Lifeline (25 page)

He flipped on his suit radio.
“Orbitech 1,
are you there?” He turned off the radio at the static; the signals could not propagate out of the metal-covered hull.

He decided to try the computer, hoping that it was voice-activated. There was nothing around to indicate where the computer was, so he spoke as loudly as he could. “Computer, transmit on ninety-four point one megacycles:
Orbitech 1,
do you read me?”

The pounding silence around him made him feel uneasy and vulnerable. He didn’t like being where he was. When the voice of the American communications officer burst back at him, he jumped, startled enough that he had to catch himself on the corner of the chair before he drifted out to the center of the room.

“This is
Orbitech 1.
We are receiving you—”

Brahms’s voice broke in. “Did you get in all right, Ramis? What did you find? Have you seen anyone?”

Ramis cleared his throat. “I am inside at this moment. I have found a man. He is dead. It appears he was alone in the command center. I do not know how he died. I must inspect the rest of the colony. I will communicate with you when I have further information.” He hesitated. “Computer, end transmission.”

He did not feel like speaking with Brahms at the moment.

He saw four prominently marked pneumatic doors at perpendicular points, each with bright red frames. These must be the
Kibalchich’s
spoke-shafts—conduits from the outer ring of living quarters up toward the central hub.

The other Soviets must be somewhere out in the main torus. He stared at the curved wall and pushed over to the nearest airlock. “One spoke should be as good as another,” he said to himself.

The spoke-shaft door was much larger than the small emergency hatch he had used to enter the station. He played with the mechanism for a few moments, then waited, wondering if it was broken. Each set of buttons seemed different; he thought he had pushed the right ones, but it was hard to tell. Then the indicator light changed from red to amber. Some sort of elevator was making its way up the shaft from the torus to the center. The light changed to green, blinked twice, and the door slid aside with a hiss of hydraulics.

A vertical platform stood in front of him, perpendicular to his orientation. Ramis realized that if he rotated himself and stood on it while the platform traveled toward the rim, he would definitely feel that he was heading down, and the platform beneath his feet would become the floor.

He stared at the lift platform for a few moments, feeling the jitters again. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to see what had happened to the other Soviets.

In his bulky suit he felt sluggish and clumsy, unable to react in an emergency. He paused, weighing the decision. Taking care to complete each step properly, he removed his helmet, unfastened the connections at his waist, lifted off his MMU pack and spare air bottles. Over the course of fifteen minutes, he managed to pull himself out of the suit.

Ramis stood, breathing comfortably again. He flopped his arms back and forth, loosening the muscles. He felt small now, agile, ready to face challenges. Staring at the enormity of the empty suit, he was amazed that he had been able to move while wearing it.

The
Kibalchich
felt cold and empty. He had dressed lightly inside the suit, wearing the old tan barong he’d brought on his long journey from the
Aguinaldo.
He had laundered it and taken great care to mend everything. One of the production designers on
Orbitech 1
had offered him a silky weavewire shirt, but it just didn’t feel the same to him.

He took a deep breath of the stale air, then buckled his equipment around a chair support to keep the pieces from drifting about while he was gone.

Bending over, Ramis slipped off his booties and socks and pressed his bare toes against the smooth, cool metal of the lift platform. He felt adrenaline pumping, bringing him to a new pitch of awareness. Without all the padding and external protection, he could be part of his situation, not sheltered from it.

He held onto a side rail to keep his balance, then pushed the activation panel. He was growing confident of his knack for these machines.

The lift platform plunged downward. Ramis held onto the rail to keep from drifting away. But as he dropped toward the outer torus, he grew heavier and heavier against the floor.

At the bottom of the shaft, the lift platform stopped, then a set of doors opened in front of him. He stepped out onto the textured metal floor of the
Kibalchich’s
main body.

He took a few steps forward. The floor felt icy against his feet. The lights were dim, reduced to emergency illumination only. Someone had shut down the systems on the entire station—mothballed it, as if in preparation for a long, long wait.

In the dim glow, Ramis could see faint wisps of his breath—the station was that cold. He shivered and ran his palms up and down his wiry brown arms. He was not used to chill like this. Looking straight ahead, he walked faster.

He shouted hello, but his voice came back explosively loud, like a thunderclap. The echoes shattered up and down the hall like accusing screams. He shrank back against the wall.

He decided not to call out again.

Above him, on the curved band of the ceiling, a strip of louvered windows let in some reflected sunlight from the inner ring of secondary mirrors. But the louvers were half closed, and the giant mirror overhead did not direct the sunlight in. The stars themselves looked distorted and haloed with diffraction from the slanted glass.

Ramis walked along the curving main corridor, which was wide enough for several people to walk abreast. Dark scuffs on the floor showed tracks from where little three-wheeled carts had moved along the thoroughfare. A faint tracing of mildew stood in patches against the wall, across one of the window plates.

To his right and left, vertical walls blocked off sections of private rooms, looking odd against the smooth arcs of the torus. He tried several doors; most were unlocked. Ramis poked his head in but found no one, only darkened spaces that seemed to be administrative offices, meeting rooms. Some looked to be rather plush living quarters all clustered in a row—probably for the high-ranking Soviets.

Inside one room he saw the soft, greenish-yellow glow of an aquarium module. The aerator bubbled in the silence, humming with insolent noise. Half a dozen fish floated belly-up in the tank.

Ramis kept walking. The constant tension was starting to wear on him. He jumped at little noises.

The walls ahead of him ended abruptly on either side, opening into a large section of the torus. Long tables were lined up—a mess hall for the two hundred men and women aboard the station. It was clean, yet something about it conveyed a sense of disarray.

Ramis noticed medical supply carts, packages neatly stacked, five used hypodermic syringes on a stainless-steel counter. He sniffed, but the air had been long purged of any odor that might have hinted at what the inhabitants had done with themselves. They had left no signs, no notices, nothing to indicate where they had gone.

At the end of the mess hall the side walls appeared again, enclosing additional private work spaces. The inner curved wall showed a bright red hydraulic door that marked another of the spoke-shaft lift platforms. He had traveled a quarter of the way around the station, and had still found no sign of people. In the air in front of his face a cloud of fruit flies flitted like static in a faulty holotank; they must have escaped from some biological experiment.

Ramis walked ahead. On the floor he found several access hatches. When he stomped his feet, he heard a hollow echo. Looking at the ceiling and where the floor met the curved wall, he realized that there must be another entire level below him.

The next set of rooms appeared to be laboratories cluttered with experimental paraphernalia. Sketches and equations were scrawled on magnetic-imprint boards. The markings had not been degaussed, but were beginning to fuzz out from the passage of time.

He passed another section of living quarters, this one more austere than the others. In each cabin the beds were neatly made and empty. On some of the bureaus, he found stereocubes with pictures of families, which had been left activated. Beside them he found occasional messages or data cubes. In one instance he even picked up a note written by hand, but he couldn’t read any of the Russian.

Everything was silent. The
Kibalchich
held its breath.

As the curve continued, the side walls dropped away again. A red cross on a field of white signified that the large room ahead would be the infirmary.

By now, Ramis had grown accustomed to the dim light. He moved as if he were one of the shadows, not an enemy of them. His eyes were wide. His bare feet made no sound as he crept forward.

The walls opened up around him, and the infirmary ahead seemed like a vast empty space, broader and colder than the gulf between the two colonies. The soft light glowed, and he blinked his eyes, staring and trying to gather in as much detail as he could. He took a deep breath.

Spread out in front of him lay all the Soviets, row upon row upon row.

His throat was dry. He stood still.

They looked like legions from an ancient Roman army, all lined up side by side, motionless and cold. Each body was encased in a glass coffin, a crystalline chamber flecked with frost on the inside and lit up by a mixed glow of monitor lights.

The cubicles lined the entire infirmary, crammed together.

He took a step forward and placed his hand on the top of the nearest coffin. The man inside looked waxen, expressionless, at peace. The glass felt cold.

Ramis raised his eyes and stared in front of him at all of them. They had all come here. Forsaking hope, had they all just given up and died?

He moved forward between the cubicles, feeling numb and awed. He didn’t know what to think or do, but part of the fear had melted from him.

He had found the inhabitants of the
Kibalchich.

***

Part Three
Interaction

***

Chapter 34

CLAVIUS BASE—Day 41

Clancy’s job-site headquarters felt more like a locker room than a survival hut. Stuffed with ten people in a space meant for five, the airtight shanty provided Clancy’s crew a chance to take a break from the excavation and construction. It reminded him of those quaint little Quonset huts the old British soldiers had used in India or Africa. Another team had set up similar huts out by the mass driver.

Clancy stared outside through the quartz inset plate. He could make out three other enclosures in the distance; the job site had fifteen units total—half again as many as necessary to house his crew. But that margin didn’t seem like much when everybody crammed in the central dwelling—the powwow tent, Shen called it. Clancy felt as if he had to breathe in whenever anyone breathed out. But he insisted on having an open door policy during any construction operation. He wanted his people to feel free to talk over problems and share ideas.

The radio-telescope project was about to take off, big time.
Clavius Base
had systematically provided all the necessary items—air, water, food, and now housing. At least now they didn’t have to worry about funding problems or maddening permits—the Earth bureaucracy was one welcome casualty of the War.

Clancy’s people had constructed the huts in record time, ferried them out on the six-packs, and erected them just outside the crater, where the gigantic telescope dish would sprawl. The Lunatics back at the base had reacted with such enthusiasm to the expedition that it had Clancy convinced they wanted his construction crew out of there.

Tomkins had come up with a name for his baby. He had proudly announced that the crater-sized telescope would be dubbed “Arecibo II.” Clancy and his people thought the name sounded much too pretentious, and decided to call it “Bigeye” instead. The engineers and the Lunatics insisted on using their preferred names whenever referring to the project, each side hoping the other would give up.

Clancy tried to push his way through the crowd in the headquarters hut. The regular ConComm broadcasts of news from the other colonies always generated a lot of interest, but this time,
Orbitech 1
seemed to be up to something spectacular. All the senior engineers had gathered in the powwow tent to watch on the portable holotank there, normally used for communicating back with
Clavius Base
.

Laughter rose around him as three of the excavation crew related an incident that had occurred earlier in the day. As Clancy squeezed past, a hand snaked out and grabbed him around the waist.

“Hey, boss.” A body pressed against him.

“Hello, Shen.”

“Kind of tight in here, isn’t it?” She rotated him around until they faced each other. He felt off balance in the low gravity; he preferred either full-G or nothing—none of this fractional-weight ballet. The top of Shen’s head came just to the middle of his chest. He had to look straight down to see her. Long black hair framed her face.

Clancy nodded. “See what happens when I call the foremen together. Can’t expect them to work now, can I?”

“You’ll have to have these meetings more often.”

Clancy overacted a grimace.

Shen pushed a finger in his stomach. “Come on, Cliffy—you love it. How else could you get a group of intelligent, talented women to throw themselves at you?”

“Thanks a lot, Shen.”

“Wiay,” she corrected him. “After all this time—my first name is Wiay. Some compassionate boss you turned out to be.”

“All right … Wiay. Thanks a lot.”

Wiay Shen had started to retort when the room grew-quiet. People crowded around the holotank image. Clancy steered Shen toward the receiver. He stepped up on the single-cast table to see above people’s heads, and pulled Shen up to join him.

When he was finally able to look down on the three-dimensional image, he saw pitch black around the edges. Seconds passed before he could make out stars. Suddenly, the view swung around to encompass a spacesuit and a stretch of gleaming surface on which the figure stood.

“Where’s this coming from?” Clancy asked.

“Orbitech 1,”
someone said. Someone else shushed him. Clancy scowled.

A sober voice from the tiny speakers described Ramis’s heroic journey from the
Aguinaldo
and his odyssey to the Soviet colony. Coming over the ConComm, it sounded like a propaganda film. As Ramis bent to start his fifty-mile Jump, Shen slipped her arm around Clancy’s waist.

Clancy dwelled on the narrator’s explanation of the weavewire. One of the hopes of zero-G manufacturing had always been the development of a true monofilament—a fiber held together by a force stronger than the covalent bonds of the atoms themselves. The garments produced by
Orbitech 1
had used this monofilament—a frivolous waste of good science, in Clancy’s opinion. Until a way was found to efficiently and rapidly draw out the filament, it would continue to be a toy. But if somebody had found a way….

The others listened to the announcer’s speculation on what Ramis might find on the silent
Kibalchich,
what might have happened to the Soviets. Clancy kept pondering the weavewire, though. They could draw out unlimited lengths of this fiber, which required negligible raw materials. The possibilities sparkled in his imagination like champagne.

The holotank faded to neutral gray, with the announcer promising updates at regular intervals. In the last scene, Ramis appeared no more than a flickering dot, contrasting with the stars that burned steadily through the darkness. In typical fashion, the engineers debated why Ramis’s image would shimmer. Someone pointed out that he must be moving his arms, randomly reflecting the sunlight, for the scintillation to appear.

Clancy became aware of other sounds in the room. An idea had flashed through his mind—a vision. The implications almost struck him down. He grinned like an idiot.

He was still standing on top of the table. As he started to move, he met resistance. Glancing down, he discovered Shen’s arm had been around his waist throughout the holocast. He muttered something unintelligible and helped her down from the table. Her hand was warm and damp.

She looked up at him, her eyes bright. “What do you think?”

“About what?”

“The Jump—that kid flying fifty miles across space!”

His voice grew quiet, lowered conspiratorially. He didn’t meet her eyes. “I just had this crazy thought—”

Shen stood on her tiptoes and searched his face. “After that, nothing could be crazy. What is it?”

Clancy shook his head. “Later. I want to check it out first.” The crowded room had become as humid as the tropics, but Clancy felt drained, dehydrated, with his excitement. Searching the hut, he spotted his crew scheduler, Josef Abdallah. Clancy raised his voice to be heard over the crowd. “Josef—over here. When’s our next six-pack heading back to base?”

Abdallah answered around a mouthful of fried wall-kelp. “Tomorrow morning.”

“Great,” muttered Clancy to no one in particular.

Shen pressed back against him, but not as close as before. Her voice was low, as if she were sharing a secret. “What’s up?”

“Nothing. I just need to check something out.”

“I can get you back to base.”

He shook his head. “This can wait.”

“If it’s really important, I’ll drive the six-pack. They won’t even notice one of them is missing.”

“And have the top two people away from the crew?”

“Josef is a big boy, and the crew can get along fine. It’s only a six-hour trip. Besides, you’re the boss. Do what you want—otherwise, there’s no point in having the job.”

Clancy looked her in the eyes for the first time since the holotank had switched off. Her dark eyebrows contrasted sharply against her skin. Her space suit was oversized for her petite figure and lay against her in soft folds, giving her an exotic look, like a nymphet wearing a mattress.

On impulse he asked, “Do you know anything about celestial mechanics?”

“No, but I can set up an orbital program that’ll blow your socks off. Is that what you need to check out?”

“I need an expert.” Then he quickly added, “Not to take away from your offer.”

“Well, you up for a six-hour jaunt, then?”

A pause. “You’re right, as usual. Sometimes that six hours makes it seem we’re a thousand miles away.”

“It’s the inconvenience that matters. Come on. If we head out now we’ll be back before the end of next shift.”

Clancy answered by pushing through the crowd and collaring Josef Abdallah. After Josef complained about rescheduling and juggling who would need what and when, he nodded his approval. Clancy motioned to Shen.

Seconds later they were in the airlock, prepping for the trip outside on the lunar surface.

***