Lifeline

Brahms touched the spongy, cold surface. Steam puffed out of his mouth into the chilly bay. Ignoring everything else, he clawed at the foam, tearing away hunks of insulation until he saw the glass cover of the Soviet sleepfreeze chamber. He pulled aside the foam until he cleared away a hand-sized area. His breath fogged the glass.

This was something his own people had not been able to create—a kind of technology sought for generations. But now it worked. His people could learn from it. Orbitech 1 need have no doubt of its future from now on. He felt as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders—Orbitech 1 had a way out.

Above, in the control bay, Allen Terachyk looked down at them behind the glass. Brahms glanced up at him, then turned his attention back to the sleepfreeze chamber.

Chapter 48

KIBALCHICH—Day 54

The room in the Kibalchich felt cold, sterile, and dead. Anna Tripolk had never needed to designate a specific place as a morgue before, but now she had thirteen dead bodies to deal with.

And one of them was Stepan … Commander Stepan Rurik.

With grudging help from the others, Anna had stacked the bodies in the freezer chamber. She had felt no need to perform autopsies on the twelve from the sleepfreeze cubicles—the physical details of their deaths raised no questions.

But she did wonder what she was expected to do with the corpses. Keep them? For what? They would never be shipped home again. Burial in space, perhaps? No, feeding them into the reprocessor made more sense, to save precious minerals and proteins sorely lacking on the colony now that the supply lines had been cut off.

Cagarin was not among the bodies. His disappearance still mystified Anna. She wondered if perhaps he had died in a sealed room somewhere on the Kibalchich, daunted by the pressures put upon him—by whatever had destroyed Rurik. He could never keep up with the Commander’s pace. She had checked Cagarin’s cabin and found no sign. That proved nothing, since it was still a big station, but Anna suspected the Americans would have found another body by now.

The room was icy around her. Though not part of the cold storage unit, the outer chamber was kept just above freezing. She felt gooseflesh up and down her arms, shivers along her back; the sweater she wore did not ward off the chill. She should have brought a container of strong hot tea with her.

She hadn’t been warm since she had awakened nearly two weeks before.

Alone in the lower decks, Anna sealed the doors to the frigid chamber, insisting on her privacy. There could be no telling when one of the Americans might come barging in, nosing around. Though it was none of their business, they seemed perfectly happy to grab whatever interested them. But Anna wanted to be left alone right now. She demanded it. She had every right.

This was much too personal a matter.

Stepan’s body lay spread out on a portable metal table she had hauled down into the storage room. It had taken a day for the body to unthaw enough for her to straighten his limbs, to make sure that the body cavity and organs were soft enough to do a full autopsy.

Ramis Barrera and Dr. Langelier had thrown him into the freezer compartment—another disposable person aboard the Soviet station. Oh, they intended to be careful, they meant well—but they had ruined many things for her.

Anna gazed into Stepan Rurik’s face, his Viking jaw pushed into a peaceful expression. They had closed Rurik’s eyes, straightened his grimace. Part of her felt relief at that, but another part resented all the detail lost. The look on his face and the position of the body could have told her many things about how Rurik had died—whether it had been sudden or with prolonged agony. Perhaps even if it was a disease, or poison, or simply a cardiac arrest. But men like Rurik did not die of heart attacks.

Now, with his body frozen, stacked, and thawed again, tiny details could have been damaged. Anna would have a more difficult time learning why the commander had died.

Rurik. Stepan Rurik.

She stared down at him. Even in death his thin brown hair fell back toward its neatly combed style. The eyes were closed and sunken. The skin had blotched and blackened with the onset of decay.

Anna tried to look around that, holding up a shield of memories instead: seeing his face as he slept peacefully beside her, eyes closed, a smile on his face, content after making love. But it didn’t work. She ached inside. She took a deep breath.

Using surgical scissors, she began to remove his uniform. Rurik’s medals and insignia glinted in the light as she pushed his tunic aside, exposing his sunken, grayish chest.

Anna inspected him externally first, seeing no obvious signs of death, no heavy blows or major wounds. She removed the rest of his garments. He looked unreal to her.