Robert Wilson - Bios

General shutdown, barriers up, contamination detected in Pod Six. The lowermost of the Oceanic Station’s laboratory units had gone hot. It took him another ten minutes trolling for information before the engineering crew determined that yes, the pod had apparently gone hot, and no, the two men trapped inside it at the time of the alarm weren’t responding to repeated calls. Telemetry from the affected pod had also failed; the structure was closed and blank. The electronic failures were particularly perplexing. Faced with locked doors and no input, the engineering people weren’t sure what the next step ought to be.

Li knew what it ought to be: He ordered the station’s shuttle pupped for emergency evacuation in case of further problems. He told his comms crew to alert the IOS and ask for its advice. He was trying to put through a personal call to Kenyon Degrandpre when Kay, still wearing the telepresence gear, said, “I think you should look at this.”

“Not a good time.” Obviously.

“I’m down at Pod Six,” Kay said. “Look.”

He canceled the call and climbed back into the telepresence chair.

Pod Six had been disastrously compromised—that much was obvious from the alarm sequence—but Li couldn’t see any physical damage from the perspective of the submersible remensor.

Multiple beams of light thatched the ridges of Pod Six’s external sensor array, revealing nothing. Huge translucent invertebrates—Freeman’s staff called them “church bells”—drifted toward the remensor in great numbers, attracted by the light; but they were a harmless nuisance, mindlessly trawling the warm equatorial water for organelles. A flock of church bells could hardly have shut down an entire laboratory.

“Kay, what am I supposed to see?”

The two men trapped in the compromised pod were Kyle Singh, a Kuiper microbiologist, and Roe Devereaux, a Terrestrial marine biologist. Even if they had survived the initial biohazard, whatever it was, they might not survive the electrical failure. Even in Isis’s warm equatorial seas, Pod Six was deep enough to shed heat quickly. And the air recyclers would already have been overloaded, revved by the alarm protocols into toxic-emergency mode.

But almost certainly, Freeman thought, the men inside were dead by now. Pod Six was home to the deep-sea alkaloid inventory. Lots of hot organisms were down there, and if something had gotten out of the glove boxes and into their air supply, Devereaux and Singh would have toxed out almost immediately. Below Six, there was only the anchor line and the blind deeps of the Isian sea. The water here glowed an inky turquoise, circulating in a thermopause between the habitat of the pressure-loving church bells and the busy phytochemistry of the shallows. Plankton-like monocells and snowflake colonies of bacteria sifted down from the surface waters, a blizzard feeding the biologically rich benthic zones.

The pod seemed intact, if dark. Devereaux had been complaining of algal films clouding the pod windows and external arrays. But none of that was visible to Freeman.

“Circle right,” Kay said emotionlessly. “I thought I saw some outgassing at a window seal. Maybe we should get an engineer in here.”

He played the remensor’s narrow beams across a porthole-like circle of augmented glass.

There. Motion. In the lamplight, a string of rising pearls. Bubbles. Air.

Li’s stomach contracted with a more personal fear. This wasn’t an overpressure vent or a ballast exchange. Kay was right. This was a leak.

He handed back the remensor gear, called the ops room, and told the crisis manager to have his men stand by the decouplers. “And keep the ballast detail alert in case we destabilize.” A fully breached Pod Six would have to be cut loose or it would drag down the rest of the pods with it. It was a worst-case scenario: Drop the breached pod, hope the tube seals held, and try to keep the whole chain from going pendulum.

Then he took back the telepresence chair and moved the remensor away from the crippled pod, catching a second trail of air in the columns of his lights. More leaks; God, he thought, the lab was a fucking sieve!

And found himself watching with numb panic as the pod began to collapse on itself—quickly and utterly silently. Bimetallic seams geysered froth, then twisted inward, hemispheres of steel torn into ragged blades. There was no sound—his remensor wasn’t equipped for it—but the shock must have been tremendous; the remensor bounced hard before it steadied, images ghosting and fragmenting in Freeman’s vision. A tremor traveled up the pod chain and rattled the floor under him.

He ordered an emergency disconnect and watched it happen. Explosive bolts severed the pod from the rest of the station. Fragments of debris—polyester cushions, glove-box lattices, aggregates of clothing that might or might not have contained bodies—separated from tangled metal and churned toward the surface. The bulk of the pod simply sank, caught in its own anchor chains, as if a vast hand had reached up to claim it.

Church bells, faintly iridescent, darted through the roiling water and fled into the deeps.

Kenyon Degrandpre hailed a transit tractible to the orbital station’s ops room as soon as news of the disaster reached him. He was afraid of what he might learn, but he mustn’t let that cloud his judgment. Deal with events now; leave consequences for later.

He found the operations center crowded with junior managers competing for console space. He sent away everyone of less than command status except for the engineers and told the communications crew to stay at their posts pending further orders. Better to have them begging for bathroom breaks than getting underfoot. He kept four subordinates with him and ordered the main screen cleared of everything but traffic from the damaged oceanic outpost.

Where everyone must be very busy. Only the standard telemetry channels were active. Even there, the damage was obvious. The deepest section of the undersea pod chain had imploded only minutes after a biohazard alarm shut it down. Obviously the two events were related, but how? With the pod itself lost, answers might be hard to come by. Not that anyone was looking very hard for answers; the outpost was working frantically to restore its own stability now that it had jettisoned the damaged lab. Degrandpre wondered whether the jettison had been truly necessary or whether Freeman Li might be covering something up, but his engineers assured him it was an act of self-preservation. Still…

But the most immediate question was whether the biohazard had been successfully contained—or whether it might spread.

Degrandpre ordered coffee for all hands in the ops room, then waited with unconcealed impatience for Li—a Terrestrial, at least—to find time for a direct uplink.

Waiting, he felt impotent. This would enrage his superiors on Earth, no matter what happened next. He would have to red-flag a report to the Families and accept whatever responsibility he couldn’t dodge. And in the meantime—

In the meantime, he could only pray that the event would be contained.

A junior brought him coffee. The coffee was synthetic and tasted like ashes steeped in well water, but he had drained two cups by the time Li appeared on the screen at last, his Trust uniform disheveled and perspiration-stained. Li’s skin was as classically dark as Degrandpre’s was classically pale; both men would have been considered moderately handsome on Earth, though not in the Kuiper settlements, where a sort of muwallad brown was the fashionable skin color.

Li said without preamble, “I want a full evacuation of the Oceanic Station.”

Degrandpre blinked. “You know you don’t have the authority—”