Lifeline

Chapter 39

ORBITECH 1—Day 43

The surprise was not that McLaris wanted to speak with him. Curtis Brahms had suspected that would eventually happen. Given enough time, McLaris would come strutting back, boasting, taunting Brahms about his escape to the Moon.

But he had not anticipated that McLaris would come humbly.

McLaris’s expression remained frozen in the holotank, sagging with the light lag brought on by the signal’s one-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-mile transmission path. The lag injected a one-second delay, an uncertainty, into the conversation. The image stared unflinching into Brahms’s face. He saw a deep-set pain in the traitor’s eyes. Good. But the emotion seemed tempered and controlled.

The office grew cold and silent. Brahms allowed a thin smile to play at his lips. He had McLaris figured out before the man could even speak a greeting. The former division leader hadn’t changed—Brahms knew it, and he knew McLaris knew it himself.

Even insulated by hundreds of thousands of miles, Brahms could see through the facade now, even as he should have more than a month ago. Brahms had considered Duncan McLaris his best friend aboard Orbitech 1, a man whose mind worked the same, who had the same goals, who had his head on straight and could see what needed to be done and how to do it. But McLaris had turned coward, thrown his own interests above those of all the other people on the colony.

You were lucky then, Duncan, thought Brahms. And you are lucky now. McLaris sat fidgeting, probably looking for an opening line. But Brahms beat him to it.

“Well, well. Base Manager McLaris. The Aguinaldo informed us of your new position. Does this mean that Clavius Base has finally dropped that silly boycott of ConComm? It was rather a petulant reaction.”

McLaris shrugged. “It wasn’t my idea in the first place.”

“Yes, cover your rear. I understand. You’ve grown a beard, Duncan.” It looked thin and scraggly on McLaris’s naturally boyish-looking face. “Are you trying to hide behind a disguise?”

McLaris stiffened, but ignored the comment. “We’ve been monitoring your ConComm link with the Aguinaldo all along—we just haven’t replied to your transmissions.” He lowered his voice. “I’ve called to discuss an important project between our two colonies. Strictly business.”

Brahms sat back, raising his eyebrows and keeping in motion just to gain a moment to think. His walls of suspicion flew up. Out of range of the holoscreen, he gripped his fists.

“What have you done now, commandeered the Clavius Base communication center? How many people are you going to hurt this time?”

McLaris shot back, “I didn’t throw a hundred and fifty people out the airlock.”

Brahms glared at the image. “You would have done the same. I know you, Duncan. We’re two sides of the same coin. Pressed against the wall, with all this hanging over your head, you would have taken the same desperate measures that I was forced to! Besides, Ombalal gave the order.”

“Give me a break, Curtis. Ombalal had trouble getting dressed in the morning! I know you, too.”

Brahms breathed through his nose, but didn’t reply. McLaris took a long moment to continue. “I didn’t call to argue with you, Curtis. I need to speak with you as an official emissary of Clavius Base.”

“I’m surprised they didn’t leave you out in the wreckage of the shuttle you crashed. I told them what you did.”

“Yes, and they saw what you did, too. They learned what I was running away from. You legitimized my actions.”

“I see.” Brahms drew his lips tight.

He had expected McLaris to get his claws into the Moon base’s management ranks, where he could eventually betray them as he had betrayed Orbitech 1. But Brahms hadn’t expected it so soon.

McLaris cleared his throat, changing the subject. “I hear the Filipinos’ wall-kelp has made things rather more, ah, pleasant up there.”

Brahms answered in a clipped voice. “We are very thankful to the Aguinaldo.” If it had come sooner, or if we had even known about it, I might not have been forced into the RIF, he thought. McLaris continued to stare at him with what looked to be an accusing expression. Damn him, Brahms thought. What would he have done in my situation? Let the people riot, and have everyone die? We didn’t know!

“Down here, we’re finding ways to bleach out the taste. We’ll share some of our results with your people, if you’re interested.”

Brahms fought to control his emotions. McLaris had shown his true nature—running away, hiding his head in Moon dust, letting someone else tackle the problem. Brahms covered his anger with a vacant, placid expression. This was not the time to strike—that would come some time in the future.

McLaris continued, “Now we see that the Filipino boy has gone over to the Kibalchich. He’s a brave one.”

Brahms pushed his face closer to the holoscreen. “Duncan, what do you really want? I have no desire for chitchat. Why did you contact me?”

The one-second lag was all he needed. McLaris launched right into his proposal, catching Brahms off guard. “I don’t have to give you growth statistics or projections of what will happen if our colonies remain separate, little islands slowly withering away. It could be decades before Earth sends somebody back here, if at all. Now that you’ve already linked up with the Aguinaldo—”

“I wouldn’t call a one-shot trip on a sail-creature an everyday occurrence,” Brahms broke in. With the light lag, McLaris continued speaking before he realized he had been interrupted.

“It doesn’t matter. They did it once, it can be done again. The English, even the Vikings, beat greater odds crossing the Atlantic. Now you’ve sent a representative aboard the Kibalchich. In a few years, there could be regular trade between the Lagrange points.”

Brahms held up a hand, maintaining a skeptical expression. “You didn’t contact me to pump me up on space exploration, either.”

McLaris drew his mouth in a scowl. “You haven’t changed, Curtis. You’re still a bottom-line man.” Brahms didn’t break his smile; McLaris knew him.

“So here’s the bottom line. You will soon have access to the Kibalchich whenever you want to go there. Believe it or not, the people on the Aguinaldo are not too far behind in their access to you, if they can find a practical way to use those sail-creatures of theirs. You three Lagrange colonies are approaching a point where you don’t need Earth to survive.”

“You pointed that out a moment ago. We’re nearing self-sufficiency right now.” Brahms realized his voice remained bitter, although he should have felt triumphant about that.

McLaris brushed the comments aside. “You know what I’m talking about. The wall-kelp will keep you hanging on—us hanging on—barely surviving, even if we don’t do anything else. But you’re a closed system. If you want the colonies to grow—to expand and thrive—then we’ve got to do it in numbers. We’ve got to pool resources. You’ll never achieve that critical mass on your own—not even with the Kibalchich and the Aguinaldo thrown in.”

“So what?”

McLaris’s face seemed to jut through the holotank. “We’ve got the means to help right here on the Moon: heavy equipment, ore, smelters, the mass driver. We intend to get back on our feet. Throw in with us and bring back civilization.”

Brahms studied McLaris without emotion. His former division leader breathed heavily, his nostrils flared in excitement. Brahms couldn’t put his finger on what had lit such a spark in McLaris.

“Dammit, Duncan, you’re not giving a campaign speech. What the hell do you want?”

“I want to establish a direct, physical connection between the Moon and Orbitech 1.”

“How? You’ll never be able to get up here.”

“On the broadcasts showing Ramis and his Jump to the Kibalchich, your commentator announced that a new way had been discovered to draw the weavewire out quickly. Is there any limit to how long you can make it?”

Brahms began to get an idea of what McLaris was going to propose. For a moment, the thoughts distracted him. “Supposedly not.” Brahms furrowed his eyebrows, wondering if McLaris had knocked every screw in his head loose when he had crashed the Miranda. “Are you suggesting we have someone Jump down to Clavius Base? That’s ridiculous.”

“No, but you’ve got the general idea.” His eyes glittered on the holotank image. “We’ve come up with a stable orbit from L-5 direct to the Moon. Here, I’ll flash up some graphics.” McLaris nodded to someone out of sight of the holotransmitter. A diagram of the Moon, the two Lagrange points sixty degrees on either side, and the Earth, replaced his image. A bright dot pulsed at L-5. McLaris’s voice came over the graphic.

“If you can ballistically shoot out a line of weavewire from Orbitech 1 with the proper initial conditions, it will be forced to follow the ‘orbit’ you see on the display.” A bright yellow line left L-5 and began inching toward the Moon. “It’ll impact the Moon, and if we can catch it, we’ll establish a sort of lifeline cable between L-5 and Clavius Base—just like you’ve made between yourselves and the Kibalchich.

The graphics dissolved into McLaris’s face again. He appeared more excited. “Our original idea was to make a kind of Clarke elevator, or Artsutanov’s elevator, or whoever you want to give the credit to. But we found that wouldn’t be stable. If we tried to hold onto the weavewire, the impact signal would propagate back up to Orbitech 1, setting off nonlinear oscillations.” McLaris smiled engagingly. “At least, those are the words my engineers told me to say.”

Brahms had to admire him for his talent, though he resented being manipulated.

McLaris held up a finger. “But, if we caught the weavewire just after it hit the surface, we could attach some sort of capsule—a cargo container or elevator car, depending on how you want to look at it—and you could start hauling the wire back up to Orbitech 1.”

“Like a giant yo-yo,” Brahms said, getting the idea. “No, more like a fishhook—we cast the line down, you hook the fish on, and we haul it in.”

He became more and more frustrated inside as he felt how important McLaris’s idea could really be for their survival. Damn him again!

“Exactly! I can have some of my people talk to yours to work out the details. But the idea is so simple that even without a huge industrial base we can do this. Compared to building an actual spaceship, this would be like hammering together a wooden horse cart instead of fabricating a sports car, but it will work.”

McLaris’s eyes remained bright, and he kept speaking as if he was afraid Brahms would jump into the time lag. “Do you understand, Curtis? If this works, we can move between the colonies and the Moon. Think of what we can accomplish!”

Brahms felt the potentials rushing through his mind. It was the kind of idea he himself would dream up—grandiose and full of challenge, and with a huge payoff.

It would mean an end to the old ways—the thought of future RIFs could be thrown away forever. They had hope—a glimmer of a solid future, in McLaris’s words.

So why did that distress him? Brahms couldn’t put his finger on the anxiety it caused.

“Wait a minute. You can reel people up here, but how do you get them back down to the Moon?

“Simple,” McLaris said, answering almost too quickly. “It’s like lowering a string with a bucket on the end. Well, not really, but our techies have all the details.”

Brahms spoke in a low voice, gruff and businesslike, but no longer laced with antagonism. “Duncan, let me set up a meeting with my engineering group. I want a complete interchange of information—let them run their own models to make sure this thing really works. If they say yes, then we can start work right away.” He lifted an eyebrow, almost as an afterthought. “If you concur, that is.”

It galled him to say that.

McLaris broke into a wide smile for the first time during the interchange. “My thoughts exactly.”

Now can you gloat some more because you think you’ve won?

“Good, we’ll consider it done.” Brahms paused. He felt very awkward.

A moment passed. McLaris spoke. “These are new times, Curtis. We’ve got to work together. Sweep away the old.”

“That’s the only way.”

Brahms switched off the holotank and rocked back in his chair, tapping his fingertips against each other.

Before he summoned the engineering team, he grew warm with the knowledge that he might finally have a chance to see Duncan face-to-face again.

Face-to-face.

His palms felt sticky with sweat.