“It’s worth it to find out what’s going on.”
“I can’t allow that, Derec.”
“It’s not your decision,” he said, reaching for the harness release with his free hand.
“I am sorry, Derec. It is,” Darla said.
Too late, Derec realized that a Massey Companion was equipped to calm a distraught survivor not only verbally, but chemically. The dual jets of mist from either side of the headrest caught him full in the face, and he inhaled the sickly sweet droplets in the gasp of surprise.
Derec had barely enough time to be astonished at how quickly the drug acted. Both his arms went limp, the right falling well short of the harness release, the left losing its grasp on the helmet. His vision rapidly grayed. As though from a distance, he heard dimly the sound of the helmet hitting the floor. But between the first bounce and the second, he drifted away into the silent darkness of unconsciousness, and saw and heard nothing more.
Chapter 2. Under The Ice
For the second time in one day, Derec awoke in strange surroundings.
This time, he was lying flat on his back staring up at the ceiling. There was a sour taste in his mouth and an empty, growly sensation in his stomach. He lay there for a moment, remembering, then sat up suddenly, his muscles tensed defensively as he looked about him.
As before, Derec was alone. But this time he found himself in more domestic surroundings-a four-man efficiency cabin, three meters wide by five meters long. The bed he had been lying in was a fold-down bunk, one of four mounted on the side walls. To his right as he sat on the edge of the bunk was a bank of storage lockers of assorted sizes. To his left was a closed door.
That damned Darla, he thought fiercely.
Though what he saw around him struck a vaguely familiar chord, Derec dismissed it as meaningless-there was a tedious sameness to all modular living designs. A more important question was whether the cabin was part of a work camp on the surface of the asteroid, tucked away somewhere inside a speeding spacecraft, or somewhere else he couldn’t imagine. The cabin itself offered no clue. Nor could it tell him whether he had been rescued or captured.
Glancing down at himself, he saw that he was no longer wearing the safesuit. His torso and legs were covered by a formfitting white jumpsweat, the sort of garment a space worker would wear inside his work jitney or augment.
It was clean and relatively new, but there was some wear on the abrasion pads at heel and knee and waist. It might have been what he was wearing under the safesuit, or-
“The suit,” he said with sudden dismay.
He jumped to his feet and looked around wildly. There was only one locker large enough to hold a safesuit. It was unlocked, but it was also empty. He went through the other lockers mechanically. All were empty.
No, they were more than empty, he decided. They looked as though they’d never been used.
Derec felt a twinge of panic. If he didn’t find the suit, he would never learn whatever information the datastrip on its name badge had to offer. And he had to find Darla as well, or lose the irreplaceable data stored in her event recorder.
Half afraid that he would find it locked, Derec crossed to the door and touched the keyplate. The door slid aside with a hiss. Outside was a short corridor flanked by four doors. The corridor was deserted, the other doors all closed.
To Derec’s left, the corridor terminated in a blank wall. The other end was sealed by an airlock, suggesting that the four rooms formed a self-contained environmental cell. Through the small window in the inner pressure door he caught a glimpse of another corridor lying beyond.
“Hello?” Derec called. There was no answer.
The door facing him was labeled WARDROOM. Inside, he found a table large enough to seat eight for a meeting or a meal, a compact autogalley, and a sophisticated computer terminal and communications center.
Derec ran his fingertips across the surface of the table, and they came away clean, without even a coating of dust. The status lights on the galley told him that the unit was in Extended Standby, which meant that its food stores had been irradiated and deep-frozen. No one had eaten here for some time.
Was it all for him? Was that why it was unused? Or was he a surprise visitor in an empty house?
He switched the galley to Demand status, and a timer began counting down the two hours it would take to bring it on line. But when he tried to activate the com center, it demanded a password.
“Derec,” he offered.
INVALID PASSWORD, the screen advised him.
He had only the most infinitesimal chance of guessing a truly random password. His only chance was if a lazy systems engineer had left one of the classic wild-card passwords in the security database. “Test,” he suggested.
“Password,” Derec said.
From that point on, the center ignored him. The silent-entry keypad was disabled, and nothing he said evoked any response. Apparently the center had not only rejected his passwords, but blacklisted him as well. The systems engineer had not been lazy.
Returning to the corridor, Derec briefly checked the other two rooms. One was another cabin, mirror-image to the one in which he had woken up. The other, labeled MECHANICAL, contained several racks of lockers and what appeared to be maintenance modules for environmental subsystems. Both rooms were as tidy and deserted as everything else Derec had seen since waking.
That left only the airlock and the mysteries beyond it to explore. The inner door bore the sonograph-in-a-circle emblem which meant VoiceCommand. “Open,” he said, and the inner door of the hatch cracked open with the ripping sound of adhesion seals separating. Derec stepped into the tiny enclosure and the door closed behind him. Peering through the window of the outer door, Derec could see no reason why the airlock was even there. The corridor beyond looked little different than the one he was leaving. “Cycle,” he said.
The inner door closed behind him, the momentary surge of pressure on his eardrums telling him it had sealed. “Warning. There is a reduced-pressure nitrogen atmosphere beyond this point,” the hatch advised him. “Please select a breather.”
“Nitrogen?”
Only then did Derec notice the small delivery door in the side wall. Inside he found several gogglelike masks made of gray plastic. Selecting one, he saw that the mask was meant to fit over the middle third of his face, like a pair of wraparound sunglasses that had slipped down his nose. The breather’s “straps” were hollow elastic tubes that met behind his neck. A flexible gas delivery tube led from there to the cartridge pack, which was small enough to strap to the upper arm.
When he put the breather on, however, he could not make the bottom edge of the mask seal against his upper lip to keep out the outside air. With the gap, the breaths he drew would be a mixture of free nitrogen and oxygen from the breather.
Belatedly, Derec realized that that was intentional. It was an arrangement that not only reduced the size of the cartridge pack, but also left his sense of smell unimpeded. A clever bit of engineering, with a minimalist flavor.
“Ready,” Derec said.
“Warning: reduced gravity beyond this point,” the hatch advised him.
“I hear you,” he said as the outer door began to open. Nitrogen? Low-G? he wondered as he stepped out. Where am I? What’s going on?
There were no immediate answers. It was cold-cold enough to bring a flush of color to his cheeks. The chill seemed to radiate equally from the ceiling and floor, though they were both made of an insulating synthetic mesh.
Standing there just outside the pressure hatch, Derec could hear a cacophony of machine noises-hissing, rumbling, grinding, squealing. But the drop in pressure, which distended his eardrums, made it seem as though he were trying to hear through a pillow. Aside from the fact that there was activity somewhere, he got nothing useful out of what he heard. He could not tell what kinds of machines he was hearing, or what they were doing.