Karen stared at him, realizing he was right, but finding it difficult to work up enthusiasm for the task. “You’ve been all over the colony?”
“I found a cold-storage compartment on the lower deck, near the waste-recycling pool. I think it was supposed to be used for storing food and specimens. We should put the bodies there, but I cannot carry them by myself. Not that I would want to.”
Karen pressed her lips together. The waste recycler would be on the lower deck, of course, so gravity could help waste diffuse through the filters. “We need to go back to the sleeping quarters first and get some sheets.”
“Sheets?”
“We can knot them into a body bag.”
Fifteen minutes later, Karen and Ramis worked together to haul Grekov’s burly body out of the sleepfreeze chamber and lifted him onto a sheet spread out on the textured metal floor. They folded the sheet over and knotted the two ends.
“Let’s move him out of here. One, two, lift!” The two of them moved in small stutter steps, carrying the stiff, sheet-wrapped corpse between them.
They slid the body down the stairs, opting not to use the direct chute to the waste-recycling unit from the commissary; she could just imagine the body getting stuck there. Karen thought it best that they store the two bodies and let the Kibalchich inhabitants decide what to do with them. Perhaps the Soviets would want to recycle the body, or maybe they would have some sort of ceremony and eject him out the airlock.
As Brahms had done in his RIF.
They found the large cold-storage chamber next to the slowly circulating pool of waste, which was mostly clear now after a month of inactivity on the station. Ramis stood watching the pool for a moment. Karen saw steel teeth just below the surface that would grind the waste into a more manageable form before it was leached and broken down by dissolvers.
The steel teeth in the recycler brought home the detailed planning for the colony back when it had been constructed. People were going to die up here, and unless they were ferried back to Earth, which was too expensive, or ejected into space, which was a waste of valuable minerals, they were going to have to face the reality of living in a closed system.
A gust of frosty air poured out of the cold-storage chamber when Ramis opened it. On the right-side wall stood a tall bank of tiny drawers apparently filled with various samples, like an old-fashioned library card catalog. Piled metal canisters and boxes cluttered the back wall. The other side of the chamber remained empty.
Karen and Ramis placed the dead Soviet on the floor, straightened the sheets, then stood to leave. Ramis mumbled some sort of prayer to himself, looking deeply guilty.
Then they sealed the man back into a frozen sleep from which he would never awaken.
Chapter 43
KIBALCHICH—Day 45
The white dream surrounded her like snow, an icy blizzard coming from inside.
Anna Tripolk saw herself standing alone in a howling void. The cold had gone beyond numbness into a tearing pain. She couldn’t tell if she had opened her eyes.
Anna tried to call out, but the wind snatched her voice away and scattered the words, freezing them as they flew by. Stepan Rurik should have been there with her. He was always there when she needed him. Anna searched for him, but she saw nothing in the coldness.
Had they finally reached Mars? Was this the colony, their first winter there? How had she gotten lost outside? Where were the others?
Then she wondered, in the crazy rationale of dreams, whether she and Rurik had somehow been thrown back in time to the end of the Tsarist days. Perhaps someone did not approve of a relationship between the ranking researcher and the commander of the station. Anna Tripolk and Commander Stepan Rurik had been exiled to old Siberia, left without shelter in the snow.
Anna realized she had begun to shiver violently, but her body seemed a great distance away. The whiteness muted, faded, and focused into low lights reflected off glass walls.
Her teeth chattered with such force that it felt like a seizure. Her fingers clenched and unclenched, and she could not stop them. Her eyes were dry.
Hearing returned, but the sounds made no sense. She fought with her mind to focus things, to remember as the sounds sorted themselves out. Words.
“… Hello …”
She tried to concentrate, comprehend.
“Welcome back. Can you hear me?”
The words were clearly Russian, but with an odd accent—a woman’s voice. Anna blinked her eyes, afraid that she might crack a thin film of tears frozen into ice.
“I hope this one doesn’t die, too.” This was a different voice, male. Anna needed a moment to realize that these words had been spoken in English.
Then the wall between herself and her memories popped like a balloon. The sleepfreeze, the War, the long wait in suspended animation. The Soviets had come to rescue them. Earth had gotten itself back to its feet.
She wondered how many years had passed. Everything would be fine now. They were all saved.
A woman’s face came into view—thin, with green eyes that were bright, intelligent. A pale cobweb of wrinkles flared out from the side of each eye. A few dark freckles dotted her cheeks and arms; she had red hair. She wore no uniform that Anna Tripolk recognized.
Then a young man pushed his face overhead. Dark hair and dark skin made him appear Asiatic. Mongolian? He could not be older than twenty.
He had spoken in English.
Something had changed drastically since the War. Anna’s body continued to shiver. It became very important for her to know how long she had been under sleepfreeze. She tried to speak, but her vocal cords wouldn’t work. Where was Rurik? Her tongue lay sluggish and still asleep inside her mouth. With exhaled breath, she managed to form words.
“When … how long …?”
The woman and the young man seemed delighted at her question. They clasped each other and then moved their hands inside Anna’s glass sleepfreeze chamber. She felt pressure as they removed the needles from her arms, peeled off the electrodes. She noticed no pain; her nerves had not fully awakened either. Pushing the young man away, the woman removed a catheter from her urinary tract.
Working together, the two of them pulled Anna Tripolk from the chamber, as gently as they could. Anna tried to help them, but her muscles would not function. Her limbs flopped. She could barely keep her gaze focused. The room spun around.
The strange woman spoke to Anna as she and the young man held her up. “It’s been forty-five days since the War, and about a month since we lost contact with you.”
As they helped Anna to a vertical position, all the blood rushed to her feet. Only a month? she thought. What could possibly happen in only a month? Disappointment began to well up inside of her.
But vertigo from the outrush of blood brought down a blanket of unconsciousness instead.
They had taken her to quarters that were not her own, but they didn’t know that. They didn’t know many things.
Anna Tripolk sat propped on the bed, covered with a crinkly insulated blanket, still shivering. A full day had passed since her awakening. She sipped strong tea, avoiding the gazes of this Dr. Langelier and Ramis Barrera.
Anger seethed in her now, swelling and falling away when she found no suitable way to express it. Her voice remained hoarse, but that only suited her roiling emotions. Anna glared from one to the other as she spoke, using English so the young man from the Aguinaldo would understand everything.