Bios (9 page)

But there had not been, for all of mankind's attentive listening, any intelligible signal, any evidence of nonhuman space travel, any hint of a star-spanning civilization. We expand into a void, Li thought. We call out, but no one answers.

We are unique.

He stowed his cargo of bacterial scrapings in the remensor's hold and turned back to the surface. He had other work to do. He was the Oceanic Station's chief manager, and this excursion by telepresence had been a guilty pleasure. There were reports to be filed, complaints to be heard. All the dreary business of a Works Trust enterprise to be hacked away like an infestation of barnacles, until it inevitably grew back.

The remensor rose like a steel bubble toward the surface. He watched the seafloor drop away but felt no sensation of motion, only his own stiff spine pressing the back of the chair in the telepresence room. Running the remensor was so absorbing that he tended to forget to shift position; he always left these expeditions with his chronic lumbar pains acting up.

He reached the point at which daylight became perceptible, the waters around him turning indigo, then sunset-blue, then turbulent green. The floating Oceanic Station was in sight, a distant chain of pods and anchors like a string of pearls dangling from the hand of the sea, when the alarm began to sound.

Li handed over the remensor controls to his assistant, Kay Feinn, and scanned the situation report flashing on the remensor room's main screen before he attended to his own rapidly flashing scroll.

General shutdown, barriers up, contamination detected in Pod Six. The lowermost of the Oceanic Station's laboratory units had gone hot. It took him another ten minutes trolling for information before the engineering crew determined that yes, the pod had apparently gone hot, and no, the two men trapped inside it at the time of the alarm weren't responding to repeated calls. Telemetry from the affected pod had also failed; the structure was closed and blank. The electronic failures were particularly perplexing. Faced with locked doors and no input, the engineering people weren't sure what the next step ought to be.

Li knew what it ought to be: He ordered the station's shuttle prepped for emergency evacuation in case of further problems. He told his comms crew to alert the IOS and ask for its advice. He was trying to put through a personal call to Kenyon Degrandpre when Kay, still wearing the telepresence gear, said, “I think you should look at this.”

“Not a good time.” Obviously.

“I'm down at Pod Six,” Kay said. “Look.”

He canceled the call and climbed back into the telepresence chair.

Pod Six had been disastrously compromised—that much was obvious from the alarm sequence—but Li couldn't see any physical damage from the perspective of the submersible remensor.

Multiple beams of light thatched the ridges of Pod Six's external sensor array, revealing nothing. Huge translucent invertebrates—Freeman's staff called them “church bells”—drifted toward the remensor in great numbers, attracted by the light; but they were a harmless nuisance, mindlessly trawling the warm equatorial water
for organelles. A flock of church bells could hardly have shut down an entire laboratory.

“Kay, what am I supposed to see?”

The two men trapped in the compromised pod were Kyle Singh, a Kuiper microbiologist, and Roe Devereaux, a Terrestrial marine biologist. Even if they had survived the initial biohazard, whatever it was, they might not survive the electrical failure. Even in Isis's warm equatorial seas, Pod Six was deep enough to shed heat quickly. And the air recyclers would already have been overloaded, revved by the alarm protocols into toxic-emergency mode.

But almost certainly, Freeman thought, the men inside were dead by now. Pod Six was home to the deep-sea alkaloid inventory. Lots of hot organisms were down there, and if something had gotten out of the glove boxes and into their air supply, Devereaux and Singh would have toxed out almost immediately. Below Six, there was only the anchor line and the blind deeps of the Isian sea. The water here glowed an inky turquoise, circulating in a thermopause between the habitat of the pressure-loving church bells and the busy phytochemistry of the shallows. Plankton-like monocells and snowflake colonies of bacteria sifted down from the surface waters, a blizzard feeding the biologically rich benthic zones.

The pod seemed intact, if dark. Devereaux had been complaining of algal films clouding the pod windows and external arrays. But none of that was visible to Freeman.

“Circle right,” Kay said emotionlessly. “I thought I saw some outgassing at a window seal. Maybe we should get an engineer in here.”

He played the remensor's narrow beams across a porthole-like circle of augmented glass.

There. Motion. In the lamplight, a string of rising pearls. Bubbles. Air.

Li's stomach contracted with a more personal fear. This wasn't an overpressure vent or a ballast exchange. Kay was right. This was a leak.

He handed back the remensor gear, called the ops room, and
told the crisis manager to have his men stand by the decouplers. “And keep the ballast detail alert in case we destabilize.” A fully breached Pod Six would have to be cut loose or it would drag down the rest of the pods with it. It was a worst-case scenario: Drop the breached pod, hope the tube seals held, and try to keep the whole chain from going pendulum.

Then he took back the telepresence chair and moved the remensor away from the crippled pod, catching a second trail of air in the columns of his lights. More leaks; God, he thought, the lab was a fucking sieve!

And found himself watching with numb panic as the pod began to collapse on itself—quickly and utterly silently. Bimetallic seams geysered froth, then twisted inward, hemispheres of steel torn into ragged blades. There was no sound—his remensor wasn't equipped for it—but the shock must have been tremendous; the remensor bounced hard before it steadied, images ghosting and fragmenting in Freeman's vision. A tremor traveled up the pod chain and rattled the floor under him.

He ordered an emergency disconnect and watched it happen. Explosive bolts severed the pod from the rest of the station. Fragments of debris—polyester cushions, glove-box lattices, aggregates of clothing that might or might not have contained bodies—separated from tangled metal and churned toward the surface. The bulk of the pod simply sank, caught in its own anchor chains, as if a vast hand had reached up to claim it.

Church bells, faintly iridescent, darted through the roiling water and fled into the deeps.

Kenyon Degrandpre hailed a transit tractible to the orbital station's ops room as soon as news of the disaster reached him. He was afraid of what he might learn, but he mustn't let that cloud his judgment. Deal with events now; leave consequences for later.

He found the operations center crowded with junior managers competing for console space. He sent away everyone of less than command status except for the engineers and told the communications
crew to stay at their posts pending further orders. Better to have them begging for bathroom breaks than getting underfoot. He kept four subordinates with him and ordered the main screen cleared of everything but traffic from the damaged oceanic outpost.

Where everyone must be very busy. Only the standard telemetry channels were active. Even there, the damage was obvious. The deepest section of the undersea pod chain had imploded only minutes after a biohazard alarm shut it down. Obviously the two events were related, but how? With the pod itself lost, answers might be hard to come by. Not that anyone was looking very hard for answers; the outpost was working frantically to restore its own stability now that it had jettisoned the damaged lab. Degrandpre wondered whether the jettison had been truly necessary or whether Freeman Li might be covering something up, but his engineers assured him it was an act of self-preservation. Still. . . .

But the most immediate question was whether the biohazard had been successfully contained—or whether it might spread.

Degrandpre ordered coffee for all hands in the ops room, then waited with unconcealed impatience for Li—a Terrestrial, at least—to find time for a direct uplink.

Waiting, he felt impotent. This would enrage his superiors on Earth, no matter what happened next. He would have to red-flag a report to the Families and accept whatever responsibility he couldn't dodge. And in the meantime—

In the meantime, he could only pray that the event would be contained.

A junior brought him coffee. The coffee was synthetic and tasted like ashes steeped in well water, but he had drained two cups by the time Li appeared on the screen at last, his Trust uniform disheveled and perspiration-stained. Li's skin was as classically dark as Degrandpre's was classically pale; both men would have been considered moderately handsome on Earth, though not in the Kuiper settlements, where a sort of
muwallad
brown was the fashionable skin color.

Li said without preamble, “I want a full evacuation of the Oceanic Station.”

Degrandpre blinked. “You know you don't have the authority—”

“Manager, I'm sorry, but time is important. Whatever it was that took out Pod Six, it affected the men first, the electrical systems second, and then the structural integrity of the pod itself—all in less than an hour. I don't want to lose any more staff.”

“According to our telemetry, the problem was contained. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please share it with me.”

“With all due respect, I don't have evidence of anything! All I know for certain is that one of my laboratories is at the bottom of the ocean and two of my men are dead. At the time of the accident, they had bacterial plaques in their glove box. I don't know if that contributed to the problem or not, but we have similar organisms in just about every glove box in the station. If it constitutes a threat—”

“You can't know that.”

“No, I can't, which is precisely why—”

“You're suggesting we abandon an extremely valuable resource because of one accident and your own surmise.”

“We can always reoccupy the station.”

“At an enormous expense in resources and work hours.”

“Manager . . .
do you really want to assume that risk?
”

The bastard was trying to protect himself in case of more trouble. Degrandpre imagined Li testifying at a Trust inquiry:
Although I requested an evacuation in unequivocal terms
. . . .

“Just give me any hard information you happen to have, Dr. Li, and we'll proceed from there.”

Li bit his lip but knew better than to argue. “If you've been monitoring our telemetry, you know as much as I do. The pod went bad this morning. No communication from the crew, only the hazard siren. I ordered the bulkheads sealed. The pod's electrical and life-support systems shut down shortly thereafter, for reasons unknown. An hour after that, the pod lost hull integrity and collapsed under pressure. That's all we know.”

“Have you recovered any of the wreckage?”

“We don't have enough tractibles or excursion gear to recover solid wreckage.”

“All right. Make the shuttle bay ready for evacuation, but wait for my order. In the meantime, try to gather at least some portion of any evidence that happens to be floating on the surface. Don't bring anything substantial past quarantine, but archive samples for the glove boxes.”

“For the record, I strongly recommend evacuating the station now and conducting any investigation by remote.”

“Noted. Thank you for your opinion. Please do as I say.”

He gave the com control to a subordinate.

When the initial report had been filed and the cleanup delegated—and in the absence of further alarms—Degrandpre put his assistant in charge and issued orders to alert him if the situation deteriorated.

By the clock, he hadn't eaten for nearly ten hours—nor, in deference, had anyone else in the ops room. He ordered a shift change and meals by tractible for anyone staying on duty.

Then he walked to the command commissary, where he found Corbus Nefford dining calmly on braised peppers and basmati rice. The gardens grew a limited range of spices and the IOS biosynthesized others, but Nefford's dish smelled strikingly of fresh garlic and basil.

The physician regarded him with undisguised pleasure. “Join me, Manager?”

Weary, Degrandpre found a chair opposite Nefford. “I assume you've heard.”

“About the incident at the Oceanic Station? A little.”

“Because I would prefer not to talk about it.”

“The crisis is over?”

“Yes.” Was that wishful thinking? “The crisis is over.”

“Two lives lost?”

“You're as well-informed as I am, apparently. Now talk about
something else, Corbus, or be quiet and let me eat.” The service tractible waited for his order. He was hungry but he asked for something light—a salad with protein strips.

The chastened physician was briefly silent before a new subject came to mind: “There are fresh Turing gens from Earth, I hear.”