Lifeline

Ramis could not decide what to do. He couldn’t get inside the coffin. He tugged at the control panel end, hoping he could yank it off and pull the man free, though he had no idea what he would do then.

“Help me!” Ramis called.

The Kibalchich had no one to hear him.

He banged on the glass, trying to break it and force his way in. “Help!”

The Soviet man lay still, rigid with a contorted expression on his face. His eyelids had popped wide open. He stared through the glass at the ceiling, but saw nothing. Tiny blood vessels had hemorrhaged, smearing his eye whites with red blots.

All the lights on the control panel had turned red. Two of the numerals fell back to zero; one remained at twenty-four.

With a hiss of pressurized air, the control panel end slid down, opening the chamber. The man did not move.

Ramis slumped to the floor and sat with his legs crossed, pressing his knees against the cold metal. He began to shiver uncontrollably.

Chapter 36

ORBITECH 1—Day 41

Karen Langelier put her head down and closed her eyes. She could imagine Ramis’s fear, sitting in an abandoned space station with hundreds of frozen bodies—it must be like a giant haunted house in orbit. There was one dead man in the airlock, and now another in the infirmary with wide eyes, staring at the person who had killed him by not understanding the sleepfreeze process.

Or was the process itself flawed? Maybe Ramis wasn’t to blame after all. But what would happen when the other Soviets did awake, only to find Ramis with their dead comrades? He wouldn’t stand a chance.

If the Soviets could indeed be revived. Biological researchers had pursued suspended animation for decades, and it seemed an odd topic to be pursuing in an orbital research station. That work could have been done as well on Earth, where laboratory space was not so precious.

But Karen knew what it was like to dig into an idea, spend months or even years on a false trail, perhaps give an entire life over to a single problem, only to learn that someone else had made the same discovery weeks before. Then you had to suffer the frustration of throwing yourself back into the whole crazy cycle again with a new idea.…

As competent and quick to learn as Ramis was, Karen didn’t believe he could intuitively guess all the necessary steps to revive the Soviets, and she was furious at Brahms for forcing him to try. More detailed revival information probably resided in the Kibalchich’s main computer, but she was certain it would all be in Russian.

Ramis had to have help.

Karen opened her eyes. The past few months weighed her down—her separation from Ray, her mourning for those on Earth, and now Brahms’s incessant pressure to produce.

She could get out, too, just as Ramis had.

And who better than she to go to the Soviet station? She was proficient in Russian, as were other people on the scientific staff, but that was only icing on the cake. She would be the first person to test out her weavewire ferry system. And the kicker was that she knew Ramis better than anyone else on Orbitech 1.

One thing gnawed at her: the thought of flying unprotected and alone across the gulf of space. But if she didn’t trust her weavewire, no one else would.

Fear kept her feet riveted to the floor in front of Brahms’s outer office. Months ago—days ago—she would have lacked the courage to approach him.

Once, as a little girl, Karen had come upon her cat after it had cornered a field mouse. She had been shocked to see the monster it had transformed into as it glared down at the mouse.

Brahms wielded the same kind of power. And Karen found herself unable to turn, to hide. The door slid aside.

“Dr. Langelier. I’ve been expecting you. Please come in.” Brahms’s smooth voice seemed to waft around her, twist about and pull her into the office. Karen was determined to win his favor—but why did she already feel defeated?

A sudden image of the trapped mouse vaulted into her mind, her cat licking its chops.

Karen stopped a few feet from the corner of Brahms’s desk. The director moved around the side of his desk and indicated a chair for her. He grasped her hand with both of his, wrapped his fingers around her wrists, engulfing her with his presence.

“Sit down, please.”

“Thank you,” she mumbled.

Brahms perched on the edge of his desk, leaning back. He slid his glasses on, as if assuming a different persona. He had repaired the broken lens. “You’ve come to talk about Ramis.”

Right to the point, she thought. What else does he know? “That’s right.”

Brahms drummed a finger on the desk. Karen studied the man while he seemed to be pondering something. She had never noticed it before, but the glasses made him look older. He was ten years younger than she, but their lives, their career paths, had diverged wildly. Still, both were trapped on Orbitech 1, having to make the best of their situations.