Lifeline (26 page)

Chapter 35

KIBALCHICH—Day 41

Ramis leaned back in the
Kibalchich’s
command center, trying to relax as he held onto one of the protruding chairs from the transceiver deck. The air still smelled rotten. His feet drifted like a slow pendulum in the zero-G.

“Please hold on a moment,” the
Orbitech 1
communications chief said. Her face turned away from the holotank in the center of the chamber. “I’ll get Mr. Brahms.”

Ramis steeled himself to see Brahms’s face. He had remained in the Soviet command center, testing various functions using the computer. It also gave him time to marshal his thoughts and consider how he would describe his discovery to
Orbitech 1.
He downloaded his videotape from the camera he carried and prepared it for broadcast back to the other station.

The curved image in front of him flickered, winked out, and switched to the giant face of Curtis Brahms in the central holotank. The director grinned; light glittered in his eyes. Ramis thought he looked like a wolf.

“Ramis, we’ve been waiting to hear from you! What have you found?”

Ramis took a deep breath. With meticulous detail, he described what he had seen, step by step, as he had explored the
Kibalchich.
As he spoke he played the tape, letting them see exactly what he had observed. He watched Brahms fidget until he came to the part about finding the Soviets in their glass coffins.

“I took extra care to inspect them.” Ramis hesitated. “I cannot be positive, but I believe they are all still alive.”

He waited a moment for that to sink in. Brahms’s eyebrows lifted.

“They did not end up there by chance, Mr. Brahms. My guess is that they have undergone some sort of suspended animation or hibernation.”

He had walked along the rows of glass coffins, studying the masklike faces of the Soviets. He noted the coolness of the chambers, the flush of life that seemed to remain on their faces. No, they couldn’t be dead. These preparations were too elaborate. It spoke of some great plan, some experiment. How had the Soviets done all this, and so quickly—within a few weeks of the War?

Unless they had been working on it all along.

“I cannot understand, though, why they did not leave prominent messages in all languages in every corridor, directing me where to go. This process must have taken some time.”

Brahms frowned, thinking. “Unless the one body you found was a guardian of some sort—a monitor to watch over them, so they wouldn’t need to leave any kind of signs. It sounds strange to leave only one person awake out of all those others.”

On the larger-than-life holotank image, Brahms wore an expression of childlike delight. “Ramis, this is all … astonishing. I’m very proud of you.”

Ramis wasn’t sure he was glad to receive Brahms’s pride.

“Did you try to revive one of them?”

“Sir?” Ramis nearly lost his grip on the chair, startled by the audacity of the question. “Mr. Brahms, I cannot read the Russian words on any of the controls. It appears to be very complicated equipment.”

“Yes, but on the tape you broadcast I saw a hand-lettered sign on the infirmary wall. It seemed to be in several different languages. Maybe the man you found knew he was dying, so he left instructions.” His eyes had a distant look. “Though if he had time to do that, why didn’t he just revive one of the others?”

Ramis swallowed, not knowing what to say. He remembered seeing the sign, but everything else had so shocked him that he had paid it little attention. He hadn’t considered that he should do anything drastic.

“No, sir, I did not try. I was not sure of the instructions.”

The director tapped his fingers together, masking a slight scowl of disappointment. He stared down at something out of the holotank’s view, apparently recalling part of Ramis’s tape. “Come now, Ramis, these are simple instructions—pushing a few selected buttons and monitoring some numbers. Do you realize how important that discovery could be? It is vital for us to learn if their suspended animation process actually works. Perhaps we can adapt it for our own survival.”

Ramis’s face must have shown a puzzled expression. Brahms put on a mask of exaggerated patience. “The Soviets have found a way to survive, apparently even without any supplies from Earth. They can just lie back and wait until someone comes to rescue them. Now, if you could revive them, and they could share their knowledge, you could single-handedly eliminate the need for any further RIFs aboard
Orbitech 1”

Ramis kept eye contact, even under the penetrating stare of the director. He had thought the wall-kelp had already removed any need for further RIFs. Or was Brahms just looking for an excuse? He tried to make his position firm.

“Perhaps I have not described it clearly enough, Mr. Brahms. The hibernation apparatus appears to be extremely complicated. I cannot understand any of the other writings left here. Perhaps they are emergency procedures. I cannot read the Russian—not even the alphabet. What if something goes wrong with the process?”

Brahms seemed to quash a flare of anger. “Ramis … Ramis, you underestimate yourself. Just look at what you’ve done already—you Jumped all the way over there and you figured out how to open the emergency hatch by yourself, without being able to read any Russian.”

He paused, as if trying to remember what else Ramis had described. “You worked the lift-shaft elevator, you explored the whole station.”

His voice softened. “Now, think about it. If the Soviets were going to put themselves completely under suspended animation, waiting for someone—someone like yourself, Ramis—to come find them, don’t you think they would make it simple and obvious how to go about reviving them? They can’t be sure that whoever finds them will know. It must be straightforward.”

“A person’s life would be at stake if I fail.”

“I trust your abilities, Ramis. I want you to go and look again. Maybe you missed something. It’s very important that you try.”

Ramis started to lose his patience with the director. “Is Karen there?” he asked.

Brahms frowned, as if wondering about the point of the question. “Dr. Langelier? Don’t worry. I’ve already informed her that you attached her weavewire according to plan. It seems to be a success.”

“No, I only meant that you should—” He stopped himself, cautious, then rephrased his words. “I would not presume to make decisions for you, since you are the acting director. But I did want to remind you of Dr. Langelier’s knowledge of Russian. I believe she is fluent in the language. Perhaps if she were over here, we would have a better chance of reviving one of the Soviets.”

Brahms looked at him with a stony expression that melted away into one of concern and friendship. “I’ll note that, Ramis. Maybe we’ll need to do it. But I think that would be a greater risk than having you try by yourself. Don’t you agree? Will you at least try before we ask Dr. Langelier to make the same dangerous journey you did? I wouldn’t want to risk her unnecessarily.”

Uncomfortable with what Brahms had just said, but not wanting to give a definite answer, Ramis replied, “I will be back in touch as soon as I have something to report.” He took a malicious pleasure in blanking the screen on Brahms.

Ramis stood outside the dimmed infirmary again, staring at the rows of glass coffins. The silence felt suffocating. He placed his hands on his hips and pressed his lips together, trying to be firm about his decision, about his resolve. But a chill made gooseflesh on his arms—strictly from the cooled-down station; he didn’t think it was from fear.

He wondered about the dead man he had discovered in the command center. The last one—the captain going down with his ship? Had someone remained behind, at the last minute remembering to scrawl a list of steps for reviving the rest of the people? What had happened?

It looked like the people in the four cubicles just inside the entrance had been the last four to go into the chambers. All of the Soviets wore loose, gray pajamalike outfits.

One burly man’s elbows bumped the sides of the glass; his knees were bent slightly, as if they had had to wedge him into the cubicle. He had reddish-blond hair. Two other men, dark-haired, occupied the coffins on either side of him. Last he saw a slim woman with a sharp nose, deep-set eyes, and gray-brown hair. Her face had a pinched look, not the serene emptiness of the other Soviets, as if she were still thinking even in her deep, cold sleep.

Ramis inspected the cubicles more closely. They were transparent, frosted on the inside with a light sketching of ice crystals. The
Kibalchich
workers had probably made the glass from the leftover lunar material that orbited the colony as a radiation shield.

This had not been done in a few days, Ramis thought. This had been a calculated, extensive project—something planned. He frowned.

Ramis went over to the burly man. Unconsciously he had made his decision. Perhaps it had no valid logic at all behind it, but he reasoned that if any of these people would have the strength, the stamina, to survive Ramis’s clumsy attempt at the reawakening process, it would be this man.

The glass looked sealed on all sides except for the end, which was opaque, metal, with a control panel mounted in the center. He placed his fingertips on the seam of metal against glass, wondering if he should attempt to pry it open to free the man from the chamber and let him thaw out in the air. But Ramis realized that was ridiculous. It would be certain death for the Soviet man.

On the wall, the handwriting indicated the first button to push that would activate the sequence, the proper numbers that each readout should display—though it gave no instructions on what to do if the numbers were wrong, or the time that must elapse before the second set of controls should be activated. Brahms was right—it did sound straightforward.

Ramis peered down, noticing that thin tubes ran from a reservoir beneath the coffin to where they plunged into the inside of the man’s elbows, anchored on blood vessels. A yellowish color in the tube showed him that a clear liquid was actually passing into the Soviet’s body. Some sort of nutrient solution? Electrodes were mounted on his temples and another on his sternum.

He kneeled in front of the control panel. He hoped it would be an automatic process, that he needed only to activate the sequence and let the machine take over, that everything would run smoothly.

It appeared to be a three-stage procedure with separate readouts. Of course he wouldn’t know what any of the numbers meant—blood pressure, body temperature, heartbeat, brain activity … the day of the week? If something went wrong, he wouldn’t know how to adjust it. He wouldn’t even know how to recognize that something was indeed going wrong! The instructions on the wall were abbreviated, with no detail.

The Soviet man lay there, eyes closed. His skin had a flourlike pallor; his eyelids showed a faint intaglio of veins. He had thick lips, perfectly round ears, a square jaw covered with pale beard stubble. Ramis wondered if the stubble had grown in the month the Soviets had been in their frozen sleep … or if the man had simply neglected to shave a day or two before crawling into the chamber. The man had a small mole beside his left eye and a tiny scar at the bottom of his chin.

Ramis knew the face would burn in his memory for a long time. This man was still alive. Ramis had no right to steal that from him.

He could not try it. He was not sure of his own abilities. He could not be so arrogant as to play with this man’s life.

Then Ramis felt his stomach knot. He would have to go back to Brahms and tell him he refused, that he didn’t feel competent.

Instructions written in Cyrillic characters covered the control panels. The walls had preprinted posters with lines of text, but he could not be sure which were inane signs about maintaining one’s health and exercising in orbit, and which contained more crucial information for reviving the hibernating people.

He kneeled next to the controls once more. With the translucent touchpad controls, Ramis was not even sure which of the dimmed squares were activation buttons and which were blank readouts.

He could go back, get the portable video imager, and record every block of text for Karen to translate and interpret.

The START touchpad was in the upper left, according to the instructions. He wondered what the other controls were for—the ones not mentioned on the list. He could activate the chamber and hope everything proceeded automatically. Everything on the
Kibalchich
had been straightforward so far—the emergency hatch, the lift platform, the transceiver.

Ramis trusted technology. The Soviets wouldn’t try to make things difficult—they would make it obvious. Perhaps Curtis Brahms was right: if they had put themselves into their sleepfreeze to wait for someone else to come, they could not know who would be first to arrive at their station. They could not be sure it would be one of their Soviet compatriots.

Before his arm muscles could lock with hesitation, Ramis reached forward and pressed his finger against the upper left touchpad.

The three readouts suddenly came to life under indecipherable labels, displaying numbers that meant nothing to him. All the numbers remained close to zero and then began to rise. One changed rapidly, while the others crept up a digit at a time. Low numbers. That all made sense—body temperature, heartbeat, respiration.

Yellow lights came on, embedded along the corners of the coffin. The frost on the inside of the glass vanished with little wisps of steam. Warming up the chamber, Ramis decided. He nodded. The first readout still rose rapidly. He watched the digits tick off faster than his heartbeat.

A thick red fluid—blood?—pushed up through the transparent tube from the reservoir below the chamber. The new blood entered the vein in the man’s left arm. After a few moments the tube in the other arm began to carry a pinkish tinge, away from the body and draining down below. Ramis thought he understood that the nutrient solution was being replaced by stored blood.

Then the background light on that readout turned red. Ramis jumped and looked around, staring at the other dead squares on the panel. Keypads, or readouts? If he pushed them, what would happen? He stared at the instructions, but they gave no assistance for anything out of the norm.