“Please keep me informed.” He gestured to Winkowski. “Come with me.” They left the lab space at a brisk walk. He saw scrub marks on the walls—fresh patches where more graffiti had been removed. Winkowski knew enough to remain silent as he pondered.
Everything was happening all at once. The yo-yo arriving from Clavius Base, bringing McLaris back. The sleep-freeze chambers ready for testing. The Filipino sails coming around for their rendezvous to take a package of the weavewire.
“Is the weavewire ready for delivery to the Aguinaldo representatives?”
Winkowski looked filled with her own importance, which made Brahms think less of her. “It is easier to let the Filipinos take a weavewire unit back with them than to store the unbraided strands. They can use their own raw materials. They don’t have the capability on their colony to construct a new unit—”
“Yet.”
“That’s right, not yet. According to their transmissions, it will take a few weeks to mature enough sail-creatures for their return trip. During that time we should be able to query them about bioengineering techniques so we can duplicate their efforts. The staff insists it would be too difficult to learn through holotank transmissions. Besides, Sandovaal wants to check on the embryos the Barrera boy brought with him, to make sure we’re taking care of them properly.”
Brahms cut her off impatiently. “The colony has been informed of the arrival time for the Phoenix? Broadcast ready for the PA holotanks and for transmission to the other colonies? You don’t know how I hate to have everybody watching all the moves I make!”
“It’s ready. My sense is that we’re all getting pretty excited about the arrival.”
Brahms pondered that. “Yes, won’t it be wonderful to have McLaris back?” He clamped his lips together to quell further sarcasm. “Have you tracked down Terachyk yet?”
Winkowski averted her expression. “Nobody seems to know where he’s gone. All I get is a bunch of people who can’t remember if they’ve seen him or not.”
Brahms felt the anger overwhelming his anxiety again. “It sure would be nice if I could find out where my own chief assessor is. I hope he’s not hiding under the covers at a time like this.”
He picked up the pace toward the docking bay. “Come on. We’ve got a lot happening today.”
Chapter 56
KIBALCHICH—Day 72
Ramis ran over a final suit check as the airlock hissed and cycled. He felt the suit ballooning around him, the soft sounds of outgassing. The airlock seemed to take forever.
Through his helmet, he heard a muffled voice coming from the PA system—maybe Karen had learned how to use the intercom—but the words faded into silence as all the air left the chamber. He had cut himself off. Karen would have to come outside and use her own suit radio if she needed to contact him, or else get inside the command center.
The outer airlock swung open, leaving him with a dizzying depth of stars in front of his faceplate. The view spun around as the Kibalchich’s torus rotated. The broken rubble shield cast flickering spots on the hull, like leaf shadows on a forest floor.
Breathing shallowly, Ramis pushed out of the chamber and worked his way over the Kibalchich’s hub. The graphite axis rod extended from the mirror above to the massive solar shield below.
Ramis could feel a strange sensation in his suit, against the hull where his feet were anchored. It seemed as if the Kibalchich vibrated to a new motion; the central graphite rod seemed to jitter with the resonance. Anna Tripolk had activated some sort of weapon, whatever it was. He whirled around, then caught himself to keep from spinning. The airlock door closed and sealed itself—he felt an enormous “click” through contact with the hull. Ramis bent forward and punched the Cyrillic open switch above the airlock.
Nothing.
Undaunted, he flipped the manual override switch. Again nothing. Anna had locked him out.
Ramis felt cold, and his stomach tightened. As Karen had reminded him, if he couldn’t stop the weapon, or at least get back inside before it detonated, he would fry from the radiation.
Ramis flipped up his radio options and began to key in Orbitech 1’s emergency frequency, but the clipped voice of Anna Tripolk burst in over his suit radio. “Ramis Barrera, I have sealed open all the inner airlock doors on this station. You can not re-enter. If you issue any sort of warning, I will destroy Orbitech 1. The blood of more than a thousand people will be on your hands.”
Ramis thought rapidly. He still had the weavewire to get back to Orbitech 1—but without the dolly to ride over, he might as well have nothing. Which left him with Jumping. He quickly shelved that idea. He had full air tanks, but it would take him too long—the weapon would detonate before he got there. He had less than two hours.
Ramis ground his teeth together, but he didn’t bother to respond to Anna. Nothing more came over the radio. He boosted himself up over the hub and steadied himself against the rod holding the mirror. Everything seemed serene. The stars burned as ice-cold pinpoints; the great wheel of the Kibalchich rotated underneath its rocky sheath.
Across the depth of space, he looked toward the bright spot of Orbitech 1. Something hung in his way, eclipsing the stars. It seemed like a thick fog, a thin film blocking the view—
Dr. Sandovaal! The sail-creatures!
Ramis squinted and tried to find the sail-creatures’ stubby bodies in the gigantic cluster—that would tell him how near they were. But it was like trying to find a rice husk at midnight in a soccer field. They were floating in, oblivious to what was about to happen, and he had no way to warn them. Anna would be listening to any transmissions,
Until it hit him that he had an easier way.
One hour and twenty minutes remaining—it seemed an eternity to her. But nothing could stop her now, not with Ramis Barrera locked outside, and Karen Langelier banging on the sealed doors to the command center and whimpering into the intercom.
“Anna, please! You don’t know what you’re doing.” Langelier’s voice echoed through the command center.
Because of emergency safety programming, the computer refused to shut off the intercom during detonation sequence Alexander, claiming that it must remain open. Anna tried to ignore Langelier’s whining. “Don’t you have any respect for other lives?”
That angered her. Any respect for other lives? She snapped, “I am not the one who murdered a helpless man in sleepfreeze through simple incompetence! Think of all the people dead on Earth. I am not the one attempting to band together with the remaining survivors in space to wipe out the people on the Kibalchich. This station had a grander purpose than anything your people will ever attempt. I will not let you ruin it.”
Anna shuddered and ignored everything else the other woman shouted back at her. The discussion would sap her strength, redirect her anger, and possibly raise some doubts. She could not afford that.
Anna checked the tall central holotank, keeping a close eye on the progress of the yo-yo vessel making its way up from the Moon. It sped onward, its acceleration constant, less than two hours from its destination. The delicate tracking mechanisms on the Kibalchich kept the target in focus. If she timed it right, the Phoenix would be destroyed with minutes to spare.