by Ben Bova
“Why, Lance, I would have been interested in a big hunk like you anyway. Learning about Kurt just cleared the field.”
“So what did you want with him the other day?”
“I wanted nothing with him. He keeps trying to explain himself to me, hoping I’ll reconsider. But I won’t. He’s gone, good-bye, for me.” Carla Sue smiled sweetly. “Is that why you’ve been avoiding me?”
Lance stared at the long legs, the nipples suddenly upright beneath the T-shirt, the glistening lips. Base desire and righteous anger battled within him as he weighed her explanation. She was talking sweet to him, saying what she thought he wanted to hear. There was no private detective. There were no unsavory things in Jaeckle’s past. They were face to face in the very room where they had made love, and she still couldn’t tell him the truth.
He forced a smile as sweet as hers.
“Yes,” he said, opening his arms.
She flew to him. They kissed long and deep. He locked his ankles behind her knees. She worked the Velcro of his shirt. He pressed his cock against her pelvis. She moaned. He caressed her neck as her tongue probed his ear. Her breath was hot.
He jammed his thumbs into her throat, choking off her scream.
They tumbled around the blister, their backs scraping the door, their elbows butting the dome. She kicked her feet and pounded his sides with her fists. But his thumbs dug into the ribbing of her trachea and his mouth sucked out her last puff of breath.
He slammed her head against the bulkhead for good measure. “Lying bitch!”
Carla Sue’s eyes were wide open. Her perfect lips formed a perfect, soundless O. Two splotches of angry red gathered where his thumbs had closed off her windpipe.
Lance looped one of her arms through a handhold so she would not float around the blister. He peeked out the door. No one was in the tunnel. He slipped out and cracked the access door. The Mars module was empty. A supply canister protruded from a cubbyhole beneath a nearby workstation. It was empty except for the inflatable bladders used to cushion its contents during lift-off. He deflated the bladders and guided the canister into the blister.
Carla Sue’s T-shirt had floated up to her shoulders. Lance folded her legs, pressed her thighs against her breasts, then pulled the T-shirt over her knees to lock her in fetal position. As he stuffed her into the canister, her neck bent at an impossible angle. He was overwhelmed by a momentary sense of deja vu, then he shook his head and closed the latch.
He never had murdered anyone before. At least, he didn’t think he had.
At 0800 hours the next morning, Dan was in his office talking to Tom Henderson over a secured comin link.
“As normal as can be expected,” he said in answer to Henderson’s opening and most obvious question. “How about with you?”
“Been fielding a slew of phone calls from CNN,” said Henderson. “In particular from a guy named Ed Yablon. He’s Weiss’s bureau chief.”
“I’m sure you can handle it,” said Dan. “How’s Constellation coming?”
“On the pad at Kennedy. Still will take two, maybe three days before she’s cleared for launch. One good break, the weather looks like it will cooperate.”
Thank heaven for small favors, thought Dan.
“All the personal communications for the Trikon people are piling up here,” Henderson said. “My people think you ought to let the incoming messages through.”
Dan shook his head. “If I do then they’ll start pressuring to send down their replies. No deal.”
“Some stuff for your crew members, too. Including the medical officer.”
Hesitating a moment, Dan grudgingly answered, “Okay, I guess you can send that through. Nothing else, though.”
“Okay.”
Before either Dan or Henderson could say another word, an alarm buzzer sounded in the command module.
“—the hell is that?” said Henderson.
Dan did not answer. He flew into the command and control center. A warning light on the life-support instrument panel flashed yellow, indicating that the oxygen supply in the atmospheric mix was nearing a dangerously low level. Dan tapped the blinking button and the angry buzz of the alarm switched off. But the yellow light still flashed balefully.
“Freddy!” he shouted.
No one answered.
Dan launched himself to the infirmary and banged on Lorraine’s door. She had a European tech inside with her; they both looked more curious than apprehensive.
“Was that an alarm we heard?” she asked, with a slightly puzzled smile.
“You seen Freddy anywhere?”
Lorraine’s smile evaporated. “No. Why?”
“What about Lance or Stanley?”
“Haven’t seen them either.”
“Thanks. No big deal. Sorry.”
Dan sailed back to his office, where Henderson’s image waited on the screen.
“Minor problem, Tom. A crewman forgot to replace an oxygen cylinder. I’ll do it myself. You have anything else?”
“Not now. If I do, I’ll holler.”
“Rog,” said Dan as he cut the comm link.
He went directly to the logistics module without searching for any of his crewman. It was unlike Freddy to ignore an order, especially one so vital to the station’s life support. But then again, the conditions on the station had been abnormal. Anything could get lost in the shuffle. I’ve got to get this tin can running efficiently again, Dan growled to himself.
He located the nearly depleted oxygen cylinder and quickly replaced it with a fresh one. As he was about to exit the module, he noticed a science-supply canister attached to a bulkhead in a position reserved for waste receptacles. Stencil markings on the canister identified it as belonging to the Mars Project.
“Goddamn Martians act like they own the place,” muttered Dan. He detached the canister and shoved it gently in the direction of its proper storage area. The canister wobbled slightly and struck a dry-goods cylinder with a loud thud. Dan instantly realized the canister held something far more massive than usual.
He opened the lid. Carla Sue Gamble stared back at him.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered. “Jesus H. Christ and a half.”
They were in the deepest recess of the logistics module, well hidden from anyone who happened to float past the hatch. Dan had waited until after Lorraine completed her therapy session with the European tech before asking her to accompany him. He did not want to arouse suspicion.
“Asphyxiation. Eight, maybe ten hours ago,” said Lorraine, her voice dropping in response to Dan’s urgent gestures. “I’ll get another body bag.”
“Not yet,” whispered Dan. “We’re going to leave her right here.”
Lorraine held her hands palm up as if asking why.
“I know I didn’t kill her and I’m pretty sure you didn’t either. After that, I’m not certain about anyone. Every innocent person on this station thinks we have a killer locked away at the observatory. If they learn otherwise, we’ll have a real panic on our hands. And the shuttle is still at least two days away.”
“But someone will notice she’s missing.”
“We’ll deal with that problem when it comes up. Help me with this.”
They closed Carla Sue in the canister.
“Lorraine, can you take over for me for a couple of hours?”
“Me?”
Nodding, “Stanley’s on watch at the command module. If you have any problems, he can help. I don’t know where the hell Freddy Aviles or Lance Muncie have gotten to.”
She saw the anxiety on his face, heard it in his voice. “Sure, Dan. But where will you be?”
“I want to visit O’Donnell. Maybe I was wrong about him.”
In the main airlock. Dan sucked oxygen from a mask as he worked himself into an EMU. Prebreathe was a pain in the ass. The pure oxygen was so dry it felt like sandpaper rasping his sinuses. And it was boring. He usually fumed about NASA, ESA, and Trikon’s joint inability to fashion a space suit pressurized to one atm
osphere, but this time he actually welcomed the forced inactivity. At least he wouldn’t discover any more dead bodies.
His thoughts turned to O’Donnell. What did he expect to accomplish by traveling to the observatory? Would O’Donnell have any answers, any clues about what the hell was happening on Trikon Station? Did he expect to return O’Donnell to the station? And if so, as what? An advisor? An ally? An instant source of panic?
Dan snapped his helmet into place and called Lorraine over channel D, the secured comm link he had designated for their chatter.
“I’m all gassed up and ready for egress,” he said. “Any of my crew show themselves?”
“Just Stanley,” said Lorraine, her usually husky voice sounding thin over the tiny speaker. “I haven’t seen Lance or Freddy.”
“Any other problems?”
“Not a one. No one’s asked about Carla Sue yet.”
“I won’t be gone long. Out.”
“Take care,” she replied before he cut the link.
Outside the airlock, Dan backed himself into an MMU and ran a quick check of its propulsion and guidance systems. Finding everything in proper order, he undocked and jetted off on a path that looped around the raft of modules at a safe distance. The brilliant wash of sunlight and earthglow exhilarated him, and he found himself thinking not of Weiss or O’Donnell or Carla Sue but of Lorraine. For reasons he could not fully understand, he sensed that their relationship was about to change. Everything that had happened before—the early days of their stint on the station, the blood-pressure testing, her fling with Kurt Jaeckle—slowly diminished into irrelevance. He did not know exactly what lay ahead for them, but he felt certain that a new relationship between them was beginning. It almost made him smile.
The sight of the observatory growing smoothly beyond his visor returned Dan to the problems at hand. He nudged the translation control, brought the MMU to a stop less than a meter from the airlock, and docked to a fitting next to the airlock entry hatch. After some trouble disengaging himself, he tethered the MMU to the docking port and entered the observatory. As the airlock slowly repressurized, Dan stared down through the mesh-covered porthole. The raft of modules—so massive and labyrinthine when viewed up close—seemed like insignificant Tinkertoys against the luminescent Earth.
After the pressure equalized, Dan removed his helmet and pulled himself through the hatch into the observatory. O’Donnell floated near the apex of the conical interior. He obviously realized he had a visitor, but he kept his eye nestled against the lens of an optical telescope. His hair, which normally gave a slicked-back appearance when restrained by a net, floated out in a nest of spikes. His free hand twirled his glasses by the eyepiece.
“You ever see any of this stuff?” he said without taking his eye off the telescope. “Makes you appreciate how much our atmosphere distorts light rays.”
“Carla Sue Gamble has been murdered,” said Dan.
O’Donnell turned slowly, deliberately, toward him. “That’s funny, I don’t remember killing her.”
“You didn’t.”
“Whew, what a relief.” O’Donnell fixed his eye back on the telescope. “You have any idea where Neptune is? Been looking for that bastard for hours.”
Dan braced himself, then wrenched O’Donnell away from the telescope.
“Look, Hugh, I didn’t come here to bullshit about the sky. I want some answers. Now what in the good Christ is happening on my space station?”
“I fucked up,” O’Donnell said with sadness. “No, to be more precise, someone fucked me up.”
“That’s what you were trying to tell me back in the rumpus room?”
“I did a lot of drugs in my day, but I never fooled around with fentanyl. Too strong. No margin for error. People die doing that shit,” said O’Donnell. “It was in my toothpaste. Somehow. I remember it tasted funny. You can check it. There’s a trace left.”
“I will,” said Dan, knowing that the investigators would test it Earthside. “But who? Why?”
“Who could be anyone. Anybody on the station is capable of synthesizing fentanyl, except maybe you and your crew. And why? Well, there’s a damn good reason.”
“Such as?”
O’Donnell swam for the telescope, but Dan grabbed his shoulder. O’Donnell stared at him for a full minute. Then he told him.
He started with the legal assassination of his company, Agritech, Inc. His name was Jack O’Neill then, and he had already long been using drugs— principally cocaine and amphetamines—as a way of coping with his myriad personal and legal problems. But the injunction that the Foundation for Assessing Technology had won against his company accelerated his downward spiral into a plummeting nosedive. One night, after eluding a repo man who had come to claim his BMW, he tooled the barrios of East L.A. looking for a bag of blow. He scored five minutes before being arrested in a police sweep.
He spent a night and a day in an open-air holding pen in the Los Angeles Coliseum. His polo shirt and penny loafers marked him as an outsider, maybe a police informer, and gangs of suspicious, angry detainees beat the shit out of him repeatedly. As dusk reddened the sky, two officers dragged him to a makeshift courtroom for arraignment. He was battered, bloody, and mumbling incoherently. A man in a blue suit, whom he took to be his court-appointed lawyer, spoke to the judge. The next thing he knew, he was seated with the man in the back of a gray car that hurtled away from the Coliseum.
The man identified himself only as Welch and stated he had posted bond for him. If O’Neill played ball, his arrest would be expunged and he would be given a new life and a new identity. If he didn’t play ball, he could spend the next ten years as a homicidal weight lifter’s jailhouse wife.
So he became Hugh O’Donnell. Welch supervised his therapy in a thousand-dollar-a-day substance abuse clinic and monitored his aftercare. One year later he was clean, and Welch installed him in a lab in the Tehachapi Mountains. The lab was supposedly owned by a company named Simi Bioengineering, but O’Donnell was convinced it was a government installation. He worked on several projects, each involving the removal of enzymes from various plants by genetic means. He suspected that these projects were mere dry runs for something much more important.
He stayed at the lab for two years, leaving only for meetings of a motorcycle club for recovered addicts he had cofounded. At the beginning of July he was informed by Welch that he had been selected to conduct research on a top-secret project so potentially dangerous that it could only be performed on Trikon Station.
“You know the rest,” O’Donnell concluded.
Dan was reluctant to agree. The story may have jibed with information he and Lorraine had pieced together. But he still heard her cautionary words: Addicts are con artists. Even if they clean up, those other habits die hard. Dan wanted to question him, but before he had a chance a call came over the observatory intercom.
“Hi, Dan. Oh, I can’t believe I’m saying this.” The voice belonged to Lorraine. She sounded giddy, like a giggling little girl. “I want you to know that I really do care about you. Maybe it’s because—”
“Lorraine!” shouted Dan.
“—it’s because I can’t see you right now. Sometimes it’s easier—”
He flew to the comm console. “Lorraine, this is Dan. Acknowledge.”
“—to say things over a gadget rather than in person.” Her voice faded.
“What the hell was that all about?” said O’Donnell.
“Lorraine, acknowledge,” Dan repeated. But all he raised was silence. “Damned if I know.”
Dan pulled himself to the airlock and peered through the portholes.
“Crazy broad must have O.D. too,” he said, hoping that explained the message. He moved his head around the porthole, focusing on the silhouette of each of the modules one at a time. Everything appeared normal.
“Aw hell, Dan. There you go selling yourself short. A woman doesn’t need Orbital Dementia to be interested in you. She needs to be totally insane.”
Dan answered him with a grunt as his eyes scanned from The Bakery to Jasmine to ELM.
“Anyway,” said O’Donnell, trying to win back his audience, “I think whoever slipped me the mickied toothpaste knows what he’s doing.”
Dan nodded absently. The Mars module, which jutted out beyond the trailing edge of the diamond as a continuation of the connecting tunnel, seemed to be askew. Dan blinked. The module still seemed bent. Thinking it was an anomalous reflection on the glass, he moved his head. The module was not merely out of line. It was completely broken from its mooring.
“Holy shit!” he said. “The goddamn Mars module just separated from the station.”
“What?” said O’Donnell.
“You heard me. Get your ass suited up. We’ve got to get back there.”
As O’Donnell struggled into the EMU, Dan tried to raise Lorraine on the comm unit. Channel D was silent. He opened all the channels. A synthesized ringing made his flesh crawl: a life-support alarm.
“You and I will talk over channel C,” he said to O’Donnell as he put on his helmet.
O’Donnell grunted. Dan helped him struggle into his suit, the need to hurry fighting against the need to make certain the suit was safely sealed and working properly. There was no need to prebreathe. The pure oxygen of the observatory was the same pressure as the EMUs. And entering the higher pressure of the station itself would pose no danger of embolism.
Dan led the way out the hatch and fit himself into the MMU. “Sit on my lap.” he instructed O’Donnell.
“What lap?” But the space-suited figure backed against Dan, who wrapped his legs around O’Donnell’s waist.
“Lock your arms around my knees,” Dan said.
“Just like biking,” O’Donnell said. “Almost.” His voice in Dan’s earphones sounded full of doubt, if not outright fear.
The station shuddered. Like a giant sail suddenly caught in a crosswind. Like a man startled by danger.
“Did you see that?” Dan heard a voice yell, high-pitched with fear. His own.
“Looked like the whole damned station… shook,” O’Donnell said, hollow-voiced.
