Lifeline

Chapter 42

KIBALCHICH—Day 44

When the inner airlock rotated open, Karen saw only darkness. She removed her helmet and stared into the shadows.

“Ramis?” she called in a quiet voice, but the word sounded as loud as a gunshot. He would be somewhere inside, but she had no idea where, or why he had not met her. She was glad she had not been the first to enter the silent station.

A dark hallway curved up ahead and behind her. Wetting her lips, she stepped out of the airlock into the Kibalchich. She tapped a toe on the floor in an instinctive gesture, to make sure it remained solid. She dragged her pack of personal belongings just inside the corridor and plopped it to the floor. She started to set her helmet down, but decided to put up with the inconvenience of carrying it.

The Kibalchich was dead quiet. She could hear the blood pounding in her ears. All the lights were dim.

The airlock hissed shut behind her.

Karen drew in a breath to stop herself from shaking. Ramis is here somewhere, she thought. Nothing is going to happen.

“Karen?”

She whirled, then her shoulders slumped with relief. She had not heard Ramis approach with his bare feet. Soft light outlined his face. His eyes looked bleary with sleep.

“You are very early. Two hours.” He pointed an elbow at one of the wall chronometers. “I am sorry I did not meet you. Have you been here long?”

“Early?” She noticed the digital time next to an intercom, a flatscreen, and several buttons. Frowning, Karen glanced at her own suit watch. “This clock is two hours fast.” Then she rolled her eyes in a ridiculous expression.

“They’re on Moscow time! Why didn’t they standardize, like everyone else? Orbitech 1 is on Greenwich Mean.” She sighed. “We should have synchronized clocks, but who would have thought?”

She shook her head, still puzzled. “But why are you two hours late, and not early?”

Ramis tried to brush her question aside. He blinked his eyes again. “I must have gotten mixed up and subtracted the two-hour difference instead of adding it. I was sleeping, for the first time in days, but I planned to wake up before you arrived. I still needed some time to … to get something.”

He looked at her with his dark eyes, hesitating. “I was not certain it would be you. It could have been one of the other Soviets, or someone else that Brahms sent over …” His voice trailed off.

On an impulse, Karen wanted to hug him, but in the monstrous padded suit that would have been more comical than poignant. “The important thing is that I’m here.” She threw a glance at his loose, comfortable clothes. His space suit was conspicuously absent. “Where are you staying?”

“I have found several private chambers.”

“Sounds like a good start.” Karen handed him the helmet to carry. “Lead on, Ramis.” She hooked her belongings on the crook of her arm.

Ramis took her through several cubicles and down to a second deck. Karen felt as if she were in a three-dimensional maze. “You will learn your way around quickly,” said Ramis. “It is a monotonous arrangement.”

At first the station’s layout confused her, but after only a few minutes, she discovered a pattern: the three decks were all arranged identically, but offset from the decks above them. An octagonal pattern of compartments surrounded each staircase, holding emergency supplies of air, food, and water. One could travel straight up or down the decks if needed, but the main thoroughfares were staggered to break the monotony.

As they walked, she noted few displays of artwork or any kind of decor. In recreation areas, she saw murals depicting larger-than-life characters with a central hero, usually standing in a field or a city, looking toward the stars.

Ramis stopped before a row of eight cabins with doors open. Karen dumped her helmet and satchel onto the floor. The rooms were not all clustered together; several blank spaces separated the doors at random intervals. Looking closely at the bulkhead, Karen ran her hand along a hairline seam.

“There are doors all along here. I wonder why some of them are closed?”

Ramis turned away. “Most of them were open, or at least activated, when I arrived. They close behind you after you leave the room.”

“And how do you open them again?”

“That I do not know,” Ramis said slowly. “I have tried to get back inside.”

“I see.” Karen suppressed a smile. She lounged back against the polished bulkhead and crossed her arms. Ramis stared back, unblinking. She nodded to the row of closed doors. “If they used to be all open, then I bet you did some experimenting, trying to find out how to open them.”

Ramis nodded.

Karen pushed away from the wall. “And I suppose you slept in one of these last night?” She could not stop her smile from growing. “And I suppose you took your helmet and suit with you. It’s in one of these rooms, and now you can’t get the door open again?”

Ramis flushed and nodded stiffly. No wonder he didn’t meet me outside, she thought. Though the time lag on the chronometers had distracted her for a while, he was obviously too abashed at losing face, and had needed to make up an excuse that would not leave him appearing stupid. Losing his helmet because he couldn’t get the door open again! He probably thought he’d be stuck here forever.

Already, being away from Orbitech 1 had improved her mood. The situation wasn’t funny, but if worse came to worst, they could always smash the door in with a Soviet forklift.

“Why don’t you help me out of this suit so I can move like a human being again? We’ll leave it right here in the hall. Then take me to the control room. That’s where you kept in communication with Orbitech 1, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I will show you.”

Over the next fifteen minutes, she struggled with the fastenings and seals of her suit. Ramis seemed patient and enjoyed being with her; they chatted about meaningless things. She realized he must have been terribly lonely.

The helmet and harness lay on the floor. Karen squirmed out of the bulky protective suit and stood hunched over in her cotton jumpsuit, breathing hard. She wiped a palm across her forehead and stared at the sweat glinting off the dim corridor lights.

“How can construction engineers live in those things?”

Ramis furrowed his eyebrows. “All the body functions are taken care of. You know how to activate the glucose tablet dispenser? That would give you energy. Vitamin supplements can keep you going for several shifts.”

Karen shook her head. “That’s not really what I meant. Right now I’m still a little dizzy from all that anti-rad junk I had to take.”

Kneeling on the floor, she dug through her bag and opened a Mylar satchel. It hissed when she broke the seal, indicating that air pressure on the Kibalchich was lower than what she had left behind. “I brought you some personal effects. I went into your quarters and took anything I thought you might want, since you left in such a hurry.” She looked into his eyes. “I hope you don’t mind?”

“No, of course not.”

Karen handed him a clean set of clothes, his St. Christopher’s medal, and—with a smile—a pack of jerky made from unprocessed wall-kelp. “I thought you might miss this.”

“How can I ever repay you?” he asked, then made a wicked smile. “Or is the correct American phrasing, I’ll get you for that?”

She laughed, then stood up again. “Control room?”

“This way.” Ramis motioned her up the corridor. He bit into the wall-kelp and winced, but chewed. He tore off a chunk and extended it to her. “For such a good friend, I will share.” Ramis glared at her. “I insist.”

They walked up the curving hallway. A low hum pulsed through the station, hovering at the edge of her ability to hear. Karen breathed deep. The air remained stale and metallic from the reprocessers, but it didn’t have the smell of anxiety and fear hanging in every lungful. It seemed refreshing to a certain degree.

Unlike Orbitech l’s low- and zero-gravity decks, depending on their configuration in the colony, the Kibalchich kept gravity throughout its torus, except for the zero-G command center at the hub. As Ramis activated the lift platform to take them toward the center, she felt weight dropping away from her.

The ceiling opened overhead. She felt no gravity at all, but a room appearing above her knocked Karen’s orientation off kilter. Ramis kicked off the lift platform and rose into the chamber. Karen drifted up after him.

“The control room. As you requested.” He made a little bow, which caused him to spin in a somersault in the middle of the room. He started to laugh.

Pinpoints of red and green light burned from control panels. Data screens and attached chairs jutted from the curved walls. A central column surrounded by a holotank extended from floor to ceiling—the light pipe, or whatever it was that connected the shield and solar collectors below the station to the tilted mirror above. The holotank was a standard Hitachi, state of the art in resolution and contrast, but appeared to lack a tactile option.

“Everything is here.” Ramis spread his hands. “One person could seal himself up in this room and control the entire station. I wonder if that is what happened. It would explain the man’s body I found.”

Karen looked around, snagging the nearest chair as she floated by. “Are the computers voice activated?”

“I was able to transmit a message to Orbitech 1.” Ramis floated over to one wall. “Beyond that, I do not know. I cannot speak Russian, remember?”

Karen stared at the holotanks and the various input pads. “Well, let’s try it. First off, we should learn how to unlock all those doors. We’ll get your helmet back.”

Selecting what appeared to be the command chair, Karen strapped in. Clearing her throat, she tried to enunciate her words clearly. It had been years since she had last conversed in Russian, and the computer would have enough difficulty interpreting her odd accent anyway.

“Computer, present a map of the colony,” she said in Russian.

Nothing.

“Computer, respond.”

Karen looked puzzled. Ramis hovered beside her. “What did you say to it?”

Distracted, she glanced at him. “Maybe I told it to calculate the value of pi or something. But I thought I said, ‘Computer, present a map of the colony.’ “

“{{AFFIRMATIVE: ALL USERS VALIDATED BY ACTING COMMANDER TRIPOLK.}}” The computer-generated voice, in English, startled both of them.

A sketch of the rotating wheel came to focus in the murk of the tank. The lines continued to add detail, forming a dense blueprint image, overlapping and growing solid as the computer reconstructed the Kibalchich from the inside out. The computer exposed sections to show how the inner core rotated inside the stationary outer layer of Moon rubble.

As she thought about it, Karen realized the computer responding to English instead of Russian made sense, too. “They must have found it simpler to use validated algorithms for speech recognition than to invent new ones for a whole different language.”

Karen placed a finger over her lips. “Ramis, when you were trying to get back into the sealed cabins, did you ask the computer to open the doors for you—out loud, I mean?”

Ramis turned away, looking angry at himself.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Karen said. “I’m not here to compete with you—or to show how smart I am. We’re in this together.

“Remember, I’m a good fifteen years older than you, and I’ve worked in control rooms and labs most of my life. It’s only natural that I’m going to hit on some things quicker than you. But I automatically thought this computer would respond in Russian—I make mistakes all the time, too.” A smile tugged at Ramis’s lips.

“I will remember that.”

“Okay. Let’s try this one more time.” She cleared her throat. “Computer, open all the doors to the sleeping areas.

“{{AFFIRMATIVE: ALL USERS VALIDATED BY ACTING COMMANDER TRIPOLK.}}”

Karen grinned. “According to this, all the doors are open again. Thanks to Commander Tripolk, whoever he is. I should check in with Orbitech 1 and let them know I got here. Too bad this is the only place you can send or receive outside transmissions.”

“They can monitor them better that way,” Ramis said. He waited beside her. “Let me take you to the commissary. They left many supplies.”

“You didn’t mention anything about supplies in your transmissions!”

Ramis raised his eyebrows at her comment. “What do you think would happen if Brahms found out the Kibalchich had supplies left? What he does not know will not hurt him.”

Ramis ducked into one of the open rooms and retrieved his helmet, looking relieved. Before departing, he bundled the rest of his gear together and hauled it out to the open. As he stepped away from the door again, it slid shut and vanished into a flat wall.

“Now, let’s see that food,” Karen said. She felt her stomach roiling with anticipation, eager to gobble food that was not rationed or guarded by Brahms’s watchers. She wished the pre-radiation treatment hadn’t left her so queasy.

Karen soon discovered that commissaries remained the same no matter who ran the station. Drab and clunky, the eatery provided the Soviet equivalent of the high-protein diet she had grown used to. She chewed black bread so stale it reminded her of crackers.

Karen had purposely avoided the nicer company dining facilities on Orbitech 1; she liked to eat undisturbed in the commissary there. Now, with strict rationing and specified eating times, that luxury had slipped away.

Here on the Kibalchich, though, Karen wondered if she might have more solitude than she could stand.

The middle deck looked similar to the other two, but lacked the clusters of small rooms. Instead, large chambers filled the space: meeting halls, a gymnasium, and even a swimming pool. Karen later discovered three more pools, located at ninety degrees to each other. She supposed they doubled as water storage and ensured an even distribution of mass around the torus. Though the Kibalchich held only about 15 percent as many inhabitants as the American industrial colony, it seemed to have more total water in storage. Karen wondered why the Soviets were so paranoid about supplies. Whatever the reason, they had proved better prepared for this disaster.

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.