Lifeline

Chapter 1

AGUINALDO—Day 1

The thrill outweighed the consequences—it was as simple as that. He didn’t need to show off for anyone but himself.

If Ramis was caught Jumping at night, he’d be barred from the Aguinaldo’s zero-G core for a year—until he turned seventeen. But flying across the colony’s diameter in the dark made the rush of adrenaline worth the risk.

Ramis had another two hours before the lightaxis came on for the morning period. Two hours to traverse about five kilometers of the Aguinaldo’s interior circumference … in the dark. Others twice his age could not claim having Jumped all the way around not even in the light.

He kept his eyes open wide as he flew across the weightless space, hoping they had sufficiently adapted to the dark; but without the danger, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

He remembered one night in the Philippine Islands, when his older brother Salita had driven him home down a winding mountain road.

“Watch this,” Salita had said, and punched the button that shut off the car lights.

Instantly plunged into the night, Ramis had watched the emptiness around them, the treacherous curves now invisible as the car continued without slowing.

“See how the road glistens?” Fascinated, Salita had accelerated the car. Ramis had gripped the door, but felt some of his brother’s feverish excitement. Salita had clicked the lights back on just in time to round a sharp curve. He had shown no sign of uneasiness, but kept smiling in silence as he drove on….

The trampoline surface of the Aguinaldo’s bouncer should be coming up now. Straining to see, Ramis caught a glint of light reflected off the circumpond’s surface, demarcating his path. Although one hundred meters square, the bouncer seemed no more than a speck in the Sibuyan Sea. And if he missed it, he’d get a dunking, which at the speed he traveled might not be better than slamming into the colony’s wall. His entire body felt like a coiled weapon, tense, every cell alive with energy. His lips were curled back in a startling grin.

As he roared toward the bouncer, Ramis bent his knees and shot a blast of air to adjust his momentum. The bouncer grew larger below him. Three, two, one …. now! He hit the elastic surface and pushed off as hard as he could. He felt his leg muscles cramp from the sudden effort. The bouncer hurled him back into the air. Ramis spun his arms, furiously trying to keep from tumbling.

Finally stable, Ramis exhausted his compressed-air can. He let the empty can float out, fastened to his side by a short cord, as he rummaged through his pouch for another container. The cool, damp wind of his motion rippled his shirtsleeves.

The lightaxis waited out there in the dark, somewhere across his path. The meter-thick array of fiberoptics and titanium structure would smash him like a bug if he hit it.

He had contemplated bringing a small flashlight, but that would have encumbered his hands—and it would also have made the Jump too easy. This wasn’t supposed to be safe. Now Ramis felt fear building up; the adrenaline roared through his veins. He drew a deep breath. It seemed so much like flying, floating free, drifting … and he didn’t need to be terrified of looking down because he couldn’t see anything in the dark.

Ramis squinted, trying to discern a shadow of the light axis, anything that might warn him. He counted to himself, still searching, as the wind whistled in his ears. He thought he could gauge his speed and direction by the force with which he had pushed off from the bouncer.

When several heartbeats had passed, Ramis relaxed, then turned his concentration on anticipating the next bouncer on the opposite side. He tried to figure in his head the optimum angle at which he’d need to hit it.

Ramis twisted in the air, orienting his feet toward the onrushing wall—

He spotted the lightaxis directly in his path, a gigantic rod stretched out and ready to snap him in two.

The sail-creature nymphs had all been corralled for the night period, where they could feed at their leisure. He couldn’t count on Sarat helping him this time.

Ramis shot a blast of air toward the lightaxis, then curled his body into a ball to present the smallest possible target. His course altered, but not by much. The thick mass of optical fibers skimmed by within touching distance. He kicked out, pushing his bare feet against the axis and thrusting himself into safer airspace. In the silent blackness he could hear the low thrum of the vibration he had sent into the lightaxis. He emptied the second air canister to slow himself further.

He floated toward the Aguinaldo’s wall at a much safer speed this time. In the darkness, he could barely make out his own location in the air. He checked to make sure he had enough canisters to stop himself from drifting into the rotating deck. He had learned that lesson three years before.

It seemed pointless to finish his circumnavigation now. He was too jittery, and he had lost most of his momentum. The encounter had frightened him more than he had realized at first. He debated if he should tell dato Magsaysay about it.

No, then he would have to admit what he had been trying to do. Against the rules, Jumping in the dark—rules designed out of safety considerations, the dato had always said.

Of course the other children obeyed, like all good Filipino boys and girls. Obeying rules was part of their culture, part of what they had brought up with them from the Islands. And since Ramis was the foster son of the dato—the president of the colony—the others expected him to follow rules better than anyone else. Ramis smirked to himself at the thought. Father Magsaysay did not push him—all the pressure to conform, and to excel, came from within. He could never live up to his parents’ names as great martyred researchers unless he constantly pushed himself, proved that he was better than anyone else.

Ramis always pretended to acquiesce to the rules, to go to his quarters during the dark period when the Aguinaldo engineers louvered the outer mirrors away from the lightaxis port. Then, in the early morning hours, he slipped out to do his Jumps before the mirrors swung back into position again. He was careful. After all, it was against the rules, wasn’t it? And he was the best.

Ramis stretched in the air, taking his time to get to the wall since he had more than an hour before the subjective dawn—

Streaks of light shot through wire-fine fiberoptics as the louvered mirrors opened up. Every few millimeters along the axis, a thousand fiberoptic threads frayed outward to illuminate the ten-kilometer span.

On one end, flares of raw sunlight bounced off outer mirrors into the transparent viewing segments. The shielding iris over the viewport end dilated, opening to a vista of space with the Earth hanging off to one side. With the sudden view, it seemed as if the entire end of the colony had sheared off.

Panicked, Ramis squinted at his chronometer in the glare. The lightaxis was on a full hour early. He twisted himself around, trying to see if anyone had noticed him in the air. Luckily, he had drifted far enough away from the circumpond that he wouldn’t draw suspicion to himself.

Sounds of shouting came from the inner surface below him; muffled PA announcements echoed in the living units. There was no broadcast over the general colony loudspeakers, Ramis realized, because everyone should have been inside.

A crowd of people began to gather near the curving viewport end, pressing their faces against the transparent segments, climbing up the rungs on the wall to get a better vantage point. Ramis emptied another can of air to increase his speed, then turned around in the air, squirting short bursts in the opposite direction to slow him again as he reached the crowd.

Ramis spread his palms to absorb momentum against the wall. Bouncing, he reached a rung, then hand-walked himself down to one of the elevator platforms. It took him to a scattered group of people who stood looking out into space. Sobs mixed with angry shouting.

“What is it?” he yelled, looking for a face he recognized. “What is happening?”

Behind the broad viewing wall, the Earth hung alone in space, shining blue and white. Somebody pointed, and Ramis caught snatches of words. “I cannot see! No, over there. Look! There goes another one!” It made no sense to him.

A shaggy, white-haired man pushed impatiently past to the rungs that would take him up to the observatory alcove. Ramis tried to get his attention over the noise. “Dr. Sandovaal! What is happening?”

“Are you blind, boy, or just stupid? I am in a hurry!”

“But—”

“I have no time right now.”

Sandovaal climbed into the Aguinaldo’s observatory. The toroidal alcove surrounded the lightaxis, jutting out from the colony. An inertial platform inside the observatory kept the telescopes and instruments pointed toward their target—Earth, in this case.

Ramis decided against provoking Dr. Sandovaal by following him. He stared out the viewing wall, mystified, until he heard someone call his name. “Ramis! Over here, Ramis.”

“Dobo!” Ramis flipped over and anchored onto the wall-handle with his feet. Sandovaal’s assistant waved his arms over the sea of feet. “Dobo, what is going on?” Ramis called.

Dobo pointed to his ears, then cupped his hands to yell over the crowd. “Too noisy! Can you get over to me?”

Ramis kicked out into the air and maneuvered to Dobo. When he got close enough that Dobo could hear him, he yelled, “Dr. Sandovaal just rushed past me on his way to the observatory.” He felt a twinge of anger at the dismissal—after all, Ramis’s parents had worked with Sandovaal at the Institute on Earth, and had left everything to come up to L-4 with him.

“Never mind Dr. Sandovaal. He would ignore his own grandmother if she got in his way—especially right now.” He hauled Ramis in with an outstretched hand. “Are you all right? Did you come with President Magsaysay? I did not see him here.”

Ramis chose not to answer. “He must be around somewhere. But what is all this commotion about? Dr. Sandovaal seemed even more upset than usual!”

Dobo blinked at him. “You have not heard? I thought the announcement was broadcast to every dwelling.”

“I am trying to find out, Dobo! Tell me.”

Dobo bit his chubby lips, as if reluctant to share bad news. He pushed an elbow away that almost struck him in the eye. “Down there.” He took Ramis’s arm, and the two rotated in the air, grasped the handholds, and looked out into space. Dobo pointed toward the Earth.

“A war is going on. A big one. Terrible!”

From the Aguinaldo, the distant battle was weirdly beautiful. Four hundred thousand kilometers away, nuclear-tipped missiles rose from their silos to draw long streaks across the dark side of the Earth. The plumes were erratic, exploding with a fast sputter-burn through the missiles’ boost phase. Opposing defensive systems tried to lock onto the incoming weapons.

American Excaliburs rocketed into space from their scattered hiding places and deployed twigs of x-ray lasers. The beams knocked out delicate Soviet homing mechanisms and disoriented nuclear warheads. A swarm of Brilliant Pebbles searched out any remaining weapon.

Polar-orbiting Soviet space stations spat out kinetic-energy weapons to destroy American missiles. Jittering spots of detonations danced across the globe. Small stations in low Earth orbit exploded, as they became targets.

And then it stopped. From the view on the Aguinaldo, the battle seemed to last about twenty minutes.

Strategic defenses on both sides of the world had worked as planned. Even before the first surviving warheads struck Soviet and American soil, the leaders called a truce. The war was already over.

Defensive systems had destroyed all but one missile in a hundred—but that wasn’t good enough.

Over four hundred megatons worth of warheads had survived to do damage. Some burrowed deep into the soil to destroy the next round of weapons; some exploded high in the air, the electromagnetic pulse obliterating all communications.

Ramis could not even guess how many deaths he had just witnessed. He longed for the days of glasnost, when the world had been so different. To him, the war had been fought in silence—screams of dying people could not be heard through space. The fires had vanished, but that could mean either the flames had died out, or simply that the smoke had hidden them from view.

Quiet and stunned, he floated back from the viewing wall. Only a damp spot of perspiration remained on the glass where his hand had been.

Someone in the crowd finally spoke. “Booto!”

The curse echoed hollowly. No one stirred. No one tittered at the schoolboy expletive.

At last the people began to disperse. The Filipinos waited numbly in line for the cross-colony shuttles. A woman sobbed. Over everything, Ramis could hear the thrumming sounds of the Aguinaldo’s recirculating system.

Ramis remained mesmerized by the delicate picture of the Earth. He did not yet want to grasp the full implications of the war. Through the churning clouds shrouding the planet, he tried to pick out the Philippines, letting his eye roam from the tip of Africa, up the Indian Ocean, past Indonesia, and out to the horizon where the ocean disappeared into the haze. He searched, but the ten thousand islands that made up his homeland were just over the horizon.

His brother Salita still lived there, in Baguio City. He had stayed behind to run the Sari-Sari store, refusing to accompany his parents up to the colony. Salita had never gotten along well with his father. Ramis wanted to think about his brother, but he was afraid to.

Two of the largest U.S. military bases were on the Philippines, kept in operation and granted a permanent lease after the Americans had given over the Aguinaldo colony to the Filipino people. The bases must have made the entire archipelago a major target.…

Dobo placed his hand on Ramis’s shoulder, startling him. They both stared into the blackness behind the viewport wall, watching the crazy cloud patterns on Earth rise and fall with unnatural speed.

A quiet, warm voice made Ramis turn around. “We have always been able to find plenty of reasons for war, no matter how many problems we eliminate.”

The dato, Yoli Magsaysay, floated alone by the viewport. He looked thin, with mottled brown skin and flecks of gray and white peppering his bushy hair. The Aguinaldo’s president moved painfully on joints calcified from too many years of low gravity.

Magsaysay’s statement came as a fact, spoken in a musing tone that asked for no debate. The dato seldom talked in public anymore, but when he did, he bore himself in the tired, worn-out manner of a man who would not give in, even after seventy-five years.

“Father Magsaysay—” Ramis caught himself, afraid to say anything more. After what he had just witnessed, he did not want to disturb the dato’s thoughts.

Magsaysay acted as if he hadn’t even heard Ramis. He said to Dobo, “Please have Dr. Sandovaal prepare an analysis for the Council of Twenty. I will call an emergency session once he is ready.”

He closed his eyes and pulled a deep breath of humid air into his lungs. “This war will put the Aguinaldo’s future in grave danger. I suspect Dr. Sandovaal is already working on projections of our existing food supply.” The dato’s hand was clenched at his side; the long fingernails were digging into his palms. “The Council will need that information if we are to select our next course of action.”

“I will ask him, President Magsaysay.” Dobo frowned and dropped his voice. “But I cannot promise that you will like what he has to say.”

Magsaysay swept his hand out over the expanse of the star-filled viewing wall. “If the United States is no longer able to ferry food and supplies to the colonies, then we will face some hard decisions. I want to be sure that we are well informed beforehand.”

He went on, mumbling as if to himself. “The Soviet Union might not be as damaged by the war as the United States. We could be forced to open a dialogue with them if it is necessary for our survival—no matter what promises we made to the Americans. All the rules have changed now.”

Magsaysay stopped, then smiled down at Ramis. “I am chattering like an old politician. Dobo, I would like to speak with Ramis.”

Dobo bowed and moved away from Ramis and Magsaysay, heading for the observatory alcove.

Magsaysay stood in silence. He looked down at Earth, toward the curving horizon where the archipelago of the Philippine Islands would remain hidden under the swirls of clouds. The president spoke quietly.

“Luis Sandovaal and I were close friends many years ago, long before the Aguinaldo was even a dream. I knew your parents when Dr. Sandovaal recruited them to come with him up to L-4. I made it a point to know everyone back then. You see, if a leader loses touch with the people, then it is time for him to step down and let himself be replaced.” He shook his head. “But today there are so many people I do not know. How can I possibly make these decisions?”

He glanced at his timepiece, then frowned, as if time had no meaning anymore. Ramis remained quiet, unsure of what to say. The dato turned to leave, then looked Ramis in the eye, as if he had forgotten to say something.

“The future depends on people such as yourself, Ramis—people willing to take chances.” He held up a finger. “We need you, so do not get hurt when you go Jumping alone at night.”

Magsaysay stepped onto the stickum of the slidewalk, and rested his hand on the railing.

Ramis watched him, his face feeling flushed. How did he know?

Behind the viewing wall, the Earth was swirled with thick clouds now. Only a few sparse patches of blue managed to peek out from beneath the cover. No land was visible.

Ramis decided against flying freefall along the core to get back home. Though his barrio in the Luzon housing area was at the opposite end of the colony, he followed Magsaysay down the slidewalk. A shadow skittered along the ground in front of him. Overhead, a sail-creature nymph whipped past, released early by the unscheduled dawn. Ramis squinted, but he couldn’t make out any markings on the creature’s fins. Once on the colony floor, he caught a jeepney to his home.