I phoned my father instead. He was still in New York, where he planned to wait for the success of the Brazilian mission. I woke him, of course, but at least this time he was alone in his bed. Or so it seemed.
“He is already on his way?” My father’s sleepy eyes opened wide once I told him about Sam.
“Yes,” I said. “And the United States is asking the IAA to make a safety investigation of the Brazilian spacecraft.”
He seemed confused by that.
“It will delay the Brazilian mission for days!” I hissed, not daring to raise my voice. “Sam will be in GEO and claim the territory before they even get off the space station.”
My father lapsed into a long string of heartfelt curses so foul that even today I blush at the memory.
He raged at me, “And what have you done about it? Nothing!”
“There is nothing I can do, Papa.”
“Bah! I am surrounded by traitors and incompetents! My own daughter cannot raise a finger to help me.”
“But Papa—”
“Do you realize what this gringo is doing? He is turning our own position against us! He is using my speech as a pretext for taking the equatorial orbit away from us! I will look like a fool! Before the United Nations, before the news media, before the whole world—I will be made to appear like a fool!”
I was shocked and saddened to realize that my father’s concern was not for his people or for the injustice of the situation. His first concern was about his own image.
“But Papa,” I asked tearfully, “what can we do about it?”
“You must act!” he said. “You said you were prepared to sabotage their spacecraft. Now is the time to do it. Strike! Strike now!”
I stared at his image in horror. My father’s face was contorted with fury and hate.
“Kill that gringo bastard!” he snarled at me. “He must never reach the equatorial orbit alive.”
The bug that I had inserted into the mission control program merely allowed me to fire an OTVs thrusters when I chose to. Originally I had thought that I could send an unmanned OTV crashing into a communications satellite; a neat piece of sabotage.
Sam was not planning to park his spacecraft close enough to a commsat for my plan to work, however. He merely wanted to establish himself in GEO long enough to make the territorial claim that my father wanted for the Twelve—and for the UN to recognize that claim.
I could not send him crashing into a satellite, I realized. But what if I used my bug to fire his thrusters as he approached GEO? He would go careening past the orbit, farther out into space. His trajectory would undoubtedly carry him into a wildly looping orbit that would either fling him into deep space forever, or send him hurtling back toward the Earth, to plunge into the atmosphere and burn up like a meteor.
Yes, I told myself, I could kill Sam Gunn with the touch of a finger. I was alone in the mission control center. No one would see me do it. I could then erase the bug in the program and no one would ever know why Sam’s thrusters misfired.
But—murder Sam? Only a few hours earlier I had been telling myself that my father was too good a man to stoop to murder. And now—
“They’re going to assassinate him.”
I whirled in my chair to see Ricardo standing just inside the control center’s doorway. His face was grim, his eyes red and sleepless.
“I thought you had gone home,” I said.
“Didn’t you hear me?” He stalked toward me, angry or frightened or both, I could not tell. “They’re going to kill him! Assassinate him!”
“No … I can’t….” My voice choked in my throat.
“It’s all set up,” Ricardo said, padding to the chair beside me like a hunting cat. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”
“I can’t kill Sam,” I said, nearly breaking into sobs.
“Sam?” Ricardo’s brows knit. “I’m not talking about Sam. It’s your father. The rebels are going to assassinate him in New York.”
“What? How do you know?”
“Because I’m one of them,” he snapped. “I’ve been with them all along. And now I’ve been assigned to kidnap you.”
“Kidnap me?” My voice sounded like a stranger’s to me: pitched high with surprise and fear. Yet inwardly I was not afraid. Shocked numb, perhaps, but not frightened.
Ricardo’s expression was unfathomable, but he seemed to be in torment. “Kidnap you,” he repeated. “Or assassinate you if kidnapping becomes impossible.”
“You wouldn’t dare!”
He made a bitter, twisted smile. “This is our moment, princess. Your father is in New York, where we have enough people to get past his security team. You are his only living relative—or the only one he admits to. General Quintana is already storming the main army barracks in the capital.”
“General Quintana? But he’s …” The words choked in my mouth as I realized that Quintana was a traitor.
“He will be our next president,” Ricardo said, then added, “he thinks.”
I could feel my eyes widening.
Still with his twisted smile, Ricardo explained, “Do you think we are fools enough to trust a traitor? Or to put a general in the president’s chair?”
“No, I suppose you are not.”
Ricardo fell silent for a long moment, then he asked, “Will you allow me to kidnap you? It will be merely for long enough to keep you from warning your father.”
“So that you can murder him.”
“I didn’t want them to do that. I thought we could overthrow him without bloodshed, but the others want to make certain that he won’t be able to stop us.”
I said nothing. I was desperately trying to think of something to do, some way to escape Ricardo and warn my father.
“After we finish Sam’s mission I’ll have to take you with me.” His expression changed. He seemed almost shy, embarrassed. “I promise you that you will not be harmed in any way. Unless you try to resist, of course.”
“Of course,” I snapped.
He pointed to my display screen. “It’s almost time for you to activate your bug.”
“You know about that?”
“Of course I know about it,” he said. “I have been watching you very closely since the first day you came here, pretending to be from Los Angeles.”
My heart sank. I had not fooled him for a moment. Yet, somehow, I was forced to admire how clever Ricardo had been, even though he was my enemy. Or rather, my father’s enemy.
“It will be a shame to kill Sam,” he said, with real regret in his voice. “Maybe his trajectory will bring him close enough to one of the space stations so that somebody can rescue him.”
“Not much chance of that,” I said.
He shrugged. Unhappily, I thought. “It must be done. We can’t allow Sam to claim the equatorial orbit.”
“So your glorious rebels want the orbit for themselves,” I taunted.
“Yes! Why not? It is the one chance that a poor nation such as Ecuador has to gain some of the wealth these corporations are making in space.”
“So you will kill Sam as well as my father.”
“No,” he said grimly. “You will kill Sam.”
At that instant Spence’s voice came through the radio receiver, “Preparing for OIB.”
Spence’s voice. Not Sam’s.
Ric looked surprised. I felt a flame of shock race through me. I whirled my chair back to the console and toggled the radio switch.
“Spence! Where are you?”
“Aboard the OTV, Juanita honey. Sam got a brilliant idea at the last minute and we switched places.”
“Where is Sam?”
“He ought to be in New York by now.”
“New York?” we both said in unison.
“Yeah. Anyway, I’m five minutes away from OIB. You copy?”
Orbital insertion burn. The final firing of the OTV’s thrusters to place the spacecraft in the geosynchronous orbit. The time when my bug would make the thrusters fire much longer than they should and fling the craft into a wild orbit that would undoubtedly kill its pilot.