by Ben Bova
“Tem? You still there?” He ignored Jerzy’s question, and had no intention of answering; he didn’t even open his eyes. There was a soft knocking, then, “Templeton?”
On the other side of the door Rice could hear voices softly, hurriedly discussing something, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. The scratching sound had finally stopped.
A faint, steady beeping from Main Control startled him and he sat forward abruptly, blinking his eyes at the stream of light from the opposite doorway. His mouth was dry, his joints stiff, and he realized that he must have dozed off. He rubbed at his face with his hands, balling his fists into tired, burning eyes, then suddenly panicked over the missing needle gun. His heart racing, he searched the floor on all fours, finding it easily enough where it had fallen from his lap and had been inadvertently knocked behind him against the door as he slept. He thumbed the test button on the side and checked the readout. He must not have slept long, he reasoned, setting the power switch on standby; it still held nearly a full charge. The microflechettes were another matter, however. Although the gun still had enough narcozine for a full magazine of projectiles, the readout showed only five flechettes left. Even if he was a crack marksman instead of an astrophysicist, he couldn’t hope to get all six of his tormentors.
Maybe he’d get lucky and could overpower one of them and get a real gun. Maybe the Imperial soldiers locked up down in 3-A could take charge of the situation. Or maybe help would get here before he needed to use it at all. Then again, maybe he’d only need the use of one flechette, fully charged with narcozine—on himself.
He leaned an ear against the door and listened carefully. Nothing. There wasn’t even any light coming beneath the door from the hallway. He rose slowly, relieving the pressure on his aching knees, and slipped the gun into one of the pockets of his lab coat as he headed for Main Control. Rice stepped almost casually over Boscawen’s lifeless body, not allowing himself to think about how accustomed he’d already become to seeing it lying there. He couldn’t afford the luxury of feeling grief for his friend and coworker. Maybe later, if he was very, very lucky; but not just now.
There was another body here, that of Julie Le Châtelier, but she had been the first to die when things had started going crazy, and her death had been treated with more respect. He and Boscawen had moved her body to one side of the room and wrapped it as best they could in lab coats. The bundle itself was featureless—unrecognizable as a human body—and, but for a large dark stain where her chest would be, Rice would not have been able to distinguish head from foot. He spared only a moment’s thought for her, wondering briefly what her face looked like. His brow furrowed deeply, and he somehow felt worse about not being able to remember the face of someone who had once been his lover than he did about the fact that she had been lying on the floor, dead, for at least twelve hours now.
The steady beeping that had awakened him several minutes earlier had continued unnoticed throughout his reverie, but finally drew his attention back to the task at hand even though his eyes remained fixed on the wrapped bundle.
“System,” he said softly, and was surprised at the halting scratchiness he heard in his voice. He turned abruptly away from Julie’s body, his eyes clenched tightly. “System,” he said again, a bit louder this time.
There were several chirping sounds from the room system as the computer links searched the emergency coding he and Boscawen had recently installed. “System ready, Tem,” it finally responded once it had verified his identity. The voice and speaking patterns were Julie’s. She had reprogrammed the system with her own voice as a joke more than a year earlier, but no one had gotten around to changing it back. Everyone had grown accustomed to it over the months, but now Rice regretted not having ordered it changed.
“Bring lights to full.” The room brightened considerably, and a quick glance into the anteroom showed that it wouldn’t be necessary to repair the lighting there. “Has any contact been made yet with the outside?”
“I’m sorry, but those circuits are no longer available, and it’s been impossible to shunt into any of the other communication lines. I’ve created a priority subroutine, however, and have dedicated it to the task of rerouting as many combinations as possible.”
Good work, Rice thought, smiling, almost as though it were Julie herself who had come up with the idea. He caught himself, burying the painful notion deep inside him, and added silently, Think, think, think! I can’t let any of this get to me. Not yet. I’ve got too much to do! “Are the circuits for incoming transmissions still accessible?”
“Yes.”
“Have any transmissions been received?”
“No.”
“Is it possible that transmissions have been received through equipment elsewhere in the sunstation, but have been intercepted without your being able to detect them?”
A pause, a tiny electronic chirp as she—it—checked, then, “No. Only the regular station support links are operating.”
Although the operation of the sunstation was autonomous, a two-way support link with the Imperial computer net on Luna functioned around the clock. The link constantly supplied updated software, information, even news and entertainment programming directly into the station system. Ironically, it was this very link to Luna—which was apparently working normally—that undoubtedly kept Imperial officials in the dark about the mutiny underway at the station. Since the communications channels were the only thing that could give away the current situation here, and those were being carefully controlled by the group on the other side of the door, there was no hope of calling for help.
Actually, there was one other way to contact the outside. Rice looked around the room, considering yet again the alternative of sabotaging some vital system in Main Control. The break in the information stream on the real-time links would certainly arouse someone’s curiosity. But every system now operating here was vital to the project, and could set things back an undetermined amount of months, even years; worse, shutting something down could pose a danger to personnel aboard the orbitals. Rice wasn’t quite desperate enough yet to risk that course of action. Besides, he realized gloomily, any inquiry from the outside might be intercepted and explained away by the mutineers.
“Thank you,” Rice said, and heard the despair in his own voice. “In the meantime, keep trying to shunt into one of the communication links.”
Chirp. “All right, Tem. Anything else for now?”
“Yeah.” There was another doorway, this one directly opposite the one he’d used to enter Main Control. He touched the opening plate in the wall next to the doorframe, nodding in satisfaction when nothing happened. “Please unlock the access hallway from Main Control to building five.”
“Ready.”
There was no sound, no click or buzz or anything that might indicate that the circuitry preventing the door from opening had changed in any way. His voice patterns already verified, there hadn’t even been a pause. Rice touched the opening plate again, and this time the door slid obediently aside to reveal a cold, dimly lit hallway about twenty meters long. The narrow corridor, one of several located throughout the facility, led to building five, the support section of the sunstation. Supplies, storage, cryosleep chamber, vehicle repair and other infrequently used services were housed here, and support systems were purposely kept either at low levels or on standby.
As Rice entered the hallway, he shivered in the chilly air but didn’t bother to have the system reset the levels—he wouldn’t be here that long. But for a lighting strip running the length of the ceiling, and communications terminals set into the wall at either end, the hallway was featureless and lent a frigidity somehow more keenly felt than the temperature of the air itself. Rice approached the opposite doorway and looked at the small screen on the terminal. On it was the floor plan of building five, showing every room, corridor and facility it contained. The portions of building five located on the side farthest from his current location—the garage and vehicle-rep
air facility, equipment storage, even-numbered emergency evac pods, and associated corridors—glowed red. Those areas were accessible from the engineering building connected by a similar hallway on the other side, and the mutineers had managed to breach them. They had not, however, gotten as far as Rice had feared. His lockouts of the door circuitry still mostly intact, all other areas in five—including cryosleep—were outlined in a soft yellow light.
“Please update display of building-five security; indicate all current activity.” The floor plan remained as before, but one area—the corridor doorway that connected vehicle repair with one of the temporary cargo holds—blinked rapidly. Rice allowed himself a chuckle when he saw it, knowing they would have little luck with that door above all the others: Even if they were successful in breaking the circuitry, they’d find the door immobilized in a decidedly low-tech fashion. He’d merely taken a motorized lifter from the facility, drove it into the hallway and, after ordering the circuitry changed, reversed the lifter and rammed it into the door itself from his side. They would have an easier time cutting through a walls
Satisfied that most of five was, and would remain, secure, he traced a route on the floor plan with a fingertip, watching as a soft dotted line appeared along the way. “Open access to indicated areas, please, and activate all terminals along the indicated route. Leave all others mute. Reseal each access doorway on my voice as I pass through.”
“Ready.”
Rice touched the opening plate on the wall, and the thick door slid noiselessly aside. He moved quickly, touching the plate on the opposite side with a barked “Secure this!” as he did. He walked to the first side corridor and turned, pressing the plate at the door he found there, going through, and vocally resecuring the lock just as he had done before. There were directional signs and arrows on the walls of every corridor in building five, intended for station personnel who rarely visited this section, but Rice ignored them as he strode purposefully along the path he had traced on the screen until arriving at his destination.
The door had been crudely stenciled with the words CRYOSLEEP-TANKS AND RECOVERY in black lettering that appeared slightly angled and off-center. Rice had often wondered whether the construction tech responsible for the sloppy paint job had been in a hurry to complete his task, or simply hadn’t cared how the finished job would look in what was intended to be little more than a warehouse. The door slid aside at Rice’s touch, and he entered.
After resealing the entrance, he immediately noticed the sound of his own labored breathing in the quiet room and realized that he must have run the entire distance from the main control room. Leaning his back against the secured door, he took a moment to catch his breath and inspect the spartan room, checking for any signs of entry.
The room bore little resemblance to most cryosleep facilities; there were no comfortable beds, there was no superfluous furniture, and there was nothing that lent the welcoming feeling of warmth so important to most people coming out of hibernation. There were, in fact, only two pieces of furniture—a divided cabinet he knew contained basic clothing and supplies on one side and a small refrigerator on the other; and a simple chair. The room was exactly as it appeared: just another featureless multipurpose compartment, like so many at the sunstation and similar installations, that had been adapted for other use.
There were a dozen nearly identical medical terminals evenly spaced on the far wall. Below each were the necessary jacks and dangling life-support connectors for cryosleep tanks, but there were only two tanks in the room. One of them—dark, and obviously not in use for some time, judging from the thin coating of dust on the once-polished plastiglass cover—was the tank in which Rice himself had arrived at the station nearly ten years earlier. The room’s single chair had been placed next to the other. The panel on the wall above was different from the others, and sported additional readouts not featured on the rest. It glowed in a multicolored display of biomedical readouts that Rice studied briefly, nodding when he saw that everything was normal in the tank below.
Rice approached the tank wearily and leaned against the plastiglass covering, letting out a long, exhausted sigh as an icy chill seemed to creep into the palms of his hands from the transparent cryotank cover.
Oidar seemed to be all right; at least, he looked the same as he had the last time he’d checked. When a human went into the tank, it was difficult to tell from appearance alone whether the person was in a decades-long period of deep hibernation, or merely taking a nap. Skin tone, hair, coloring—everything looked normal. But the Sarpan had never attempted to extend their short life spans beyond their normal ten or twelve years, even during long space voyages. The Sarpan Empire, unlike the Hundred Worlds, had been forged over generations. A Sarpan citizen—whether scientist or general, colonist or historian—embarking on a journey to a new world knew that only a descendant could carry on his work upon arrival. Oidar had been the first of his race to attempt cryosleep.
Looking at the alien now, frowning deeply at the dry, leathery skin that made his friend look more like a mummy than a living being, Rice was forced to carefully examine the readouts to assure himself yet again that the wake-up procedure was still going correctly. He compared what he saw in the readouts to his wristwatch, then tapped the watch’s face to set the countdown timer. A human could be brought out of cryosleep in a matter of hours, but the alien’s delicate physiology required a days-long process that was more experiment than anything else. There was no guarantee, for that matter, that it would even work. He glanced at his watch again; in a little under fourteen hours, he’d find out.
Maybe it would be better if I didn’t do it, he thought morosely. Maybe you and I and everyone else would all be better off. The readouts blurred softly as he stared, and he rubbed at his eyes and face, trying to force away the fatigue he felt. The palms of his hands felt cold against his cheeks.
“I’m sorry, friend,” he said to the silent, corpselike alien. “I hope we’re doing the right thing.”
He allowed one last look at Oidar, then crossed to the cabinet and examined the contents, verifying that everything was as he and Boscawen had left it. The refrigerator was still stocked with everything he’d need when Oidar awoke, dehydrated and thirsty after his long sleep. There was also food and several packets of ordinary fruit drink, and he tore one open, sipping absently of the beverage as he checked the supply side of the cabinet.
The top shelf was lined with four-liter jugs of water, and a quick inspection showed that the seal on each was still green, the water untampered with. The tiny electric water pump and sprayer were there, along with a number of Oidar’s personal items. Specialized clothing—a sterile wet suit and bubble helmet for Oidar to wear when he awoke—remained tightly sealed in plastic on the bottom shelf. It would be especially important now since the section containing the cabin reserved for the alien was under control of the others and no longer accessible. Without that cabin, and the Sarpan-normal environment it would maintain, the wet suit was all that would keep Oidar alive until they could get help from Luna.
Rice hefted two of the jugs down and set them near the tank, then retrieved the pump and sprayer. It took a few minutes to hook the pump to one of the jugs and test the sprayer mechanism, but Rice was glad he did. The water was too cold for Oidar, and he set the pump control to bring the water up to the proper temperature and carefully coiled the sprayer around the top of the jug. It wasn’t until then that he realized that he, too, was cold.
“System, reset room environmental levels to normal.” There was a soft chirp in way of response, and Rice felt the slightest movement in the air.
In the hour that followed, Rice removed the rest of the water jugs and anything else he thought he’d need from the cabinet and stacked it against the wall near the tank.
That’s it, he thought, and, realizing there was nothing left for him to do now except wait, he felt the tiredness he’d been fighting for so long pour over him. Yawning deeply, he decided there was no reason wh
y he shouldn’t give in to the feeling—in not too many hours, he reasoned, he would need all the strength he could get.
There were shrink-wrapped sandwiches and fruit bars in the refrigerator, and Rice took one of each, washing both down with another packet of juice. Suddenly ravenous, he finished the food in only a few bites and wasted little time in helping himself to more.
His thirst quenched and hunger gone, Rice was pleased to notice that he now felt almost comfortably tired instead of exhausted. He accessed the comm terminal by the door and requested an updated security check for building five. He noted his watch and the biomedical readouts again and, reassured that there was no danger for the present, settled himself as comfortably as he could on the floor near the cryotank. The room was warm now, and he removed his coat. Placing the needle gun within easy reach, he balled the coat into a pillow and curled up on the floor with his back against the tank.
There was a gentle humming sensation that he could feel through his shirt and that relaxed him almost involuntarily, and he allowed his mind to drift for the first time since the shooting began.
Nine more hours, Oidar. Hang on for just nine more hours.
Sleep overtook him before he could reflect on just what he was going to do after that.
9
AIRBORNE
The hike had been both long and hard, and Gareth Anmoore was grateful for the pleasant weather. The earlymorning sky was a deep blue above the trees, and the rays of the warm sun were tempered by a dry, cool wind that came up from the south and wafted through the forest. They were nearing the end of a long uphill climb and had stopped in a small clearing for a short break before reaching the top. There was plenty of time to rest before peering out over the river valley that he already knew, from the many orbital scans and recordings from the previous scouting missions, would be there.
