Reggie Waite was just finishing his first cup of coffee when the call came through. When he looked at the number, he thought he was looking at a system glitch, until he realized that the incoming call didn’t use the North American Numbering Plan.
It started with 8, which meant a Russian phone number. Up here the VoIP systems were supposed to filter out international numbers, thanks to the enormous number of scams that the Russian mafiya was running with autodialers. However, by agreement between NASA and the other spacefaring nations’ space agencies, numbers assigned to people in their lunar settlements and their space centers were supposed to be passed through.
Hoping he wasn’t making a mistake, he hit the accept button and answered. Any cosmonaut who was calling an American would know English, so there was no point fumbling with his admittedly rusty Russian.
“Good morning, Captain Waite.” There was something familiar about the timbre of the voice on the other end. “I apologize for calling you from an unfamiliar telephone, but we are experiencing difficulties with our office network and I was forced to resort to a personal device. This is Vitali Grigorenko, at Gagarinsk.”
Astonishment blew away any lingering brain fog. No wonder the man’s voice sounded familiar. Not surprising, given that Vitali Grigorenko was in fact a Grissom clone, kidnapped as a newborn by KGB agents in retaliation for the Kolya-Yozhik Incident and raised by parents who were involved in the old Soviet space program.
“Good to hear from you, Vitya. We’ve been having trouble with our Internet connection down here, but I hadn’t realized the problem was going around. It’s not like you guys are running a pirate radio station critical of your government.”
“No, we are not.” Was that a hint of regret in Grigorenko’s voice? A sense that he wasn’t pushing hard enough, never mind that he’d come up here by his own request, wanting to share his clone-brothers’ exile when he had been preparing for a comfortable retirement? “But we have Purificationists.”
Reggie recognized the term. They were a splinter sect of the Russian Orthodox Church that believed clones were soulless abominations, quite possibly animated by demons. Two Patriarchs had condemned their position as heretical, saying that it was inconceivable that God should refuse to provide a child with a soul simply on the basis of the child’s irregular conception. The current one had excommunicated the most prominent Purificationists, but instead of recanting, they had taken the attitude of screw you and the horse you rode in on.
Like his own ur-brother, Reggie had been raised Christian Scientist. Although the Church of Christ, Scientist did not have an episcopal hierarchy in the same sense as the Eastern Orthodox Churches, the Mother Church in Boston did have the authority to excommunicate members and practitioners whose teachings were not in line with doctrine. And there had been those who had rejected that corrective and gone their own way.
“And you’ve become just a little too prominent for their liking.”
Now that got a definite affirmative from his opposite number in Gagarinsk.
Reggie considered his response. “In ordinary times I’d send some of our IT people up there to help you straighten things out.”
“But these are not ordinary times. No doubt you have heard already about Indian astronauts having been exposed to diablovirus.”
“That I have.” This time yesterday the news would’ve caught him by surprise, for the simple reason that he had still been catching up with the enormous amount of e-mail that had been stuck on various servers all over the Earth-Moon system. By last night he’d read over a dozen accounts of the situation, including three separate official NASA advisories. “Do you think your IT people would be able to communicate with ours via videoconference well enough to be of any use.”
“I would have to ask, but I do not know why we should not try.”