Lifeline (30 page)

As they walked the corridor, Karen detected another smell in the metallic staleness in the air. An impulse made her want to open a window somewhere and get the air to circulate.

“This is where I found the Russians,” Ramis said.

Karen drew in a breath, knowing what to expect—she had looked at the visuals he had transmitted to
Orbitech 1.
She imagined lines and lines of frozen bodies, like stacked cordwood.

Might as well face it before that stink gets any worse,
Karen thought. She remembered a story she had heard about an old Coast Guard vessel coming upon an abandoned ship. The Coast Guard first mate entered the freighter’s hold and never returned. He had been overcome by noxious fumes from decaying bodies. The tiny ship had carried Central Americans seeking asylum, stuffed together like sardines. The smuggler had abandoned his cargo, leaving the refugees to bake to death in the merciless tropical sun.

Karen spoke loudly for fear she might lose her will to enter the chamber. “Show me where the lights are.” Ramis found a panel on the wall and increased the illumination in the large, dark room ahead.

Row after row of machines filled the place—crystal coffins like boxes in a warehouse. The nearest coffin had one end open, the control panel moved away to allow the reawakened man to emerge. But this man would never emerge—not under his own strength. Ramis had done something wrong in the process, and the test subject had lain here, dead and unthawed, for four days now.

Karen walked alone to the open chamber, ignoring the smell. Ramis hung back, reluctant. She didn’t blame him.

Karen stared down into the dead man’s slack face. His eyes were closed and peaceful. She suspected Ramis had closed them himself.
This man didn’t have a clue he was dying,
she thought. Just closed his eyes and expected to be awakened when the time was right.

Karen turned her head and moved to the adjacent working units. A steady green glow from three monitor lights on the control panel showed everything apparently normal. No pulsations or vibrations came from the machine, only a faint tracing of frost inside the glass, dusting the view of the compact middle-aged woman frozen inside. In Cyrillic characters, the LCD name panel spelled out TRIPOLK, ANNA.

Tripolk—the computer had said something about an Acting Commander Tripolk.

On the walls and engraved onto the control panels, reasonably clear instructions and warnings described how to revive the sleepfreeze subjects—all in Russian, all in Cyrillic characters. Apparently posted as an afterthought, the handwritten English list on the wall covered only the most basic procedure, with no details and no contingencies. Karen muttered to herself about the arrogance of assuming that any rescuer who might stumble upon the
Kibalchich
would be able to understand. The process appeared complicated enough that Ramis’s mistakes did not surprise her at all.

But Karen thought she could do it. She might be able to query the control computer to enlighten her on specific details. The computer seemed accessible to outside queries, through “validation by Acting Commander Tripolk.”

Behind her Ramis coughed, bringing her back to reality. “I was hoping you would help me remove the body. His name was Grekov.” He swallowed. “And there’s the other body in the command center airlock. The smell is going to get worse, otherwise.”

Karen stared at him, realizing he was right, but finding it difficult to work up enthusiasm for the task. “You’ve been all over the colony?”

“I found a cold-storage compartment on the lower deck, near the waste-recycling pool. I think it was supposed to be used for storing food and specimens. We should put the bodies there, but I cannot carry them by myself. Not that I would want to.”

Karen pressed her lips together. The waste recycler would be on the lower deck, of course, so gravity could help waste diffuse through the filters. “We need to go back to the sleeping quarters first and get some sheets.”

“Sheets?”

“We can knot them into a body bag.”

Fifteen minutes later, Karen and Ramis worked together to haul Grekov’s burly body out of the sleepfreeze chamber and lifted him onto a sheet spread out on the textured metal floor. They folded the sheet over and knotted the two ends.

“Let’s move him out of here. One, two, lift!” The two of them moved in small stutter steps, carrying the stiff, sheet-wrapped corpse between them.

They slid the body down the stairs, opting not to use the direct chute to the waste-recycling unit from the commissary; she could just imagine the body getting stuck there. Karen thought it best that they store the two bodies and let the
Kibalchich
inhabitants decide what to do with them. Perhaps the Soviets would want to recycle the body, or maybe they would have some sort of ceremony and eject him out the airlock.

As Brahms had done in his RIF.

They found the large cold-storage chamber next to the slowly circulating pool of waste, which was mostly clear now after a month of inactivity on the station. Ramis stood watching the pool for a moment. Karen saw steel teeth just below the surface that would grind the waste into a more manageable form before it was leached and broken down by dissolvers.

The steel teeth in the recycler brought home the detailed planning for the colony back when it had been constructed. People were going to die up here, and unless they were ferried back to Earth, which was too expensive, or ejected into space, which was a waste of valuable minerals, they were going to have to face the reality of living in a closed system.

A gust of frosty air poured out of the cold-storage chamber when Ramis opened it. On the right-side wall stood a tall bank of tiny drawers apparently filled with various samples, like an old-fashioned library card catalog. Piled metal canisters and boxes cluttered the back wall. The other side of the chamber remained empty.

Karen and Ramis placed the dead Soviet on the floor, straightened the sheets, then stood to leave. Ramis mumbled some sort of prayer to himself, looking deeply guilty.

Then they sealed the man back into a frozen sleep from which he would never awaken.

***

Chapter 43

KIBALCHICH—Day 45

The white dream surrounded her like snow, an icy blizzard coming from inside.

Anna Tripolk saw herself standing alone in a howling void. The cold had gone beyond numbness into a tearing pain. She couldn’t tell if she had opened her eyes.

Anna tried to call out, but the wind snatched her voice away and scattered the words, freezing them as they flew by. Stepan Rurik should have been there with her. He was always there when she needed him. Anna searched for him, but she saw nothing in the coldness.

Had they finally reached Mars? Was this the colony, their first winter there? How had she gotten lost outside? Where were the others?

Then she wondered, in the crazy rationale of dreams, whether she and Rurik had somehow been thrown back in time to the end of the Tsarist days. Perhaps someone did not approve of a relationship between the ranking researcher and the commander of the station. Anna Tripolk and Commander Stepan Rurik had been exiled to old Siberia, left without shelter in the snow.

Anna realized she had begun to shiver violently, but her body seemed a great distance away. The whiteness muted, faded, and focused into low lights reflected off glass walls.

Her teeth chattered with such force that it felt like a seizure. Her fingers clenched and unclenched, and she could not stop them. Her eyes were dry.

Hearing returned, but the sounds made no sense. She fought with her mind to focus things, to remember as the sounds sorted themselves out. Words.

“… Hello …”

She tried to concentrate, comprehend.

“Welcome back. Can you hear me?”

The words were clearly Russian, but with an odd accent—a woman’s voice. Anna blinked her eyes, afraid that she might crack a thin film of tears frozen into ice.

“I hope this one doesn’t die, too.” This was a different voice, male. Anna needed a moment to realize that these words had been spoken in English.

Then the wall between herself and her memories popped like a balloon. The sleepfreeze, the War, the long wait in suspended animation. The Soviets had come to rescue them. Earth had gotten itself back to its feet.

She wondered how many years had passed. Everything would be fine now. They were all saved.

A woman’s face came into view—thin, with green eyes that were bright, intelligent. A pale cobweb of wrinkles flared out from the side of each eye. A few dark freckles dotted her cheeks and arms; she had red hair. She wore no uniform that Anna Tripolk recognized.

Then a young man pushed his face overhead. Dark hair and dark skin made him appear Asiatic. Mongolian? He could not be older than twenty.

He had spoken in English.

Something had changed drastically since the War. Anna’s body continued to shiver. It became very important for her to know how long she had been under sleepfreeze. She
tried
to speak, but her vocal cords wouldn’t work. Where was Rurik? Her tongue lay sluggish and still asleep inside her mouth. With exhaled breath, she managed to form words.

“When … how long …?”

The woman and the young man seemed delighted at her question. They clasped each other and then moved their hands inside Anna’s glass sleepfreeze chamber. She felt pressure as they removed the needles from her arms, peeled off the electrodes. She noticed no pain; her nerves had not fully awakened either. Pushing the young man away, the woman removed a catheter from her urinary tract.

Working together, the two of them pulled Anna Tripolk from the chamber, as gently as they could. Anna tried to help them, but her muscles would not function. Her limbs flopped. She could barely keep her gaze focused. The room spun around.

The strange woman spoke to Anna as she and the young man held her up. “It’s been forty-five days since the War, and about a month since we lost contact with you.”

As they helped Anna to a vertical position, all the blood rushed to her feet.
Only a month?
she thought.
What could possibly happen in only a month?
Disappointment began to well up inside of her.

But vertigo from the outrush of blood brought down a blanket of unconsciousness instead.

They had taken her to quarters that were not her own, but they didn’t know that. They didn’t know many things.

Anna Tripolk sat propped on the bed, covered with a crinkly insulated blanket, still shivering. A full day had passed since her awakening. She sipped strong tea, avoiding the gazes of this Dr. Langelier and Ramis Barrera.

Anger seethed in her now, swelling and falling away when she found no suitable way to express it. Her voice remained hoarse, but that only suited her roiling emotions. Anna glared from one to the other as she spoke, using English so the young man from the
Aguinaldo
would understand everything.

“So, you have no solutions? Nothing has changed. These Lagrange colonies are still practically as desperate as they were before, yet you saw nothing wrong with trying to awaken us, merely to see if you could! Why did you not heed the warnings we broadcast? The signs we stationed in the command center?” Anna raised her voice. “Where is Commander Rurik?”

Karen and Ramis exchanged puzzled looks. Karen frowned and said, “There was only one warning broadcast, then silence. We found no signs posted.”

“You did not know what you were doing, yet you decided to tinker with our lives! How many people have died because of your ignorance?”

“Only one,” Ramis said. “The English instructions on the wall were not complete. The process should have been more intuitive. You could not know who would come to rescue you.”

Anna saw that his scorn was only misdirected anger at himself. “Only one? Is that an acceptable number?”

Karen Langelier interrupted. “It was from a fault in the apparatus, I think. You can check the system out. You know it better than we do.”

Anna scowled at them. “Thank you for that concession. Why did Commander Rurik not stop you, or at least assist you? He knew the process well enough.”

Karen and Ramis looked at each other. Karen spoke in Russian. “Who is this Commander Rurik?”

Anna frowned. “If it has been only a month.… He and another officer, Cagarin, remained to watch over us, to keep the colony intact. They did not go under sleepfreeze with the rest of us. They had enough supplies to last them for years.”

Ramis looked puzzled, then swallowed. “We found—I found—another body, in the command center. It was a man. He was large and had brown hair. He was wearing a dark uniform with many medals and insignia. He had been dead several weeks when I arrived.”

The blow was too much for Anna. She closed her eyes, but did not lie back on the bed. Karen took the cup from her hand.

Rurik dead? But how? He had said he would stay, for all of them. Some kind of accident?

Anna recalled his quiet strength, how the others had looked up to him and listened when he spoke, how he had drifted along the edges of the Soviet bureaucracy and somehow retained a clear perception of what he wanted and how to dance around the ineffective political machinery. He could ignore orders from his superiors and all the while convince them that he had done exactly what they’d meant to ask him.

She remembered holding Rurik, feeling warm next to his skin. Warmth seemed like such a foreign feeling to her now.

“Leave me alone,” she whispered. She kept her eyes closed as she heard them leave her quarters.

Rurik was dead.

Let us not debate who is making the bravest choice,
he had told her in their last few moments together.
I do what I must, and you do what you must.
She looked at the empty walls around her, but saw nothing to tell her whose quarters she was in.

Without me, you would be considered the acting commander of this station.

She gave a quiet moan.

Anna Tripolk stood in the infirmary, looking at the rows of glass cases, like baubles in a china shop. The hundreds of other
Kibalchich
inhabitants still slept unaware, peaceful … as she had been, just a day before.

Ramis Barrera and Karen Langelier left her alone, perhaps ashamed of themselves, or perhaps just afraid of her. This suited Anna fine. Every time she saw the two of them, she resented what they had done. She thought of Grekov’s wasted life and the arrogant ignorance that had led these outsiders to believe that Soviet technology and scientific prowess was so trivial they could decipher its nuances by pushing random buttons and keeping their fingers crossed.

Anna inspected both of the newly empty cubicles—Grekov’s and her own. The first cubicle had indeed malfunctioned. The awakening steps had occurred out of sequence, and the Barrera boy hadn’t known how to react to the warning signals.

Grekov’s body remained down in the lower deck, in the cold-storage locker by the recycler pool—frozen again, but this time, only as so much meat. Rurik’s body lay there, too.

She needed to know why the commander had died. She felt a knot in her throat. She would have to do an autopsy on him.

She remembered Rurik’s bravery, his charisma, his presence. He was like a legend to them all, so different from the manipulative, bureaucrat director on
Orbitech 1.
Karen Langelier and Ramis Barrera had led her to the command center. There, Director Brahms had spoken to her.

Anna had listened, repulsed by this slimy little man who rubbed his hands together, prattling his empty welcomings and congratulations and babbling shallow words through his image on the tall central holotank. But Anna drew herself up.

“Mr. Brahms, I want to assure you that under no circumstances will I allow you to revive any more of the people on this station. You have nothing to offer us. You are ruining our sacrifice. We were to go into sleepfreeze until conditions had returned to normal. You should not have directed your lackeys to waken me. Now that my commander has died, I am in charge of this station.”

Brahms appeared taken aback, but then he smiled at her. “The rules have changed, Ms. Tripolk. Lines of authority and nationality no longer mean the same thing. Your sleepfreeze process could save the lives of many people on
Orbitech 1
if our food continues to run in short supply. I will not allow your petty indignation to ruin our future.” He paused. “Think of it as evolution in action.”

He folded his hands, appearing to thrust them through the walls of the holotank.

“But this is too heavy a subject to be discussing right now. I’m sure you’re still recovering from your ordeal. We will speak again later. We are proud to have you back among the living.” He smiled, then signed off before she could say anything.

In fury, she launched herself across the zero-G command center to one of the lift platforms on the opposite side. Ramis and Karen tried to be placating, but Anna had closed her ears. She rode the lift-shaft down alone.

Now she stood among the sleepfreeze cubicles with a liquid-crystal input pad in one hand, inspecting each of the chambers, verifying that everything remained stable. In her research, this was the long-term, large-scale test they had not been able to conduct ahead of time.

Before the War, Anna had located a volunteer among the station inhabitants to test the sleepfreeze chambers, when their work had proceeded rapidly and the Mars program had been a gleaming dream on the horizon. The volunteer was to be given a medal of honor, extra pay, extra leave, special privileges for himself and his family.

But after the War had cut the
Kibalchich
off, they all had to go under sleepfreeze, with survival being the biggest benefit of all.

She ticked off the cubicles on her input pad, taking inventory, checking—until she came upon one in the fourth row that sat dead. The monitoring lights remained gray and dim. The maintenance systems had been disconnected from the main power supply.

Anna bent down and found two of the wires intentionally severed with a neat cut. She stared in shock. Inside the sealed chamber, the waxen-faced man appeared different. He looked dead. His skin showed the wrong color, sagged in the wrong places. Because of the airtight chamber she could smell no decay, but this man was dead.

The severed wires could not possibly be an accident. Someone had sabotaged the sleepfreeze chamber.

Anna stood, narrowing her eyes. Outrage and confusion smoldered behind them. She made a fast check, walking briskly up and down the aisles. She wore a stiff white uniform that rustled against her legs—it felt more proper than the gray pajamas she had worn in the sleepfreeze cubicle.

She moved quickly through the large room and below decks, where the first wave of frozen colonists had been put under. She found eleven dead cubicles—each sabotaged, intentionally shut down, the wires cut.

She ran through a roster of inhabitants. Everyone except Rurik and Cagarin was accounted for. And Rurik was dead.

Cagarin.

He was missing.

Then she remembered Rurik warning her about State Security, the open secret that some of the people on the station were actually KGB. Why had Rurik picked Cagarin, of all people, to remain awake with him? Had Cagarin killed Rurik? Then why was he missing? It did not make sense.

She stared around at the walls. Everything seemed oppressive and silent. Anna felt alone and uneasy, but she would not show it, for Rurik’s sake.

The
Kibalchich
hung empty, except for herself and the two outsiders. She hesitated to think of them as her enemies, but as she looked at the senseless death, the intentional executions in the sleepfreeze chambers, she began to change her mind.

***