Lifeline

Chapter 33

KIBALCHICH—Day 40

As Ramis approached, the torus of the Kibalchich turned in front of him like a colossal windmill. It astounded him that it had been just a point of light seen from Orbitech 1.

Karen’s voice came over the radio. “Ramis, the Doppler has pegged you five hundred yards from the Kibalchich. You’ll feel some tension in the weavewire as we help slow you down.”

Ramis mumbled an acknowledgment but continued to stare at the giant construction.

The Soviet station looked like a huge doughnut with four thick spokes radiating away from a small central sphere—the command center, most likely, which would be at zero gravity. Thinner support struts extended between the thick spokes.

Above the center of the torus, connected by a long, cylindrical shaft, floated an aluminized mirror, nearly invisible except where it reflected a smear of sunlight down into a central network of angled mirrors that, in turn, directed light into the station. The central shaft seemed able to swivel and point the mirror in different directions, perhaps to focus incoming energy toward different spots on the Kibalchich. In the zero-G environment it puzzled Ramis that the Soviets would expend so much unnecessary mass and reinforcement on a structure that would hang in place by itself.

The central shaft extended through the hub and out the bottom in a long, antenna-like prong. A rotational stabilizer for the mirror and the colony? Ramis wondered. Large masses hung hundreds of meters “below” the central hub sphere, centered on the prong; at the end of the prong, a broad inverted cone pointed toward the Sun like the Aguinaldo’s shadow shield.

Slag left over from the Kibalchich’s processing of lunar rock had been encrusted on the sides of the hull for additional radiation shielding, and another sheath of rubble drifted around the main torus. Ramis saw wide swathes where the rubble had been stripped away, as if the Soviets had needed to salvage more raw materials for their own purposes.

Cyrillic characters stood out in one of the clear patches, black against the silvery metal background. Ramis assumed the characters spelled out the name of the station, though he couldn’t read the language or even the alphabet.

As Ramis drifted in, he made his way toward the central hub sphere. He had to attach the weavewire where it would not be wound up like a fishing reel by the Kibalchich’s rotation. And from the telescope photos back on Orbitech 1, the hub would also be the most likely place for him to get inside through one of the emergency access hatches.

Orienting himself to the relative positions of Orbitech 1 and the Soviet station, Ramis shot another spurt from his MMU. He seemed to be moving in faster than he expected.

Karen’s voice broke the silence. “Ramis, we have you at approximately one hundred yards from the Kibalchich. How are you doing?”

“Fine. I doubt I can miss it now.”

He had reserve fuel in the MMU, but he had greatly increased his forward velocity by jetting with the air tank early in his Jump. Without bothering to tell Orbitech 1, Ramis turned toward the Kibalchich and kicked on the MMU braking thruster. A force hit his chest as the maneuvering unit pushed in the opposite direction, slowing his motion.

Gyrating once more about his center of gravity, he saw with some satisfaction that he had slowed himself enough, but now he had veered off course.

“Ramis, are you all right? The video showed you rotating.” Karen sounded worried.

“I am just preparing to land.”

No problem, Ramis thought to himself. This is getting easier. He made a quick estimate and, trying to hold down his breathing rate, he gave two more squirts on the thruster. He found himself drifting toward the Kibalchich’s giant mirror support. The flat reflecting surface grew closer, like a tilted plate filled with stars. Everything seemed to be in slow motion, inexorable, like a dream.

Holding his breath, Ramis reached out and grabbed onto the approaching mirror support girder as he started to sail by. His feet swung around, slamming his upper body into the mirror’s surface. He let out an audible “Ooof!” The reflector rocked back and forth, wobbling with the impact.

“Ramis! We’ve lost you on the visual. Have you reached the Kibalchich?”

Ramis pushed backward, hand over hand, down the girder. It was made of a dark, porous material—some sort of composite manufactured from lunar soil. He eyed the central hub and caught his breath for a moment. “I am here, but I need a few moments to position myself.”

“Keep in contact,” Brahms broke in.

Ramis did not bother to answer. Looking above him at the mirror’s surface still oscillating from his impact, he continued crawling down the support structure. The dish mirror did not appear to concentrate light, as the Aguinaldo’s did, only reflect it. Then the conical light collector below the station probably provided for their energy needs, he thought. So why bother with the big reflecting mirror above?

Ramis keyed his mike. “Karen?”

She came back instantly. “Yes? Are you all right?”

“I am right above the Kibalchich. It is rotating quite rapidly. I intend to move down to the hub and try to enter from there.”

“That’s just what we were going to suggest,” Brahms said.

“Be careful,” Karen added.

“By the way, the Soviets have sent no welcoming committee. I see no one so far.”

“I didn’t expect anything,” Brahms said.

Making sure that he kept the braided part of the weavewire away from the superstructure, he climbed down the Kibalchich’s central axis, careful to have a good grip each time, until he reached the point where the support column intersected the hub sphere. His feet touched the metal surface. He let out a long sigh of relief as the magnets in his soles clanked against the hull.

Karen and several of the other engineers had constructed his braided weavewire belt so he could unfasten it from around his waist and use reinforced clamps to anchor it to the Kibalchich. Ramis tugged on the fiber behind him and felt a slight tension.

Fumbling, he managed to unfasten the belt, still holding it tightly. He turned, extending his arms and stepping away from the fiber. The lack of resistance and the bulkiness of his suit made his movements awkward, contrived. He started to sweat.

The support shaft rising from the command sphere looked to be an ideal place. He wrapped his feet around it and fastened the belt around the shaft, anchoring it with clamps. He plucked a self-sealing tube from his belt and squeezed liberal amounts of vacuum cement over the connection. In less than a minute the polymer resin would harden from the cold and the vacuum into a bond more powerful than the metal of which the Kibalchich was constructed.

Smiling inside his helmet, Ramis turned and looked at the tiny Day-Glo orange thread extending a hundred meters from the support column, then vanishing abruptly into its single-molecule thickness. Ramis could not see the remainder of the weavewire, but frozen in space, it pointed directly to where the bright spot of Orbitech 1 anchored the opposite end of the strand.

The bridge was established. The two colonies were joined. He tongued his radio mike. “Orbitech 1, I have successfully anchored the weavewire to the Kibalchich.”

Throughout the maneuver he had remained silent, debating whether to keep in constant, step-by-step contact with Orbitech 1. But he decided against that. If they wanted to know exactly how it was done, they could come do it themselves.

“I am now standing on the outside of the central sphere. I will search for an entrance.”

Free of the line and able to be more versatile in his movement, Ramis scrambled along the hull of the hub sphere, planting one foot in front of the other. Following the rotational axis, he tried to orient himself with “up” and “down.”

He clunked along the outside of the sphere until he found the markings of a man-sized emergency hatch recessed into the hull. He made his way to it, then stopped and stared. Strange symbols, painted in a deep dull yellow, covered the hatch. He could not understand the writing, but the mechanism itself seemed obvious enough. He flicked on his radio mike again. “Orbitech 1, I have found one of the access hatches.” He pointed his chest camera toward it. “I will attempt to enter the Soviet colony.”

Then he turned to face the sphere and, after a moment’s thought, spoke toward the metal wall. “Kibalchich, I hope you give me a happy welcome.” After all, he thought, perhaps their radio was just broken and they could not respond. Maybe it was that simple. But then why hadn’t they come out to meet him?

He fitted his bulky fingers into the red-painted lock mechanism and turned it counterclockwise. Bolts around the seal kicked back, and the door slid out and over, leading to a cramped airlock chamber. It looked like a great black mouth; he halfway expected to see fangs around the edge.

“Orbitech 1, the outer door has opened. I am stepping inside. This will be your last contact from me until I find a working transceiver inside. If something happens—” He paused, then shrugged. “The cable is connected between the two colonies. The next step will be yours.”

Brahms’s voice answered back, echoing in his ears. “Ramis, we wish you the best of luck. Our hopes ride with you. Your transmissions are being broadcast over ConComm. Everyone is cheering for you.”

Ramis shut off the mike. “Thanks,” he muttered.

When he closed the outer door, the chamber was dark, with only a red strip of phosphors on the ceiling for dim illumination.

He punched a sequence of buttons that he thought would fill the chamber with air, but his suit was so insulated he could hear no hissing. The light on the panel turned from red to green, which looked more like white to black in the reddish background light, and Ramis hesitated. His suit had relaxed, lost most of its stiffness.

He cracked open his faceplate and drew a deep breath of stale, sour air. It had a rotten smell to it.

Fear crept up his spine again. If the Soviets’ radio wasn’t broken and if they had all died, perhaps they had succumbed to some kind of disease, a plague. Genetic research gone wrong? That was the ostensible reason Dr. Sandovaal had come up to L-4—so he wouldn’t have to worry about unleashing a plague on Earth if his experiments went awry. And if the Soviets had contaminated their colony with a deadly virus, Ramis had just breathed a lungful of it.

He let the air out of his nostrils and swallowed hard. No good now—it is too late. I have already exposed myself. He took another breath, turned to the interior door, and pushed the release button. It slid open with a grating hiss.

Directly in front of his face was the purple, bloated body of a dead man, drifting in the disturbed air currents.

Ramis gasped and choked. The stench was powerful.

The man’s eyes were wide open, his face swollen and distorted. He was a large man, clad in a dark uniform spangled with military insignia.

Ramis backed up in horror, but he could go no farther. The back wall of the airlock chamber stopped him. The body drifted in, as if it were following him.

He screamed “Help!” in Tagalog.

He stopped, felt his pounding heartbeat, calmed his own breathing. The stench continued to seep into his pores, into his lungs. He forced himself to relax.

It was only a dead man. Someone had died on this colony. He had been prepared for that. Perhaps the entire Soviet station had turned into a huge tomb in space. Without gravity, the body had been drawn over to the door when Ramis had filled the inner airlock.

He stared at the bulging, jellied eyes of the corpse. The man’s hair was neatly combed, fixed into place with hair oil. The insignia on the dark uniform showed him to be someone of importance—a commander, perhaps—left here untended to rot.

Ramis forced himself to move. He had to bump past the bobbing corpse to enter the main command center. He touched the body with his shoulder, shielding it with the most padded portion of the space suit. He felt his skin crawl. As the firm, weightless mass moved aside, the arm bent at the elbow and the gray-green, blotched hand drifted up and down, as if waving good-bye. Ramis’s stomach flopped.

He closed his eyes and reached out with gloved fingers, grasping the corpse’s torso. He felt a rush of sweat inside his suit. He gave the body a shove toward the airlock chamber. After it obligingly floated inside, Ramis sealed the door, closing the body out of sight.

He expected to see more corpses there, all sprawled out and ripe with decay, but the command center stood empty. He swiveled his head to stare at the large, spherical room. From “floor” to “ceiling” ran a cylindrical pipe, embedded in a holotank; he realized the pipe must be the support strut for the mirror overhead and the solar shield below. The pipe would not be noticed when the central holotank was functioning.

Lighted screens and input pads covered the curved walls without any regard for standardizing the direction of up or down. Mounted chairs jutted out from beneath the control panels at odd angles to each other to maximize the working arrangement, though Ramis thought it must be disorienting. The chairs had Velcro straps to keep the workers from recoiling across the room every time they punched a keypad.

Ramis kicked off the wall and drifted in, looking at the buttons and readouts, everything in indecipherable Cyrillic characters. The individual panels were unfamiliar to him. The station seemed to be functioning still, but he couldn’t figure out how to control anything.

He searched for the radio, but the controls made no sense at all. He had taken a tour of Orbitech 1’s communications center to familiarize himself with the general layout of what the Soviets might have, but this place seemed totally alien.

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.