He pursed his lips. He vowed not to be like the bickering senators in the Aguinaldo’s council meetings, endlessly considering options until the problem got around to resolving itself. And besides, what did he have to look forward to if he returned to Orbitech 1?
It sounded like a good enough risk to him.
Ramis took a few moments to rig one of his spare bottles, pointing the emergency bleed nozzle directly behind him over his shoulder. He wondered why none of the Orbitech theoreticians had come up with that solution.
He had to be extremely careful not to send himself into a tumble that would get him tangled in Karen’s weavewire; the first hundred meters were thick multistrands that wouldn’t cut him, but a tangle could still cause him big difficulties.
He blasted a jet of air behind him. In the padded suit, he felt the jerk of sudden acceleration, then rapidly lost all sensation of movement again. The Orbitech 1 monitors would probably lecture him for altering his plans without letting them know.
Let Director Brahms come give me a spanking, then, he thought. I can make my own decisions. As if in defiance, he let out two more bursts from the air tank.
“—Ramis, what in the living hell are you doing out there?” He clicked off Brahms’s voice, leaving his helmet in silence.
He decided he should try to get a little sleep. He could do nothing else. Newton’s first law—or was it the second?—would keep him drifting until something made him stop.
Ramis jerked his eyes open. Stars rotated around him in a slow drift. Waving his arms in panic, he tried to see what was happening. The Kibalchich was nowhere in sight.
Fumbling with the controls on his suit’s forearm, Ramis squirted the MMU to compensate for his rotation. He felt the vibration of the hissing attitude jets. The bright wheel of the Soviet colony centered itself in his visor again.
The sound of breathing filled his helmet. He kicked on his heads-up display and scanned the suit diagnostics as they were bounced from the control panel below his chin into his front view plate. His air tank supply and the propellant in the MMU looked good. The carbon dioxide count was a little high in the suit, but that made sense with his recent burst of rapid breathing.
He kicked back on his radio.
“—detected a click. We’ve got him back on line. Someone get the director.”
A minute passed but no other sounds came over radio, until, “—Ramis, Curtis Brahms here. We lost you there for a while. How are you feeling?”
“Fine.” His voice came out rough from sleepiness. He cleared his throat. “I am fine. I took a short nap—”
“We know,” said Brahms. “We were monitoring your vital signs, and we show your breathing rate greatly increased. Is anything wrong?” Brahms paused a beat. “Why did you turn your radio off, Ramis?” His voice had an edge to it.
Ramis scowled to himself. Even here, he is watching me. “I started to rotate, but I have made the appropriate correction with the MMU.”
Karen Langelier’s voice broke back into the conversation. “Diagnostics show the weavewire has twisted but is not now rotating. He’s doing just fine.”
“Good. Good job, Ramis.” Brahms’s voice still sounded tight. Ramis closed his eyes and scowled. “I’m leaving now. You will follow directions, won’t you, Ramis?”
“Of course.” Ramis cut the transmission short.
Hours passed as the universe coasted beneath him. Karen occasionally broke in to chat, and Ramis was glad of the company. Off and on he tried to signal the Kibalchich himself, but received no answer.
Now, it was less than thirty minutes away. The station’s outer sheath of rubble hid the rotating living quarters. He could make out the giant mirror suspended above the colony. Unlike the Aguinaldo, which was built as an immense rotating cylinder, or even Orbitech 1’s dumbbell of counter-rotating wheels, the Soviet colony looked like the classic doughnut-shaped space station conceived by Willy Ley more than a century before.
As he grew close, though, the station took on an alien look: jutting struts, weirdly placed objects on the exterior, even the paint scheme looked dark and brooding. The silent Soviet colony looked dormant, devoid of life. Tiny darkened portholes dotted clear patches on the outer hull.
Ramis remembered his approach to Orbitech 1 while riding in the organic solar sail, watching as the flatscreen broadcast the view from the external cameras mounted on Sarat. He had been half an hour away from the American colony when he had injected Sarat with the hormone that collapsed the huge, beautiful sails. He had been half an hour away when he had caught sight of faces in the colony windows—weary and frightened faces, watching him with hope.
Now, thirty minutes from the Kibalchich, he saw nothing.
“I will use the maneuvering units to guide me in,” he said into the radio.
“Be careful—every time you punch those MMUs, you’re adding some component to your forward velocity,” Karen said. “It might not seem like much, but remember how fast you’re already going.”
“I will manage.” Ramis thought to himself that with all her concern, Karen did not know of his experience flying in the Aguinaldo. He had hit the Jump squares peppering the Sibuyan Sea going twice as fast as he was moving now. The Kibalchich should have had two hundred people aboard, waiting to greet him. But instead, the colony refused any contact. It hung dark, like a giant empty house in space.
Chapter 32
ORBITECH 1—Day 39
Drawing in a breath, Allen Terachyk looked both ways down the corridor. He was all alone, yet he had a feeling that someone was watching him. Air coming from a ventilation grate made a whispering sound in the silence.
Of the four division leaders on Orbitech 1, only he remained. Duncan McLaris had stolen the shuttle and escaped to Clavius Base; Tim Drury had been killed in the first RIF; and three days ago, Linda Arnando had been murdered. And now, Terachyk was the only one who knew that Brahms, not Ombalal, had ordered the RIF.
He did not feel comfortable in his exclusive position.
When his home city of Baltimore had become one of the first slag heaps in the War, his family had gone with it. He had had a wife and four sons. Their names haunted him: Helen, Josh, Jon, Cameron, and Danny. For a moment, he couldn’t remember their faces, their voices—only the motionless family portrait he kept in a holocube in his quarters.
Brahms had never given him time to grieve.
Under a clever disguise and sidetracking of blame, Brahms had styled himself a Napoleon in space. His watchers remained armed and visible throughout the corridors. Brahms had not appointed any replacements for the other division leaders—he probably didn’t trust anyone else. As the only assessor left, Terachyk had to keep aware of everyone’s work. He had to judge its significance and suggest how it might be used to help their survival. He had to provide data on which Brahms would base his decisions, his efficiency ranking system.
With the wall-kelp giving them a small amount of breathing space, Terachyk didn’t know why Orbitech 1 still required Brahms’s brutal crackdown measures, but the director refused to hear any argument about it.
The spoke-shaft elevator to the docking bay stood directly in front of him, like the closed metal doors of a coffin. The light on the elevator door blinked without a sound, signaling it was ready to be boarded. Terachyk clutched the d-cube he carried and closed his eyes.