Charles Sheffield - Aftermath

Reza scowled, and for another moment Celine thought there would be an open mutiny. Finally he nodded, and so did everyone else. Celine felt that it was she alone, Celine (Cassandra) Tanaka, who deep inside whispered, Perhaps.

Jenny Kopal had programmed a careful approach to ISS-2, one that allowed ample time for close-up inspection. Every sensor on the Schiaparelli — as well as every human eye — was trained on the big station as it slowly turned against a background of stars.

Celine, Ludwig, and Zoe were already in their suits, floating at the open entrance to the Schiaparelli’s main hatch. There was no way to dock the Mars ship at ISS-2 without active cooperation from within the station. The first transition had to be an open-space maneuver.

That held no fears for Celine. She loved EVAs. An antenna repair on the outward trip to Mars, when the Schiaparelli floated eighty million kilometers distant from the home planet, had given Celine and Ludwig Holter the record for both the longest and most distant free space activity. That evening, in her excitement and exuberance, she had seduced Wilmer. He had said afterward, as though describing something as far removed from human control as a stellar flare, “I wondered when that would happen.”

Today would be different, and depressing. Straight ahead lay the station, a dark irregular bulk that answered no queries and offered no signs of life. On the left, filling the sky, was an alien Earth. All the normal circulation patterns of the atmosphere had vanished, replaced by great streaks and whorls of cloud that curved across the equator. The surface beneath was rarely visible on the sunlit hemisphere that faced them; but the Schiaparelli’s onboard sensors had recorded south-to-north wind vectors of up to six hundred fifty kilometers an hour. That exceeded by a wide margin the highest speeds ever reported in Earth tornadoes.

“We have attained zero relative velocity.” Jenny Kopal’s calm voice sounded over Celine’s suit radio. “Distance from ISS-2 is eighty meters.”

“Hold there pending further instructions.” That was Zoe Nash. “All right, no point in waiting. Let’s go.”

She led the way out of the hatch. Celine and Ludwig followed more slowly, drifting across toward the space station. By the time they joined Zoe she was waiting at a point between the two orbiters where a station entry hatch was located. She moved the airlock door a few inches with her suited hand, making it clear from her action that the hatch was not sealed. If the inner lock was open, too, the interior of a large part of ISS-2 would be airless.

Celine, moving abruptly from sunlight to shadow, felt a cold like death inside her. It could only be psychological, because her suit maintained internal temperature control. During the return journey from Mars they had talked often about the return to Earth space, and -the joyful reunion they would have with the staff of the big stations when they docked there.

“The orbiter access external airlock is open.” Zoe spoke for the benefit of those aboard the Schiaparelli. She had the hatch fully open and was moving inside. “The inner door of the lock is not sealed. No mechanical locks are engaged. ISS-2 appears to have been relying on electronic control. That was probably the case everywhere on the station.”

The crew of the station are all dead. Celine added those words only to herself. Everyone on the Schiaparelli was capable of drawing the same conclusion without assistance.

Once they were through the inner airlock door, she and Zoe moved away in different directions. Zoe had assigned their duties in advance. Ludwig would remain outside and determine the condition of the two single-stage orbiters. Celine would head for the control room and decide what elements of ISS-2, if any, might be restored to useful function.

Zoe had reserved the most unpleasant job for herself. She would inspect the station’s living quarters.

But unpleasantness was all relative. Celine, easing her way along the corridor that led to the deep interior and heart of ISS-2, had to push her way past four bodies. They rested against the corridor wall, contorted as they had been at the moment of their deaths. She made a brief inspection, enough to confirm that they had all died in the decompression that followed the failure of the ISS-2’s locks.

It had not been a quick death. This corridor was a hundred feet from the lock, and the air pressure drop to a fatal level had been far from instantaneous. There had been time to reach a bulkhead with its own safety airlock, and learn that it too would not work.

Two of the people were holding hands. Celine shone her suit light on their uniform tags and noted their names: Ursula Klein and Lawrence Morphy. United forever in death. They must have made that final gesture deliberately, and if she lived she would find a way to record the fact. Had they also, the living man and woman who now formed freeze-dried and desiccated corpses, had time enough to realize that the cause of all their problems was a failure of the microchips throughout the whole of ISS-2?

Surely not. The fatal Gotcha! was the one that you never expected; no one had expected this.

Celine recorded the other two names also, and forced herself to keep going. The control room had its own share of horrors. Seven more corpses. Three people, all women, sat in chairs before the control board, where not a warning light glowed or a single display was active. The interior temperature of the chamber, according to Celine’s suit sensors, was hundreds of degrees below freezing. ISS-2 was dead. Unlike its doomed personnel, the station might one day be brought back to life. But that resurrection would require the replacement of thousands, perhaps millions, of electronic components. Celine had no hope that she and her companions could perform such a task with the limited resources available on the Schiaparelli. So far as the Mars expedition was concerned, ISS-2 was a derelict hulk and would remain so.

She made a final inspection of the seven bodies in the control room, again noting from the uniforms the name of every dead individual. She did not know why she was doing it. Earth records would certainly contain identification of everyone on ISS-2.

She did it anyway, a bizarre gesture of final respect. Then with the presentiment of death inside her she drifted back along the corridor to the airlock.

There was no sign of the other two. Zoe must still be inside, while Ludwig was presumably in one of the two orbiters. Celine headed for the nearer, noting as she approached how small it seemed. She had been to orbit and returned from it many times, but always in vehicles ten times the size of this one. It looked like a toy, a single-person reentry pod. And this little bug was supposed to hold three or four of them?

Celine made a determined effort to avoid negative -thinking. This orbiter would take them home, because it had to. She had seen ISS-2, and she knew there was no chance of waiting on the station for a possible rescue from Earth.

Ludwig was inside the orbiter. He had pulled the front off the control board, and was studying what lay behind it using the light of his suit. He turned when Celine’s light added to his in illuminating the panel. “Well? What did you find?”

“What we expected.” She did not want to go into details. “We will have to use these orbiters. Maybe we can scavenge materials from the station, and fuel. But no working electronics.”

He scowled at her. “Marvelous. But not surprising. And not good, because the electronics are shot in both orbiters. The other one is a bit bigger inside than this one, but they have identical computers and identical control systems. We won’t need fuel, because both orbiters have full tanks. But we do need control systems, and that’s going to be a problem. Zoe’s one of the best, but even she can’t fly a reentry without controls.”