Ark Read Free Page A

cave, still in the clothes she had put on that morning on the Ark, with her pitiful collection of belongings lost forever.
    “This is at the heart of what we do,” Holle said.
    “What is this place?”
    “Mission Control. We’re running a simulation right now—”
    “And this?” Grace held up the key ring globe.
    “Our spaceship.” Holle smiled, a basic humanity shining through the competitiveness. “Come on. You look like you need a coffee. We’ll talk about how Harry Smith got killed. And I’ll tell you how we got started here.”

Two
    2025-2041

4
    June 2025
    I t was raining in Denver, a steady, unrelenting downpour that fell from a gray lid of sky. It pinged off the wings of the plane that brought Patrick Groundwater and his daughter in over the city, and glistened on the runways and sculpted roofs of the terminal buildings as he carried six-year-old Holle through the international airport, discreetly tailed by Alice Sylvan and the rest of her security team, and hammered on the roofs of the cars that drove them through kilometers of suburban sprawl, crowded with IDP camps and welfare facilities, toward downtown. Under rusting junction signs the interstate was deserted save for police and government vehicles, and only a handful of private cars. To the west the mountain line was entirely invisible.
    Patrick had visited Denver long ago, in his early teens, on his way to go skiing at Aspen. This was before the turn of the millennium, maybe fifteen years before the inception of the flood. He remembered the breathlessness, and today the air felt just as thin. Back then it hadn’t rained at all, save for a couple of intense storms which had been kind of fun, nothing like this steady, relentless downpour. But since those days the sea had risen two hundred meters from where it used to be, the air was full of heat and moisture, and you couldn’t expect to escape the rain even in the mile-high city. Well, Thandie Jones would tell Patrick and the other assembled mega-rich folk of LaRei all about that tomorrow.
    All Thandie’s words wouldn’t deflect a single raindrop from his daughter’s head. But in Denver he hoped to meet people who intended to do something about it.
     
     
     
    At the hotel they were met by smiling porters in galoshes and wielding umbrellas.
    Patrick was reassured by his first impression of the Brown Palace. Set on a peculiar triangular lot where two street layout systems collided, it reminded him oddly of an ocean liner wrought of red granite and sandstone. Inside, an atrium towered up eight stories. While Alice completed the check-in formalities, Holle ran around the polished floor, pointing at the golden onyx pillars and lifting up her little face to peer wide-eyed at the filigree rails and the stained-glass ceiling far above, from which hung an immense Stars and Stripes. In a world that was slowly breaking down, you could rely on a church-like Victorian-vintage pile like the Brown to stand solid and comfortable where newer confections of glass and reinforced concrete were crumbling. Besides, it was only a few hundred meters from Denver’s civic center, where in the morning he was due to meet Nathan Lammockson and the rest of the LaRei people.
    The suite Patrick was given had everything he needed to keep Holle happy, including a kid-friendly mini-bar, a net sack of books and toys, and screens with a variety of entertainments. There were tough notices about conserving water. Denver’s weather had always come from rain on the Rockies, and although the climate was a lot wetter now, the disruption to the rainfall patterns and the increased population made the freshwater supply chancy.
    One TV screen was tuned permanently to a news channel, put out by the Rocky Mountain News, a defunct old print outlet revived as a broadcaster. Over a rolling tickertape of more or less dismal headlines, the channel showed images of the latest disaster, in this case a kind of limited civil war that had broken out