Lifeline (11 page)

“Luis—” Magsaysay’s eyes seemed haunted.

“Look at him.” Sandovaal held out an arm to Ramis. “He is an expert in zero-G gymnastics. Everyone knows about his nighttime acrobatics in the core. Do you wish to deny the best-qualified person on the
Aguinaldo
his right to go? Think! It could be our only chance to save all those people.” He knew that tactic would work best against Magsaysay.

Sandovaal breathed heavily, his nostrils flaring. The Council members watched the two men. Ramis stood unflinching, as if in the eye of the storm.

Sandovaal spoke again in a quieter tone. “You must not allow your feelings for Ramis to keep thousands from living, Yoli. Agpalo and Panay Barrera would have wanted it this way. I knew them well. They would not have stopped their son. Your son.”

Magsaysay’s shoulders slumped. He looked suddenly older than the seventy-five years he carried. The colony’s low gravity had been kind to him, keeping age at arm’s length. But the thought of Ramis leaving seemed to bury him.

Seconds passed; no one spoke.

The
dato
straightened. “Dr. Sandovaal, I accept your conclusions and direct the following actions: your tether idea to send wall-kelp to
Clavius Base
will receive the utmost priority. Your research team will also prepare one of the sail-creatures for a journey to our sister Lagrange point. As chief scientist, you will have all the resources of the
Aguinaldo
at your disposal.”

Magsaysay lowered his eyes, his voice barely audible as he turned to the rear door of the chamber. He avoided looking at Ramis. “For now, I wish to be alone. The special Council meeting is adjourned.”

***

Chapter 14

CLAVIUS BASE—Day 11

His slippers scritched on the polished rock floor as he made his way from the infirmary. McLaris had decided not to don a
Clavius Base
uniform. He still wore his robe, still brandished his bandages, hoping to divert some of the anger of the other base inhabitants.

Sharp pains stabbed his side from the cracked ribs. His eyes were puffed red, and his beard had grown to a rough stubble. All of him ached, but that was a sign of healing.

Dr. Berenger had declared McLaris fit enough to walk about, and McLaris had decided it was best not to avoid the issue any longer. He had to face the chief administrator of
Clavius Base
.

McLaris knew virtually nothing about Philip Tomkins, except that he’d been running the lunar base for several years. He had contacted Tomkins, who had said he’d be delighted to chat and had given him directions to the communications center.

McLaris decided he’d make no mention of his injuries, try not to show that he was aware of them at all. He didn’t want to come across as looking for sympathy. But neither did he want to appear completely unscathed by the crash.

Fluorescent lights glinted off the lumpy fused rock of the walls. The air smelled damp and dusty, cavelike. He saw no windows, only occasional narrow slits at eye level. He thought the lunar tunnels would get oppressive after a while.

He didn’t know what Tomkins and the others would do. Would they sentence him? Punish him? Would Tomkins himself be the judge and jury? Had the chief administrator already made up his mind? Everyone else on
Clavius Base
seemed convinced of McLaris’s worthlessness.

But he walked straight, keeping his face set. He had spent days wallowing in guilt, reliving what he should have done and what he had done. He’d passed through that now, though. He felt tempered, stronger.

McLaris regretted his actions. He was guilty—no question about it. But he couldn’t take it back, couldn’t return the
Miranda.
He could only move forward, changed, and hope that he could work his way back to acceptance.

McLaris paused at the communications center doorway, took a deep breath, then entered the room without announcing himself. Three large holotanks protruded from the white tile walls. A pair of technicians argued over data flashing in the units; another lounged back and spoke to her computer with her eyes closed. A long, narrow window ran at eye level along the far wall.

Beside the window stood a big-boned black man with his back to the door, staring out onto the lunar surface. Philip Tomkins: McLaris recognized him from a picture he’d seen.

“Excuse me, Dr. Tomkins. I’m Duncan McLaris—” He tried to speak calmly, businesslike, but his vocal cords clenched so that no sound came out until the third syllable. He forced himself not to clear his throat—that would seem a nervous gesture.

Tomkins turned around. The chief administrator was heavily built, a massive man. He looked as if he had been well-muscled once but had slacked off his exercise routine in the Moon’s low gravity, allowing himself to soften. His skin was a warm chocolate brown, smooth, with wrinkles around his eyes and throat. His tight, woolly hair was thinning, scattered with white and trimmed close to his head. He looked to be in his early sixties.

Tomkins nodded toward the technicians, who had stopped when McLaris spoke. “Why don’t you three take a break? Thanks.”

McLaris felt the technicians staring as they left the room, but he refused to look at them. Tomkins was the one who mattered here.

Now he was alone with Tomkins, but he could not guess what the chief administrator intended to do. He felt tense, wary, expecting something terrible.
Go on, get it over with!

He pictured Tomkins pronouncing sentence, condemning him to be executed for crimes against humanity. They would take him outside in a suit, march him across the flatlands to the middle of the crater, tell him to kneel down. He would bend to his knees in the loose rock and powder, not feeling it in his padded suit. He would look up at the deep pool of stars one last time, and then someone would ritually bash open his faceplate with a club.…

“So, Mr. McLaris—” Tomkins stared at him, “about this business of stealing the
Miranda.
That was rather a selfish and ill-advised thing for you to do, don’t you think? On a par with one man in a lifeboat drinking all the water when everyone else is asleep.” His voice was rich and well controlled, as if from a lifetime of speaking in large auditoriums.

McLaris tried to keep his expression from changing. He wanted to cringe, confess his guilt, beg for forgiveness. He forced himself to count to five before he answered, to make his voice steady.

“My daughter has already paid the price for my selfishness. So has Stephanie Garland.” He swallowed, but found he couldn’t wait any longer to ask. “What are you going to do to me? Saying I’m sorry just won’t—”

“You’re going to be punished, of course,” Tomkins interrupted. McLaris felt cold.

“You are not going to get a free ride—no lounging around some padded cell, wasting your time watching the holos. I’m going to make you pay, put you to work.” He paused. “From now on, you are going to do some of my tedious administrative duties. Input the daily logs, study workforce and resource allocation sheets. Deathly boring stuff. Worse than working on an assembly line.”

McLaris blinked at the administrator. It all seemed so absurd. “That’s it?”

“It’s been punishment for me—I can’t stand doing those things.”

The chief administrator turned back to stare out the narrow window at the tread-marked lunar dust. He sounded tired. “Mr. McLaris, if I ordered your death, what would that accomplish? What good would it do? The difference between human beings and machines is that we learn from our mistakes.”

Tomkins extended a large hand toward McLaris. “Welcome to
Clavius Base
.”

McLaris walked carefully forward and gripped the administrator’s hand, feeling as if his own would be swallowed up in the other man’s broad palm. His first impulse was to be intimidated, but as he watched Tomkins move and talk, he picked up subtle hints. The chief administrator looked massive but gentle, and he was not as comfortable as he tried to appear.

“Besides, I’m afraid you’ve been vindicated. You can now say ‘I told you so’ and have people believe you.”

McLaris felt an ice ball forming in the pit of his stomach. “What do you mean?”

Tomkins closed his eyes and spoke without looking at anything. “On
Orbitech 1
your director, Roha Ombalal, just ejected a hundred and fifty people out of the airlock. Ten percent of the population. He called it a reduction in force.”

McLaris sat down, blinking hot tears from his eyes. “Ombalal doesn’t have the spine to do something like that. Brahms was behind it.” He hung his head. “Now do you see why I had to get my daughter out of there?”

“I didn’t ask you for any explanations, Mr. McLaris. Our official response was outrage. We broadcast a direct communiqué to
Orbitech 1,
breaking off all contact.”

McLaris couldn’t seem to focus on what Tomkins was saying, or why it mattered. “What good is that going to do?”

Tomkins looked flustered. “Since we’re completely cut off from each other anyway, there aren’t a lot of things we
can
do. Think of it as a symbolic gesture.”

Tomkins motioned for McLaris to join him at one of the tables. He walked to a wall unit and came back carrying two steaming cups, then shoved equipment aside to make room on the tabletop. “Tea,” he explained. “No nutritional value, but we can manufacture the water and synthesize the flavoring. More substantial food is in shorter supply, I’m afraid.” He took a sip, slurping on the edge of the cup.

“At least there’s no shortage of personnel—not with two hundred extra construction people from
Orbitech 2.
I’m keeping everyone at low physical activity to reduce caloric consumption. I don’t know how much good that’ll do.”

The chief administrator set down his tea, stood, and paced back and forth. Tomkins seemed starved for conversation, and McLaris let him speak. Tomkins had a faraway look in his eyes.

“I wanted to attend the Air Force Academy and be an astronaut—my father worked for NASA at Langley—but I was too tall. Six foot ten. Silly reason, huh? Instead, I went to the Hampton Institute and studied astrophysics. I got here eventually, though. Been chief administrator three years now.”

Tomkins turned his gaze away, staring into the rising steam from his tea. “But I’m no administrator, Mr. McLaris. We don’t have a genuine manager on this entire base—we’re all scientists. My passion is radio astronomy, not red tape and paperwork.”

McLaris sighed, sensing what the man needed. “Please call me Duncan. I’d like you to.”

Tomkins walked back over to the narrow window in two long strides. Tapping his fingers on the thick glass, he indicated the shadowed surface of the crater’s basin.

“Do you know what Arecibo is, Duncan? The radio telescope in Puerto Rico? It’s the largest single radio telescope in
the world, laid down in a perfect bowl-shaped valley. You don’t find many natural locations like that, so radio astronomy spends most of its effort on aperture synthesis, adding up the signals from an array of smaller dishes instead of a single big antenna.”

Tomkins’s voice took on a tone of delight. “But look out there! All those craters, hundreds of kilometers across, perfectly round. Think of how easy it would be to construct mankind’s most magnificent radio telescope—just a little excavation on the crater floor, then lay down wire mesh that we can make here, attach some receivers … it would be so simple! So glorious. I’d call it Arecibo II or something appropriate.”

McLaris wondered at the man’s priorities: cut off from Earth, two hundred extra people on his base, food in short supply—how could Tomkins dream about building a new telescope? McLaris kept his face carefully neutral.

The chief administrator returned to sit at the table again. He slurped his tea. “Ah, but that project is put on permanent hold now, I suppose, because of the damn War. Why can’t politicians ever think with a broader perspective?”

Tomkins touched McLaris’s arm. “Come here—I’ve been compiling all the snippets from the War. Since we’re run by the U.N.,
Clavius Base
keeps close watch on all events on Earth—we always have. We can filter through some of the confusion, since we’ve got a good perspective here—a view from a height, you might say.”

He went to one of the computer consoles, then indicated the main holotank set into the white-tiled wall. The tank was tuned to ConComm. Tomkins pursed his lips and spoke to the computer. “Assemble hyperstack. Header: The War, in serial.” He shrugged apologetically at McLaris. “Couldn’t think of a better title.”

The tank blinked once, then focused on laserfax transmissions of various news reports. Tomkins pointed to a geopolitical world map shimmering in the tank.

“Someday, if mankind ever has historians again, they’ll go back and find all the preliminary influences. Remember the MacKenzie Treaties? Those wonderful days of
glasnost,
before the backlash? The U.S. gave up its expensive space-based weapons systems, then cut just as much money on conventional forces.”

Tomkins flicked from one photo to another, skimming past story after story so rapidly that McLaris could do no more than glean highlights.

“What we didn’t know was that the U.S. had deployed its super-Excalibur pop-up defensive weapons anyway. Nuclear-driven x-ray lasers—one of their ‘black’ programs. Now they can say it was justified, I suppose. The Soviets had also publicly claimed to be giving up space-based weaponry, as they armed their space platforms in secret. Disguised as polar-orbiting ‘scientific research stations,’ of all things!”

Tomkins snorted. “But you can’t hide a space-based laser while you’re using it. We’ve got actual footage from the War, computer enhanced.”

The chief administrator talked the way a child would at show-and-tell—like Jessie trying to explain things to other children. McLaris felt a twinge of grief.

“Up until about a week before the outbreak, the squabblings between the United States and the Soviet Union bubbled along as they always had. But the discovery of a well-entrenched Soviet battalion in the Turkish foothills outraged the U.S., and all Soviet officials were expelled from Washington.”

Tomkins frowned. “Since Orbitechnologies Corporation was going to allow some Soviet production work to take place on
Orbitech 2,
the U.S. pressured the company to withdraw all construction engineers and delay completion of the station. All two hundred men and women from L-4 were brought back down here for a few days. Supposedly, they were going to be shipped home, but I honestly think it was just a bluff.”

Tomkins showed some videotapes of the transports landing, all the construction people disembarking and finding cramped quarters on the base.

“So,
Clavius Base
suddenly had seven hundred people instead of five hundred. The construction crew brought some supplies, but most of their stores are still sitting at L-4, totally out of reach. Remember what I said about them expecting to go right back? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

Tomkins grew philosophical, running his fingers along his chin as he spoke. “It’s all political games—everything working according to murky rules that nobody seems to understand.”

The chief administrator looked like a storyteller at a campfire. A grainy satellite photograph showed a blasted urban area: buildings had toppled, fires burned from girders and trees, but the skyline in the distance appeared to be undamaged. McLaris thought he recognized Washington, D.C.

“Then a wild card was played and blew the game all to hell. A terrorist built a crude nuclear device and detonated it in an apartment building less than two miles from the White House. The weapon barely worked, but he still wiped out a good section of urban Washington and contaminated a portion of Maryland and Virginia. Both the president and the vice president were killed in the blast.

“But that’s not all of it. In his transmission just before the detonation, the terrorist claimed to be doing this to free the world from … let’s see,” Tomkins flipped through screen after screen until he froze on a transcript. “‘From American democratic oppression, to pave the way for a peaceful and equal communist world.’”