got a power drain going somewhere, one-and-only-one part of this station that’s not dead and it’s got something moving in it that wasn’t here when the station was still active.” Obviously he’d been monitoring the command channel. A minor breach of protocol, but understandable with such a small crew. “Too many variables, sir. We should abort.” Cathcart took a breath in the silence that followed. “We should abort.”
“Abort?” Parker wasn’t angry, but he was getting there. “After a day and a half? With zero data retrieval and only five of twenty-two persons accounted for. Are you nuts?”
Cathcart turned his head towards the fogged window. “Sorry, sir, but this feels wrong. I can’t say it better, but this whole thing gives me the creeps.” He looked Parker in the eye. “I don’t want to know what’s in there.”
Parker was silent for a moment, then “Kestrel.”
“Kestrel, aye.”
“We’re returning with the bodies. We’ll discuss our next step after they’ve been properly interred. Winters, you might dig up the ceremony for the burial-in-space of civilians. We’ll do what we can for them after they’ve been scanned and sampled.”
“Aye. ETA?”
“Call it thirty minutes, plus or minus. We’ve got four bodies to ferry over.” Parker switched back to the EVA channel. “We’ll talk it over in Kestrel.” Clearly he wanted to proceed, but he wouldn’t force Cathcart to. He could push rank only so far and maintain good order and discipline.
“. . . and we commend these bodies to the deep. Amen.” Parker finished saying the prescribed words and launched the probe containing the bodies of Jeffries, Denisovna, Sayyad and Westfall. In a month or so it would fall into this system’s star. He had enough probes to handle all of the bodies not yet recovered. That wasn’t a computation he’d ever thought he’d have to make. A part of him wanted to suggest it as a practical math problem for the third year cadet command class. “How many casualties can you properly dispose of if your inventory of probes is . . . ?” Not a difficult problem, but a sobering one.
Day three, after consultation with Winters and Cathcart, Ensign Parker ordered that until further notice, salvage operations would be limited to the recovery of bodies and retrieval of any artifacts that could be done without accessing station power. The mystery of the power drain was to be held in abeyance. A PSR was set up at the portable reactor on Howard to let the command team monitor the power loss, but given the unstable nature of gravitic reactors, Parker had decided that it was too risky to simply shut off or disconnect their temporary power source. He placed the reactor module off limits as well. Parker wasn’t convinced that there was anything to worry about, but Cathcart’s steadfast refusal to return to the station and his obvious fear of what might be in that chamber moved him to at least defer venturing there.
EVA fell exclusively to Winters and Parker now. Cathcart, humbled by his fear, retreated into the protective shell of protocol and operated from Kestrel’s command station with all the emotive content of a training AI. On their first EVA of the day, Parker and Winters brought back the bodies of N’dele M’bikwe, the Station Administrator and Crewman Wei from BQ3a and BQ3b, Crewman Lafferty from BQ2b, and Gwen Baker, the Physical Chemist, from BQ4b. The apparent randomness of the quarters selected for search was the result of simply sticking with those hatches where the opening latches were still functional. A quarter hour trip to Howard, an hour finding and shrouding the bodies and gathering personal effects, half an hour to return, forty-five minutes to scan and sample the bodies, another twenty-five to prep them and get them into a probe and twenty minutes for the burial ceremony. Factor in donning and doffing the EVA gear and half the shift was gone. The EVA team had cleared three other BQ units but found no additional bodies, only knick-knacks that their survivors would probably appreciate having. Natalia’s quarters, BQ6a, was still fused shut. They’d clear it out with the next trip.
Cathcart had made lunch. Hot dogs, again. If Parker couldn’t convince Dr. Volonskaya to try her hand at cooking, they were going to be eating a lot of flattened, burned hot dogs. Between bites they discussed the day so far.
“. . . forty-three percent now, but I’ll be damned if I know why,” Cathcart was commenting on the power loss. “IR is constant from the reactor module. It seems to be leaking a bit of heat. Temperature of the command and control cabling visible between modules is up, but the rest of the station is still cold.”
“Ensign Parker, I have a request,” this from Natalia.
“Yes, ma’am.” All eyes were on her. She’d been virtually mute thus far in the lunch meeting.
“I would like to go to Howard. Will you permit me?”
Parker looked at Winters, a cue. Winters spoke, “Ma’am, you’re a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Science and as such at least nominally a member of His Imperial Majesty’s Privy Council. That carries a reserve Naval commission with a rank of Captain, junior grade.” He raised a non-existent eyebrow. “It isn’t for us to permit or forbid you anything.”
Parker spoke, “May I ask why? What do you hope to accomplish?”
“What, exactly, are your orders regarding Howard, Ensign Parker?”
“We do not have orders,” he replied. “TSFHQ was very careful only to make suggestions.”
“Then I may tell you.” She took a sip of cold tea. “There is data on Howard that I do not wish to be seen by anyone.”
“Does that include us?” Cathcart chimed in. “Is this an ‘I’d tell you, but then I’d have to kill you’ scenario?” He was only half joking.
“Nyet.” She shook her head and smiled. “No offense intended, but I do not think you would understand the data. I worry more about those who would.”
“You’re doing research into higher order Euclidean geometry, n-space, right?” Winters. It wasn’t really a question. “Are you suggesting that discovering what a triangle looks like mapped to five spatial dimensions is dangerous?”
“Ensign Winters,” her voice was cool again, formal, “do you recall my telling you that axial rotation was a low energy function?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What happened to Howard?” She spoke as if she expected an answer, but none was forthcoming. “Exactly. Do you want to try to solve this same mystery in the Capital? Or your hometown?” She continued without giving them time to answer. “There is a very good reason we do our research out here in the middle of nowhere.” She let this sink in a moment. “Until I know what happened to Howard, to my friends, I wish to retain control over all information retrieved from the station. Does protocol allow me to phrase that as an order?” With this last question, she looked at Parker.
“I’ll log it as such, ma’am,” he replied. “Do you wish to go through the artifacts we’ve retrieved so far? If I’d known you felt this way, I’d have cleared them through you first.”
“Da, and I did not feel this way until this morning. I only made up my mind a few minutes ago. Your culture, military culture, values decisiveness. That is new to me. I apologize if it causes extra work.” The cool was gone from her voice.
“Cathcart, you can fetch what we’ve brought over so far and perhaps you and the Doc can go through it this afternoon while Winters and I fetch back another . . . load.” That last word felt irreverent of the dead involved. He hoped Natalia’s knowledge of the language wasn’t developed enough to take note of it. “We can include you on EVA missions beginning tomorrow morning, if you like.”
Natalia made two EVAs in the following three days, both during morning excursions. On the first one she’d retrieved the holographic memory array from the command module. Parker had been concerned that they wouldn’t be able to dump it, but she’d assured him that she could interface with it easily enough. On the second she’d assisted in the recovery of Mikhail Telyatitski and his wife Elena Telyatitskaya from MQ2b. On that EVA she’d finished helping shroud the bodies but had excused herself and returned to Kestrel early, clearly shaken.
“Elena was my sister in all but blo
od,” she’d told Cathcart when he asked about her early return. “I am unused to death, especially among those I love.”
By day seven they’d cleared all the bodies and artifacts accessible to them through the hatch into the mudroom. Passage through the reactor module was still out of the question and the hatches between the command and galley modules had proven too stubborn to be opened. A plasma torch would be needed to cut through those hatches. Winters said he knew that particular type of galley module, a SpaHabSys G-8, and he claimed that the scissoring tool wouldn’t work on the hatches to its hydroponics bays. Parker didn’t see any reason to doubt him. Natalia said she didn’t recall, not having had any reason to take special note of them. The power drain from their temporary reactor had stabilized at sixty-two percent of output capacity. Ensign Parker declared a one-day EVA holiday to regroup and plan their next steps. The discussion started over breakfast.
“Thank you for the breakfast burritos, Ensign Parker,” Natalia said. “I do not think I could have handled another squashed hot dog breakfast. Sorry, Cathcart.” She gave him a sad face.
“No offense taken. If I were better at cooking, I’d be asked to do it more often.” Parker looked up sharply at the comment. He’d never suspected Cathcart might be hiding galley talent. He
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