Robert Wilson - Bios

“And if we do that,” Degrandpre said, “what do you imagine would happen? We’re contaminated with an infectious agent that the Trusts would happily kill us all to contain. There won’t be a rescue mission, certainly not if we’re idiotic enough to broadcast a distress call.”

The engineer blinked at this logic. Trembling, Degrandpre imagined, under the weight of blasphemy. “Sir, the regulations—”

“Regulations are suspended for the duration of the emergency.” Degrandpre put his hand on the grip of his quirt, to make the matter official.

The engineer swallowed hard and left the communications chamber.

Alone in the room, Degrandpre located the main power switches—a bank of breakers that queried and recognized his thumbprints—and cut power to the complex of communications machineries embedded in the walls. Panels of indicator lights winked out. But that was not enough, not nearly enough.

He opened a deckplate over the phalanx of batteries (a battery of batteries, he thought senselessly) that provided a constant flow of uninterruptible current to the core of the particle-pair reactor, maintaining the delicate cohesion that was the beating heart of the link. He disconnected the cells manually, systematically, ignoring the alarm signals, until the overhead lights nickered and went dark m a last futile attempt to reroute power and preserve cohesion.

Degrandpre switched on a hand lamp.

Working by lamplight, he pulled the three coaxial lines that were the link’s last source of energy. Deep in the supercooled com core, photons that had resonated with their Terrestrial twins for years began to decohere; information was scattered in a sudden entropic collapse, and the IOS was alone.

The Isis Orbital Station maintained a semblance of life. Shipments of replacement parts from the lunar Turing factories arrived with clockwork regularity, docked at the few remaining live bays and transferred their cargo to waiting tractibles. The station’s holds filled with finished goods and raw materials that would never be put to use.

Of the nearly one thousand crew who had escaped quarantine, fifteen at most would find a berth on the sole escape vessel: a small Higgs sphere embedded by Turing tractibles in a cometary body and parked at an Isian Lagrange point. Fifteen, coincidentally, was the number of section managers plus Kenyon Degrandpre, the general manager. Two of the original section managers, including Corbus Nefford, had been lost to disease or general quarantine. Their replacements were guaranteed a berth.

Degrandpre understood the possibility of insurrection from the excluded crew, and indeed he had found his hand straying to the holster of his quirt more often in the last few days. But most of the crew were Terrestrial and sufficiently disciplined to carry on even in the face of this disaster. Degrandpre had encouraged them to believe in the possibility of rescue and they seemed grateful for the lie.

Once he had ordered the preparation of the escape launch, a sort of numb quiescence overtook the station. Degrandpre spent the last night in his cabin with a guard detail posted at the door, his first uninterrupted sleep in seventy-two hours. He dreamed of a steel labyrinth with shrinking corridors, and then of his father’s greenhouses, dewy and warm in the winter afternoons.

Odd, he thought, waking to the chime of his scroll, how the psyche salvages calm from disaster. Dreamlike, these nautilus chambers of normalcy, when the IOS was in fact a crippled and doomed environment. The crisis was acute but somehow lazy, the way a sailing vessel damaged below decks betrays itself first with the gentlest of lists.

The scroll chimed again, an incoming message tagged high-priority. He debated ignoring it. What could be urgent when the end of everything was already in progress? He was facing, at best, a life in exile among the Kuipers. He could never return to a vengeful Earth, nor even to Mars, with its prisons and its extradition treaties. He wasn’t a criminal—or so he insisted to himself—but the Families would see it differently. The Families would hang him, given a chance.

He picked up the scroll, his fingers suddenly numb with dread.

“Sir.” It was Leander of Medical. “We have a stack of calls from Yambuku demanding immediate evacuation. Avrion Theophilus wants to speak to you directly.”

And the last thing Kenyon Degrandpre wanted was some Family cousin pulling rank on him. God, not now. “Tell Theophilus I can’t take his call. But clear them for the evacuation.”

“And dock them—?”

“At the last Turing bay. And declare quarantine. Keep them in the shuttle, if possible.”

“You mean—indefinitely?”

Yes, indefinitely; more precisely, until the escape module was launched—did he have to spell this out? “Is there anything else?”

“Yes.” Leander’s voice grew flat. “Reports of sickness in the Delta pod.” A dormitory pod adjoining Engineering. “We sealed the bulkheads at once, of course, but—”

He shrugged.

Degrandpre understood the rest. No guarantees.

The outer ring of the ground station was hot, according to nanosensors embedded in the walls. Yambuku had lost its first perimeter of defense. Wholesale failure, Dieter Franklin insisted, could not be far behind.

Avrion Theophilus took the planetologist to the small launch-control room above the core—“the aerie,” Franklin called it—to discuss their options.

Dieter Franklin had the slightly mad look of a man condemned to death. Condemned, and resigned to it. He spoke too freely. But Theophilus listened.

“There have been sporadic seal failures since the ground stations were first constructed. But nothing like this. We’re looking at a massive, concentrated attack.” The planetologist frowned. “Think of Isis as a killer. She wants in. She wants us. Until now, she’s been fumbling with a set of keys, chemical compounds, trying to find one that fits the lock. It was a long and frustrating effort and it led us to believe we were relatively safe. But now she has the key. The killer has the key, and all she has to do is use it, patiently open the doors one by one, because it’s too late to change the locks.” He summarized: “Basically, we’re rucked.”

“So you agree that we ought to evacuate.”

“It’s the only way we can continue to draw breath.” He took a drink from a cup of coffee—that bitter substance the station crew was pleased to call coffee. “However, we have two people in the field.”

“Hayes.”

“Tam Hayes and Zoe Fisher. Last I heard, she was still alive.”

“Trapped under the digger mounds.”

“Admittedly.”

“By your own logic, we can’t do any more for them without putting us all at risk.”

“We’re already just about as ‘at risk’ as a human being can get. That’s not the point, sir.”

“I’ve already demanded evac and I’ve already offered to monitor their situation from orbit. Give me another recommendation.

“We’re obliged to take as many people out of harm’s way as we can. So we evacuate the station, but we leave it up and running. Nanos and tractibles can monitor the core for at least a few days. We can maintain contact with Hayes from the IOS, and if by some miracle he or Zoe make it back to Yambuku we can send the shuttle for them. I wouldn’t care to calculate the odds on any of this succeeding. But it costs us nothing.”

Theophilus cupped his hands. “You call Isis ‘she.’ She wants in, you said. Do you have any idea why she wants in?”

The tall planetologist shrugged. “Maybe she’s curious. Or maybe she’s hungry.”

Theophilus’s scroll chimed; he glanced at it. A summons from the communications room. He headed for the door.