Lifeline

Anna forced herself to put on her professional mask. She muttered to herself, imagining that she was talking into a recording device to transcribe the autopsy. But she had purposely shut off all recorders so that the Americans could not steal this information as well.

“Still no sign of external injury.” She took one more deep breath and bent closer to the body. Using her fingertips to mark her passage, she inspected his skin, combing for tiny injuries, marks of injections. The skin felt cold and rubbery, like a chilled chemical protective glove. It made her feel detached, cut off.

“After close inspection of the skin, I have still found no indications of injury.”

Here, Anna Tripolk ran into a barrier she was not yet willing to cross: she would have to draw coagulated blood; would have to run tests on his remaining body fluids. She would have to cut him open, rummage around his insides, and pluck into his most private corners.

She pictured Stepan holding her, whispering to her. Or standing there with all his silent strength. I do what I must, and you do what you must.

She couldn’t do that to him. She stiffened, telling herself to don the professional façade again, to fit the mold of objective doctor and do what was expected of her. It just wasn’t fair.

Life isn’t fair. As Anna hesitated, she remembered how the crew of American engineers had come over, the second wave from Orbitech 1 to pry into her sleepfreeze process, to dismantle her transparent chambers. Even though she had refused to cooperate, told them they could not have the Soviet technology, they had taken it anyway. They didn’t care about what was right or honest. They had no qualms. They had stolen three of her sleepfreeze chambers and shipped them over to Brahms.

The rage this evoked made Anna Tripolk forget all thoughts of Rurik for a moment. Finally, she wrapped his discolored, naked body in a white sheet and wheeled him back into the frozen storage compartment. Steam wafted in the air, swirling with the disturbed air currents.

She had one other thing to do, in Rurik’s private quarters. He must have left a personal log somewhere. Anna had looked at the official Kibalchich logs in the command center, as had Ramis Barrera and Karen Langelier, and no doubt all those other engineers from Orbitech 1. But there had been nothing out of the ordinary—the log entries had simply stopped.

She suspected that Rurik might have kept a diary of his own, though she had failed to find it when she had first combed his quarters. With the questions she had, finding his recorded voice was more important than performing an autopsy.

Anna Tripolk sterilized her hands in the sonic dryers, then unsealed the hatches from the storage chamber and went to search her lover’s former quarters.

She managed to avoid bumping into anyone on her way there. That wasn’t too difficult, since the Kibalchich had so few inhabitants. But when she entered Rurik’s private chambers, she closed the door behind her and engaged the locking mechanism.

“Lights, half illumination please.”

The glow rose in the chamber. She looked around at the silken purple coverings on the bed unit, neatly made. To the end, Rurik had maintained careful order, even in his own quarters. A few papers lay stacked on his desk. The terminal screen was folded into the desk and shut off. It was just the way she had left it, days ago after awakening, when she had had to satisfy herself that this wasn’t all some sort of trick, a scheme, mind games the Americans might be playing on her.

She paused at a sudden thought: it seemed as if Stepan had known he would not return to this room again.

On the holocube on his desk was a picture of Anna Tri-polk’s head. It was a bad image, lifted from her personnel file—her heart ached to think that he had used it to keep his memories going.

She wondered if Rurik had come down into the infirmary and stared at her through the transparent case of the sleepfreeze chamber. Had he touched the glass? Had he talked to her in his loneliest times? What had he been thinking about?

As she studied the holocube, she noticed that her image looked distorted. Frowning, she inspected it closer. Her face looked odd, bloated. There was something just inside the image that caused her features to bulge out. Switching off the holocube, she watched a d-cube appear in the center of the device. He had disguised it with her image. Was it meant for her—something only she would discover right away?

Anna didn’t think Stepan would hide his personal log, but maybe he would make it more likely for her to find it before anyone else. What had he been thinking about?