Lifeline

The Jumping on the Aguinaldo, the trip to Orbitech 1, the hundred-kilometer Jump to the Kibalchich—all seemed minor compared to this task: a mere twenty-five-meter hop, no farther than the length of a small rice paddy … yet he was now truly alone: no hull to catch him, no sail-creature to nudge him, no weavewire to send him bouncing back if he missed.

Ramis aimed his body carefully, bending deep to get the most push possible, and jumped as hard as he could. He shot up and reached out. The ring mirror seemed to be just beyond his grasp.

He snagged the edge with his curled fingertips and jerked himself around. He felt his muscles strain with the sudden change; his arm was nearly yanked from its socket.

“Booto!” he cursed, coughing from the pain and surprised at his own profanity. Wincing, his eyes shut, he hauled himself to the surface and crawled to the unfinished side. From the impact the mirror bent, rocked against its support, and began oscillating. He tried to increase the rocking motion by crawling and swaying across the mirror.

Ramis felt like laughing. Anna would never be able to aim her weapon now.

Red lights blinked in the Kibalchich’s command center. A siren shrieked up and down the scale, making Karen jerk. Dozens of windows opened up in the central holotank, displaying a visual of the giant mirror from different external cameras. Oscillation rates, yaws, periodicity, and pitch angles all flashed in red. The mirror rocked back and forth, held in the center by the single graphite rod. The carefully configured parabolic shape had been bent from some kind of impact.

“{{UNABLE TO OBTAIN TARGET LOCK. MIRROR WILL REMAIN UNSTABLE FOR SEVENTY-FOUR POINT SIX TWO MINUTES. UNABLE TO DETERMINE AIMING ABILITY OF NEW MIRROR CONFIGURATION.}}”

The computer fell silent; a second passed.

“{{DETONATION SEQUENCE ABORTED.}}”

Chapter 64

PHOENIX—Day 72

Two minutes of stomach-knotting blasts from the hydrogen-oxygen rockets seemed like an eternity. The Phoenix roared in Clancy’s ears; he vibrated like a man at a jack-hammer. He prayed to himself, all the while thinking about how a transposed digit in the computer codes, an impatient worker affixing one of the gaskets with too little sealant, a measured exhaust angle offset by a fraction of a degree—any trivial mistake could make everything fail.

Visions of catastrophe filled his head, until the burn ended with explosive silence. Tugging back against the connecting weavewire, the Phoenix counteracted all the velocity they had built up over three days.

Then they hung still.

The port showed a glowing—unmoving!—vision of Orbitech 1. The industrial colony filled the view, only a short distance away. They had stopped themselves with their cobbled-together engines.

Clancy ripped the restraining straps from his chest and pushed away from the acceleration chair, bellowing like a madman.

Orbitech 1 began pulling the weavewire again, slowly hauling the yo-yo in toward the waiting docking bay.

McLaris looked gray and sick, shaky. Clancy clapped him on the shoulder and helped to unstrap him. “We made it, Duncan! Have that keyboard of yours play something triumphant!”

Clancy felt ready to tackle anything, but McLaris didn’t look in any condition to respond to the humor. After rebounding from the opposite bulkhead, and performing a spontaneous jerk-worrble from a popular punk ballet, Clancy managed to reach the communications console. He whistled as he established contact with Clavius Base and Orbitech 1 on the open channel.

“Howdy, howdy! This is the, ahem, successful pilot of the one and only orbital yo-yo in history! Braking rockets have fired and we are home free. Forget all that stuff about ‘the Eagle has landed’—the Phoenix has risen!”

Wiay Shen manned the comm unit. Her almond eyes lit up when she saw Clancy’s face intact. The full second of light delay burned her image in Clancy’s mind. He grinned at her.

“You made it!” she cried. He heard cheers in the background from his crew. “I mean, of course you did. We weren’t really worried about you hitting Orbitech 1—”

A massive brown face moved into view. Tomkins grinned and gave them a thumbs-up. “Congratulations, you two! Cliff, you can take a rest now, but Duncan’s work is just starting.”

The Orbitech 1 ConComm broke in, overriding the transmission from Clavius Base and pushing Tomkins’s face off to the side of the screen. “Phoenix, we have you positioned and our intercept crew is ready to receive you. We are still having some difficulty contacting the Filipino emissaries—”

“Wiay, do you know what this means?” Clancy smiled smugly as he pushed his own override back to Clavius Base. The Orbitech 1 people knew what they were doing; inside the Phoenix, Clancy and McLaris could do nothing but wait anyway.