Chapter 12

The Ark's captain would be Angus MacPherson, a dyed-in-the-wool Scot who was reputed among the most flamboyantly daring of the starship commanders. To balance his bravado SES had selected stolid Warren Cromartie as second in command, "as sound as they come," Mallet told Meiersdottir.

Only a skeleton supercargo would travel on the outbound run. Heisinger and Igwanda would be joined only by biologists Watesi and Yuan, chemist Johann Paulssen and astronomer Yisheda Amuri for the voyage. There would be an equally skeletal technical crew: engine specialists Torken Insheida and Moammar Umbyoto, ship's physician Maureen O'Bannion and general dogsbody Arlen Nassir.

And, of course, Meiersdottir herself.

Toshimura had argued briefly to be added to the list. "It's my baby!" he'd protested to Meiersdottir. "I set the whole thing in motion!" But after she'd explained her reasons for her own inclusion his arguments crumbled. There was, he saw clearly, no valid reason for him to go; there were imposing ones for her. He grumbled, he pouted, but he couldn't disagree and in the end he acquiesced gracefully.

Because as much of the Ark's enormous available space as possible had to be left free—free for the precious cargo it hoped to collect from Eden. Unlike on all previous missions the ship's purpose was not to send out, it was to bring back; it was the return trip that mattered, the outbound run was merely to place the vessel where it needed to be when it needed to be there. The rest of the space, and mass, was reserved for what they expected to carry home from the doomed planet to which they were bound.

Construction of the massive vessel had proved the most challenging part of the enterprise. Indeed, for a time it had appeared that the work wouldn't be completed in time. Delay after delay had plagued the project, and SES had seemed helpless to overcome them. Igwanda, who'd overseen that end of the program for Eden Rescue, had been repeatedly obliged to intervene personally to overcome seeming deadlocks between the bureaucracy and the contractors who were doing the actual work.

In fact, in the final stages the young man had virtually taken over management of the construction. It was he who'd cut off an incipient work stoppage by disgusted workers fed up with chronic payment delays from SES by re-routing payroll channeling through Eden Rescue, and also he who, with the aid of Eden Rescue's own impressive staff of engineers, had settled a simmering design dispute between SES and the contractor responsible for engine installation by the simple expedient of cutting the Gordian knot with a command to "do it this way, period."

"Jesus Christ!" he exploded in frustration to Heisinger one evening after spending most of his day overcoming what he still thought was a senseless bit of pettifoggery on SES' part. "You know what a hundred bureaucrats at the bottom of the sea are? A good start. And these assholes have been running the space program for all these years? For the life of me I can't see how they've managed it."

But for all the fumbling and bumbling the Ark was finally ready. The ultra-conservative SES administration was still expressing concern about its safety, and refused to approve test flights—for which little time was left anyway—but Igwanda on behalf of Eden Rescue had declared the ship ready to go and, by bringing maximum public and political pressure to bear on the agency, had managed to push his directive through.

MacPherson's pre-launch briefing was something less than a model of clarity, a far cry from the detailed descriptions and advisories Meiersdottir had been accustomed to on her prior voyages. He opened with a cursory discussion of how the worm drive, which allowed real-time interstellar transportation, worked:

"Firrs' we accelerra'e, verra, verra fas'," he told them brusquely. "Ships beforre had t' gae t' nearrly th'orrbi' o' Sa'urrn, bu' they werre smallerr; i' will take us oo' beyon' Neptune t'rreach th' speed we mus' ha'e. Then we throw oo' th'impulses to crrea'e th' worrmhole in frron' o' us, i' opens up forr an instan' an' if we'rre gaein' fas' enough th' whole ship dives inta i'. Then i' ta'es a wee bi' o' time forr us, bu' none a' all in th' rreal univerrse wherre we arre noo, an' then we come oo' t'other en', wherre we ha'e to slow back doon. Wi' this whackin' grrea' ship i' will be twen'y, twen'y-twa weeks forr th' whole trrip to us on boarrd. Ye un'err­stan'?" He paused barely an instant. "Guid."