Lifeline

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.