Free Bios by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

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.
    â€œCircle 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, andtold 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 communicationscrew 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