But there was a figure standing directly in front of him, helmet lamp bright, dressed in an electric-blue skinsuit, arms raised. As the car’s sensors picked up the figure, its safety routines cut in, and he felt it hesitate. He slammed his palm to the control panel, overriding the safeties. Nine minutes.
He closed his eyes as the car hit the protester.
He remembered the blue skinsuit. He had just mown down the man from the airlock, who had been so desperate to save his family. He had no right to criticise the courage or the morals or the loyalty of others, he saw.
We are all just animals, fighting to survive. My berth on Ship Three doesn’t make me any better. He hadn’t even had the guts to watch.
Eight minutes. He disabled the safety governors and let the car race down the empty road, its speed ever increasing.
He had to pass through another block before he reached Ship Three – but this one was manned by Enforcers. They were in an orderly line across the road, dressed in their bright yellow skinsuit uniforms. Evidently they had pulled back to tight perimeters around the five Ships. At least they were still loyal.
The queuing was agonising. With only five minutes before Andres’s deadline, an Enforcer pressed a nozzle to the car’s window, flashed laser light into Rusel’s face, and waved him through.
Ship Three was directly ahead of him. It was a drum, a squat cylinder about a kilometre across and half as tall. It sat at the bottom of its own crater, for Port Sol ice had been gouged out and plastered roughly over the surface of its hull. It looked less like a ship than a building, he thought, a building coated by thick ice, as if long abandoned. But it was indeed a starship, a ship designed for a journey of not less than centuries, and fountains of crystals already sparkled around its base in neat parabolic arcs: steam from the Ship’s rockets, freezing immediately to ice. People milled at its base, running clumsily in the low gravity, and scurried up ramps that tongued down from its hull to the ground.
Rusel abandoned the car, tumbled out onto the ice and ran towards the nearest ramp. There was another stomach-churning wait as an Enforcer in glowing yellow checked each identity. At last, after another dazzling flash of laser light in his eyes, he was through.
He hurried into an airlock. As it cycled it struck him that as he boarded this Ship, he was never going to leave it again: whatever became of him, this Ship was his whole world, for the rest of his life.
The lock opened. He ripped off his helmet. The light was emergency red, and klaxons sounded throughout the ship; the air was cold, and smelled of fear. Lethe, he was aboard! But there could only be a minute left.
He ran along a cold, ice-lined corridor towards a brighter interior.
He reached an amphitheatre, roughly circular, carpeted by acceleration couches. Andres’s voice boomed from the air: ‘Get into a couch. Any couch. It doesn’t matter. Forty seconds. Strap yourself in. Nobody is going to do it for you. Your safety is your own responsibility. Twenty-five seconds.’ People swarmed, looking for spare couches. The scene seemed absurd to Rusel, like a children’s game.
‘Rus! Rusel!’ Through the throng, Rusel made out a waving hand. It was Diluc, his brother, wearing his characteristic orange skinsuit. ‘Lethe, I’m glad to see you. I kept you a couch. Come on!’
Rusel pushed that way. Ten seconds. He threw himself down on the couch. The straps were awkward to pull around the bulk of his suit.
As he fumbled, he stared up at a Virtual display that hovered over his head. It was a view as seen from the Ship’s blunt prow, looking down. Those tongue ramps were still in place, radiating down to the ice. But now a dark mass boiled around the base of the curving hulclass="underline" people, on foot and in vehicles, a mob of them closing in. In amongst the mass were specks of bright yellow. Some of the Enforcers had turned on their commanders, then. But others stood firm, and in that last second Rusel saw the bright sparks of weapon fire, all around the base of the Ship.
A sheet of brilliant white gushed out from the Ship’s base. It was Port Sol ice, superheated to steam at tens of thousands of degrees. The image shuddered, and Rusel felt a quivering, deep in his gut. The Ship was rising, right on time, its tremendous mass raised on a bank of rockets.
When that great splash of steam cleared, Rusel saw small dark forms lying motionless on the ice: the bodies of the loyal and disloyal alike, their lives ended in a fraction of a second. A massive shame descended on Rusel, a synthesis of all the emotions that had churned through him since that fateful call of Diluc’s. He had abandoned his lover to die; he had probably killed others himself; and now he sat here in safety as others died on the ice below. What human being would behave that way? He felt the shame would never lift, never leave him.
Already the plain of ice was receding, and weight began to push at his chest.
II
Soon Port Sol fell away, and even the other Ships were lost against the stars, and it was as if Ship Three was alone in the universe.
In this opening phase of its millennial voyage Ship Three was nothing more than a water rocket, as its engines steadily sublimated its plating of ice and hurled steam out of immense nozzles. But those engines drew on energies that had once powered the expansion of the universe itself. Later the Ship would spin up for artificial gravity and switch to an exotic ramjet for its propulsion, and its true journey would begin.
The heaviest acceleration of the whole voyage had come in the first hours, as the ship hurled itself away from Port Sol. After that the acceleration was cut to about a third standard – twice lunar gravity, twice what the colonists of Port Sol had been used to. For the time being, the acceleration couches were left in place in that big base amphitheatre, and in the night watches everybody slept there, all two hundred of them massed together in a single vast dormitory, their muscles groaning against the ache of the twice-normal gravity.
The plan was that for twenty-one days the Ships would actually head towards the sun. They would penetrate Sol system as far as the orbit of Jupiter, where they would use the giant planet’s gravity field to slingshot them on to their final destinations. It seemed paradoxical to begin the exodus by hurling oneself deep into the inner system, the Coalition’s home territory. But space was big, the Ships’ courses had been plotted to avoid the likely trajectory of the incoming Coalition convoy, and the Ships were to run silently, not even communicating with each other. The chances of them being detected were negligible.
Despite the wearying gravity the first days after launch were busy for everybody. The Ship’s interior had to be rebuilt from its launch configuration to withstand this high-acceleration cruise phase. And the daily routines of the long voyage had to be set up – the most important of them being cleaning.
The Ship was a closed environment and its interior had plenty of smooth surfaces where biofilms, slick detergent-proof cities of bugs, would quickly build up. Not only that, the fall-out of the Ship’s human cargo – flakes of skin, hair, mucus – were seed beds for bacterial growth. All of this had to be eliminated; Captain Andres declared she wanted the Ship to be as clean as a hospital.
The most effective way to achieve that – and the most ‘future-proof’, in Andres’s persistent jargon – was through the old-fashioned application of human muscle. Everybody had to pitch in, even the Captain herself. Rusel put in his statutory half-hour per day, scrubbing vigorously at the walls and floors and ceilings around the nanofood banks that were his primary responsibility. He welcomed the mindlessness of the work; he continued to seek ways in which to distract himself from the burden of thought.