Lifeline

Sandovaal switched off the holotank and used controls to retract the external telescopes into their casings. “Getting to L-5 is a much more difficult problem. We must use an exotic orbit, swing around the Earth. But we must first grow the sail-creature outside the Aguinaldo. You should order the preparations to begin soon.”

Magsaysay set his mouth, making lines stand out in his dark skin. His gaze drifted out the observation window, focused on infinity. He seemed to be avoiding Ramis, who sat holding his breath.

Magsaysay spoke without turning. His knuckles were white against the window. “Luis, you are forcing me to use Ramis.”

Sandovaal grunted. “I am trying to send food to save fifteen hundred people. If anyone can accomplish this mission, the boy can. We will make it as safe as possible for him.”

Silence, then, “Very well. You and Dobo do what you must. Prepare one of the sail-creature nymphs.” He closed his eyes, then looked directly at Ramis. He seemed to be pronouncing a death sentence, no matter how much Ramis wanted to go. “And I am very sorry, Ramis.”

Chapter 18

ORBITECH 1—Day 14

The mass spectrometer did not give the results she wanted. Karen Langelier felt tears of frustration brim in her eyelids. It was so difficult to work in fear.

After five years of testing and development, the weavewire she had developed at the Center for High-Technology Materials proved a growing success. Indestructible garments woven from the monomolecular fiber had just started to gain popularity before the War, first in protective clothing and then in expensive items of high fashion. It had nearly unlimited potential: surgical knives, new types of construction and engineering, materials processing. But drawing the weavewire out a few kilometers a day in their precious L-5 industrial complex was not economically feasible for Orbitechnologies Corp. Karen had been sent up to Orbitech 1 only a few months before to work on a scheme for accelerating the extraction process. In theory, the weavewire should be able to form along its laser guide beam as fast as molecules could react.

In theory.

Karen felt frantic with pressure to perform. Perhaps the spinneret had been too small this time. Her hands had been shaking during the attempt.

In her anger, she tossed the Pyrex flask across the lab. It tumbled end over end, striking the curved wall and ricocheting back. The specimen hardened into a lump inside the flask. Karen scowled at it. Give me the right answer, dammit! Her thoughts brimmed with hysteria. Do what you’re supposed to do!

Polymer research in zero gravity had so little history that everything was new. When a technique worked, they tried every variation, attempting to improve the process, or at least to understand it.

The complex had been a bustling outpost, with dozens of other chemistry team members working at their own brainstormed experiments. The laboratory bay contained imaginative apparatus with odd adaptations for zero-G: heating units were self-enclosed and mechanically stirred, since convection did not occur; gas-jet burners had been supplanted by high-intensity electrical-resistance heating units—without gravity, open flames remained spherical and extinguished themselves from lack of oxygen.

But the lab cubicles were without friendly banter after the RIF. Two of the testing stations stood painfully empty. A few of the other researchers looked up at Karen’s outburst and watched, but most kept working.

Primary researchers and their assistants sweated over their own projects, as if they could bring them to fruition by sheer force of will. Others, like Karen, worked independently, hoping for that one breakthrough, whatever it was, that might turn things around.

Everything will work out the way it’s supposed to, Karen thought to herself. It had always sounded good to her before. But what if it doesn’t work out?

She swallowed back her fear, pretending not to look affected. It would work next time. She would just try again. She needed to make a significant breakthrough.

Nobody competed for Nobel prizes anymore—this time, the reward was simple survival. And Curtis Brahms was the only judge.

Brahms had suggested they all work together, to cooperate more than ever. But Karen knew the teams would prefer to tear each other apart, gladiators in a scientific coliseum, squirming to climb on top and give themselves a few more moments of survival.

And only two weeks had passed since the War. What would they do when things began to get worse, much worse?

She thought again of Ombalal’s RIF—a hundred and fifty people dead, without warning. She had been in her quarters, reading Soviet Physics JEPT online, when the announcement had come over the PA system.