David Brin - The Heart of the Comet

“You don’t hate me… for what the gene treatments did to you?” Saul asked.

Virginia looked up quickly and met his eyes. She shook her head. “I did, long ago. You and Simon Percell. Then I met some of the other Percells… those for whom your lupus cure worked completely.

“I studied. I learned that without the treatments I would have been stillborn or horribly crippled… not merely—lacking. It was just the luck of the draw that I…”

“It’s all right.” Saul drew her near and she closed her eyes. “We both still have our work now. Good work. And that does give us a piece of the future too, Virginia.”

“Yes, our work… and maybe a little more.” She felt warm. Virginia lifted her face to him. Saul had to push aside the wires of his helmet in order to kiss her.

I’ve never done anything like this while linked, before . She thought amid the tidal swell of feeling. I wonder what Jon Von will make of it.

Above them, unheeded, the simulation had panned back again, taking in a wall of clay and a salty, electric-bright current.

Bright shapes had begun emerging from the rust-colored crevices. They flitted about in the hot stream—now coated and armored against the battering molecules—and set out into a multicolored world, consuming one another, growing, and making little replicas of themselves.

At first he thought it was nothing important.

Carl wiped the green and brown gunk off the distillation pipes and moved on. The gas-gathering zone of Shaft 3 was a long dark tunnel, its phosphors giving everything a lime-green cast.

The plumbing looked okay—magnetic motors humming, pipes gurgling, a smell of rotten eggs from the sulfur compounds. Excess vapors were condensed here from the miles of tunnels now threading Halley Core. Bioinventory showed a surplus of useful fluids and was talking about storing it. The boiloff would probably lessen as the more-volatile ices were used up, and also there would be less heat-making activity during the long cruise out. Everything looked pretty damn good.

But there was brown sticky stuff in the filters. Shit. It’s everywhere . Carl cleaned them carefully with a water jet and flushed his covered bucket into the outbound tube—one-way flash vaporization that dumped directly into free space.

This odd-looking mess wasn’t supposed to be here. Prefilters should take out the big stuff and sift it for useful solids. These backup filters should catch impurities and crystallize them.

Maybe there was something special about this particular sticky stuff. He filled a sample bottle—the bio types nagged him incessantly for traces of anything odd—and kicked off toward sleep slot 1. Malenkov should have a look at this.

Cycling through the big lock into Central Complex, he realized that he missed Jeffers. The founding crew were all safely slotted now, making things a bit lonely for the First Watch. Captain Cruz had made him senior petty officer, which merely meant he roamed more than the others, checking—but the minor honor pleased him.

He liked working alone, anyway—gliding smoothly and surely through the locks and shafts with Bach or Mozart weaving in his ears. Maybe I’m a natural hermit , he thought. I wonder if the crew selection people could tell that from their psychoinventory tests . He had hardly seen anyone these last few days.

When he entered the aft port of Life Sciences the first thing he heard was loud talking.

“He goes in now ! I make no compromises,” Nikolas Malenkov’s gravelly voice cut through.

“I want a sample to study,” Saul persisted.

“I have taken samples.” Malenkov put his hands on his hips and leaned forward menacingly. “Epidermis and fluids only.”

“I’ll need more than that to find out what—”

“No! Later, we revive him, maybe! When we know what killed him. If you take samples from internal organs, that will make it harder for us to bring him back later.”

Carl frowned. “Hey, what’s—”

Saul wiped his nose with a handkerchief, ignoring Carl, and said, “You can’t cure him unless you know what killed him!”

“You have smears from throat, urine, blood samples—”

“That might not be enough. I—”

“Hey!” Carl cut in. “Will someone tell me what’s going on?”

Malenkov noticed Carl for the first time. His expression suddenly changed from tight-lipped rage to sad-eyed dejection. “Captain Cruz.”

Carl felt suddenly lightheaded, incredulous. “What? That’s… But I saw him just two days ago!”

Neither of the two other men spoke—there was still steam in their argument. Virginia said quietly, “He had a fever yesterday and went to bed. When Vidor went to find him this morning he… would not waken. He died within an hour. Apparently there were no other symptoms.”

“ Fever? That’s it?”

“It doesn’t seem he ever woke up.”

The shock of it was only now penetrating, filling Carl with a sensation of falling. Commander Cruz had been the center, the heart and brains of the entire expedition. Without him…

“What… what’ll we do?”

Malenkov mistook Carl’s question. “Sleep slot him—now. There is yet little or no neural damage.”

Dazed, Carl said, “Well… sure… but I meant…”

Saul said, “I still feel we must have more data to study these cases—”

“We are not certain how long he ran a high temperature. Any more time, he risks brain damage.” Malenkov waved a hand brusquely in front of Saul, erasing any objections. “Come.”

They all went numbly to the hub of the sleep-slot complex. Carl was stunned. He tried to think, chewing his lip. The sociosavants had written extensively about how small, high-risk enterprises had to have a clearly superior, Olympian leader to avoid factionalism and weather hard times. A Drake, a Washington. Without the leader…

In the sealed prep room Samuelson and Peltier were running checks and planting diagnostics around a body that was already wrapped in a gray shroud of web circuitry. Miguel Cruz-Mendoza’s face was calm, and still projected a powerful sense of purpose.

Wisps of fog laced the air as the workroom dropped in temperature. Malenkov spoke to the two laboring techs through a mike and the party watched the last procedures of interment.

“So you’d authorized slotting even before our little argument,” Saul noted calmly.

“I wanted you should see my logic. While Matsudo is in slots, I am responsible for health of the whole expedition,” Malenkov said stiffly.

“Indeed you are.” Saul’s voice carried only a dry hint of irony.

“I hope we can bring him back soon—very soon,” Malenkov said. “Damnation! At the very beginning!”

Virginia said gamely, “We’ll all pull together. Of course, we’ll have to…”

“Pick a new commander,” Saul finished for her. “That’s obvious— Bethany Oakes. She’s next in line.”

Carl nodded reluctantly. Another Ortho. All the senior crew were. And Oakes wasn’t even a spacer.

They watched in silence as Peltier and Samuelson rolled the commander’s body into a sleep slot and opened the valves to feed fluids. The tube fitted snugly into a broad wall of similar nooks, gleaming steel certainly wreathed in gauzy fog. So much like death, yet it was the only hope of life to come. It they could figure out what had killed him. If .

Malenkov sighed. “We should have some ceremony. But there was no time.”

Saul said, “And perhaps it’s not such a good idea to assemble everyone in one place.”

Still numb, Carl thought, Miguel Cruz wouldn’t want a stiff little ritual. Some of us’ll get together and hoist a few for him later. The captain would understand that.