Lifeline (24 page)

Chapter 32

ORBITECH 1—Day 39

Drawing in a breath, Allen Terachyk looked both ways down the corridor. He was all alone, yet he had a feeling that someone was watching him. Air coming from a ventilation grate made a whispering sound in the silence.

Of the four division leaders on
Orbitech 1,
only he remained. Duncan McLaris had stolen the shuttle and escaped to
Clavius Base
; Tim Drury had been killed in the first RIF; and three days ago, Linda Arnando had been murdered. And now, Terachyk was the only one who knew that Brahms, not Ombalal, had ordered the RIF.

He did not feel comfortable in his exclusive position.

When his home city of Baltimore had become one of the first slag heaps in the War, his family had gone with it. He had had a wife and four sons. Their names haunted him: Helen, Josh, Jon, Cameron, and Danny. For a moment, he couldn’t remember their faces, their voices—only the motionless family portrait he kept in a holocube in his quarters.

Brahms had never given him time to grieve.

Under a clever disguise and sidetracking of blame, Brahms had styled himself a Napoleon in space. His watchers remained armed and visible throughout the corridors. Brahms had not appointed any replacements for the other division leaders—he probably didn’t trust anyone else. As the only assessor left, Terachyk had to keep aware of everyone’s work. He had to judge its significance and suggest how it might be used to help their survival. He had to provide data on which Brahms would base his decisions, his efficiency ranking system.

With the wall-kelp giving them a small amount of breathing space, Terachyk didn’t know why
Orbitech 1
still required Brahms’s brutal crackdown measures, but the director refused to hear any argument about it.

The spoke-shaft elevator to the docking bay stood directly in front of him, like the closed metal doors of a coffin. The light on the elevator door blinked without a sound, signaling it was ready to be boarded. Terachyk clutched the d-cube he carried and closed his eyes.

A recurring nightmare haunted him. In the dream, the elevator seemed to beckon him, drawing him inside for a silent journey to the bay. He stepped out from the dilated opening, floating up to the high bay window. He heard the sound of the elevator whisking shut, leaving him alone … only to see Brahms watching from the control panel, self-righteously playing Ombalal’s recording on why it was so important for Allen Terachyk to die for the survival of the colony. Nobody else knew that it had been Brahms and not Ombalal all along.

Beads of sweat formed on his forehead and he felt hot, scared. He lurched down the corridor. It was getting more difficult to move past the elevator each time he had the nightmare. He wondered if anyone had used that elevator since Brahms had RIFed Linda Arnando and Daniel Aiken.

RIF.

Reduction in force.
What a wonderful euphemism.

Duncan McLaris had figured it out ahead of time. He had stolen the shuttle and escaped.

Terachyk was trapped on
Orbitech 1
with the rest of them. After the loss of his family, his life and the lives of others had become doubly precious to him. That made everything harder about his own job as assessor and the implications of his results.

And who would believe him if he revealed that Brahms had been behind the first RIF? They would tear him apart along with Brahms, for how would they know who was telling the truth?

He tightened his grip on the d-cube, wishing he could crush the information out of the three-dimensional memory module. Terachyk knew that when they manufactured the d-chips in vacuum, once in a while a cosmic ray plowed in and ruined the matrix; he could use that as an excuse. But even if he did, if the performance information were somehow lost, Brahms would find out again. Terachyk had been head of the Computer Applications branch of
Orbitech 1
before being promoted to division leader. He knew that nothing was truly erasable anymore; ways existed to resurrect deleted information.

Linda Arnando had discovered that fact the hard way.

He could do nothing but deliver the information, and somehow talk Brahms out of another RIF.

He turned the last corner and stood in front of Brahms’s main office. The darkened offices of the other two division leaders looked painfully empty and ominous. Brahms had put the Filipino boy Ramis in Tim Drury’s private quarters, where Drury had held open checkers tournaments for some of his friends, but the offices themselves remained vacant. Terachyk reached out to rap on the door.

“Come in, Allen.” Curtis Brahms stood from behind his desk and reached for his glasses. He grasped the wire-rimmed frames, and as he swung them up, his eyes met Terachyk’s. One of the lenses had shattered, but Brahms did not acknowledge it. He tossed the unnecessary glasses back down on the desk and motioned for Terachyk to take a seat.

Behind the director, a holotank showed a starscape. Brahms glanced toward it. “Ramis is well along on his journey. That’s footage we’re seeing from his camera. The colony’s morale seems to have improved remarkably already!”

Terachyk felt his face grow warm. He forced his eyes away from the acting director.

Acting
director … Terachyk wasn’t sure he could convince himself that their situation was only temporary, but he held onto that hope for the strength to play this through until things really were better on
Orbitech 1.

“I take it your efficiency study is complete?”

“The second study.” Terachyk leaned forward and pushed the d-cube across the table.

“That’s what I meant.” Brahms raised a brow at Terachyk’s tone.

Flipping the black solid around, Brahms inserted the d-cube into his desk unit. A series of graphs appeared in the holotank—statistics underscored by explanations. At the touch of a nested menu, tiny portraits sprang up next to the data to fill the image.

“You’ll need time to study it, of course,” Terachyk said.

“I trust your conclusions, Allen. That’s why you’re our main assessor.”

Terachyk shook his head. “It’s not that simple. I’ve taken days to compile this. There are some extenuating circumstances and they need to be looked at carefully before you start pronouncing death sentences.”

Brahms looked up sharply. “I have not said there will be another RIF! This is just a precautionary measure.”

Terachyk felt afraid, but maintained his position. “Of course.”

Brahms lounged back to take in the display. A descending list, numbered from 1,247 to one, appeared in the tank. Next to the names and numbers floated another set of scores: FIRST EFFICIENCY SURVEY RANKING.

As Brahms digested the rankings, Terachyk stared stone-faced at the bottom 10 percent. Many of the names at the bottom of the list had received the same ranking in both the first and second efficiency studies; Brahms highlighted those names in red. Other names, higher up on the list, he marked in yellow—still low, but showing some improvement. As Brahms took in the names, Terachyk felt sickened and giddy.

The rankings were so cold—they showed a quantitatively correct, business-school evaluation of what Brahms had chosen as the most critical factor of survival: efficiency. But how could you compare the tasks of a maintenance electrician with those of a pharmaceutical chemist? It didn’t matter what hard luck the person had run into—physical illness or broken equipment, even sabotage by other workers. All of the soul of human experience was missing from this evaluation—no mercy, only judgment.

And the part that made Terachyk most afraid was that Brahms himself believed in it.

Terachyk broke the silence filling the office. “So you are not even considering …?” He let the question hang in the air.

“Another RIF?” Brahms sounded on edge. His body looked stiff, but his voice came out cool, modulated. “That’s something we’ll always need to consider, Allen. You were there. You saw how people reacted. It wasn’t easy, but we’ve survived this long. The wall-kelp is helping us, but you know as well as I that our colony is not static. We are standing on the razor’s edge of survival. It will be a long time before we can be sure of our balance.”

Brahms sat up in his chair. Terachyk kept his eyes on the tiny pictures of the low-ranking people sorted out by the arbitrary scores Terachyk himself had assigned.

He recognized one of the men: Sigat Harhoosma. His wife was a sickly woman with a muscular disease that required her to live in the low-gravity environment. It had taken two people—a physical therapist and a nurse—to monitor her condition. Brahms had placed her on the first RIF list, and she was gone now.

Afterward, Terachyk had heard some people muttering that Harhoosma’s wife had deserved to be chosen for the first group—as if they condoned Brahms’s madness! That left her husband saddled with their two children and his high-pressure job as a metallurgist. Harhoosma was a hard worker, but he was trapped in the ranking war, and would probably never pull himself up. He had too many factors against him.

Brahms could always argue that people were going to die anyway, so it might as well be the ones pulling down the rest of the colony—like Sigat Harhoosma. And to make things worse, other people were beginning to believe as Brahms did. He had fooled them. Otherwise, they would have revolted against him a month before.

Unless no one was willing to stand up and organize the rebellion.

Terachyk spoke as Brahms continued to stare at the data. “I’m not sure how valid those rankings are. I did my best, but you shouldn’t just take the results at face value. They know they’re being watched, and they’ll only make adjustments to do better when I’m around.”

Brahms waved a hand at the holotank. “You can get statistics from all over—how many times they access their computers, how many times they call up entertainment on their holotanks, how many hours they spend with their families compared to how many hours they spend at their jobs. There are dozens of ways to get around them.”

“And dozens of ways to be fooled,” Terachyk shot back.

Brahms sat up straight in his chair. “The efficiency survey can’t be fooled. It has too many safeguards built in.”

“You can’t be absolutely sure.”

“Yes, I can. I know. It was my master’s thesis at Harvard. It passed all of its beta tests.”

Terachyk nodded at the holotank. Data still floated, names highlighted with a blood-red glow. “I see an error right now—look at Sigat Harhoosma. Your Efficiency Study didn’t take his particular situation into account.”

Brahms studied the statistics. He came back quickly—too quickly. Terachyk realized that Brahms must have prepared a justification for every single person on the potential RIF list.

“You’ve pointed him out before, Terachyk. Harhoosma wasn’t hit any harder than anyone else. He is unable to perform under pressure. In fact, he gets worse. This shows that our efficiency ranking does work. Tough times demand tough people.”

Brahms rocked back in his chair. He lifted an eyebrow. “Any other examples?”

Terachyk’s stomach burned. He needed to get out of there. He stood, shaking his head. “No.” The response sounded lame.

Brahms smiled tightly. “I’m glad you approve of the technique, then. I wouldn’t want my chief assessor having second thoughts.”

Terachyk felt Brahms’s voice closing in around him, like the metal doors of the spoke-shaft elevator carrying him up out of his nightmare and into cold, empty space. He turned toward the door, feeling dizzy.

“You should keep track of Ramis’s progress, Allen,” Brahms called. “He might find something over on the
Kibalchich
that’ll help us all.”

Mumbling a good-bye, Terachyk backed out of the office and let the door close by itself. He saw Nancy Winkowski lounging outside the door, dressed in her spring-green watcher jumpsuit. She stared at him without emotion. Terachyk mumbled a greeting to her as he turned down the corridor. He didn’t let his face show any worry, although he wondered why Brahms had seen fit to station one of the Watchers outside his own door. Was he afraid of other colonists? Or did he not trust Allen Terachyk?

He drew in a breath to clear his thoughts. The air smelled stale and cold. He walked past the elevator, feeling trapped.

He was going to be sick.

He quickened his step.

***

Chapter 33

KIBALCHICH—Day 40

As Ramis approached, the torus of the
Kibalchich
turned in front of him like a colossal windmill. It astounded him that it had been just a point of light seen from
Orbitech 1.

Karen’s voice came over the radio. “Ramis, the Doppler has pegged you five hundred yards from the
Kibalchich.
You’ll feel some tension in the weavewire as we help slow you down.”

Ramis mumbled an acknowledgment but continued to stare at the giant construction.

The Soviet station looked like a huge doughnut with four thick spokes radiating away from a small central sphere—the command center, most likely, which would be at zero gravity. Thinner support struts extended between the thick spokes.

Above the center of the torus, connected by a long, cylindrical shaft, floated an aluminized mirror, nearly invisible except where it reflected a smear of sunlight down into a central network of angled mirrors that, in turn, directed light into the station. The central shaft seemed able to swivel and point the mirror in different directions, perhaps to focus incoming energy toward different spots on the
Kibalchich.
In the zero-G environment it puzzled Ramis that the Soviets would expend so much unnecessary mass and reinforcement on a structure that would hang in place by itself.

The central shaft extended through the hub and out the bottom in a long, antenna-like prong.
A rotational stabilizer for the mirror and the colony?
Ramis wondered. Large masses hung hundreds of meters “below” the central hub sphere, centered on the prong; at the end of the prong, a broad inverted cone pointed toward the Sun like the
Aguinaldo’s
shadow shield.

Slag left over from the
Kibalchich’s
processing of lunar rock had been encrusted on the sides of the hull for additional radiation shielding, and another sheath of rubble drifted around the main torus. Ramis saw wide swathes where the rubble had been stripped away, as if the Soviets had needed to salvage more raw materials for their own purposes.

Cyrillic characters stood out in one of the clear patches, black against the silvery metal background. Ramis assumed the characters spelled out the name of the station, though he couldn’t read the language or even the alphabet.

As Ramis drifted in, he made his way toward the central hub sphere. He had to attach the weavewire where it would not be wound up like a fishing reel by the
Kibalchich’s
rotation. And from the telescope photos back on
Orbitech 1,
the hub would also be the most likely place for him to get inside through one of the emergency access hatches.

Orienting himself to the relative positions of
Orbitech 1
and the Soviet station, Ramis shot another spurt from his MMU. He seemed to be moving in faster than he expected.

Karen’s voice broke the silence. “Ramis, we have you at approximately one hundred yards from the
Kibalchich.
How are you doing?”

“Fine. I doubt I can miss it now.”

He had reserve fuel in the MMU, but he had greatly increased his forward velocity by jetting with the air tank early in his Jump. Without bothering to tell
Orbitech 1,
Ramis turned toward the
Kibalchich
and kicked on the MMU braking thruster. A force hit his chest as the maneuvering unit pushed in the opposite direction, slowing his motion.

Gyrating once more about his center of gravity, he saw with some satisfaction that he had slowed himself enough, but now he had veered off course.

“Ramis, are you all right? The video showed you rotating.” Karen sounded worried.

“I am just preparing to land.”

No problem,
Ramis thought to himself.
This is getting easier.
He made a quick estimate and, trying to hold down his breathing rate, he gave two more squirts on the thruster. He found himself drifting toward the
Kibalchich’s
giant mirror support. The flat reflecting surface grew closer, like a tilted plate filled with stars. Everything seemed to be in slow motion, inexorable, like a dream.

Holding his breath, Ramis reached out and grabbed onto the approaching mirror support girder as he started to sail by. His feet swung around, slamming his upper body into the mirror’s surface. He let out an audible “Ooof!” The reflector rocked back and forth, wobbling with the impact.

“Ramis! We’ve lost you on the visual. Have you reached the
Kibalchich?”

Ramis pushed backward, hand over hand, down the girder. It was made of a dark, porous material—some sort of composite manufactured from lunar soil. He eyed the central hub and caught his breath for a moment. “I am here, but I need a few moments to position myself.”

“Keep in contact,” Brahms broke in.

Ramis did not bother to answer. Looking above him at the mirror’s surface still oscillating from his impact, he continued crawling down the support structure. The dish mirror did not appear to concentrate light, as the
Aguinaldo’s
did, only reflect it. Then the conical light collector below the station probably provided for their energy needs, he thought. So why bother with the big reflecting mirror above?

Ramis keyed his mike. “Karen?”

She came back instantly. “Yes? Are you all right?”

“I am right above the
Kibalchich.
It is rotating quite rapidly. I intend to move down to the hub and try to enter from there.”

“That’s just what we were going to suggest,” Brahms said.

“Be careful,” Karen added.

“By the way, the Soviets have sent no welcoming committee. I see no one so far.”

“I didn’t expect anything,” Brahms said.

Making sure that he kept the braided part of the weavewire away from the superstructure, he climbed down the
Kibalchich’s
central axis, careful to have a good grip each time, until he reached the point where the support column intersected the hub sphere. His feet touched the metal surface. He let out a long sigh of relief as the magnets in his soles clanked against the hull.

Karen and several of the other engineers had constructed his braided weavewire belt so he could unfasten it from around his waist and use reinforced clamps to anchor it to the
Kibalchich.
Ramis tugged on the fiber behind him and felt a slight tension.

Fumbling, he managed to unfasten the belt, still holding it tightly. He turned, extending his arms and stepping away from the fiber. The lack of resistance and the bulkiness of his suit made his movements awkward, contrived. He started to sweat.

The support shaft rising from the command sphere looked to be an ideal place. He wrapped his feet around it and fastened the belt around the shaft, anchoring it with clamps. He plucked a self-sealing tube from his belt and squeezed liberal amounts of vacuum cement over the connection. In less than a minute the polymer resin would harden from the cold and the vacuum into a bond more powerful than the metal of which the
Kibalchich
was constructed.

Smiling inside his helmet, Ramis turned and looked at the tiny Day-Glo orange thread extending a hundred meters from the support column, then vanishing abruptly into its single-molecule thickness. Ramis could not see the remainder of the weavewire, but frozen in space, it pointed directly to where the bright spot of
Orbitech 1
anchored the opposite end of the strand.

The bridge was established. The two colonies were joined. He tongued his radio mike.
“Orbitech 1,
I have successfully anchored the weavewire to the
Kibalchich.”

Throughout the maneuver he had remained silent, debating whether to keep in constant, step-by-step contact with
Orbitech 1.
But he decided against that. If they wanted to know exactly how it was done, they could come do it themselves.

“I am now standing on the outside of the central sphere. I will search for an entrance.”

Free of the line and able to be more versatile in his movement, Ramis scrambled along the hull of the hub sphere, planting one foot in front of the other. Following the rotational axis, he tried to orient himself with “up” and “down.”

He clunked along the outside of the sphere until he found the markings of a man-sized emergency hatch recessed into the hull. He made his way to it, then stopped and stared. Strange symbols, painted in a deep dull yellow, covered the hatch. He could not understand the writing, but the mechanism itself seemed obvious enough. He flicked on his radio mike again.
“Orbitech 1,
I have found one of the access hatches.” He pointed his chest camera toward it. “I will attempt to enter the Soviet colony.”

Then he turned to face the sphere and, after a moment’s thought, spoke toward the metal wall.
“Kibalchich,
I hope you give me a happy welcome.” After all, he thought, perhaps their radio was just broken and they could not respond. Maybe it was that simple. But then why hadn’t they come out to meet him?

He fitted his bulky fingers into the red-painted lock mechanism and turned it counterclockwise. Bolts around the seal kicked back, and the door slid out and over, leading to a cramped airlock chamber. It looked like a great black mouth; he halfway expected to see fangs around the edge.

“Orbitech 1,
the outer door has opened. I am stepping inside. This will be your last contact from me until I find a working transceiver inside. If something happens—” He paused, then shrugged. “The cable is connected between the two colonies. The next step will be yours.”

Brahms’s voice answered back, echoing in his ears. “Ramis, we wish you the best of luck. Our hopes ride with you. Your transmissions are being broadcast over ConComm. Everyone is cheering for you.”

Ramis shut off the mike. “Thanks,” he muttered.

When he closed the outer door, the chamber was dark, with only a red strip of phosphors on the ceiling for dim illumination.

He punched a sequence of buttons that he thought would fill the chamber with air, but his suit was so insulated he could hear no hissing. The light on the panel turned from red to green, which looked more like white to black in the reddish background light, and Ramis hesitated. His suit had relaxed, lost most of its stiffness.

He cracked open his faceplate and drew a deep breath of stale, sour air. It had a rotten smell to it.

Fear crept up his spine again. If the Soviets’ radio wasn’t broken and if they had all died, perhaps they had succumbed to some kind of disease, a plague. Genetic research gone wrong? That was the ostensible reason Dr. Sandovaal had come up to L-4—so he wouldn’t have to worry about unleashing a plague on Earth if his experiments went awry. And if the Soviets had contaminated their colony with a deadly virus, Ramis had just breathed a lungful of it.

He let the air out of his nostrils and swallowed hard.
No good now
—
it is too late. I have already exposed myself.
He took another breath, turned to the interior door, and pushed the release button. It slid open with a grating hiss.

Directly in front of his face was the purple, bloated body of a dead man, drifting in the disturbed air currents.

Ramis gasped and choked. The stench was powerful.

The man’s eyes were wide open, his face swollen and distorted. He was a large man, clad in a dark uniform spangled with military insignia.

Ramis backed up in horror, but he could go no farther. The back wall of the airlock chamber stopped him. The body drifted in, as if it were following him.

He screamed
“Help!”
in Tagalog.

He stopped, felt his pounding heartbeat, calmed his own breathing. The stench continued to seep into his pores, into his lungs. He forced himself to relax.

It was only a dead man. Someone had died on this colony. He had been prepared for that. Perhaps the entire Soviet station had turned into a huge tomb in space. Without gravity, the body had been drawn over to the door when Ramis had filled the inner airlock.

He stared at the bulging, jellied eyes of the corpse. The man’s hair was neatly combed, fixed into place with hair oil. The insignia on the dark uniform showed him to be someone of importance—a commander, perhaps—left here untended to rot.

Ramis forced himself to move. He had to bump past the bobbing corpse to enter the main command center. He touched the body with his shoulder, shielding it with the most padded portion of the space suit. He felt his skin crawl. As the firm, weightless mass moved aside, the arm bent at the elbow and the gray-green, blotched hand drifted up and down, as if waving good-bye. Ramis’s stomach flopped.

He closed his eyes and reached out with gloved fingers, grasping the corpse’s torso. He felt a rush of sweat inside his suit. He gave the body a shove toward the airlock chamber. After it obligingly floated inside, Ramis sealed the door, closing the body out of sight.

He expected to see more corpses there, all sprawled out and ripe with decay, but the command center stood empty. He swiveled his head to stare at the large, spherical room. From “floor” to “ceiling” ran a cylindrical pipe, embedded in a holotank; he realized the pipe must be the support strut for the mirror overhead and the solar shield below. The pipe would not be noticed when the central holotank was functioning.

Lighted screens and input pads covered the curved walls without any regard for standardizing the direction of up or down. Mounted chairs jutted out from beneath the control panels at odd angles to each other to maximize the working arrangement, though Ramis thought it must be disorienting. The chairs had Velcro straps to keep the workers from recoiling across the room every time they punched a keypad.

Ramis kicked off the wall and drifted in, looking at the buttons and readouts, everything in indecipherable Cyrillic characters. The individual panels were unfamiliar to him. The station seemed to be functioning still, but he couldn’t figure out how to control anything.

He searched for the radio, but the controls made no sense at all. He had taken a tour of
Orbitech 1’s
communications center to familiarize himself with the general layout of what the Soviets might have, but this place seemed totally alien.