Lifeline

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.