It was as if the whole hull dropped like a falling elevator car. Holle drifted up from the catwalk, and with a stab of panic she grabbed at the rail, even though she was safely anchored.
She peered down through the catwalk at the inferno below. The decks, shocked into zero gravity, were full of clouds of junk lifting into the air, furniture, handhelds, bits of clothing, food fragments, tools, even loose bolts and screws, anything not held down suddenly mobile. But the fire was the crux. She thought she saw an immediate difference in the way the smoke was billowing, and maybe the flames licked a bit less eagerly at the decking and equipment racks.
That was the idea. By cutting the tether Holle had eliminated the artificial gravity from the hull’s interior. Without gravity there was no convection; hot air could not rise, and the processes that had been sustaining the fire, the updraft that drew in fresh oxygen to feed the flames, had been eliminated. The fire still had to be doused, and there were other dangers deriving from zero-gravity fires, which could smolder unseen for days or weeks. But at least with the fire choking on its own products there was a better chance that the hull as a whole would survive.
The alarm tone changed, and now Venus’s voice rang out, relayed from the cupola. “Prepare for vernier fire. All hands prepare for vernier fire…”
This was the next step. Right now both hulls, released from the tether’s grip, had been flung away from the center. They could not afford to fall too far; an encounter with the warp bubble wall would destroy them. So auxiliary rockets would be fired to hold the hulls somewhere close to the bubble’s center, and to still any residual rotation. Some time in the future the hulls could be brought back together, the tether reattached, the assembly spun up again.
If the verniers fired in the first place, Holle thought. If they or their control systems hadn’t been ruined by the fire. If there was the fuel remaining to rejoin the hulls and restore their mutual rotation. If, if, if. Holle had always held in her head an image of the long chain of events that all had to occur precisely as programmed if she were ever to walk safely on the ground of Earth II. Just now she could feel that chain stretching, its weakest links straining.
A small bundle floated below her, wriggling oddly. It was a baby, Holle saw, drifting in open space. Only a few months old, bundled in a diaper, it waved bare arms and legs. With eyes and mouth opened wide, the baby seemed to be enjoying the experience of swimming in the air. But now the hull banged, as if huge fists were hammering on its exterior wall. That was the verniers, firing in hard bursts. Holle, hanging onto her rail, felt the jolts as each impulse was applied. The baby caromed off a deck plate and bounced back up in the air, limbs flailing. It was frightened now, crying. Holle unclipped herself from the catwalk and descended like an angel, folding the baby in charred spacesuit sleeves.
65
June 2048
On the morning Thomas Windrup’s sentencing was due to be announced Holle woke in an unfamiliar room, with odd metallic colors and strange smells. This was not her cabin, not Seba, not the hull she had come to think of as home. In the weeks since the fire she had been stationed in Halivah, hot-bunking with Paul Shaughnessy in a tiny cabin improvised from one of their own maintenance lockups. She still hadn’t got used to it.
It didn’t take her long to get dressed.
Paul was outside the cabin with their pressure suits. He waited while she used the bathroom block. Then she led the way to the hull’s nose airlock, where they suited up briskly. Holle didn’t try to engage Paul in conversation. Today he was going over to Seba to see the sentencing of the man who had tried to kill his brother by sabotaging his suit. Paul’s anger had been barely contained since the incident, and it was best to leave him be.
They cycled through the lock and out into the dark, and latched their harnesses to the cable that now linked the hulls. This wasn’t a rotation tether, and wasn’t held rigid; the cable was just a guide strung between the two hulls along which they pulled themselves hand over hand, across the two hundred meters to Seba. Traveling this way was hard work, but it saved fuel.
The hulls drifted, stationary with respect to each other but not side by side, and not even parallel; Halivah was tipped up compared to Seba, so that the two hulls lay like wrecked ships on the bottom of Earth’s ever-deepening ocean. More lengths of cable connected Halivah to the warp generator assembly, so that the components of the Ark were bound up in a kind of spiderweb, lit by externally mounted lights. And beyond the hulls lay the silent, steady stars.
Once aboard Seba, Holle and Paul made their way down to Deck Ten, proceeding by handholds down from the nose of the hull. Kelly had ordered that the sentencing of Thomas Windrup should be held in the very place where his sabotage had started the disastrous fire. Without spin up the hull was without effective gravity, and people swam everywhere, flicking from handhold to handhold. The children, all too young to remember the weightless cruise before Jupiter, loved it, and flying, tumbling, tag-chasing kids had become a minor hazard. But the hull still smelled of smoke and scorched plastic.
At Deck Ten, Kelly was waiting outside a small cabin, its door shut. Despite weeks of cleanup there was no furniture here, not even any intact decking to which furniture could be attached. But ropes had been strung across the deck from wall to blackened wall, and the gathering people hung onto the ropes, or found themselves corners where they could cling to wall fittings.
Holle seemed to be the last of the senior crew to make it here. She saw Wilson, Venus, Mike Wetherbee, Masayo Saito-even Zane, and Holle wondered which of his alternate personalities had shown up for this meeting. Doc Wetherbee was studiously avoiding everybody’s eyes. Wilson, still Kelly’s lover, bore the marks of recent hard work; he wore vest and shorts, and his muscular limbs were streaked with ash.
Jack Shaughnessy wasn’t here. Presumably he was still too feeble from the massive burns he had suffered over his arms and chest to be released by Doc Wetherbee. And Thomas Windrup wasn’t here either, to hear the verdict passed on him. Venus looked wary. As one of her colleagues in GN amp;C and astronomy Thomas Windrup was one of “her” people.
Kelly, subtly isolated from the crowd, checked over notes on her handheld. She was dressed in a grimy coverall. She had shaved her blond hair, and smoke and soot had stained the lines around her mouth and eyes, making her look a lot older than her thirty years. Nearly seven years of leadership had made her tougher, Holle thought, more decisive, more clear-thinking. She had done her job competently enough. But all her hard work and even her relentless search for unanimity, the hours of talking, hadn’t made her popular. Holle sometimes thought the strain was pulling her down.
Kelly glanced around at her silent crewmates. “OK,” she began. “I guess everybody who wants to be here, is here. I suspended all regular duties save the watches. You can watch the session live via the surveillance system, or the recordings we’ll make, and eventually we’ll be shipping transcripts back to Earth too.
“Today I want to draw a line under the fire. The recovery of Seba is going to take us years-we’ll probably be still working on it when we get to Earth II, in three years’ time. But we’ve already done a great deal. We buried our dead.”