Lifeline

Then she wondered, in the crazy rationale of dreams, whether she and Rurik had somehow been thrown back in time to the end of the Tsarist days. Perhaps someone did not approve of a relationship between the ranking researcher and the commander of the station. Anna Tripolk and Commander Stepan Rurik had been exiled to old Siberia, left without shelter in the snow.

Anna realized she had begun to shiver violently, but her body seemed a great distance away. The whiteness muted, faded, and focused into low lights reflected off glass walls.

Her teeth chattered with such force that it felt like a seizure. Her fingers clenched and unclenched, and she could not stop them. Her eyes were dry.

Hearing returned, but the sounds made no sense. She fought with her mind to focus things, to remember as the sounds sorted themselves out. Words.

“… Hello …”

She tried to concentrate, comprehend.

“Welcome back. Can you hear me?”

The words were clearly Russian, but with an odd accent—a woman’s voice. Anna blinked her eyes, afraid that she might crack a thin film of tears frozen into ice.

“I hope this one doesn’t die, too.” This was a different voice, male. Anna needed a moment to realize that these words had been spoken in English.

Then the wall between herself and her memories popped like a balloon. The sleepfreeze, the War, the long wait in suspended animation. The Soviets had come to rescue them. Earth had gotten itself back to its feet.

She wondered how many years had passed. Everything would be fine now. They were all saved.

A woman’s face came into view—thin, with green eyes that were bright, intelligent. A pale cobweb of wrinkles flared out from the side of each eye. A few dark freckles dotted her cheeks and arms; she had red hair. She wore no uniform that Anna Tripolk recognized.

Then a young man pushed his face overhead. Dark hair and dark skin made him appear Asiatic. Mongolian? He could not be older than twenty.

He had spoken in English.

Something had changed drastically since the War. Anna’s body continued to shiver. It became very important for her to know how long she had been under sleepfreeze. She tried to speak, but her vocal cords wouldn’t work. Where was Rurik? Her tongue lay sluggish and still asleep inside her mouth. With exhaled breath, she managed to form words.

“When … how long …?”

The woman and the young man seemed delighted at her question. They clasped each other and then moved their hands inside Anna’s glass sleepfreeze chamber. She felt pressure as they removed the needles from her arms, peeled off the electrodes. She noticed no pain; her nerves had not fully awakened either. Pushing the young man away, the woman removed a catheter from her urinary tract.

Working together, the two of them pulled Anna Tripolk from the chamber, as gently as they could. Anna tried to help them, but her muscles would not function. Her limbs flopped. She could barely keep her gaze focused. The room spun around.

The strange woman spoke to Anna as she and the young man held her up. “It’s been forty-five days since the War, and about a month since we lost contact with you.”

As they helped Anna to a vertical position, all the blood rushed to her feet. Only a month? she thought. What could possibly happen in only a month? Disappointment began to well up inside of her.

But vertigo from the outrush of blood brought down a blanket of unconsciousness instead.

They had taken her to quarters that were not her own, but they didn’t know that. They didn’t know many things.

Anna Tripolk sat propped on the bed, covered with a crinkly insulated blanket, still shivering. A full day had passed since her awakening. She sipped strong tea, avoiding the gazes of this Dr. Langelier and Ramis Barrera.

Anger seethed in her now, swelling and falling away when she found no suitable way to express it. Her voice remained hoarse, but that only suited her roiling emotions. Anna glared from one to the other as she spoke, using English so the young man from the Aguinaldo would understand everything.

“So, you have no solutions? Nothing has changed. These Lagrange colonies are still practically as desperate as they were before, yet you saw nothing wrong with trying to awaken us, merely to see if you could! Why did you not heed the warnings we broadcast? The signs we stationed in the command center?” Anna raised her voice. “Where is Commander Rurik?”

Karen and Ramis exchanged puzzled looks. Karen frowned and said, “There was only one warning broadcast, then silence. We found no signs posted.”

“You did not know what you were doing, yet you decided to tinker with our lives! How many people have died because of your ignorance?”

“Only one,” Ramis said. “The English instructions on the wall were not complete. The process should have been more intuitive. You could not know who would come to rescue you.”

Anna saw that his scorn was only misdirected anger at himself. “Only one? Is that an acceptable number?”