The two watchers—an older man and a sour-looking woman—held Aiken’s hands behind his back, but he seemed to be in no condition to struggle.
He had been beaten badly. His upper lip was smashed into an angry, blood-coated wound that had been cleaned and tended but not bandaged. His hair was rumpled, his eyes bloodshot, his skin scuffed with new bruises that would soon turn purple. The way he acted made him look like a lost animal, utterly helpless.
Linda looked at Aiken, and her false repentant expression dropped away like a sheet. She stared, then whirled to gape in horror at Brahms. He waved away her accusation before she could say anything.
“Two of the watchers … misinterpreted my instructions. They have been reprimanded, don’t worry. You’ll be getting punishment enough, both of you.”
Now Linda began to look very afraid. Brahms watched it creep up on her: Her skin became pale and grayish, and a sheen of sweat appeared on her forehead. Brahms turned away from her. He began to talk in a low voice as he stared at a picture on the wall. It was a reprint of an old Russian masterpiece by Ilia Repin, a dramatic portrait of Ivan the Terrible in the moment of shock after he had accidentally killed his own son, his only hope for the future of his dynasty. Now the tsar’s problems seemed trivial and melodramatic.
Brahms’s words were low and ominous, but they built in intensity.
“I trusted you, Linda. And I don’t trust people lightly. You were supposed to be concerned for the safety and the future of this colony. You were not to use your position for your own ends. You have let me down. Do you realize that? Do you even know what you’ve done?”
Brahms glared at her, then at Aiken, with undisguised disgust. “If I can’t trust my own assessors, we’re all doomed. You know the magnitude of trouble we’re in, and you still think you can do whatever you want, that your actions have no consequences.
“You and this … worm of a scientist who tried to bankrupt our hope—you are lower than any of those who went out the airlock first. I can’t have it.”
He shook his head stiffly, like a ventriloquist’s dummy that could rotate only a little from side to side. He clutched his fists, then released them. His whole body stiffened. He felt his muscles locking.
“I can’t have it!”
Then it all ran out of him. He let his voice drop to a dead, uninflected tone. “You, Linda Arnando, and you, Daniel Aiken, will be RIFed. Tomorrow.
“It will be broadcast live. Everyone on this station will be given the full story. Everyone will know what you have done, how you betrayed us. All of us. It’s your fault entirely.”
Linda blinked her eyes, absolutely astounded.
“But you … can’t. I’m one of your division leaders, for Christ’s sake! How can you—”
But Brahms was not even listening. Aiken seemed to collapse in on himself. He made no sound, did not beg for his life or plead for mercy. He just shook with silent sobs. His puffed eyes were shut tight. Tears streamed down his bruised cheeks.
Brahms pushed the intercom button again. “Come and get them.”
The two watchers came back in and escorted Linda Arnando and Daniel Aiken out.
“See that they stay in their cabins. Seal the doors.”
One of the watchers lifted an eyebrow. It was the woman, Nancy Winkowski. “There’s nowhere for them to go, Mr. Brahms.”
“Seal it anyway.” There’s no place for any of us to go, he thought.
Chapter 27
ORBITECH 1—Day 36
To Ramis, Karen Langelier’s lab seemed like a toy store, filled with remnants of American industrial technology that in light of their disaster were alien or even nonsensical. The lipstick fabrication section seemed especially ludicrous.
Karen showed him how she extruded her weavewire, making it zip up the laser guide beam into a fiber so fine that it couldn’t be seen—and though two rockets couldn’t snap it in half, it could cut through titanium. Even to touch a single strand of the fiber would have sliced his fingertips off.
And when Karen pointed out that some of the garments on Orbitech 1 were woven from the monomolecular fiber, he was even more astonished. He listened to her explanation of how the manufacturing prototypes spun together hundreds of kilometers of thread—thereby making it safe—into a single piece of indestructible clothing that could be worn like any other shirt.
Over the last two days, he and Karen had spent hours together. They found in their loneliness a friendship that transcended the quarter-century difference in their ages.
Now he sat and watched. She wanted to talk, but he knew she couldn’t afford to give up more time from her research, not with the assessors watching over them all. Karen’s lower lip was drawn back, held between white teeth in an expression of concentration. Her red hair was tousled.
The air stank of escaped chemicals from burners and polymer melts. His eyes stung at first, but he got used to it. The other polymer chemists worked on their own projects, and Ramis knew how dangerous it would be to interrupt them.
He could drift in the zero-G labs, float from cubicle boundary to cubicle boundary, though he could not Jump here. They didn’t have the wide-open spaces. He thought of the Aguinaldo’s core.
Here, only the wraith-like spider plant, sealed vials of chemicals, and empty spheres from drinks bobbled and drifted in the air currents. The zero gravity offered them freedom, so they caged everything.
After a burst of static, the “attention” tones sounded from the PA holotank column in the center of the lab cubicles. Karen sat up with a start and turned to look, focusing back in on her situation. The neutral gray of the holotank resolved into colored speckles that congealed into a three-dimensional representation of the face of Curtis Brahms.
“May I have your attention, please?” His voice warbled and his face moved, as if he was working the controls himself and didn’t quite know what he was doing.
“May I have your attention, please?” The voice became stronger, firmer. “I must make an announcement of the greatest importance to all on Orbitech 1.”
The other workers in the lab complex snapped to attention. “Another RIF already? My God!” someone said. Ramis drifted closer to the curved face of the holotank.
“You all know the desperate plight the War has brought us to. You all know how hard you’re working to help save us from starvation, to rescue us by using our technical excellence to make up for the few resources we have on hand.”
Brahms lifted his chin and swallowed, as if opting not to continue his morale-building speech. His face had a haunted look. Ramis noticed he was not wearing his eyeglasses, and he appeared too young for the burden he bore, too boyish.
“I am sorry to say that two among us have been traitors to that mission. They have tried to sabotage our survival by lying and cheating, to improve their own situation at the expense of the rest of our people. This man—”
The scene dissolved, and a camera swiveled to show a man being hauled along by two of the watchers. His lip looked wounded, and his eyes were sunken and dark with bruises.
“—is Daniel Aiken. He altered research results to make his work seem more important, to make us seem closer to survival than we are. His lie has stolen a valid hope from all of us. He sidetracked and wasted valuable resources.”
“Look, they’ve beaten him up!” one of the polymer chemists cried. “Brahms beat him up!”
“Linda Arnando is also part of this,” Brahms continued. “She worked with Aiken. She was our chief assessor—one of my division leaders. But instead of reporting Aiken’s falsified data, she used it to blackmail him. She also used her administrative position to steal our rations—to take more than her share.”