when they had gone diving together in a museum-piece submarine, seeking evidence of subterranean seas. Now, having forced her way back to his attention over the issue of Grace Gray, he’d invited her to come here to watch the climax of the project. She would never have dreamed that after all these years she and Gordo would be standing side by side in a situation like this. She’d never even liked the man.
There were gasps as images from an aircraft just outside the blast zone were fed to the screens. Thandie turned to see.
A crater, kilometers wide, had been burned into the Earth. Above it rose the familiar sight of a nuclear fireball, a mushroom cloud. But a spacecraft contrail punched astonishingly up and out of that cloud, powered by more detonations, more fireballs, a string of them. Soon the plasma glare from the rising craft outshone the atomic glow on the ground, and cast light across the remnant of the land and the encroaching sea, a lethal sun rising.
“What did I start, Gordo? Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut.”
He grunted. “You always did take all the credit, you ballsy dyke.”
Three
46
February 2042
It was a relief for Wilson Argent to drift out of the airlock and into the blackness beyond the hull. A relief to get out of the small chamber where for hours he had been pre-breathing the low pressure pure oxygen that filled his suit. A relief, forty days after launch, to get out of the cramped, noisy environs of Seba and Halivah, the twin hulls of the Ark, that competitive, fractious hothouse. Yet he was still deep within the bowels of the ship, deep within the factory-sized Orion launch stage, and his view of free space was obstructed by struts and tanks and shadows. He could hear nothing but the whirr of the pumps in his backpack, the hiss of static from the comms units in his Snoopy-hat headset, and the rasp of his own breathing.
The latching end of the manipulator arm-formally the Mobile Servicing System-was waiting for him, just as according to the EVA plan, right outside the hatchway. The arm was like an ungainly robot hand, sprouting latches and tool stubs and cameras, swathed in white insulating cloth, bright where it caught the spotlights.
Wilson turned around, grabbed the edge of the hatch with his gloved hands, and launched himself feet first toward the arm’s latching end. His Kevlar tether unrolled behind him. The bulky gloves were a smart design that enabled his fingers to bend easily, but his legs were stiff, stuck inside what felt like an inflated inner tube. His Extravehicular Mobility Unit, his suit, insulated and cooled him and kept him under pressure and even offered some protection from micrometeorites and radiation, but it made him as rigid as a plastic doll. But then he wasn’t planning on walking on the moon today; he was to make an eyeball inspection of the pusher plate, and most of the movements he would be making would be controlled by the arm.
His aim was true, and his booted feet settled gently against the arm’s end. He heard a distant scrape as latches closed around his boot soles. A rail swiveled up to meet him, and he grasped a double handle, so that it was as if he was riding a scooter. He clipped a harness around the stem of the handle. More security: if the arm failed altogether, he could conceivably work his way back to its base hand over hand. He was ready.
“Cupola, Argent,” he said, his voice muffled in his own ears from the enclosure of the helmet. “I’ve interfaced with the arm. I’m good to go. Preparing to release the hull tether.”
“Copy that, Wilson,” Venus called from the cupola. “Your medical signs are a little off. You’re breathing too hard, your heart rate’s above nominal. Take a few seconds.”
He supposed she was right, but she didn’t need to say it out loud. He knew that many of the crew would be following his progress on the internal comms, and he no doubt had an audience Earthside via the continual live feed. “Venus, I know what I’m doing. We practiced this very maneuver for hours back in the Hilton. I could do it in my sleep.”