At last they were convened, and Kelly rapped a stylus on the tabletop to call them to order.
“OK, this is the ship’s council, held today, fourteenth February 2042, Kelly Kenzie presiding.”
“Happy Valentine’s, sweet cheeks,” called one of Masayo’s boys, and there was a ripple of laughter.
Kelly ignored this, stony-faced. “The discussion is being beamed back to Alma for comments and guidance later. We’ll start with section reports. Zane, you want to go first?”
Zane nominally led a team that covered the more exotic engineering. He reported that the Orion drive had been shut down and safed for now, with no major defects reported, and pending completion of inspections like Wilson’s there seemed no reason the drive shouldn’t serve them just as well when they arrived at Jupiter. “We’re likely to finish with a cargo of spare nukes,” he said.
Meanwhile the Prometheus reactors should soon come online. These were advanced engines based on designs for a canceled unmanned spacecraft called the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. When brought into operation the pressure would be taken off the fuel cells. And the warp-bubble equipment, stowed for now in the hulls’ lower sections and to be assembled in Jovian orbit, showed no signs of damage from the launch events.
Venus, calling in from the cupola, reported that her planet-finding project was under way on a trial basis. The idea was to make observations that would supplement those made from Earth-orbit telescopes like the Hubble and the surviving ground-based instruments such as in Chile. The most useful work would be achieved in the months they would spend in Jovian orbit, at a stable distance from Earth, and the work of selecting the Ark’s destination would begin in earnest. Meanwhile Venus also had responsibility for GN amp;C, a NASA-type acronym for guidance, navigation and control. She gave the results of her most recent course-correction vernier burn, in terms of the accuracy of their trajectory on three axes: “Minus one, plus one, plus one. You don’t get much better than that.”
“OK. Holle?”
Holle Groundwater ran a team responsible for more prosaic aspects of the ship’s systems, but she gabbled out acronyms with the best of them. “Comms” Grace grasped easily enough. “EPS” was the electrical power system. “ECLSS” was the environmental control and life-support system, complicated mechanisms devoted to the air scrubbing and water cycling on which all their lives depended. The target was ambitious. There would always be leaks and wastage, but they were aiming to keep the loops of air and water and other essentials closed tight enough to last for years. Right now Holle was leading her team through a complex series of configurations and tests, bedding down her systems for flight. These tasks included establishing a hydroponic garden on Seba’s lower deck. So far, she reported, things were going well.
The gatecrashers and illegals listened silently to all this. All the section heads were, of course, Candidates, and had been trained for the job. That alone made a point about the divisions in the crew.
Doc Wetherbee was the last to report. Only twenty-four years old he was a Candidate too. As well as his formal education he had served in general practice in Denver, in hospital emergency rooms, and on triage teams in eye-dee camps and processing centers. With one eye on his handheld he ran through a brief survey of the general health of the crew, of whom only three were still suffering from spacesickness, another two had fluid balance problems, and the woman who broke her leg when her couch collapsed during the launch was recovering-as was an illegal who had cracked a knuckle while beating up a Candidate. Depletion of his various medical stores was actually less than had been expected.
“Our two new mothers and their babies are doing fine,” he finished up. “Which leaves me with one question. Is there a doctor in the house? Aside from this one.”
There was a general stir; the crux of the meeting approached. Wetherbee was understandably furious about the outcome of the launch, because among those who hadn’t made it on board had been Miriam Brownlee, qualified psychiatrist and surgeon, and Wetherbee’s lover.
Kelly said, “Grace, you ran your census.” She flipped back the handheld. “You want to field that one?”
Grace caught the handheld. “OK. You all know the boarding process on launch day was a mess. At Kelly’s request I’ve been running a simple check of who’s actually on board this boat-who you are, what skills you have, what sicknesses or inherited disorders, all the rest. I asked you all for data, and also asked you to confirm what your buddies told me.
“Here’s the summary results. I’ll download the detail to the ship archive if the council approves. The nominal crew was eighty adults. There are actually seventy-eight adults on board. Well, the head count we did on the first day told us that.”
Kelly said, “So the mutiny actually caused us to leave Earth with two wasted berths. Go on.”
“Of the seventy-eight, forty-nine are ex-Candidates. Of the remainder, twenty-one are late additions to the crew, but formally approved by the command team under Gordo Alonzo on the ground. That includes myself. And that leaves eight, who got on board in those last moments before the ramp came up.”
Masayo Saito said, “Just use the word. We’ve all heard what you call us. Illegals.”
“As for medical staff,” Grace said, unperturbed, “the original crew plan was to have three doctors on board, with specialisms in surgery, psychiatry, child care, other fields.”
Wetherbee asked, “And after your careful survey, the number of trained doctors who actually made it on board is-”
“One. You, Mike. It’s just bad luck, I guess. I’m sorry.”
He laughed bitterly. “Well, it’s not your fault.”
“What a screw-up,” Kelly said. “What else, Grace? How about first-aid skills?”
“There we’re better off. All the Candidates have decent first-aid or first-response training. So do Masayo and some of his boys.”
“Well, there you go,” Masayo said. “You need us after all.”
“But,” Kelly said, “we’re heavily dependent on Doc Wetherbee here. Gordo Alonzo will come down hard on us to find some way to back him up. Look, Mike, I don’t mean to put you under any extra pressure. But maybe you could work with Grace and pick out the most promising paramedic-type candidates we have. Figure out some kind of training program. For now we have remote support from the ground; for anything less than surgery or trauma cases I guess that’s going to be a help.”
“But we will lose the ground once we go to warp,” Zane said coldly. “And when the waves close over Alma.”
“I know that, Zane,” Kelly snapped. “We’ve got time to come up with solutions before then. Grace, what about genetic diversity? The social engineers tried to stick to their selection parameters even with the gatecrashers.”
Grace said, “We’ll have to run a DNA analysis for a full answer. But only one of the military people is female. And two are actually brothers, the Shaughnessys.”
“Brothers.” Mike Wetherbee barked a laugh. “Christ! We even fouled that up.”
Masayo said heavily, “Is this how it’s going to be all the way to fucking Jupiter?”
Kelly folded her arms. “I don’t like you, or the way you got yourself aboard. But we’re all stuck in this tub together, for the rest of our lives. And we don’t have room for passengers, Masayo.”
“Fine,” Masayo said. “We want to work.”
“Good. Holle?”
Holle smiled around at the group, looking as if she was actually enjoying the meeting. The tension palpably lessened. Grace admired her unobtrusive skill. “We urgently need to establish a maintenance routine. There are seventy-eight of us, crammed into a small space.”
“Yes, and it seems a damn small space to me,” Masayo said. “How much room do we actually have?”
Holle tapped her own handheld, searching for figures. “You know that the two hulls are based on Ares propellant tanks-in turn derived from the old space shuttle external tank. Each is a cylinder about eight meters in diameter, and fifty meters long. We lose some of that diameter to the water tanks under the hull, the equipment racks, and so on. We’re left with about forty-seven hundred cubic meters of living space, in the habitable hulls. That’s around three times the pressurized volume in a Boeing 747. About five times the pressurized volume available in the ISS-”