Lifeline

“But this is too heavy a subject to be discussing right now. I’m sure you’re still recovering from your ordeal. We will speak again later. We are proud to have you back among the living.” He smiled, then signed off before she could say anything.

In fury, she launched herself across the zero-G command center to one of the lift platforms on the opposite side. Ramis and Karen tried to be placating, but Anna had closed her ears. She rode the lift-shaft down alone.

Now she stood among the sleepfreeze cubicles with a liquid-crystal input pad in one hand, inspecting each of the chambers, verifying that everything remained stable. In her research, this was the long-term, large-scale test they had not been able to conduct ahead of time.

Before the War, Anna had located a volunteer among the station inhabitants to test the sleepfreeze chambers, when their work had proceeded rapidly and the Mars program had been a gleaming dream on the horizon. The volunteer was to be given a medal of honor, extra pay, extra leave, special privileges for himself and his family.

But after the War had cut the Kibalchich off, they all had to go under sleepfreeze, with survival being the biggest benefit of all.

She ticked off the cubicles on her input pad, taking inventory, checking—until she came upon one in the fourth row that sat dead. The monitoring lights remained gray and dim. The maintenance systems had been disconnected from the main power supply.

Anna bent down and found two of the wires intentionally severed with a neat cut. She stared in shock. Inside the sealed chamber, the waxen-faced man appeared different. He looked dead. His skin showed the wrong color, sagged in the wrong places. Because of the airtight chamber she could smell no decay, but this man was dead.

The severed wires could not possibly be an accident. Someone had sabotaged the sleepfreeze chamber.

Anna stood, narrowing her eyes. Outrage and confusion smoldered behind them. She made a fast check, walking briskly up and down the aisles. She wore a stiff white uniform that rustled against her legs—it felt more proper than the gray pajamas she had worn in the sleepfreeze cubicle.

She moved quickly through the large room and below decks, where the first wave of frozen colonists had been put under. She found eleven dead cubicles—each sabotaged, intentionally shut down, the wires cut.

She ran through a roster of inhabitants. Everyone except Rurik and Cagarin was accounted for. And Rurik was dead.

Cagarin.

He was missing.

Then she remembered Rurik warning her about State Security, the open secret that some of the people on the station were actually KGB. Why had Rurik picked Cagarin, of all people, to remain awake with him? Had Cagarin killed Rurik? Then why was he missing? It did not make sense.

She stared around at the walls. Everything seemed oppressive and silent. Anna felt alone and uneasy, but she would not show it, for Rurik’s sake.

The Kibalchich hung empty, except for herself and the two outsiders. She hesitated to think of them as her enemies, but as she looked at the senseless death, the intentional executions in the sleepfreeze chambers, she began to change her mind.

Chapter 44

ORBITECH 1—Day 47

The specter of Tim Drury stood glaring down at Brahms as he cowered beneath the blankets on his bunk. Instead of rattling chains, Drury bore the shackles of his own obesity, towering over the acting director as if to smother him.

“You didn’t have to kill me,” Drury said. “You didn’t have to kill any of us.” His voice felt like the cold of space.

Brahms woke in a sweat, shivering, though he knew the temperature in his quarters remained a constant 70 degrees. He blinked and forced his eyes to adjust to the dimness, half expecting to see a bulky phantom with blazing eyes in the corner.

Brahms had had the nightmare several times before, and he forced his rational mind to combat the knee-jerk primitive fear. He felt angry at his psychological weakness—he was haunted by a guilty conscience! He recognized that, and he could live with it. He had chosen his actions; he had to face the consequences. No excuses.

He had acted swiftly, decisively. He had chosen the RIF before it was too late to do any good.

But now, other factors—unexpected factors—had changed their situation. The wall-kelp from the Aguinaldo, the lifeline to the Kibalchich, the “yo-yo” down to Clavius Base, and now the Soviet sleepfreeze technology—all provided less drastic means to help them survive.

Brahms had made the wrong choice.

He stood up and climbed off the bunk. The clock flashed 3:17 A.M. He got up anyway. Brahms didn’t need to raise the illumination to sidestep the molded furniture, to find his closet and remove a soft, single-weave robe. Made on Orbitech 1, of course.