Lifeline

Dobo bit his chubby lips, as if reluctant to share bad news. He pushed an elbow away that almost struck him in the eye. “Down there.” He took Ramis’s arm, and the two rotated in the air, grasped the handholds, and looked out into space. Dobo pointed toward the Earth.

“A war is going on. A big one. Terrible!”

From the Aguinaldo, the distant battle was weirdly beautiful. Four hundred thousand kilometers away, nuclear-tipped missiles rose from their silos to draw long streaks across the dark side of the Earth. The plumes were erratic, exploding with a fast sputter-burn through the missiles’ boost phase. Opposing defensive systems tried to lock onto the incoming weapons.

American Excaliburs rocketed into space from their scattered hiding places and deployed twigs of x-ray lasers. The beams knocked out delicate Soviet homing mechanisms and disoriented nuclear warheads. A swarm of Brilliant Pebbles searched out any remaining weapon.

Polar-orbiting Soviet space stations spat out kinetic-energy weapons to destroy American missiles. Jittering spots of detonations danced across the globe. Small stations in low Earth orbit exploded, as they became targets.

And then it stopped. From the view on the Aguinaldo, the battle seemed to last about twenty minutes.

Strategic defenses on both sides of the world had worked as planned. Even before the first surviving warheads struck Soviet and American soil, the leaders called a truce. The war was already over.

Defensive systems had destroyed all but one missile in a hundred—but that wasn’t good enough.

Over four hundred megatons worth of warheads had survived to do damage. Some burrowed deep into the soil to destroy the next round of weapons; some exploded high in the air, the electromagnetic pulse obliterating all communications.

Ramis could not even guess how many deaths he had just witnessed. He longed for the days of glasnost, when the world had been so different. To him, the war had been fought in silence—screams of dying people could not be heard through space. The fires had vanished, but that could mean either the flames had died out, or simply that the smoke had hidden them from view.

Quiet and stunned, he floated back from the viewing wall. Only a damp spot of perspiration remained on the glass where his hand had been.

Someone in the crowd finally spoke. “Booto!”

The curse echoed hollowly. No one stirred. No one tittered at the schoolboy expletive.

At last the people began to disperse. The Filipinos waited numbly in line for the cross-colony shuttles. A woman sobbed. Over everything, Ramis could hear the thrumming sounds of the Aguinaldo’s recirculating system.

Ramis remained mesmerized by the delicate picture of the Earth. He did not yet want to grasp the full implications of the war. Through the churning clouds shrouding the planet, he tried to pick out the Philippines, letting his eye roam from the tip of Africa, up the Indian Ocean, past Indonesia, and out to the horizon where the ocean disappeared into the haze. He searched, but the ten thousand islands that made up his homeland were just over the horizon.

His brother Salita still lived there, in Baguio City. He had stayed behind to run the Sari-Sari store, refusing to accompany his parents up to the colony. Salita had never gotten along well with his father. Ramis wanted to think about his brother, but he was afraid to.

Two of the largest U.S. military bases were on the Philippines, kept in operation and granted a permanent lease after the Americans had given over the Aguinaldo colony to the Filipino people. The bases must have made the entire archipelago a major target.…

Dobo placed his hand on Ramis’s shoulder, startling him. They both stared into the blackness behind the viewport wall, watching the crazy cloud patterns on Earth rise and fall with unnatural speed.

A quiet, warm voice made Ramis turn around. “We have always been able to find plenty of reasons for war, no matter how many problems we eliminate.”

The dato, Yoli Magsaysay, floated alone by the viewport. He looked thin, with mottled brown skin and flecks of gray and white peppering his bushy hair. The Aguinaldo’s president moved painfully on joints calcified from too many years of low gravity.

Magsaysay’s statement came as a fact, spoken in a musing tone that asked for no debate. The dato seldom talked in public anymore, but when he did, he bore himself in the tired, worn-out manner of a man who would not give in, even after seventy-five years.

“Father Magsaysay—” Ramis caught himself, afraid to say anything more. After what he had just witnessed, he did not want to disturb the dato’s thoughts.

Magsaysay acted as if he hadn’t even heard Ramis. He said to Dobo, “Please have Dr. Sandovaal prepare an analysis for the Council of Twenty. I will call an emergency session once he is ready.”