Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  “Active cosmonauts do not get heart attacks,” Yevgeny said stiffly. “We are screened too thoroughly. Not to mention that Nikolay had said nothing about chest pains.”

  “I know.” Donna pushed off from the wall and began to pace. “But not all MIs cause pain. Others begin with vague symptoms like indigestion, easily rationalized or ignored. And no screening is perfect. It’s possible for any of us to have, for example, an asymptomatic, non-obstructing plaque in a coronary artery. Let such an unsuspected plaque rupture ….”

  And presto, Marcus completed, a blocked coronary artery. Cardiac muscle damage. And troponin.

  Yevgeny’s eyes narrowed. “How might we determine whether Nikolay had a heart attack? Not just speculate, but know?”

  “It’d take an autopsy,” Donna said. “Just as it would take an autopsy to establish any of the yet more remote medical possibilities. Pulmonary embolism. Brain aneurysm. A massive stroke. Before either of you gets any bright ideas, I lack the training to do an autopsy, even if we had the proper equipment.”

  “A stroke?” As Marcus’s mind raced, the words just slipped out. Was confusion due to a stroke why Nikolay disabled his camera? The motivation for whatever he’d done to the robot?

  Yevgeny turned toward Marcus. “Why do you ask?”

  “It’s just a scary thought,” Marcus said hastily.

  “No matter,” Yevgeny said. “Once I shuttle Nikolay back to Base Putin, the doctors there will make the determination.”

  “Well …?”

  “What is it?” Marcus prompted Donna.

  She stopped pacing and turned to face him. “Hoping to make sense of this, I contacted the biology team at Base Putin. Yes, over a secure link. Their assignment is to study Goliath, but first and foremost, many of them are physicians. And all are cleared to know what we’re dealing with.”

  “Well?” Yevgeny prompted.

  Again, she hesitated. “They are as unconvinced, Yevgeny, as are you that Nikolay might have had an MI. Oh, they agree an MI would be consistent with my observations. They also suggest that he may have succumbed to an alien contagion. None of us are to leave this area, not even poor Nikolay.” Her tone turned nasal. Mimicking who? “You don’t have a Class Four biosafety lab, now do you?”

  “Do they?” Marcus asked.

  She shook her head. “They’d become almost as cavalier as we about any biological risk. Apart from examining Goliath inside an improvised, supersized glove box, they had taken no special precautions, either. Well, that era has ended. All further work on Goliath is on hold till a Class Four facility is built at Base Putin.”

  “At which point, the doctors will have a look at Nikolay?” Yevgeny asked.

  Donna hesitated.

  “Seriously?” Marcus slugged the nearest wall. They had exposed themselves willingly—but to be treated as guinea pigs still rankled. “The aliens are millions of years dead and gone.”

  She nodded. “And not that anyone I spoke to cared, I’ve seen no sign, in any of our routine blood samples, of infection or immune response.”

  “Unless,” Marcus said, “Nikolay is our first sign.”

  Donna broke a lengthening silence. “I don’t buy it. No one has revived any alien cells, much less seen any interact with terrestrial cultures. If alien viruses or gut bacteria or prions somehow survived for eons within Goliath’s mummy, well, the ‘experts’ have yet to find them. Regardless, we’re locked down here. Quarantined. Officially so.”

  Yevgeny folded his arms across his chest. “There must be an autopsy. If not today, then later. Until that time, we must, we will, preserve the option of a meaningful examination.”

  Marcus thought, and if Brad or Donna were to die so unexpectedly? I’d demand answers, too. “We can preserve the body in the constant cold in the back of the lava tube.”

  But even the idea of needing a morgue made him shiver.

  “The fact of the matter,” Donna said, “is that we’ve been ordered to preserve the body. Soon, too. But cold alone won’t do the job. We’d find ourselves with another mummy, like Goliath, from the vacuum. Unless we seal the body, that is. But his pressure suit was tattered even before I cut him out of it. The body needs to go into a PRE.” Personal rescue enclosure. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “It,” Yevgeny growled, his face flushed. “The body. I cannot be so detached. So clinical. This is Nikolay. This is our colleague, our friend. It’s bad enough that he must be zipped inside a plastic bag like dinner scraps. I will not permit him to be gawked at on our every trip to or from the surface.

  “No. We will make use of one of the chambers behind us, in the vacuum beyond the sealed-off part of the facility. There Nikolay may rest, undisturbed, and with some dignity. Until I can appeal this foolish recommendation, to the director of the FSB if I must. These gutless doctors will be overturned. We will know what happened to Nikolay.”

  * * *

  For the first time in Marcus’s experience, Yevgeny turned out to be wrong.

  Chapter 24

  “I believe that about covers it,” Yevgeny said. Pointedly. Leadingly.

  He was eager to take Ilya aside, to delve into matters best not discussed in front of the Americans. Not that Yevgeny’s reflexive secretiveness had stopped him from pressing Brad about what the two had encountered, however—apparently—unenlightening, in the attempt to reconstruct Nikolay’s final hours ….

  Brad and Ilya had scarcely set foot back inside, people converging as soon as the airlock began to cycle. Their exploration had been radio-silent, the men linked by fiber-optic cable, while everyone else speculated what they might find. Donna and (exhibiting an exasperating lack of discipline) Ekatrina had exploded with questions as soon as the men removed their helmets. Yevgeny and (he noted with interest) Marcus were more deliberate. If Yevgeny had not dropped his hint, he suspected, his American counterpart would soon have done so.

  Ilya’s eyes narrowed at the suggestion. “I think you are right.”

  “Well …,” Brad said.

  “We should let you guys have a bit of downtime,” Marcus injected.

  Yevgeny cleared his throat. “Ilya, Ekatrina, we need to discuss what can be said to our friend’s family about this tragedy.”

  “I know a bit about them,” Ekatrina piped up. “His parents are in Orel. His sisters—”

  “Come to my quarters.” Yevgeny set off, expecting the other two to follow. Ilya did.

  “ … Moved separately, years apart, to Rostov-on-Don.” Even as she prattled on, Ekatrina began walking. Did she suppose such basic information was unknown to the FSB? “I do not believe Kolya is, was, close with his ex-wife, but still, I think, he would want her told.”

  Kolya? Yevgeny thought. He wondered when the two had found the time for bonding—and how he had missed it. In any event, their friendship (or more?) explained Ekatrina’s unexpected knowledge of the deceased’s family. “Hold that thought,” he hissed under his breath.

  She shut up.

  Marcus, meanwhile, had taken hold of Brad’s arm, and was guiding the big man somewhere private. Like Ilya, he had been given no opportunity to take off his pressure suit. Inwardly, Yevgeny shrugged. Why bother de-suiting? They would all be going into vacuum soon enough.

  They reached his quarters. Apart from a sleep platform and the shelf with a few changes of clothing, the room was bare—and that starkness seemed an apt metaphor for the day. He gestured Ilya and Ekatrina inside, shut the door behind himself, and signaled for quiet. A quick sweep with his FSB datasheet for bugs showed the room remained clean. He started the comp playing the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. If a more melancholy piece of music existed, Yevgeny had never heard it. “Now we can talk.”

  “About what we can tell Kolya’s family,” Ekatrina resumed at once, but in Russian. “It seems to me—”

  “Later,” Yevgeny snapped. Biting her
lip, she for once took a hint. “And stick with English, both of you. If anyone should overhear a word or two, let us not sound like we are hiding anything.” And on any wager as to whether Marcus had CIA software for translating Russian, Yevgeny would bet yes, on pain of eating his own helmet. “All right, Ilya. What did you see up there?”

  “What I told you and the Americans.”

  “Tell me again. But first, is it possible that Marcus or Donna left the base while Nikolay was alone outside?” Because Marcus might also have gotten a suggestion from his superiors about convenient accidents ….

  Without hesitation: “No.”

  “I agree,” Ekatrina confirmed unprompted. “I was in or near the control room the entire time. Had the airlock cycled, I would have heard.”

  “Good,” Yevgeny said. “So, Ilya, review what you and Brad did.”

  With a weary shrug, the physicist proceeded. “We hiked to where Nikolay had said he next planned to survey. Out toward where you and Brad had seen him going. To judge from row upon row there of boot prints, he started his sampling. But as Brad and I both reported, a set of tracks led from that area over a ridge to the inoperative American robot, then returned. Another set of tracks led back toward the base, detouring into the crater where Brad later found him. Nikolay’s excursion to the robot came first, obviously.”

  Ekatrina asked, “And had Kolya taken the robot’s mass spectrometer?”

  Ilya considered. “Mounting brackets are empty beneath the bot where something was removed. You saw as much on Brad’s and my helmet vids. But is the missing object a mass spectrometer? If so, when was it taken? I don’t know. Assuming that Nikolay did detach an instrument, we found no sign of it.” He thought some more. “I noticed earlier that Nikolay’s backpack was missing a spare battery. That may not mean anything, but if he did remove the American’s instrument, the missing battery might have been used to power it.”

  “There had been a mass spectrometer on the robot,” Yevgeny said flatly. “And Nikolay did take it.”

  “How can you know?” Ekatrina asked, still angry.

  “The American leasing company promotes its robots’ features on its website. I reviewed that even before we arrived here. And once I have the opportunity to obtain recent satellite images taken from a proper oblique angle, I will get an idea when the instrument went missing.”

  All of which the Americans must anticipate. That was why he felt sure they had not lied. But had Nikolay realized that no satellites had a line of sight while he was scavenging the mass spectrometer? Or was the absence of timely surveillance an instance of bad luck?

  “Then explain this,” Ekatrina demanded. “If Nikolai took it, where is this purloined instrument?”

  As mousy as Yevgeny found her in appearance, down to her chisel-like front teeth, her personality was aggressive. All ferret. But her mind was first-rate, else he would never have coerced her along. He gestured for her to continue.

  “Ilya, you followed Nikolay’s tracks without finding the mass spec. How do you explain that?” Her eyes narrowed. “Might Brad have hidden it on his way to the crater, or before bringing Nikolay inside?”

  Yevgeny had his own reasons for questioning the big American’s version of events. As in: why had Brad “happened” to find Nikolay? No matter that Brad’s helmet vid had shown nothing untoward, and that the Americans had had no obvious opportunity to alter that record, Yevgeny remained suspicious.

  “Gotta go back,” Brad had announced before separating from Yevgeny and their mutual project for the day to return early to the base. “I forgot to refill my drinking water. Sorry.”

  Had that been only hours before? It felt like a whole different era. A sudden death would do that, Yevgeny supposed.

  Regardless, a water tank carelessly left unreplenished? Possible, to be sure, but out of character—Yevgeny had never known the American to be other than thorough and prepared. And then, multiplying improbabilities, “for no particular reason,” Brad had decided to detour past the Nikolay’s crater rather than go directly to the lava tube.

  “Might Brad have earlier recovered and then hidden the mass spectrometer?” Ilya frowned in concentration. “I cannot prove otherwise, but he seemed surprised that the bot had been tampered with. Also, I saw nothing along Nikolay’s reconstructed path to suggest anyone else’s recent presence. Not till boot prints converged where Brad had approached the crater in which we know he found Nikolay. Nor did I find the instrument within the crater. I even looked beneath the tarp of the disturbed scrap pile.”

  “The path as you reconstructed it must have had gaps,” Ekatrina insisted. “Otherwise you must have found where one of them left the instrument.”

  Ilya gazed into space, lost in thought. “True,” he conceded at last. “Several times Brad and I encountered terrain too rocky or too much trodden upon to disclose particular boot prints. But each time, we continued in the direction we had been going, and always we picked up Nikolay’s trail.”

  “So,” Ekatrina interpreted, “At any of those rocky or churned spots Kolya might have left his supposed trail and hidden the mass spectrometer. Or Brad, if he had first used the same inhospitable terrain to sneak up on our friend.”

  “Enough!” Ilya shouted. “I just do not get it. I do not get you. Either of you. What weird conspiracy have you concocted in your minds? That by magic or telepathy the Americans knew Nikolay had scavenged an instrument from their robot? That they assassinated him for that? This is madness!

  “I already feel horrible about his death. If not for my speculations about alien power sources, we”—that meant Yevgeny—“would not have been pushing him so hard. Then, I have to believe, he would not have been so desperate as to take that instrument.

  “But for you to imagine he was killed over that? Madness, I say again. And utter nonsense. Nikolay was dead well before Brad came upon him.”

  Do I imagine things? Yevgeny wondered. Perhaps. And yet, perhaps not. “We have only Donna’s word for when Nikolay died. And nothing but her tentative”—dubious—“theory as to how he died.”

  “Then what do you believe—”

  They fell silent at the clomp of boots in the hallway.

  “Yevgeny, it’s time. We three are ready and suited up.” Marcus’s voice softened. “This has all been so sudden. If you need a little while longer …?”

  “Just a moment,” Yevgeny answered. More softly, he said, “We will continue this conversation later. But for now, we go to speak our goodbyes to Nikolay Sergeyevich.”

  * * *

  They spoke often of the airlock of their underground lair, despite the imprecision of the usage. True, there was but one portal through which they accessed the surface. But there were other airlocks, in the partitions they had erected to separate the structurally sound front of the ancient alien facility from several crumbling passages extending far—often, they did not know how far—into the lunar bedrock. Several meters beyond the wall and airlock they had installed in the main tunnel, fissures abounded. There, the rock-and-mooncrete rubble of untold roof collapses lay thick upon the floor. Barring major reconstruction, the deepest reaches of the ancient alien facility would likely remain off-limits.

  Hence, the volume they occupied terminated in sturdy walls—and like all dead ends, these had accumulated stuff. Bags of trash. Scraps of alien tech, in crates and bags and random piles, staged for shifting to the surface and eventual off-site analysis. To-be-processed supplies from shuttle deliveries. Nests of emptied boxes. Most recently, shelving units, bearing both alien and human goods, relocated from storage rooms in the so far unsuccessful search for an all but imperceptible, but cumulatively annoying, air leak. Now much of that debris had to be moved before they could access the long-ignored rear airlock.

  Ilya strode after the Americans to help shift things, while Yevgeny and Ekatrina retrieved and struggled into their pressure suits. If she noti
ced him put on a tool belt, or the industrial endoscope and reel of fiber-optic cable he tucked into one of the belt pockets, she showed the good judgment not to comment. The two of them rejoined the others, adding their helmets to the row on the floor alongside one wall of the main passageway. On the wall opposite, beneath a gray tarp, rested something long and lozenge-shaped.

  Something, the word echoed in Yevgeny’s mind. Except this was not something, was it? Nor was tarp the appropriate term. He folded back a corner of the shroud to gaze through the clear plastic of the rescue bubble. Within the PRE, Nikolay was covered up to his shoulders by a clean white sheet. Yevgeny studied the face, waxen in death—and accusatory.

  I will find out what happened to you, Yevgeny silently promised. And then I will take the appropriate actions.

  A flurry of activity finished opening a path to the airlock. Marcus cleared his throat. “Yevgeny?”

  “Thank you,” Yevgeny said. As though this reflexive response had somehow held significance, people arranged themselves into a line, facing him. Most bowed their heads. It had not until that moment registered—events were moving so quickly—but as leader of the Russian contingent, everyone would expect him to officiate. “We are here to …” Honor? Recognize? Mourn? “We are here to respect the memory of our colleague, Nikolay Sergeyevich Bautin. We—”

  “Our friend,” Ekatrina corrected. “Our good friend.”

  “Indeed,” Yevgeny agreed. “His untimely death was tragic, and we shall all miss him. Our thoughts are with his family.”

  He fell silent, all too conscious of the men and women studying him. Disappointed. Disapproving. But what could he add with convincing sincerity? It had been drummed into him: never befriend an asset, lest you be tempted to prioritize their safety over the mission. But his readiness to sacrifice them, if it should come to that, did not mean he was willing to have anyone else harm them.

  Ekatrina shifted her weight from foot to foot. Frowned. Raised an eyebrow at him.