“Call me Zoe.” He obviously preferred Kuiper-style informality or he wouldn’t be here talking to her.
He offered his hand—again. She took it reluctantly. His hand was dry; hers was moist. He said, “I’m Tam.”
She knew all about him from her prep reading. Hayes ran Yambuku from the ground. He was a technical manager and microbiologist, exiled from some puritanical Kuiper colony because he had dared to sign a contract with the Trusts.
He was thirty-five years old. Real years: he hadn’t taken rejuvenation treatments. Zoe found herself drawn to the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, amiable contour maps. Like Theo’s eye lines, but less harsh, less etched.
“You envy me,” she said, “but Kenyon Degrandpre seems to think I’m doomed.”
“Well, Degrandpre… IOS politics mean nothing to me, but Degrandpre is old Terrestrial stock. No insult intended. He’s a manager, a kacho. He’d be happy if nothing ever changed here. Keep the equilibrium, balance the books, save face, that’s his agenda. Don’t expect sympathy from Kenyon Degrandpre.”
“It seemed like he was trying to frighten me.”
“Did it work?”
He meant the remark jokingly, but Zoe was startled. Because, yes. She was frightened.
She was, now that she came to admit it, so frightened that the food stuck in her throat and her stomach clenched like a fist. More frightened than she had thought possible. “Zoe?” Hayes frowned across the table. “Are you all right?” She controlled herself. “Yes.”
Just waiting for her thymostat to do its work, to wash her in some soothing bath of neurotransmitters. It would happen, Zoe was sure, if she was only patient enough. The fear would go away, and she would be normal again.
TWO
Traveling back to the surface of Isis was ordinarily a tedious process, at least in calm weather—and better tedious than exciting—but the shuttle had barely broken the cloud layer when Tam Hayes discovered he had a crisis waiting for him. Not that a crisis was unusual at Yambuku, either. But this crisis might prove lethal.
Hayes had left Macabie Feya in charge of the station. Mac was an accomplished engineer, a Reformed Mormon, Needle Clan out of Kuiper Body 22, with a genius for micro and Turing devices and as fine a grasp of sterile technique as a Kuiper education could provide. He was also an old Yambuku hand with two years’ station time behind him, and he should have known better than to venture outside with uncertified armor. But that was exactly what Mac had done, and he had got himself into trouble out in open air.
A scatter of cirrus ran high across the western steppes. The shuttle skimmed through overcast into watery daylight. Winds were light, though a distant storm cell dropped curtains of rain a dozen kilometers north of the river valley. Eastward, the Copper Mountain range was all but invisible in an upwash of cloud; a few fingers of sunlight touched the emerald foothills. Yambuku was situated in a relatively dry forested incline in the heart of the Western Continent, but Isis was everywhere a wet world. The rains came almost daily and winds were often a problem, complicating shuttle schedules and shutting down mobile remotes.
Hayes moved up next to the shuttle’s reserve pilot, who nodded curtly. “Not much in the way of details so far, Dr. Hayes. They’re pretty busy with this. I gather Mac Feya was outside the station doing maintenance and he suffered some kind of suit breach … not a full breach, but they’re hung up on decon, plus he’s stuck in place with an armor malfunction.”
“Just get me there,” Hayes said.
“Doing our best.”
Yambuku’s docking bay was the largest structure associated with the station. A domed vault rising above the station’s sterile core, it opened for the shuttle’s vertical landing and closed, agonizingly slowly, over the landing pad. The Isian atmosphere was evacuated and flushed with sterile air from the exchange stacks; then the chamber was triple-washed with aerosol sterilants, ultraviolet light, and radiant heat not much less searing than the reentry burn had been. During the interminable washdown, Hayes spoke with Cai Connor, ops chief while Hayes was absent and Mac was incapacitated.
Connor, an organic chemist, was almost as seasoned a hand as Mac Feya. Hayes didn’t doubt she was handling the emergency at least as well as he would have, but he heard the catch of anxiety in her voice. “Contact with Mac is sporadic. We have remote tractibles with him, but he’s noncooperative. The decon is going to be tricky at best, and we don’t want to force a joint and open another breach—”
“Take a breath, Cai. From the beginning, please. All I know is that Mac was out on a maintenance excursion.”
“It was another seal failure, this one on the south tractible bay. You know how these ring faults have been driving Mac crazy. Frankly, he shouldn’t have gone out. The alpha excursion suit was hung up in maintenance, so he took the beta unit even though it hasn’t been through a refit since the last walkabout. I guess it needed it. He was at the bay door taking samples from the bad seal and laying down a caulk bead when a servo in his right leg overheated. Suit homeostasis went crazy, then that system locked too. Big, big cascade failure. The servomotor fused a hole through the exterior armor, and the inner seal may or may not have been breached—we have contradictory telemetry on that. But it for sure cooked Mac’s leg above the knee. He’s in pain even with the suit feeding him analgesics, and the analgesics are about to run out. Plus, he’s incoherent, so we can’t count on him cooperating with any rescue effort.”
Hayes winced. God help Mac, riveted to the ground by a bad motor, seared and in pain, not knowing—and this must be the worst of it—whether his bioperimeter was intact or whether he was already, in effect, a dead man. “Cai, how deep in maintenance is the alpha suit?”
“Hang on.” She consulted someone away from the transducer. “I fast-tracked it as soon as Mac’s alarms sounded. It’s been through preliminary diagnostics and looks okay, but none of the deep testing has gone ahead.”
“Pull it out and prep it.”
“That might not be wise.”
“Prep it, Cai, thank you. And get the tunnel out here.”
“Okay, it’s happening.” She sounded relieved to have him back in charge, despite her misgivings. “You’re about twenty minutes away from confirmation.”
“I want the armor prepped as soon as I’m through the tunnel. In the meantime, do whatever you were doing—keep Mac as calm as possible and have the tractibles handy with a chordal brace. And relay his telemetry, let me see if I can make sense of it.”
“Yes,” she said promptly. Station rank was informal. Cai, a Kuiper freewoman of the purest sort, would never call him “Sir,” the way Terrestrial scientists inevitably did. But he heard the deference in her voice.
And felt the burden of responsibility shift squarely onto his own shoulders.
The new hand—Zoe Fisher, the bottle baby whose novel excursion suit was still deep in stowage, unfortunately—came forward from the passenger cabin. She was solemn, frowning. “Is there anything I can do?”
“You can keep out of the way.” It was the first thing that came to mind.
She nodded once and left the cabin. Hang on, Mac, Hayes thought.
Yambuku didn’t need another tutelary death. Isis had claimed too many lives already.