Halo

By Tom Maddox
First Published: 1991
“He stepped up and into a chrome half-egg, then shivered and lay back as body-warmth liquid bled into the slack plastic, which began to balloon underneath him. He took hold of finger-thick cables and pushed their junction ends home into the sockets set in the back of his neck. As the egg continued to fill, he fit a mask over his face, felt its edges seal, and inhaled.”

Something strange is happening on the high-orbital space station called Halo, and the men who run the corporation who own Halo don’t know what it is. SenTrax has hired freelance data auditor Mikhail Gonzales to find out. Why are the resources of Aleph, the artificial intelligence that operates Halo’s systems, being diverted to the experimental sections? Who authorized the extraordinary life-support systems being built?