Lifeline

Dismayed at the way the suit fit her, McLaris lifted Jessie and carried her back to the acceleration seat. He strapped her in carefully and squeezed where he thought her shoulder was.

He brought a suit back for Garland and slipped into another one himself. As he tugged on the thick material, McLaris closed his eyes and thought back to the intense training he had taken before he, Jessie, and Diane had moved up to Orbitech 1.

“You’d better hurry—we’re coming in,” Garland called back without turning her head. “Clavius Base, we’re on our way!” She switched off the radio again. “Does Jessie remember any prayers from Sunday school? You’d better have her start saying them.”

McLaris went cold. “Let’s not get her worried,” he said shortly, then sealed his own helmet.

Garland muttered, glancing at the cross hairs on one of the screens as the landscape streaked beneath them. She pulled on her own helmet, and McLaris heard her voice crackle in his headset. “Here we go!”

The Miranda dropped in its descent, and its rockets fired to stop the fall. The jagged surface of the Moon rose up toward them. McLaris felt his stomach clench.

The upturned lip of a crater opened before them, and a vast flat plain spread out. Suddenly McLaris could see the blurred forms of the buried buildings on Clavius Base, and the shining, kilometers-long rail of the mass launcher used for catapulting lunar material into orbit for construction of the Lagrange colonies.

The crater Clavius spread out like a giant bowl—it seemed so smooth, a perfect spot to land. But as they came closer, McLaris spotted sharp edges, jutting rocks of smaller craters and fissures.

“Diddy!” Jessie cried, muffled in her suit.

The far wall of the Clavius crater grew visibly with each moment. “It’s now or never.”

Garland fired the attitude jets in an attempt to slow them down further, to take the shuttle in gently. They still seemed to be descending too fast. The rockets sputtered.

“So much for the safety factor in the fuel supply!”

Garland clutched at the controls, but the shuttle did not respond. A last spurt from one of the engines tilted them sideways at a crazy angle. McLaris squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, only to see the saw-toothed wall of rock hurtling toward them.

“Stephanie, look out—!”

A ripping explosion tore out the belly of the Miranda. The shuttle pitched. McLaris thought he could see stars, then the lunar surface, through a gash in the floor. Ragged metal strips dangled like knives as their air vented out into the vacuum in a cloud of white frost crystals.

The Miranda crashed, nose first, half burying itself into the lunar surface. Explosive pain popped inside of McLaris.

The cockpit wall folded up and struck him.

Fighting a red haze, McLaris clawed back to consciousness. Part of him wanted to remain in the floating warmth, in the dark, but another part insisted on returning to life.

He squinted, focused enough to see flecks of blood spattered on the inside of his faceplate. He was hurt. McLaris faced the knowledge coolly, at a distance from himself.

He forced his vision beyond the faceplate, into the distorted wreckage of the shuttle. His eyes began to assess distance and perspective again.

He recognized with a sick detachment the torn remains of Stephanie Garland in the pilot’s seat. Frozen, iron-hard tatters of flesh and powder-dry blood hung from the ragged ends of the control panel. Half the cockpit yawned open to space.

McLaris realized that he was now sitting in hard vacuum. He had no idea how long he had been unconscious. He wondered how long the air in his suit would last.

Pain rose up inside his head, and his eyes refused to focus again. Something peaceful called him to come back into sleep … back into a blissful coma, away from all pain and worry.

McLaris fought against it. Jessie! He had to find Jessie. But movement was much more difficult than opening his eyes. He clenched his hand, feeling the fingers move, touching the fabric on the inside of the glove. He breathed, but it felt as if he had inhaled needles that tore at his lungs with each gasp.

He needed to turn only a little to see Jessie behind him. With each slight motion of his head, the nauseating shadows filled his mind again. He was going to faint soon …. for a long time. He didn’t know if he would ever wake up. But McLaris couldn’t fall into unconsciousness again … not without seeing Jessie one last time.

He wrenched his head too quickly. Blackness reared, but he did get a chance to locate her, strapped into the passenger seat.

Then he saw the jagged crack down the center of her faceplate.