Lifeline

Deep shadows filled the interior. The floodlights from the two six-packs could not reach inside; no atmosphere reflected the light. Only one of the self-illuminated indicator panels glowed, still showing ALARM status.

Through a gaping hole in the main viewing window, he could see a carpet of stars. From his backpack, Clancy removed two trouble lights and set them up, illuminating the chamber. Multiple glares bounced off the floor and walls, like luminous ghosts.

Clancy preferred open space and vast distances with nothing to get in the way. He liked to be able to look in every direction and see infinity. Isolated, the Orbitech 2 site had seemed to hang at the center of the universe itself. But this place felt like a coffin.

He came to the spot where McLaris had been lying. A broken piece of sharp lunar rock jutted through the floor only a foot away. McLaris had been lucky.

Clancy squeezed through a crushed piece of the bulkhead and the floor. The trouble lights shone on a dry brown stain, darker than the gray lunar dust. Kneeling, Clancy ran his finger through the dry powder. He’d found Stephanie Garland there, as mangled as the Miranda. The captain always goes down with her ship, right?

But McLaris had lived. He had to cope with the death of his daughter. Clancy had seen the little girl’s last expression, and he would be haunted by it for the rest of his life, but McLaris would have to live with his imagination, and the knowledge of what he had done.

Clancy had no children, not even a niece or sister back on Earth. He’d never wondered what it would be like to have a daughter who depended so totally upon him. Now, after thinking about what McLaris had done, he suspected that the parental instinct must place the rational mind into overdrive. He had seen mother cats jealously protect their kittens … and he thought he had read about birds sacrificing themselves to keep predators away from their young.

Still, Clancy found it difficult to imagine how even an overprotective father could have put his daughter into such a hazardous position. Either he was the most devoted parent, or the most abiding horse’s ass, in human history.

As he started to stand, Clancy spotted a colorful object trapped under one of the back passenger seats. He had missed it before, but now he ducked under the hatch, squatted, and reached into the darkness. He groped around with his gloved hand, felt the object, and pulled it free.

He hauled it into the full glare of the trouble lights. It was a keyboard with a computer pack in the rear and light synthesizers on a plate on top—a child’s musical instrument, undamaged.

Clancy ran his fingertips along the keys. A few streaks of light flashed across the top, but he heard no music … of course it would make no sound out in the vacuum, right? Gee, engineers were supposed to know these things.

He grinned at himself in the darkness, embarrassed. He thought he might want to fix the gadget once they got back in the pressurized environment. It might even still play.

Then he realized that it must have belonged to McLaris’s daughter. She’d been playing with it during the long escape journey from Orbitech 1.

Clancy backed out of the compartment, carrying the instrument with him. On his way out, he banged the flat of his hand against several of the bulkheads to see if the structure felt solid. He brushed past dangling fiberoptic cables and stepped over debris on his way out.

The rest of the salvage crew swarmed over the wreckage, pulling out crushed equipment and prying away sections of the engines to place on the flatbed. Clancy’s six-pack was starting to look like a junk truck.

Shen bounced up to him. “Everything all right inside? Can we go in?”

“Uh, yeah—just fine. Go ahead.”

“Right.” Shen reached out as if to take the musical instrument from him. “Here, I’ll throw that on the flatbed if you want to supervise the rest of the team.”

“No, I’ll take it.” Clancy was surprised by his sudden possessiveness. “Go ahead and keep an eye on them. We can’t get too many people inside the Miranda anyway.”

“Right, Doc.” She turned and bounced away into the crossed headlight beams toward the shuttle-tug. Clancy made his way back to the rover and placed the instrument on the floor beside the driver’s seat.

When Shen signaled for him to bring the flatbed over to the wreckage, he backed it to the north of the crash site. The others unstrapped the winch and crane. Shen and her crew lashed the rear of the six-pack to stakes driven deep into the lunar soil. Slowly, in a meticulous dance in the low gravity, they hoisted the heavy rocket motors onto the platform.

Later, with both rovers loaded, the vehicles lumbered back to Clavius Base. Clancy listened to the silence of his crew, smelled the dirty-sock odor in his suit.