Читать книгу The Fall - Laura Nolen Liddell - Страница 13

The EuroArk was dark when we came in. I’m not sure what I expected, but the only major points of light were the docks. There were tiny pins of light at the tips of the other structures, but I couldn’t make them out. I squinted, slack-jawed, as we drew near. I couldn’t imagine the shape of the massive ship ahead of me. From where I sat, it looked exactly like the stars.

“Gotta be careful here,” said Dad, mostly to himself. “The cities reach farther out than the docks.”

I continued to gawk, wondering what he meant by that, until the rest of the Ark came to light. It was a dark ship in a darker sky, but from what I could tell, it was composed of several cube-like modules connected by a series of wide tubes and interspersed with smaller, more tapered tubes that held the docks.

“It looks like a jack,” I said, recalling a game I’d played as a child. “Knucklebones.”

“Yes, that was intentional, to preserve and insulate as many cultures as possible. So is the darkness. It’s mandatory for eight hours a night. Saves energy. Helps with the Lightness, too. Gets people used to power outages before they happen.”

The hopper eased toward the space between a protruding pair of cities, allowing me to gape at the vacant-looking windows in wonder. “They don’t have a nuclear generator? I hope you got your clearance ahead of time,” I said nervously, looking for weapons ports among the asteroid shields. “What do you mean, intentional?”

“The European Ark was engineered to minimize interdependency among the cities. The areas at the end of each strut operate separately, but the core city, right in the middle, has final say over everything. Kinda like the United States, before it was dissolved. And it adds surface area for the solar sails.”

“Minimize inter—but wait, isn’t the whole point of the Treaty of Phoenix that we’re all supposed to depend on each other? To stop everyone from going to war again? We’re all mixed together, so that no one group of people gets isolated. I gotta wonder what the Tribune thinks about that. It has the final say over everything, right?”

“That’s an untested theory, at this point. The Tribune has never done anything controversial enough to matter, so no one has ever challenged its authority. But it’s really meant to arbitrate disputes under the Treaty. It’s more of a legal recourse for the heads of the governments than an executive one. Its only weight is the strength of the other Arks, who’ve all agreed to abide by its rulings.”

“In theory.”