James Axler – Parallax Red Parallax Red

“That’s Baptiste’s opinion,” commented DeFore. “I’m not convinced yet.”

Brigid shrugged. “It’s a hypothesis, but it’s more than provisional.” She dropped the foot and began ticking off points on bloody fingers. “The Vertebrae are modified to the point where the load-bearing function is no longer necessary. They are more like a system of levers.

“The legs and feet don’t have to support the full weight of the body, and therefore effectively become a second pair of arms and hands, useful for anchorage in a weightless or near weightless environment.

“The outer epidermis is thick and strengthened, but without a significant loss in its elasticity. The pelvic girdle is very light.”

“And his size?” Kane asked. “What about that?”

“The smaller and more compact the body structure, the less bulk he has to pack around while coping with low gravity.”

Kane studied the troll’s fixed expression of ferocity. “If that’s the kind of environment he came from, what the hell was he doing in Redoubt Papa?”

“I would imagine,” replied Brigid, “he was in a lot of discomfort due to the increased gravity and external atmospheric pressure. He may have even been half-drunk because of the richer oxygen content.”

Kane’s brows/fcnitted. “Just where did he come from?”

“Hopefully the imaging scanner’s memory will give us an idea.”

As if on cue, Lakesh’s voice filtered out of the speaker grid of the wall comm. “Dearest Brigid, friends Grant and Kaneplease join me in the control center as soon as soonest.”

DeFore nodded to Brigid. “Tell him I’ll have a report ready within the hour.”

Stripping off the blood-spattered gown and peeling off the gloves, Brigid crossed the room to a sink and thoroughly washed her hands. “What were you and Rouch doing here anyway, Kane?”

For a moment, his memory failed him. “I came to get something for my knee.”

“And Rouch?”

“She was helping me.”

Brigid dried her hands briskly on a towel. “I guess you aroused her strong female drives toward mothering.” She smiled when she said it, but her smile didn’t reach her eyes.

Kane bit back a retort, and turned toward the door. “Let’s go.”

“Sure you don’t need Rouch to get you there?”

“Leather it, Baptiste.”

Grant was already in the control complex, standing behind a seated Lakesh and scowling at the main monitor screen. When they entered, he glanced toward them and growled, “You two will love this.”

On the screen glowed the cutaway outline of a round tube connected to a cylinder by a double array of slen-der rods. It resembled a narrow wheel or a particularly unappetizing doughnut.

“What is it?” Kane asked.

” ParallaxRed ,” replied Lakesh matter-of-factly.

Kane sighed in irritation. “And what’s a Parallax Red ?”

Brigid intoned, “A space habitat.”

“More commonly known as a space station,” Lakesh said. “The existence of this one was rumored, hinted at, but never conclusively proven.”

All of them knew the stories about predark space settlements, even of bases on the moon. But after the nukecaust, without the transmission of telemetric signals to correct orbits, most of them dropped to Earth over a period of decades. In her former position as an archivist, Brigid had read about a Russian station that had crashed in the vicinity of the Western Islands in the early part of the century. Shostakovich’s Anvil , its name had been.

Beneath the diagram of the ring-shaped habitat, Brigid swiftly read the specs. Parallax Red was based on the Stanford Torus design, built with prestressed concrete, reinforced by vanadium-steel bulkheads and cables. The structure was an astonishing two miles in overall diameter, with a mass of over ten million tons.

“You may be wondering why I direct your attention to this,” said Lakesh.

“Not particularly,” Kane replied nonchalantly. “It’s more than likely where our dead troll came from.”

Grant and Lakesh swiveled their heads toward him in astonishment. Kane met their gazes with a bland smile. “Am I close?”

Tersely Brigid explained the findings of the autopsy on the troll and her own theories. Lakesh nodded when she was done. “It makes a reasonable amount of sense.”

He touched /the keyboard, and the image on the screen shifted to a full-color production painting showing a vast circle of parklike lawns where flowers bloomed and shrubbery grew in neat hedgerows. Fountains splashed here and there between the hedges, and little pools gleamed like polished silver.