Lifeline

He wished he could use the MMU again to add to his velocity, speed up the trip. Maybe he could use one of the air tanks. With nothing else to occupy him, Ramis began to run through mathematics in his head. If he doubled his velocity and finished the trip in half the time, he’d need only half as much air. And he could use compressed air from his tanks as easily as he could use propellant gas in the MMU. A couple of blasts from the nozzle of an air tank, and he could double, maybe even triple his speed. And if he did get inside the Soviet station, he could recharge his tanks. That meant he really only needed enough air for one way, not two.

He pursed his lips. He vowed not to be like the bickering senators in the Aguinaldo’s council meetings, endlessly considering options until the problem got around to resolving itself. And besides, what did he have to look forward to if he returned to Orbitech 1?

It sounded like a good enough risk to him.

Ramis took a few moments to rig one of his spare bottles, pointing the emergency bleed nozzle directly behind him over his shoulder. He wondered why none of the Orbitech theoreticians had come up with that solution.

He had to be extremely careful not to send himself into a tumble that would get him tangled in Karen’s weavewire; the first hundred meters were thick multistrands that wouldn’t cut him, but a tangle could still cause him big difficulties.

He blasted a jet of air behind him. In the padded suit, he felt the jerk of sudden acceleration, then rapidly lost all sensation of movement again. The Orbitech 1 monitors would probably lecture him for altering his plans without letting them know.

Let Director Brahms come give me a spanking, then, he thought. I can make my own decisions. As if in defiance, he let out two more bursts from the air tank.

“—Ramis, what in the living hell are you doing out there?” He clicked off Brahms’s voice, leaving his helmet in silence.

He decided he should try to get a little sleep. He could do nothing else. Newton’s first law—or was it the second?—would keep him drifting until something made him stop.

Ramis jerked his eyes open. Stars rotated around him in a slow drift. Waving his arms in panic, he tried to see what was happening. The Kibalchich was nowhere in sight.

Fumbling with the controls on his suit’s forearm, Ramis squirted the MMU to compensate for his rotation. He felt the vibration of the hissing attitude jets. The bright wheel of the Soviet colony centered itself in his visor again.

The sound of breathing filled his helmet. He kicked on his heads-up display and scanned the suit diagnostics as they were bounced from the control panel below his chin into his front view plate. His air tank supply and the propellant in the MMU looked good. The carbon dioxide count was a little high in the suit, but that made sense with his recent burst of rapid breathing.

He kicked back on his radio.

“—detected a click. We’ve got him back on line. Someone get the director.”

A minute passed but no other sounds came over radio, until, “—Ramis, Curtis Brahms here. We lost you there for a while. How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” His voice came out rough from sleepiness. He cleared his throat. “I am fine. I took a short nap—”

“We know,” said Brahms. “We were monitoring your vital signs, and we show your breathing rate greatly increased. Is anything wrong?” Brahms paused a beat. “Why did you turn your radio off, Ramis?” His voice had an edge to it.

Ramis scowled to himself. Even here, he is watching me. “I started to rotate, but I have made the appropriate correction with the MMU.”

Karen Langelier’s voice broke back into the conversation. “Diagnostics show the weavewire has twisted but is not now rotating. He’s doing just fine.”

“Good. Good job, Ramis.” Brahms’s voice still sounded tight. Ramis closed his eyes and scowled. “I’m leaving now. You will follow directions, won’t you, Ramis?”

“Of course.” Ramis cut the transmission short.

Hours passed as the universe coasted beneath him. Karen occasionally broke in to chat, and Ramis was glad of the company. Off and on he tried to signal the Kibalchich himself, but received no answer.

Now, it was less than thirty minutes away. The station’s outer sheath of rubble hid the rotating living quarters. He could make out the giant mirror suspended above the colony. Unlike the Aguinaldo, which was built as an immense rotating cylinder, or even Orbitech 1’s dumbbell of counter-rotating wheels, the Soviet colony looked like the classic doughnut-shaped space station conceived by Willy Ley more than a century before.