“So, you have no solutions? Nothing has changed. These Lagrange colonies are still practically as desperate as they were before, yet you saw nothing wrong with trying to awaken us, merely to see if you could! Why did you not heed the warnings we broadcast? The signs we stationed in the command center?” Anna raised her voice. “Where is Commander Rurik?”
Karen and Ramis exchanged puzzled looks. Karen frowned and said, “There was only one warning broadcast, then silence. We found no signs posted.”
“You did not know what you were doing, yet you decided to tinker with our lives! How many people have died because of your ignorance?”
“Only one,” Ramis said. “The English instructions on the wall were not complete. The process should have been more intuitive. You could not know who would come to rescue you.”
Anna saw that his scorn was only misdirected anger at himself. “Only one? Is that an acceptable number?”
Karen Langelier interrupted. “It was from a fault in the apparatus, I think. You can check the system out. You know it better than we do.”
Anna scowled at them. “Thank you for that concession. Why did Commander Rurik not stop you, or at least assist you? He knew the process well enough.”
Karen and Ramis looked at each other. Karen spoke in Russian. “Who is this Commander Rurik?”
Anna frowned. “If it has been only a month.… He and another officer, Cagarin, remained to watch over us, to keep the colony intact. They did not go under sleepfreeze with the rest of us. They had enough supplies to last them for years.”
Ramis looked puzzled, then swallowed. “We found—I found—another body, in the command center. It was a man. He was large and had brown hair. He was wearing a dark uniform with many medals and insignia. He had been dead several weeks when I arrived.”
The blow was too much for Anna. She closed her eyes, but did not lie back on the bed. Karen took the cup from her hand.
Rurik dead? But how? He had said he would stay, for all of them. Some kind of accident?
Anna recalled his quiet strength, how the others had looked up to him and listened when he spoke, how he had drifted along the edges of the Soviet bureaucracy and somehow retained a clear perception of what he wanted and how to dance around the ineffective political machinery. He could ignore orders from his superiors and all the while convince them that he had done exactly what they’d meant to ask him.
She remembered holding Rurik, feeling warm next to his skin. Warmth seemed like such a foreign feeling to her now.
“Leave me alone,” she whispered. She kept her eyes closed as she heard them leave her quarters.
Rurik was dead.
Let us not debate who is making the bravest choice, he had told her in their last few moments together. I do what I must, and you do what you must. She looked at the empty walls around her, but saw nothing to tell her whose quarters she was in.
Without me, you would be considered the acting commander of this station.
She gave a quiet moan.
Anna Tripolk stood in the infirmary, looking at the rows of glass cases, like baubles in a china shop. The hundreds of other Kibalchich inhabitants still slept unaware, peaceful … as she had been, just a day before.
Ramis Barrera and Karen Langelier left her alone, perhaps ashamed of themselves, or perhaps just afraid of her. This suited Anna fine. Every time she saw the two of them, she resented what they had done. She thought of Grekov’s wasted life and the arrogant ignorance that had led these outsiders to believe that Soviet technology and scientific prowess was so trivial they could decipher its nuances by pushing random buttons and keeping their fingers crossed.
Anna inspected both of the newly empty cubicles—Grekov’s and her own. The first cubicle had indeed malfunctioned. The awakening steps had occurred out of sequence, and the Barrera boy hadn’t known how to react to the warning signals.
Grekov’s body remained down in the lower deck, in the cold-storage locker by the recycler pool—frozen again, but this time, only as so much meat. Rurik’s body lay there, too.
She needed to know why the commander had died. She felt a knot in her throat. She would have to do an autopsy on him.
She remembered Rurik’s bravery, his charisma, his presence. He was like a legend to them all, so different from the manipulative, bureaucrat director on Orbitech 1. Karen Langelier and Ramis Barrera had led her to the command center. There, Director Brahms had spoken to her.
Anna had listened, repulsed by this slimy little man who rubbed his hands together, prattling his empty welcomings and congratulations and babbling shallow words through his image on the tall central holotank. But Anna drew herself up.
“Mr. Brahms, I want to assure you that under no circumstances will I allow you to revive any more of the people on this station. You have nothing to offer us. You are ruining our sacrifice. We were to go into sleepfreeze until conditions had returned to normal. You should not have directed your lackeys to waken me. Now that my commander has died, I am in charge of this station.”
Brahms appeared taken aback, but then he smiled at her. “The rules have changed, Ms. Tripolk. Lines of authority and nationality no longer mean the same thing. Your sleepfreeze process could save the lives of many people on Orbitech 1 if our food continues to run in short supply. I will not allow your petty indignation to ruin our future.” He paused. “Think of it as evolution in action.”
He folded his hands, appearing to thrust them through the walls of the holotank.
“But this is too heavy a subject to be discussing right now. I’m sure you’re still recovering from your ordeal. We will speak again later. We are proud to have you back among the living.” He smiled, then signed off before she could say anything.
In fury, she launched herself across the zero-G command center to one of the lift platforms on the opposite side. Ramis and Karen tried to be placating, but Anna had closed her ears. She rode the lift-shaft down alone.
Now she stood among the sleepfreeze cubicles with a liquid-crystal input pad in one hand, inspecting each of the chambers, verifying that everything remained stable. In her research, this was the long-term, large-scale test they had not been able to conduct ahead of time.
Before the War, Anna had located a volunteer among the station inhabitants to test the sleepfreeze chambers, when their work had proceeded rapidly and the Mars program had been a gleaming dream on the horizon. The volunteer was to be given a medal of honor, extra pay, extra leave, special privileges for himself and his family.
But after the War had cut the Kibalchich off, they all had to go under sleepfreeze, with survival being the biggest benefit of all.
She ticked off the cubicles on her input pad, taking inventory, checking—until she came upon one in the fourth row that sat dead. The monitoring lights remained gray and dim. The maintenance systems had been disconnected from the main power supply.
Anna bent down and found two of the wires intentionally severed with a neat cut. She stared in shock. Inside the sealed chamber, the waxen-faced man appeared different. He looked dead. His skin showed the wrong color, sagged in the wrong places. Because of the airtight chamber she could smell no decay, but this man was dead.
The severed wires could not possibly be an accident. Someone had sabotaged the sleepfreeze chamber.
Anna stood, narrowing her eyes. Outrage and confusion smoldered behind them. She made a fast check, walking briskly up and down the aisles. She wore a stiff white uniform that rustled against her legs—it felt more proper than the gray pajamas she had worn in the sleepfreeze cubicle.
She moved quickly through the large room and below decks, where the first wave of frozen colonists had been put under. She found eleven dead cubicles—each sabotaged, intentionally shut down, the wires cut.