Ark Read Free

Blinking in the daylight she looked warily at Grace.
    “Grace, this is Holle Groundwater, one of our most promising Candidates. Not that that’s saying much. Holle, meet Grace Gray—and Gray junior,” he said, clumsily pointing to Grace’s belly. “Here for selection. Maybe you could show her the ropes.”
    “Sure.” Holle smiled at Grace, and offered a hand to shake. But Grace could see the smile was forced.
    “You aren’t glad to see me,” Grace said bluntly.
    Holle raised thin eyebrows over sea blue eyes. “It’s just we’ve got enough competition for places already, and there are only a few months left. The last thing we need is more applicants.” Her accent was soft, lilting, British maybe, unfamiliar to Grace. Then she grinned. “Of course that’s not your fault.”
    “Places? Places on what?”
    But there was no reply. Evidently secrecy was habitual. Holle was well fed, earnest, bright. Grace remembered how she had been at Holle’s age, still on the road, feet like leather and not a gram of fat on her body, everything she owned in a faded pack on her back.
    Maybe Gordo sensed the tension between the women. He took off his cap and ran a hand over his grizzled scalp. “Listen, Grace. You’re going to need some way to prove your capabilities. Let me give you an assignment. Just now we have a crime we need solving here.”
    “What kind of crime?”
    “A murder,” Gordo said simply.
    The word shocked Grace. She looked blankly at the block, the biblical slogan, Holle’s intent, competent-looking face. “I don’t know anything about investigating crimes. We had cops in Walker City, and on the Ark Nathan’s guards—”
    “You can start by talking to Holle, here. Find out how it all started for her. I mean, you’ve been in the program since you were six years old—right, kid?”
    Holle smiled. “According to my father, since I was conceived.”
    “It will be a way for you to figure out what we’re up to here.” Gordo grinned. “Yeah. Solve the crime, and earn your place. Two birds with one stone. I don’t often have ideas, but when I do they’re generally doozies. Now I got work to do, not least organizing the retrieval of Nathan Lammockson’s seed cache from his sinking ship. But before I go—” Gordo fished in a jacket pocket, and produced a key ring with a bauble pendant. “I hand these out to the government suits, and anybody else I think needs some inspiration. What we’re working toward.” He put the little artifact in Grace’s hand.
    She raised the key ring. The pendant was a translucent sphere, bluish, maybe a centimeter across. Embedded within it were two silver splinters, connected by a bit of thread. “What is it?”
    “Ask Holle. Catch you later, Groundwater.” He strode off back toward the cars, and once more Grace was abandoned with a stranger.
    “This way—Grace, is it?” Holle led Grace into the building.
     
     
     
    Inside, the block was corridors and offices and computer rooms, suffused by a hum of air-conditioning. It reminded Grace of facilities aboard Lammockson’s Ark Three, the bridge, the engine room.
    The two of them didn’t meet anybody else until the corridor opened out into a glass-fronted room with banks of chairs, microphones, screens. Through the glass Grace saw a larger chamber, dug some way into the ground so that she was looking down on rows of people before consoles, where screens glowed brightly, text and images flowing. Before them the front wall was covered by two huge screens. One showed a map of the world—continents outlined in blue, surviving high ground glowing bright green—with pathways traced over it. On the second screen concentric circles surrounded a glowing pinpoint, each circle labeled with a disc. Gary’s amateur education program had always heavily favored science. Grace understood that she was looking at a map of the solar system.
    Holle was watching her curiously. Grace felt utterly out of place in this technological