Lifeline

He saw the others removing the sail-creature embryos, then the wall-kelp nodules. The wall-kelp would survive for some time in the vacuum, but they needed to bring it inside as soon as possible.

As he drifted through the maw of the towering docking bay doors, he could see the empty hangar where the shuttle-tugs would have docked, back when everything was normal. He could see a control bay up above with slanted transparent windows. He saw several forms behind the windows.

Another space-suited figure took his arm and directed him to one of the airlock doors at the wall. He supposed it was an elevator shaft. His legs continued to tremble, and he felt ready to dissolve inside his suit. He wanted to get out, where he could breathe again. He had exerted himself too much all at once. He was not anxious to be back inside a gravity environment.

Behind him, he saw the suited figures cutting at Sarat’s crumpled sails, getting at the creature’s body core. The severed, tissue-thin sails drifted away as the L-5 colony continued to orbit.

Though he felt weary and dizzy, he waited by the spoke-shaft elevator and watched to make sure the colonists brought in the wall-kelp and embryos. The frozen kelp strands were still edible, and the central nodules would survive. His escort seemed impatient and urged him to enter the elevator.

Ramis floated inside the elevator chamber as the other figures carried Sarat’s hard, elongated body core into the bay, pushing it toward one of the other elevators. He felt a moment of shocked indignation and anger as he realized they were probably recovering the meat for distribution among the colonists.

One more sacrifice for Sarat, one more debt owed.

As the spoke-shaft elevator descended, the chamber filled with air. Ramis could feel his weight increase as the elevator traveled out to the rim of the torus, picking up artificial gravity along the way.

Ramis’s suit lost some of its stiffness as the elevator pressurized. His escort cracked open his helmet and indicated for Ramis to do the same. As the elevator reached the bottom of the shaft, Ramis lifted up the faceplate and took a deep breath of the warm, stale air of the industrial colony. He heaved an exhausted sigh. The man beside him clapped him on the back.

A potpourri of odors wafted past, very different from the dank, stifling air of the cramped cyst. The smell was metallic, scrubbed clean—more artificial than the Aguinaldo’s. But Ramis felt numb, unable to take it all in at once.

A buzz of people surrounded him. Arms reached out to embrace him, and he almost collapsed in their grasp. He looked around frantically. The men with the embryos must have gone into one of the other elevators, down a different spoke into another part of the wheel. Ramis stood on his tiptoes and called out, wondering what he should do.

“Wait—the sail-creatures! They are my only way back! I need to tell you about the wall-kelp!”

A man pushed through the mass and grabbed Ramis’s elbow. He was tall and forceful, with blond hair swept back from his forehead. At first glance, he seemed too young to be in charge, but the dark bags under his eyes made him look old beyond himself.

“—Curtis Brahms, Acting Director of Orbitech 1.” He seemed to be out of breath. “Welcome to our colony. I hope you’ve brought a miracle with you. We could sure use one. We must have a meeting with my assessors as soon as possible.”

The people grew silent when the man spoke. Their faces smiled back at Ramis, but their eyes looked dead, beaten.

Ramis studied Brahms, trying to quell the urgency he felt. He did not look as forbidding as Magsaysay had led him to expect.

Ramis wanted to see the embryos, make certain they were not mishandled or injured. “I must show you how to grow the wall-kelp, raise the sail-creatures. It is a chance for you all to survive.”

“We can’t thank you enough for helping us.” Brahms gripped Ramis on the shoulders. “We had only … unpleasant options left.” Brahms steered Ramis through the crowd. People stepped out of their way.

“Let me show you your room. We’ve got good quarters for you—they used to belong to one of our division leaders.”

Ramis stumbled along, feeling weak. He tried not to think of Sarat, of the Aguinaldo, of the time he would have to live here until the sail-creature embryos reached maturity—nor of the unpleasant options to which Brahms had referred.

“After you clean up, we need to have a talk.” He flashed a smile that made Ramis uneasy.

The people appeared glad to see Ramis, but somehow he felt more stifled than welcome. He would be walking a tightrope, balancing everything he knew against what he understood of the grim situation on the American colony.

Orbitech 1 seemed to hold many secrets.

Part Two

Incentive

Chapter 23

ORBITECH 1—Day 30