Lifeline (39 page)

Chapter 56

KIBALCHICH—Day 72

Ramis ran over a final suit check as the airlock hissed and cycled. He felt the suit ballooning around him, the soft sounds of outgassing. The airlock seemed to take forever.

Through his helmet, he heard a muffled voice coming from the PA system—maybe Karen had learned how to use the intercom—but the words faded into silence as all the air left the chamber. He had cut himself off. Karen would have to come outside and use her own suit radio if she needed to contact him, or else get inside the command center.

The outer airlock swung open, leaving him with a dizzying depth of stars in front of his faceplate. The view spun around as the
Kibalchich’s
torus rotated. The broken rubble shield cast flickering spots on the hull, like leaf shadows on a forest floor.

Breathing shallowly, Ramis pushed out of the chamber and worked his way over the
Kibalchich’s
hub. The graphite axis rod extended from the mirror above to the massive solar shield below.

Ramis could feel a strange sensation in his suit, against the hull where his feet were anchored. It seemed as if the
Kibalchich
vibrated to a new motion; the central graphite rod seemed to jitter with the resonance. Anna Tripolk had activated some sort of weapon, whatever it was. He whirled around, then caught himself to keep from spinning. The airlock door closed and sealed itself—he felt an enormous
“click”
through contact with the hull. Ramis bent forward and punched the Cyrillic open switch above the airlock.

Nothing.

Undaunted, he flipped the manual override switch. Again nothing. Anna had locked him out.

Ramis felt cold, and his stomach tightened. As Karen had reminded him, if he couldn’t stop the weapon, or at least get back inside before it detonated, he would fry from the radiation.

Ramis flipped up his radio options and began to key in
Orbitech 1’s
emergency frequency, but the clipped voice of Anna Tripolk burst in over his suit radio. “Ramis Barrera, I have sealed open all the inner airlock doors on this station. You can not re-enter. If you issue any sort of warning, I will destroy
Orbitech 1.
The blood of more than a thousand people will be on your hands.”

Ramis thought rapidly. He still had the weavewire to get back to
Orbitech 1
—but without the dolly to ride over, he might as well have nothing. Which left him with Jumping. He quickly shelved that idea. He had full air tanks, but it would take him too long—the weapon would detonate before he got there. He had less than two hours.

Ramis ground his teeth together, but he didn’t bother to respond to Anna. Nothing more came over the radio. He boosted himself up over the hub and steadied himself against the rod holding the mirror. Everything seemed serene. The stars burned as ice-cold pinpoints; the great wheel of the
Kibalchich
rotated underneath its rocky sheath.

Across the depth of space, he looked toward the bright spot of
Orbitech 1.
Something hung in his way, eclipsing the stars. It seemed like a thick fog, a thin film blocking the view—

Dr. Sandovaal! The sail-creatures!

Ramis squinted and tried to find the sail-creatures’ stubby bodies in the gigantic cluster—that would tell him how near they were. But it was like trying to find a rice husk at midnight in a soccer field. They were floating in, oblivious to what was about to happen, and he had no way to warn them. Anna would be listening to any transmissions,

Until it hit him that he had an easier way.

One hour and twenty minutes remaining—it seemed an eternity to her. But nothing could stop her now, not with Ramis Barrera locked outside, and Karen Langelier banging on the sealed doors to the command center and whimpering into the intercom.

“Anna, please! You don’t know what you’re doing.” Langelier’s voice echoed through the command center.

Because of emergency safety programming, the computer refused to shut off the intercom during detonation sequence Alexander, claiming that it must remain open. Anna tried to ignore Langelier’s whining. “Don’t you have any respect for other lives?”

That angered her. Any respect for other lives? She snapped, “I am not the one who murdered a helpless man in sleepfreeze through simple incompetence! Think of all the people dead on Earth. I am not the one attempting to band together with the remaining survivors in space to wipe out the people on the
Kibalchich.
This station had a grander purpose than anything your people will ever attempt. I will not let you ruin it.”

Anna shuddered and ignored everything else the other woman shouted back at her. The discussion would sap her strength, redirect her anger, and possibly raise some doubts. She could not afford that.

Anna checked the tall central holotank, keeping a close eye on the progress of the yo-yo vessel making its way up from the Moon. It sped onward, its acceleration constant, less than two hours from its destination. The delicate tracking mechanisms on the
Kibalchich
kept the target in focus. If she timed it right, the
Phoenix
would be destroyed with minutes to spare.

She tried to imagine what the people of
Orbitech 1
would think. Would they realize her position? Would they find that her decision was the only way she could prevent a corrupting system from rising again? She fought for her own future, to keep the
Kibalchich
from becoming expendable. Generations from now, the Soviets might herald her as their savior.

They were nice thoughts, but she knew the Americans would never see it that way.

The computer interrupted her musings. The command center diagnostics blinked, catching the side lobe of a radio signal being broadcast from just outside the
Kibalchich.
Anna snapped at the control system, “Increase the gain—subtract all noise.” She hissed under her breath. “I warned him!”

Ramis’s voice came over the speakers for just a few seconds. She could not make out what he said—he spoke gibberish, babbling nonsense words. Then he fell silent. “Computer, translate!” she said. “Is he speaking some sort of code?”

“{{WORKING.}}”

A minute passed. Ramis did not rebroadcast. “Computer! What did he say?”

“{{UNABLE TO TRANSLATE. UNDERGOING HEURISTIC PROGRAMMING—}}”

“Computer, what was the target of his broadcast?
Orbitech 1?”

“{{NO KNOWN TARGET. ANGULAR PARAMETERS ONLY: 0.006 RADIANS AZIMUTH, NEGATIVE 0.8226 RADIANS POLAR.}}”

“Display!” she said, growing frantic. How was she supposed to make sense out of some coordinate numbers? The computer showed a three-dimensional grid emanating from the
Kibalchich,
with a narrow cone of Ramis’s broadcast extending away from the station, nearly straight toward Earth.

But why? Nothing on Earth could help him. If he was lucky, some amateur radio operator might pick up the signal, but to what purpose? Had the Filipino boy gone crazy? Did he hope that someone on Earth would relay the message to
Orbitech 1?
Not if he spoke nonsensical gibberish.

“Anna, please listen to me!” Karen Langelier’s voice burst out of the intercom speakers.

“Be quiet!” Anna shouted.

The sudden stillness in the control room closed around her, making Anna feel the churning anxiety. Her head pounded, and she found herself breathing shallowly. Why was it so cold in here?

“Computer, raise the temperature in the command center!”

Ramis Barrera’s transmission had upset her. She didn’t know how to respond. Anna struck the arm of the command chair with a fist. “Who is it? What is he saying?”

***

Chapter 57

L-5—Day 72

It was not the hissing sound of static that brought Luis Sandovaal out of his sleep inside the sail-creature’s core. He had been dreaming of airships flying over Baguio City in the summer heat. But he immediately snapped awake upon hearing the clipped, high-pitched sounds of a message being shouted in Tagalog.

Tagalog!

It seemed like a dream. Sandovaal blinked open his eyes, not quite believing that he was hearing his native Filipino tongue.

“—if you can hear me! Dobo, Dr. Sandovaal—this is Ramis. Steer away from L-5! Somehow, you must get away. The
Kibalchich
plans to destroy
Orbitech 1
with some sort of weapon. Save yourself and warn
Orbitech 1!
Please hear me—I cannot risk transmitting again. Holy Mother Maria, watch over all of us.”

The transmission cut off.

Sandovaal drew in deep breaths. It was not a dream. He glanced at the radio, bringing his head up from the soft wall of the sail-creature’s body. His helmet distorted the view, but he did not dare sleep without his suit, since even a small leak in the sail-creature’s cyst would destroy the fragile internal environment.

Sandovaal yanked off his helmet and listened to the radio speaker, raw and unfiltered from the bone-conduction circuit in his helmet. He heard little hissing or static. That was nothing unusual, but still … had he really heard Ramis’s voice?

Holy Mother Maria …

The boy had never much embraced Catholicism, but Sandovaal remembered the day that his parents had been killed in the accident. The boy had stood with his head bent down, President Magsaysay holding his shoulders, and had wiped a single tear from his face. It seemed to usher in the era of rebellion, his assertion that there was nothing on the
Aguinaldo
—or in the universe—that could stop him in his quest to prove himself.

Holy Mother Maria.

Sandovaal punched up the direct communications link and discovered that it was already on. “Dobo, wake up!”

“I am awake, Dr. Sandovaal,” came Dobo’s reply. “That was Ramis on the radio. What are we going to do? We will be over the center of the Lagrange well in an hour.”

If Dobo had heard the transmission, too, then Sandovaal was not imagining things. He scowled, already burying himself in the problem. “Let me think, Dobo.”

He did not bother quizzing his assistant on the consequences of possible decisions. He would have to decide for himself. Dobo would look to him for answers—and Ramis himself was obviously hoping that Sandovaal could rescue them all. The boy would never expect a proud and brave Filipino like Sandovaal to heed the warning he had issued.

Sandovaal drew in a deep breath and smelled the humid musk of wall-kelp. He reached out and switched on the outside monitor. The sail-creatures moved slowly enough that he could not risk a rash decision—any alteration in trajectory would take a long time to correct. He pondered what he could do that would have a suitable … flair.

At the moment, the cluster of sail-creatures were headed for a point just above the ecliptic plane, where they would perform a final tacking to stop their motion relative to the L-5 gravity well. The movement was programmed into the flight computer that controlled motion stimulus to the mosaic of creatures.
Orbitech 1
would be ready to send out its emissaries with MMUs to help the two of them exit from their sail-creatures and to package up the dormant nymphs for the return journey.

Sandovaal swung the exterior camera around and surveyed the broad armada of sails. They were oriented perpendicular to the Sun, already slowing in their journey, converting kinetic energy to potential. Soon, the computer-generated signal would initiate one last command, to tack to a slow drift. Sandovaal inched the camera to a view of
Orbitech 1
and panned across to the torus of the
Kibalchich.
Everything seemed tranquil and unmoving.

Save yourself and warn Orbitech 1,
Ramis had called. The boy was not one to make up fanciful stories. Sandovaal knew he could take him at his word.

He bumped the radio around the different bands, but found no sound of danger, no other cries of alarm. Everyone seemed unaware of the
Kibalchich’s
plans, and no one else could have understood Ramis’s warning in Tagalog. He heard only the banter between the colonies over ConComm—news about the ascent of the
Phoenix
and the imminent arrival of the Filipino sail-creatures. He thought about
Orbitech 1:
innocent victims. They didn’t even know what was coming. Once again, Luis Sandovaal would save them all.

He stared at
Orbitech 1
and the
Kibalchich
for some time. What he was about to do had worked for his forefathers, many years ago, when they had placed their own feeble longboats between those of two warring nations. He was taking a chance that it would still work now.

Sandovaal punched a new set of directives into the flight computer. Light coursed its way through kilometers of optical fiber, taking the message to sensors in the other nineteen sail-creatures in the mosaic. Sandovaal began to sense the slow, lumbering rotation as the sail-creatures turned away from the irritating shocks. Over several minutes, the sails would reorient themselves, forcing the armada to drift five kilometers below their intended rendezvous point.

Directly into the line of fire.

After three days, the yo-yo vessel seemed hot, claustrophobic, cramped. Outside the thick ports,
Orbitech 1
shone like a bright star, unwavering without atmospheric distortion, and growing closer by the second. The counter-rotating wheels on either side of the colony blinked with various service and guidance lights in a well-timed sequence.

The image burned in Duncan McLaris’s mind—so much like what he had seen when fleeing the colony more than two months before, stealing the
Miranda
and taking Jessie with him. The memory brought a heavy feeling to his stomach, but he pulled in a deep breath of stale air, focusing on an inner strength he had found over the past couple of months. In less than an hour he would be on board, back where he had started. He didn’t know whether to think of it as home or not, but it was a place where he could face his fears and move his life forward again. He tore his gaze away from the port.

Clifford Clancy hummed to himself, checking over the
Phoenix’s
diagnostics. McLaris forced himself to watch the construction engineer as the man prepared for the final maneuver that would slow them to a halt. At times, Clancy’s optimism and enthusiasm grated on him; now, though, it gave him strength.

Clancy shot a glance over his shoulder and grinned. “Ready for the big splash?”

McLaris frowned. “Excuse me?”

“Big splash. We’ll be going down in history either way, Duncan. If those reconditioned rockets fire enough to bring us to a stop, we’ve established a way to get from the Moon to L-5. If they don’t,” he said, shrugging, “we’ll take out
Orbitech 1
like a cannonball. We’re going over thirty five hundred miles an hour, which is enough to ruin everybody’s day.” He grinned. “Kind of exciting, isn’t it?”

McLaris tried to keep a calm expression on his face. “Most fun I’ve had in years.”

He knew it would get even worse when he finally faced Brahms again.

***