Mei was right. Benson did not like it.
“What is this, duct-tape?” Benson poked a finger at the gray strip covering one of the elbow joints of the ancient spacesuit.
“Yes. Duck tape work like lucky charms.”
Benson decided it was a language barrier issue and moved on. “Where the hell did you dig these things up from?”
“People throw them out, we fix them up.” Mei turned around and pointed at a zipper at the bottom of her suit’s back flap. Benson obliged her.
“Are you sure about this? You’re pregnant, after all. Can’t you just tell me where to go?”
Mei shook her head. “You get lost. Turn around.” She tugged at his zipper, but couldn’t get it to close. “You too fat.”
“I’m not fat,” Benson said defensively. “I’m just a little bigger than average.”
“Breathe out.”
“But we wear these things to breathe.”
Unimpressed by the line of logic, Mei slapped him in the stomach. Begrudgingly, Benson exhaled and she managed to finish zipping him up. The suit was indeed a bit snug. He wiggled around in it trying to find any extra room. But instead he found that the left shoulder joint was sticky and didn’t want to go higher than forty-five degrees.
“Hey, my arm can’t move all the way.”
“It just need oil.”
“Great, do you have some?”
“No.”
“Of course not. It was a silly question.”
Mei slung on her backpack life-support unit and cinched down the straps before hooking up the trio of hoses that connected to the front of the suit. Benson followed suit, and immediately felt cool air circulating inside the tight confines.
“How many times have you gone outside?” Benson asked.
Mei shrugged. “Many. Whenever we need to move between the modules. Sometimes we go outside just to watch the stars.”
It explained how they’d gotten around security. Only a smattering of external cameras studded the hull for maintenance inspections. They were equipped with floodlights, which would make them easy to avoid for anyone walking around in the dark.
Benson had realized his gun wouldn’t do much good zipped up inside his suit, so he fashioned a lanyard and tied one end to the trigger guard and the other to the suit’s belt. Not that he could actually fit a gloved finger inside the trigger guard to fire the gun, but if push came to shove, he could jam a stylus inside the guard to pull the trigger.
The helmet was the last piece of Benson’s suit to put in place. The top of his scalp pushed up against the inside of the helmet, matting his hair flat against his skull.
“This was built for somebody ten centimeters shorter than me.”
“You complain too much.”
She turned away and ambled towards the small maintenance lock, her usual feline grace lost inside the cumbersome suit. Benson followed in his bouncy, halting way. Someone had long ago spliced through the lock’s control panel to avoid tripping any alarms. Mei spun open the inner door, and before Benson had the chance to talk himself out of it, pumps had pulled out all of the air. His suit popped and crinkled like an inflating balloon as it swelled in the vacuum, sending little waves of fear through him. But the suit’s integrity held, even the duct-taped elbow, although Benson intended to flex the joint as little as humanly possible.
The outer door opened and Mei signaled for him to step out. The suit had short-range radio coms built in, but using them could give away their presence, so Mei had given him a short run down of hand signals the Unbound used during their jaunts.
With a deep breath, Benson stepped out onto the small platform and back into infinity. It had enough space for one person, barely. Mei was already climbing towards the hub.
Benson, meanwhile, was busy beating back panic. From his perspective standing on a tiny metal grate bolted to the outside of Avalon’s rear bulkhead, the entire universe was busy spinning along at three hundred and fifty kilometers an hour. The effects this had on his sense of balance and stomach were all too predictable.
With sweat already forming on his forehead, Benson shut his eyes and took deep, calming breaths. The sensation of spinning wildly through open space brought the memory of the EVA pod accident bubbling right back up to the surface. He turned around to face the outer hull, suddenly very interested in reading the serial numbers of each honeycomb composite tile.
Something tapped the top of his head. It was Mei’s foot. Her face looked more impatient than concerned, but he couldn’t blame her for that. The spacewalk to the secret entrance would already push the safety margins on their suit’s endurance without time wasting freak outs.
Get it together, Bryan, he admonished himself. The ladder had no cage around it, but it did have a saw-tooth arresting rail running up the right hand side for a tether to hook to. Still, he’d prefer the claustrophobic maintenance tube on the inside to this.
Benson hooked one of his tethers to the safety rail, then followed Mei, keeping his eyes straight ahead. Every twenty meters, he had to stop to swap over his tether to the next length of rail. He very quickly came to look forward to these little breaks. Making the climb had been hard enough without almost forty extra kilos of equipment to lift up each rung. All the while, the aluminum foil still wrapped around his head shifted and chafed.
Mei scampered up the ladder with little apparent effort, pausing with annoyance to wait for Benson to catch up. Youth alone couldn’t account for the difference. Maybe he really was getting fat.
It wasn’t long before he fell into a rhythm as the distance shed the kilos. He reached the top without throwing an aneurism. Of course, the “top” was actually the middle, which is where things got complicated. The hub sat directly above their heads, spinning away at just over one revolution per minute.
Mei made a “V” with her fingers and pointed at her eyes, signaling him to watch her carefully. She’d explained the procedure earlier as best she could, but some things only made sense when you saw them.
Like Avalon’s hull, every panel on the outside of the Ark’s spine was studded with at least one loop. They’d been welded in place to serve as anchor points for the men and drones building the Ark back in Earth orbit.
With one tether still attached to the safety rail, Mei reached out ahead and snagged one of the approaching loops, then deftly unhooked her other tether from the safety rail an instant before the rotation took out the slack.
Benson swallowed hard as his turn came up. Even though the hub wasn’t moving by at the breakneck pace of the outer hull, it still seemed plenty fast, and although his effective weight up here was only a kilo or two, it still wasn’t zero. If he missed his mark, he could fall off into empty space, albeit very slowly. By the time the Ark’s gravity pulled him back in again, he’d have been out of air for quite a while. Mei had made sure to reinforce this point in her little safety briefing. She’d watched a man killed exactly that way less than a year ago.
Soon, Mei rotated out of sight, leaving Benson alone with his fear. He picked a loop to shoot for and reached out a tentative arm, but his sticky left shoulder kept him from stretching to his full arm span.
“Figures.” He forced the hobbled joint into position. He spotted another loop and tried again, and failed again. By now, Mei was cresting on the horizon, holding a finger to her wrist in the sign for, “Hurry up, you incompetent jerk.”
Assuming third time lucky, Benson lunged at a loop, willing his arms longer to cover the last few centimeters. To his surprise, the carabiner hooked in as if he’d just caught the universe’s largest fish.
“Yes!” he shouted in a moment of triumph, while completely forgetting to unhook the other tether from the safety rail. Benson could only watch in muted horror as the tethers snapped taut, until one of them inevitably failed with a tear he could hear through his suit.
Still connected to the module, he watched as the tether attached to the hub sped out of reach. The look on Mei’s face as she passed was… clinically unimpressed.
“Of course the wrong one broke,” Benson said to himself. “At least my luck remains consistent.” Heart pounding, Benson unhooked his remaining tether from the safety rail and switched it to his good hand.
Before he had the chance to change his mind, Benson leapt clear of the ladder and crashed into the hub. His teeth snapped together from the jolt, and as soon as he hit the deck, he bounced and fell away again. His arms pinwheeling wildly, Benson screamed as if trying to propel himself back on sound waves alone before floating off into total silence forever.
With a last desperate flail, the carabiner clinked against a loop and hit home. Already at its full reach, the tether yanked Benson hard, stopping him dead.
“Fuck,” was all he could think to say. Yet it felt perfectly appropriate. Benson pulled himself back down along the tether and grabbed one of the anchors, then slowly worked his way hand over hand back around to Mei. Reunited, she led him further down the Ark’s spine, methodically swapping tethers from one anchor point to the next.
Mei still had the two she’d started with, but Benson was down to one. Every time he unhooked his carabiner, a small electric shock of panic went through his body until it was firmly connected to the next loop.
Their progress was slow, to put it mildly, but eventually they reached the part of the engineering module commonly referred to as the Aviary. Surrounding them, a flock of enormous atmospheric shuttles, each a hundred meters long, laid belly-up to the stars where their ablative ceramic composite tiles had protected them from centuries of micro-meteor impacts and would soon protect them from the hellish heat of reentry through the atmosphere of Tao Ceti G. Well, just entry, Benson corrected himself.
The shuttles gave him something to focus on instead of just the deck. He could look at them without getting lost in the sea of stars beyond. They totaled a dozen, two of which hadn’t weathered the long journey very well and would be used for spare parts. Enough redundancy had been built into the plan that the loss of two shuttles wasn’t going to be catastrophic; indeed the twin habitats themselves had been a form of redundancy. If some disaster crippled one, humanity didn’t have all of its eggs in one basket. A contingency plan existed to start the colony in the event half the population was lost to a meteor, plague, or mechanical failure.
That plan had been officially activated yesterday. No one, not the Ark’s builders, or the eleven generations that followed, ever thought the calamity would come from one of their own.
“When did we become so naïve?” Benson asked. No one else could hear him. He didn’t expect an answer.
Their pace quickened. The individual anchor points had been replaced by long, straight rails that they could hook their tethers to and slide from one to the next. Apparently, the people building the Ark had gotten just as fed up with the stupid loops as he had and came up with something more practical. They left the Aviary behind, crossed the maintenance hangars and the handful of EVA pods, and soon reached the bulbous compartment that housed the ship’s twin fusion reactors and massive Helium-3 tanks.
The reactors were, thankfully, still there, but of the forty-eight tanks the journey had started with, only six remained. The rest had been jettisoned as they ran empty along the way with enough force to send them off on new headings. Every kilogram of unnecessary mass the ship shed along the way was a kilogram that didn’t have to be decelerated at the other end, which meant more velocity could be built up back at the beginning of the trip. The enormous ablative cone that had protected the bow of the ship for so long would meet the same fate during the Flip.
Provided Benson could stop a lunatic from nuking what was left of humanity. No pressure.
By then, he was starting to feel the heat, literally. They were passing through an alley between two of the reactor’s titanic radiator fins. Pressurized steam passed through thousands of meters of tubing, slowly radiating excess heat from the fusion process back out into space before condensing back into liquid to cycle through the system all over again. It was funny to think, but save for the donut-shaped stars at the heart of the reactors, the actual mechanics of the system would be familiar to any nineteenth-century train conductor.
Benson checked a small data monitor on his wrist and realized his cooling unit was working overtime to try to keep up. But even more worryingly, the monitor very casually mentioned that he had ten minutes of oxygen reserves left.
“A fucking alarm would have been nice!” he shouted into his helmet hard enough to hurt his ears. Benson took a deep breath to calm himself, then realized that was probably even worse. With a hard tug on the rail, he closed the gap between himself and Mei and grabbed her foot to get her attention, then pointed at his wrist screen.
She shook her head and pointed at her own wrist, then made an “OK” sign with her fingers. She raised her hand, then flipped the palm over and lowered it again, repeating this gesture slowly several times. It took Benson a moment to realize she was telling him to slow his breathing. Apparently, she thought they were close enough for his supply to last, if he was cautious.
Breathing shallow, Benson followed Mei as they left the reactor compartment behind. Ahead of them, the immense disk of the ship’s pusher plate eclipsed all of the stars behind it. Benson felt like he was running out of superlatives, but nothing about any component of the Ark was small. Ahead of them, and much deeper than Benson had ever ventured into the ship’s bowels, was their destination.
Behind the reactor module, deep storage loomed, but no one called it that. The few techs who ever had cause to come back here had dubbed it the Bomb Shelter. The space served as a repository for most of the hardware and construction materials being carried to seed the new colony, but its most important cargo was a repository of tens of thousands of nuclear bombs.
Mei unhooked from her rail and pushed off in a new direction. Benson’s fingertips tingled from the diminishing oxygen, making it hard to unhook. Hopefully, they didn’t have far to go.
Just off the main street of rails sat an odd, lumpy-looking structure about three meters tall and as many across, a sun-faded yellow that clashed against the uniform white of the hull. It looked out of place, almost parasitic sitting against the hull. It wasn’t until Mei climbed on top of it and disappeared inside that Benson realized what it was: a lock, but not like any of the standard locks he’d ever seen. It looked like an afterthought, and maybe that’s exactly what it was. A temporary lock set up by the builders to make their work easier, then forgotten as they moved on or ran out of time. That would explain why it wasn’t on the security grid or any blueprints. The Ark was the most complex object mankind had ever built by a wide margin. Alterations and oversights along the way from paper to reality were inevitable.
Little shooting stars flew across Benson’s field of vision, sending a fresh jolt of dread through him. For a fleeting, paranoid moment, he realized that if Mei had been playing some elaborate double cross, now would be a perfect time to just lock the door and leave him out in the cold, gasping like a freshly-landed fish.
Benson scrambled up the side of the temporary lock to get at the hatch. With a sigh of relief, he pulled the loose hatch open and slipped inside head first. It had enough room inside for himself, Mei, and maybe half a sandwich, so cramped that she had trouble spinning the hatch shut behind him.
His suit finally sent out a warning bell when his reserves had been completely depleted, but by then, Mei was already cycling the lock. Even as grey crept into the edges of his vision, Benson could feel the air rushing into the tiny compartment, deflating the shell of his suit as the pressure equalized. Benson wasted no time getting his helmet off and sucking down a big lungful of air the moment the light turned green. It was dry, stale, and tasted like an unsealed tomb, but he didn’t care one bit. Mei tapped him with her foot and pointed at the inner hatch.
Benson spun it open and floated into the darkened space beyond. Weapon in hand, ready to face down a monster.