Lifeline

Sandovaal attempted to plug a fiberoptic cable into the monitor but was quickly frustrated by the maze of cable ports in the back. “Where does this go?”

Dobo didn’t seem to notice Sandovaal’s harshness. “The second port. But my wife, Dr. Sandovaal—she is waiting for me outside. We were going to mass.”

“Your wife is an adult, old enough to take care of herself. You did come to the Aguinaldo to assist me, correct?” Sandovaal turned back to the screen.

Dobo looked lost in thought for a moment and then shrugged. He pulled up a chair next to Sandovaal.…

After closing his eyes and listening to his breathing in the closed cyst, Sandovaal gave up trying to sleep and sat up.

Unlike Ramis, who had continued to accelerate until the end, Sandovaal wanted his armada of sail-creatures to arrive at Orbitech 1 intact. So they had tacked a carefully calculated course, allowing their kinetic energy to evolve into potential (or whatever the nuts-and-bolts people called it), and steered for a spot in the middle of the L-5 gravity well—between Orbitech 1 and the Soviet Kibalchich. He dismissed the insignificant danger of running into the weavewire strung between the two colonies, but nevertheless they had plotted the sail-creatures’ course to bring them in above the ecliptic plane.

Satisfied that the Aguinaldo transmissions had indeed ceased, Sandovaal turned his attention to inspecting the sail-creatures. He flicked on the external flatscreen camera. From his vantage point in the center of the array, everything appeared to be all right. He swiveled the exterior camera around and tried to pick out the individual cores dotted among the huge wings. Only his nearest neighbors were visible, since the tiny camera could not resolve features more than twenty kilometers away.

Slapping at the controls, Sandovaal activated the direct fiberoptic line to Dobo’s sail-creature. The vision segment on the flatscreen showed only a gray-white storm of static. A deep, rumbling sound buzzed out of the speakers. Sandovaal jerked upward and pressed at the volume control. Listening for a moment, he raised his white eyebrows.

“Dobo!” No answer. “Dobo, wake up, you imbecile!”

Nothing.

“Dobo—you are to keep on the schedule. Now, wake up immediately!”

Sandovaal grew angrier with each passing second until he felt as though he might explode. He was glad the doctors on the Aguinaldo could not monitor his blood pressure. Dobo must have turned off his receiver, as well as the visual portion of their communication link; only the audio came through. Inexcusable! “Probably left the transmission line on just to intimidate me.”

Sandovaal had kept in constant contact, making sure Dobo didn’t sleep too much, that he kept his mind challenged by listening to Sandovaal’s theories on bioengineering. Someday Dobo might have to carry on the work.

But it seemed that as soon as they had pushed off from the Aguinaldo, Dobo had become difficult—adhering to his own schedule, switching Sandovaal off in the middle of a conversation, only to apologize later for “accidentally” bumping the television controls. You would think the man had a mind of his own.

Sandovaal snorted. A mind of his own! A preposterous thought for anybody who knew Dobo Daeng.

He stopped abruptly, wondering if Dobo had actually been trying to intimidate him. A moment passed before Sandovaal snorted again, wondering if the cramped solitude was beginning to give him delusions. No, he thought, not Dobo.

Twenty kilometers away, in the core of his own sail-creature, Dobo stopped making his snoring sounds into the microphone and pushed away from the transmitter. With a grin on his face, he watched the flatscreen image as Sandovaal switched off the monitor. As before, Sandovaal had forgotten to turn off his own transmitter.

Dobo watched in quiet amusement as Sandovaal threw a fit but found no target for his outrage. Finally, after all these years of being an unappreciated assistant …

If nothing else, Dobo was having the time of his life.

Chapter 52

KIBALCHICH—Day 72

The shock did not wear off, as Anna Tripolk had thought it would. Instead, the secret left behind by Commander Rurik unlocked many doors inside her, unleashing outrage, betrayal, anger, despair. She had never felt like this before.

Instead of healing, for more than a week Anna’s emotions had festered, twisting, depriving her of sleep. Without realizing it, she had somehow descended into a personal hell.

Anna remembered going into the command center ten days before, or was it eleven? She had lost track of time. Her attention had been elsewhere. After hearing Rurik’s personal log, his excuses, the rationalization of his suicide and the murders he had committed, she had gone up to the weightless command center alone. She had never felt so alone.