Lifeline

Linda maintained her silence, puzzled, looking uneasy. He heard footsteps on the thin carpet, then two Watchers in spring-green jumpsuits came to the doorway, holding Daniel Aiken up between them.

The two watchers—an older man and a sour-looking woman—held Aiken’s hands behind his back, but he seemed to be in no condition to struggle.

He had been beaten badly. His upper lip was smashed into an angry, blood-coated wound that had been cleaned and tended but not bandaged. His hair was rumpled, his eyes bloodshot, his skin scuffed with new bruises that would soon turn purple. The way he acted made him look like a lost animal, utterly helpless.

Linda looked at Aiken, and her false repentant expression dropped away like a sheet. She stared, then whirled to gape in horror at Brahms. He waved away her accusation before she could say anything.

“Two of the watchers … misinterpreted my instructions. They have been reprimanded, don’t worry. You’ll be getting punishment enough, both of you.”

Now Linda began to look very afraid. Brahms watched it creep up on her: Her skin became pale and grayish, and a sheen of sweat appeared on her forehead. Brahms turned away from her. He began to talk in a low voice as he stared at a picture on the wall. It was a reprint of an old Russian masterpiece by Ilia Repin, a dramatic portrait of Ivan the Terrible in the moment of shock after he had accidentally killed his own son, his only hope for the future of his dynasty. Now the tsar’s problems seemed trivial and melodramatic.

Brahms’s words were low and ominous, but they built in intensity.

“I trusted you, Linda. And I don’t trust people lightly. You were supposed to be concerned for the safety and the future of this colony. You were not to use your position for your own ends. You have let me down. Do you realize that? Do you even know what you’ve done?”

Brahms glared at her, then at Aiken, with undisguised disgust. “If I can’t trust my own assessors, we’re all doomed. You know the magnitude of trouble we’re in, and you still think you can do whatever you want, that your actions have no consequences.

“You and this … worm of a scientist who tried to bankrupt our hope—you are lower than any of those who went out the airlock first. I can’t have it.”

He shook his head stiffly, like a ventriloquist’s dummy that could rotate only a little from side to side. He clutched his fists, then released them. His whole body stiffened. He felt his muscles locking.

“I can’t have it!”

Then it all ran out of him. He let his voice drop to a dead, uninflected tone. “You, Linda Arnando, and you, Daniel Aiken, will be RIFed. Tomorrow.

“It will be broadcast live. Everyone on this station will be given the full story. Everyone will know what you have done, how you betrayed us. All of us. It’s your fault entirely.”

Linda blinked her eyes, absolutely astounded.

“But you … can’t. I’m one of your division leaders, for Christ’s sake! How can you—”

But Brahms was not even listening. Aiken seemed to collapse in on himself. He made no sound, did not beg for his life or plead for mercy. He just shook with silent sobs. His puffed eyes were shut tight. Tears streamed down his bruised cheeks.

Brahms pushed the intercom button again. “Come and get them.”

The two watchers came back in and escorted Linda Arnando and Daniel Aiken out.

“See that they stay in their cabins. Seal the doors.”

One of the watchers lifted an eyebrow. It was the woman, Nancy Winkowski. “There’s nowhere for them to go, Mr. Brahms.”

“Seal it anyway.” There’s no place for any of us to go, he thought.

Chapter 27

ORBITECH 1—Day 36

To Ramis, Karen Langelier’s lab seemed like a toy store, filled with remnants of American industrial technology that in light of their disaster were alien or even nonsensical. The lipstick fabrication section seemed especially ludicrous.

Karen showed him how she extruded her weavewire, making it zip up the laser guide beam into a fiber so fine that it couldn’t be seen—and though two rockets couldn’t snap it in half, it could cut through titanium. Even to touch a single strand of the fiber would have sliced his fingertips off.

And when Karen pointed out that some of the garments on Orbitech 1 were woven from the monomolecular fiber, he was even more astonished. He listened to her explanation of how the manufacturing prototypes spun together hundreds of kilometers of thread—thereby making it safe—into a single piece of indestructible clothing that could be worn like any other shirt.

Over the last two days, he and Karen had spent hours together. They found in their loneliness a friendship that transcended the quarter-century difference in their ages.

Now he sat and watched. She wanted to talk, but he knew she couldn’t afford to give up more time from her research, not with the assessors watching over them all. Karen’s lower lip was drawn back, held between white teeth in an expression of concentration. Her red hair was tousled.