Lifeline

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.