Lifeline

McLaris blinked, then smiled to cover his surprise. He stood up behind the administrative desk and console, extending his hand. “Are you the one who pulled me out of the wreckage of the Miranda? Thank you. I’m Duncan McLaris. I guess we couldn’t see each other with the suits and all.”

Clancy squinted at him with a puzzled expression, then his eyebrows rose up. “You’re McLaris? I’m surprised to see you here.”

“Rather than in the brig, you mean?”

“Something like that.”

“I’m just helping out.”

The desk in the outer office was cleared of Tomkins’s scientific potpourri; only an empty cup remained, stained with a brown rim of tea. McLaris hadn’t dared to get himself a nameplate for the desk, or even to request an official title. He was happy enough that Tomkins let him do something productive at all.

The rest of Tomkins’s outer office was cluttered with stacks of d-cubes, holo pictures of stars, drawings of radio telescopes, and a few old-fashioned paper textbooks.

McLaris waited for Clancy to take in the situation. He had watched the scene repeat itself over the past week as Tomkins spent less and less time doing administrative duties, leaving McLaris in his place.

He flattened his hands on the desk. “Is there something I can do for you, Mr. Clancy?”

Clancy set his mouth. “My people are still working in the tunnels, on the chief administrator’s orders.” McLaris thought he detected an angry overtone to the last phrase. “I need to show Tomkins something.”

McLaris moved around to the front of the desk with a take-charge expression on his face. “What’s the problem? Is this an emergency?”

Clancy bristled and stared at the left wall, covered by a panoramic photograph of the Milky Way in Sagittarius, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. McLaris could see he was upset about something, frustrated and losing control.

“I’d really rather discuss it with Dr. Tomkins. If I’m going to lose my temper, I might as well do it in front of the right person.”

McLaris smiled. “Maybe it would be better if you did lose your temper in front of me, and saved a little diplomacy for the chief administrator.” He waited a beat. “Why don’t you let me go with you and see what this is all about?”

Before Clancy had a chance to answer, McLaris had started easing him out of the office. It felt good to be managing people again, dealing with their problems and acting as arbitrator—not for any sense of power it gave, but to see things work together.

McLaris motioned for Clancy to lead the way. “Dr. Tomkins left me with explicit instructions not to bother him unless there’s an emergency. I’ve been helping him out with the paper pushing and stuff like that. He hates it—he says it’s my punishment.”

Clancy grunted something noncommittal. The engineer seemed uneasy, not sure how to treat McLaris. He kept conversation to a minimum as they walked. “I heard what happened on Orbitech 1.”

McLaris didn’t respond.

They left the office complex behind and entered the smooth rock tunnels that connected the administrative, laboratory, and living areas. Their boots clicked down a long passageway. “Where are these tunnels your men are digging?” McLaris asked.

“My people, you mean—almost a third of them are women.”

McLaris chuckled. “Touché! I haven’t slipped in years, I don’t think. But that doesn’t answer my question.”

“They’re the far tunnels, away from the main complex.”

Several turns and some minutes later, Clancy stopped before a newly installed airlock, jerked open the door, and stepped into the tunnel. McLaris sniffed the spoiled wet smell of growing wall-kelp. They stepped inside.

Incandescent lamps ran down the length of the murky tunnel. Cut-up pieces of the wall-kelp had been mounted in the brightest yellow patches under the lamps. Looking tiny against the immense volume of the new catacombs, the shreds of wall-kelp grew as fast as they could metabolize.

Clancy extended his arm to show where the incandescent lights disappeared around a bend in the tunnel. “My crew spent the last week tunneling down here. My guess is that we’ve scooped out at least as much volume as was dug for the entire base in the first place. Here, see our chart.”

Clancy took out a pocket flatscreen and punched up a base map, then added an overlay plot of the Orbitech 2 engineers’ additions.

“We took the debris over to the rubble processor. Don’t ask me why, since we haven’t been doing materials processing anyway—not with construction shut down. And it’ll be a while before the base itself is hurting so much that we need to scale up production again.”

McLaris interrupted. “Mr. Clancy, you’re not giving me very many hints about what’s bothering you. I don’t picture you as the type of man who enjoys playing mind games.” The image of Curtis Brahms flashed across McLaris’s mind, leaving a cold line of fear in its wake; he wondered how Brahms had convinced Ombalal to do his dirty work. “Please tell me what the problem is.”