Lifeline

Chapter 48

KIBALCHICH—Day 54

The room in the Kibalchich felt cold, sterile, and dead. Anna Tripolk had never needed to designate a specific place as a morgue before, but now she had thirteen dead bodies to deal with.

And one of them was Stepan … Commander Stepan Rurik.

With grudging help from the others, Anna had stacked the bodies in the freezer chamber. She had felt no need to perform autopsies on the twelve from the sleepfreeze cubicles—the physical details of their deaths raised no questions.

But she did wonder what she was expected to do with the corpses. Keep them? For what? They would never be shipped home again. Burial in space, perhaps? No, feeding them into the reprocessor made more sense, to save precious minerals and proteins sorely lacking on the colony now that the supply lines had been cut off.

Cagarin was not among the bodies. His disappearance still mystified Anna. She wondered if perhaps he had died in a sealed room somewhere on the Kibalchich, daunted by the pressures put upon him—by whatever had destroyed Rurik. He could never keep up with the Commander’s pace. She had checked Cagarin’s cabin and found no sign. That proved nothing, since it was still a big station, but Anna suspected the Americans would have found another body by now.

The room was icy around her. Though not part of the cold storage unit, the outer chamber was kept just above freezing. She felt gooseflesh up and down her arms, shivers along her back; the sweater she wore did not ward off the chill. She should have brought a container of strong hot tea with her.

She hadn’t been warm since she had awakened nearly two weeks before.

Alone in the lower decks, Anna sealed the doors to the frigid chamber, insisting on her privacy. There could be no telling when one of the Americans might come barging in, nosing around. Though it was none of their business, they seemed perfectly happy to grab whatever interested them. But Anna wanted to be left alone right now. She demanded it. She had every right.

This was much too personal a matter.

Stepan’s body lay spread out on a portable metal table she had hauled down into the storage room. It had taken a day for the body to unthaw enough for her to straighten his limbs, to make sure that the body cavity and organs were soft enough to do a full autopsy.

Ramis Barrera and Dr. Langelier had thrown him into the freezer compartment—another disposable person aboard the Soviet station. Oh, they intended to be careful, they meant well—but they had ruined many things for her.

Anna gazed into Stepan Rurik’s face, his Viking jaw pushed into a peaceful expression. They had closed Rurik’s eyes, straightened his grimace. Part of her felt relief at that, but another part resented all the detail lost. The look on his face and the position of the body could have told her many things about how Rurik had died—whether it had been sudden or with prolonged agony. Perhaps even if it was a disease, or poison, or simply a cardiac arrest. But men like Rurik did not die of heart attacks.

Now, with his body frozen, stacked, and thawed again, tiny details could have been damaged. Anna would have a more difficult time learning why the commander had died.

Rurik. Stepan Rurik.

She stared down at him. Even in death his thin brown hair fell back toward its neatly combed style. The eyes were closed and sunken. The skin had blotched and blackened with the onset of decay.

Anna tried to look around that, holding up a shield of memories instead: seeing his face as he slept peacefully beside her, eyes closed, a smile on his face, content after making love. But it didn’t work. She ached inside. She took a deep breath.

Using surgical scissors, she began to remove his uniform. Rurik’s medals and insignia glinted in the light as she pushed his tunic aside, exposing his sunken, grayish chest.

Anna inspected him externally first, seeing no obvious signs of death, no heavy blows or major wounds. She removed the rest of his garments. He looked unreal to her.

Anna forced herself to put on her professional mask. She muttered to herself, imagining that she was talking into a recording device to transcribe the autopsy. But she had purposely shut off all recorders so that the Americans could not steal this information as well.

“Still no sign of external injury.” She took one more deep breath and bent closer to the body. Using her fingertips to mark her passage, she inspected his skin, combing for tiny injuries, marks of injections. The skin felt cold and rubbery, like a chilled chemical protective glove. It made her feel detached, cut off.

“After close inspection of the skin, I have still found no indications of injury.”

Here, Anna Tripolk ran into a barrier she was not yet willing to cross: she would have to draw coagulated blood; would have to run tests on his remaining body fluids. She would have to cut him open, rummage around his insides, and pluck into his most private corners.

She pictured Stepan holding her, whispering to her. Or standing there with all his silent strength. I do what I must, and you do what you must.

She couldn’t do that to him. She stiffened, telling herself to don the professional façade again, to fit the mold of objective doctor and do what was expected of her. It just wasn’t fair.

Life isn’t fair. As Anna hesitated, she remembered how the crew of American engineers had come over, the second wave from Orbitech 1 to pry into her sleepfreeze process, to dismantle her transparent chambers. Even though she had refused to cooperate, told them they could not have the Soviet technology, they had taken it anyway. They didn’t care about what was right or honest. They had no qualms. They had stolen three of her sleepfreeze chambers and shipped them over to Brahms.

The rage this evoked made Anna Tripolk forget all thoughts of Rurik for a moment. Finally, she wrapped his discolored, naked body in a white sheet and wheeled him back into the frozen storage compartment. Steam wafted in the air, swirling with the disturbed air currents.

She had one other thing to do, in Rurik’s private quarters. He must have left a personal log somewhere. Anna had looked at the official Kibalchich logs in the command center, as had Ramis Barrera and Karen Langelier, and no doubt all those other engineers from Orbitech 1. But there had been nothing out of the ordinary—the log entries had simply stopped.

She suspected that Rurik might have kept a diary of his own, though she had failed to find it when she had first combed his quarters. With the questions she had, finding his recorded voice was more important than performing an autopsy.

Anna Tripolk sterilized her hands in the sonic dryers, then unsealed the hatches from the storage chamber and went to search her lover’s former quarters.

She managed to avoid bumping into anyone on her way there. That wasn’t too difficult, since the Kibalchich had so few inhabitants. But when she entered Rurik’s private chambers, she closed the door behind her and engaged the locking mechanism.

“Lights, half illumination please.”

The glow rose in the chamber. She looked around at the silken purple coverings on the bed unit, neatly made. To the end, Rurik had maintained careful order, even in his own quarters. A few papers lay stacked on his desk. The terminal screen was folded into the desk and shut off. It was just the way she had left it, days ago after awakening, when she had had to satisfy herself that this wasn’t all some sort of trick, a scheme, mind games the Americans might be playing on her.

She paused at a sudden thought: it seemed as if Stepan had known he would not return to this room again.

On the holocube on his desk was a picture of Anna Tri-polk’s head. It was a bad image, lifted from her personnel file—her heart ached to think that he had used it to keep his memories going.

She wondered if Rurik had come down into the infirmary and stared at her through the transparent case of the sleepfreeze chamber. Had he touched the glass? Had he talked to her in his loneliest times? What had he been thinking about?

As she studied the holocube, she noticed that her image looked distorted. Frowning, she inspected it closer. Her face looked odd, bloated. There was something just inside the image that caused her features to bulge out. Switching off the holocube, she watched a d-cube appear in the center of the device. He had disguised it with her image. Was it meant for her—something only she would discover right away?

Anna didn’t think Stepan would hide his personal log, but maybe he would make it more likely for her to find it before anyone else. What had he been thinking about?

Switching the holo back on, she picked up the cube and stared at an image of herself, several years younger, when she had just begun the background work that would be the keystone of her mission aboard the Kibalchich. She had been searching for ways to make a Soviet Mars colony viable—the sleepfreeze process for the long journey, for the colonization of a new planet.

Anna had been younger then, more idealistic. The future was bigger and brighter, before so many opportunities had turned into dead ends.

She pulled the d-cube from the image and inserted it into Rurik’s terminal. The screen fuzzed and projected an image of the commander. He had left the lights too low to capture a good image of himself, and he had lain on his bunk as he spoke. This kept him partly out of view of the recorder so that his image wavered, shifting from clarity to indistinctness. But his voice came in clearly. She couldn’t see the expression on his face, but the tone of his words let her know the emotional wringer he had apparently gone through. She swallowed, afraid of what he might say.

“I suppose someone will find this record, eventually. Anna, I hope it’s you, but I have no guarantee of that. It could be centuries before anyone comes back here. I hope the sleepfreeze process protects our people for that long. We certainly couldn’t test it under such extreme conditions.

“I am all alone.” His voice suddenly sounded tired. “I have killed Cagarin and dumped his body in the materials reprocessor.” Rurik leaned forward and smiled tightly. “He always wanted to be of service to the State.”

Anna stood up with a sharp indrawn breath and stepped backward from the image. Rurik had killed Cagarin? But he was the political officer! She continued to listen.

“I am a traitor, I suppose. I refused the last order my government on Earth issued to me. I have questioned orders before, but this one I could not rationalize. And in refusing, I aroused the suspicion of Vice Commander Cagarin. It should be no surprise that Cagarin had approval and veto power on the Kibalchich—but that is all on paper. There is no more government, and I remain commander of this station.”

Anna Tripolk sat back down on the bunk, confused even further. Vice Commander Cagarin? Stepan had hinted that Cagarin was KGB—but even then, she had thought he was just some bureaucratic flunky.

She had wondered why Cagarin had remained awake with Rurik, what special position he had. It made no sense. She felt as if the tip of the iceberg was rising out of the sea and showing more and more that she had never suspected.

“You see,” Rurik continued, “the Kibalchich has much more to it than most of us realized. State Security had its own plans for this ‘strategic position’ at L-5. Not the straightforward idealistic challenge that you had, Anna, though that’s too bad—a successful mission to Mars was such a nice goal, the perfect cover story.

“There’s no place for KGB at L-5 or in humanity’s future. Their paranoia—along with equivalent paranoia on Orbitech 1 and our entire world—is what caused the downfall of Earth. They seem to forget that human beings are supposed to be an intelligent species. We have to prove that now.

“I refused my final orders from Earth; I could not destroy Orbitech 1 and murder fifteen hundred helpless people. Cagarin and his people would have killed me, taken over the station, and followed the instructions without question. I could not allow that. I knew that in order for us to survive, most of us had to go under sleepfreeze, to wait for help. I convinced Cagarin that I had every intention of following the government’s directive, but that people here would riot if they knew about it. I told him I would carry out the instructions after everyone had gone into the chambers. No one would know.

“Cagarin was suspicious, but he agreed. I put him out of the way before he discovered what I was planning to do. Then I disconnected the sleepfreeze chambers of the other eleven KGB people. The remaining survivors on the Kibalchich have clear consciences and true forward-thinking minds. They are the hope for our future. I have removed the tainted ones.

“Anna, if it is you listening to this, don’t resent me. It will all work out for the best. If someone else is hearing my words, I can only hope mankind has matured a little in the years since I recorded this.”

Anna breathed heavily. She stopped the recorder. Stepan, a traitor? She allowed the shock to sweep over her. Stepan, a murderer?

She played the recorder through at fast forward, catching snippets of Rurik’s message. His entries became more disjointed, day after day, as he remained alone on the silent station.

“I have no idea how long it will be before someone comes. I hope it will be time enough for our wounds to heal. I have cut off all communication with the other colonies and warned them to stay away. I cannot guess how long that will remain effective. I do not intend to wait and see.”

Anna Tripolk closed her eyes, not wanting to hear what he was going to say.

“Anna, you must understand. I cannot put myself into sleepfreeze—there is no one here to operate the chamber.” He looked around the room. “I do not know how long I can stand this.” He lowered his voice.

“And the transmissions I have intercepted from the other colonies—on Orbitech 1 I watched them kill ten percent of their population.… Their new director, Brahms, executed two more. Things are getting very bad all over. I have had no contact with anyone on Earth. I begin to fear we will never come away from all this. What is the use?

“It may be a hundred years until the madness has been wiped out.” He was silent for some minutes. The d-cube recorded only the sound of his breathing. When he spoke, the words sounded forced.

“Using the medical computer and the pharmaceutical dispensary, I have found an appropriate and supposedly painless poison. After I record this, I am going to the command center. I will adjust the computer to recognize Anna Tripolk as commander of this station.”

She saw Rurik’s image sit up from the bed and walk over to the screen before the picture blanked out.

She felt angry to discover tears running down her cheeks. She brushed them away. Her fingers felt cold. Her confusion and grief funneled together into anger. How could Rurik do this? What did he mean he was ordered to destroy Orbitech 1—that was nonsense! How could he make her commander of this station? She wasn’t ready for that; she didn’t want the responsibility.

Commander Tripolk. She snorted at the sound of the title. There must be another reason—he had acted more as a coward than a commander.

She stood up and ejected the d-cube from the terminal. In Rurik’s holo her own face looked back at her, a younger face, before her dreams had been shattered. One thing she did know was that Rurik was a traitor—and a murderer.

Anna put the cube on the floor and crushed it with her heel. Then she brushed at her jumpsuit, searching for her own dignity, and walked stiffly out the door.

A commander belonged in the command center.

Very well. She would see just what she could do there.