“If they could mount it on a ship, they can put it on a station,” opined Durrance. “It’s not some kind of perpetual motion, though,” he cautioned. “It sucks power like crazy, the jump pilot said. That’ll cost something.”
“Not as muchâand surely they’ll find more design efficiencies as they go alongâoh, God.”
This chance wasn’t going to favor the quaddies. This chance favored no one. Damn, damn, damn the timing! Ten years from now, even one year from now, it could have been their salvation. Here, now, might it beâa death sentence? Leo flipped his feet out of the straps and coiled to launch himself toward the module doors.
“You just leaving this tray here?” asked Durrance. “Can I have your dessert … ?”
Leo waved a hand in impatient assent as he sprang away.
*
One look at Bruce Van Atta’s glum and hostile face, as Leo swung into his Habitat office, confirmed Durrance’s story. “Have you heard this artificial gravity rumor?” Leo demanded anyway, one last lurch of hopeâlet Van Atta deny it, name it fraud… .
Van Atta glared at him in profound irritation. “How the hell did you find out about it?”
“It’s none of your business where I found out about it. Is it true?”
“Oh, yes it is my business. I want to keep this under wraps for as long as possible.”
It was true, then. Leo’s heart shrank. “Why? How long have you known about it?”
Van Atta’s hand flipped the edges of a pile of plastic flimsies, computer printouts, and communiqués, magnetized to his desk. “Three days.”
“It’s official, then.”
“Oh, quite official.” Van Atta’s mouth twisted in disgust. “I got the word from GalacTech district headquarters on Orient IV. Apmad apparently met the news on her way home, and made one of her famous field decisions.”
He rattled the flimsies again, and frowned. “There’s no way around it. Do you know what came in yesterday on the heels of this thing? Kline Station has cancelled its construction contract with GalacTech, the first one we were going to send the quaddies out on. Paid the penalty without a murmur. Kline Station’s out toward Beta Colonyâthey must have found out about this weeks agoâmonths. They’ve switched to a Betan contractor who, we may presume, is undercutting us. The Cay Project is cooked. Nothing left to do but wrap it up and get the hell out of here, the sooner the better. Damn! So now I’m associated with a loser project. I’ll come out reeking with odor of loss.”
“Wrap, wrap how? What do you mean, wrap?”
“That bitch Apmad’s most favored scenario. I’ll bet she was purring when she cut these ordersâthe quaddies gave her nervous palpitations, y’know. They’re to be sterilized and stashed downside. Any pregnancies in progress to be abortedâshit, and we just started fifteen of ‘em! What a fiasco. A year of my career down the tubes.”
“My God, Bruce, you’re not going to carry out those orders, are you?”
“Oh no? Just watch me.” Van Atta stared at him, chewing his lip. Leo could feel himself tensing, rigid with his suppressed fury. Van Atta sniffed. “What d’you want, Leo? Apmad could have ordered them exterminated. They’re getting off lightly. It could have been worse.”
“And if it had beenâif she had ordered the quaddies killedâwould you have carried it out?” inquired Leo, deceptively calm.
“She didn’t. C’mon, Leo. I’m not inhuman. Sure, I’m sorry for the little suckers. I was doing my damndest to make ‘em profitable. But there’s no way I can fight this. All I can do is make the wrap as quick and clean and painless as possible, and cut the losses as much as I can. Maybe somebody in the company hierarchy will appreciate it.”
“Painless to whom?”
“To everybody.” Van Atta grew more intent, and leaned toward Leo with a scowl. “That means I don’t need a lot of panic and wild rumors floating around, you hear? I want business as usual right up to the last minute. You and all the other instructors will go on teaching your classes just as if the quaddies really were going out on a work project, until the downside facility is ready and we can start shuttling ‘em. Maybe take the little ones firstâthe salvageable parts of the Habitat are supposed to be moved around the orbit to the transfer station, we might cut some costs by using quaddies for that last job.”
“To imprison them downsideâ”
“Oh, come off the dramatics. They’re being placed in a perfectly ordinary drilling workers’ dormitory, only abandoned six months ago when the field ran dry.” Van Atta brightened slightly in self-congratulation. “I found it myself, looking over the possible sites to place ‘em. It’ll cost next to nothing to refurbish it, compared to building new.”
Leo could just picture it. He shuddered. “And what happens in fourteen years, when and if Orient IV expropriates Rodeo?”
Van Atta ruffled his hair with both hands in exasperation. “How the hell should I know? At that point, it becomes Orient IV’s problem. There’s only so much one human being can do, Leo.”
Leo smiled slowly, in grim numbness. “I’m not sure … what one human being can do. I’ve never pushed myself to the limit. I thought I had, but I realize now I hadn’t. My self-tests were always carefully nondestructive.”
This test was a higher order of magnitude altogether. This Tester, perhaps, scorned the merely humanly possible. Leo tried to remember how long it had been since he’d prayed, or even believed. Never, he decided, like this. He’d never needed like this before… .
Van Atta frowned suspiciously at him. “You’re weird, Leo.” He straightened his spine, as if seeking a posture of command. “Just in case you missed my message, let me repeat it loud and clear. You are to mention this artificial gravity business to no one, that means especially no quaddies. Likewise, keep their downside destination secret. I’ll let Yei figure out how to make them swallow it without kicking, it’s time she earned her overinflated salary. No rumors, no panics, no goddamn workers’ riotsâand if there are, I’ll know just whose hide to nail to the wall. Got it?”
Leo’s smile was canine, concealing âeverything. “Got it.” He withdrew without turning his back, or speaking another word.
*
Dr. Yei was not usually easy to track down, it being her habit to circulate often among the quaddies, observing behavior, taking notes, making suggestions. But this time Leo found her at once, in her office, with plastic flimsies stuck to every available surface and her desk console lit like a Christmas tree. Did they have Christmas at the Cay Habitat? Somehow, Leo thought not.
“Did you hearâ”
Her glum slouch answered his question, even as his strained face and rapid breathing finished asking it.
“Yes, I’ve heard,” she said wearily, glancing up at him. “Bruce just dumped the whole Habitat’s personnel evacuation logistics on my desk to organize. He, he tells me, being an engineer, will be doing facility dismantling and equipment salvage flow charts. Just as soon as I get the bodies out of his way. Excuse me, the damned bodies.”
Leo shook his head helplessly. “Are you going to do it?”
She shrugged, her lips compressed. “How can I not do it? Quit in high dudgeon? It wouldn’t change a thing. This affair would not be rendered one iota less brutal for my walking out, and it could get a lot worse.”
“I don’t see how,” Leo ground out.
“You don’t?” She frowned. “No, I don’t suppose you do. You never appreciated what a dangerous legal edge the quaddies are balanced on here. But I did. One wrong move andâoh, damn it all. I knew Apmad needed careful handling. Everything got away from me. Although I suppose this artificial gravity thing would have killed the project whoever was in charge, we are very, very lucky that she didn’t order the quaddies exterminated. You have to understand, she had something like four or five pregnancies terminated for genetic defects, back on her home world when she was a young woman. It was the law. She eventually gave up, got divorced, took an off-
planet job with GalacTech âcame up through the ranks. She has a deep emotional vested interest in her prejudices against genetic tampering, and I knew it. And blew it … She still could order the quaddies killedâdo you understand that? Any report of trouble, unrest, magnified by her genetic paranoias, and …” She squeezed her eyes shut, massaged her forehead with her fingertips.
“She could order itâwho says you’ve got to carry it out? You said you cared about the quaddies. We’ve got to do something!” said Leo.
“What?” Yei’s hands clenched, spread wide. “What, what, what? One or two âeven if I could adopt one or two, take them away with meâsmuggle them out somehow, who knows?âwhat then? To live on a planet with me, socially isolated as cripples, freaks, mutants âand sooner or later they would grow to adulthood, and then what? And what about the others? A thousand, Leo!”
“And if Apmad did order them exterminated, what excuse would you find then for doing nothing?”
“Oh, go away,” she groaned. “You have no appreciation for the complexities of the situation, none. What do you think one person can do? I used to have a life of my own, once, before this job swallowed it. I’ve given six yearsâwhich is five and three-quarters more than you haveâI’ve given all I can. I’m burned out. When I get away from this hole, I never want to hear of quaddies again. They’re not my children. I haven’t had time to have children.”
She rubbed her eyes angrily, and sniffed, inhalingâtears?âor just bile. Leo didn’t know. Leo didn’t care.
“They’re not anybody’s children,” Leo growled. “That’s the trouble. They’re some kind of … genetic orphans or something.”
“If you’re not going to say anything useful, please go away,” she repeated. A wave of her hand encompassed the mass of flimsies. “I have work to do.”
Leo had not struck a female since he was five years old. He removed himself, shaking.
*
He drifted slowly through the corridors, back toward his own quarters, cooling. And whatever had he hoped to get from Yei anyway? Relief from responsibility? Was he to dump his conscience on her desk, Ã la Bruce, and say, “Take care of it …”
And yet, and yet, and yet … there was a solution in here somewhere. He could feel it, a palpable dim shape, like a tightness in the gut, a mounting, screaming frustration. The problem that refused to fall into the right pieces, the elusive solutionâhe’d solved engineering problems that presented themselves at first as such solid, unscalable walls. He did not know where the leaps beyond logic that ultimately topped them came from, except that it was not a conscious process, however elegantly he might diagram it post facto. He could not solve it and he could not leave it alone, but picked uselessly at it, counterproductive like picking a scab, in a rising compulsive frenzy. The wheels spun, imparting no motion.
“It’s in here,” he whispered, touching his head. “I can feel it. I just … can’t … see it …”
They had to get out of Rodeo local space somehow, that much was certain. All the quaddies. There was no future here. It was the damn peculiar legal setup. What was he to doâhijack a jumpship? But the personnel jumpships carried no more than three hundred passengers. He could, just barely, picture himself holding aâa what? what weapon? he had no gun, his pocket knife featured mainly screwdriversâright, hold a screwdriver to the pilot’s head and cry, “Jump us to Orient IV!”âwhere he would promptly be arrested and jailed for the next twenty years for piracy, leaving the quaddies to do … what? In any case, he could not possibly hijack three ships at the same time, and that was the minimum number needed.
Leo shook his head. “Chance favors,” he muttered, “chance favors, chance favors …”
Orient IV would not want the quaddies. Nobody was going to want the quaddies. What, indeed, could their future be even if freed from GalacTech? Gypsy orphans, alternately ignored, exploited, or abused, in their dependency on the narrow environment of humanity’s chain of space facilities. Talk about technology traps. He pictured Silverâhe had little doubt just what sort of exploitation would be her lot, with that elegant face and body of hers. No place for her out there …
No! Leo denied silently. The universe was so damned big. There had to be a place. A place of their own, far, far from the trappings and traps of human so-called civilization. The histories of previous utopian social experiments in isolation were not encouraging, but the quaddies were exceptional in every way.
Between one breath and the next, the vision took him. It came not as a chain of reason, more words words words, but as a blinding image, all complete in its first moment, inherent, holistic, gestalt, inspired. Every hour of his life from now on would be but the linear exploration of its fullness.
A stellar system with an M or G or K star, gentle, steady, pouring out power for the catching. Circling it, a Jovian gas giant with a methane and water-ice ring, for water, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen. Most important of all, an asteroid belt.
And some equally important absences: no Earth-like planet orbiting there also to attract competition; not on a wormhole jump route of strategic importance to any potential conquistadors. Humanity had passed over hundreds of such systems, in its obsessive quest for new Earths. The charts were glutted with them.
A quaddie culture spreading out along the belt from their initial base, a society of the quaddies, by the quaddies, for the quaddies. Burrowing into the rocks for protection against radiation, and to seal in their precious air, expanding, leapfrogging from rock to rock, to drill and build new homes. Minerals all around, more than they could ever use. Whole hydroponics farms for Silver. A new world to build. A space world to make Morita Station look like a toy.
“Why”âLeo’s eyes widened with delightâ“it’s an engineering problem after all!”
He hung limply in air, entranced; fortunately, the corridor was empty of passers-by at the moment, or they would surely have thought him mad or drugged.
The solution had been lying around him in pieces all this time, invisible until he’d changed. He grinned dementedly, possessed. He yielded himself up to it without reservation. All. All. There was no limit to what one man might do, if he gave all, and held back nothing.
Didn’t hold back, didn’t look backâfor there would be no going back. Literally, medically, that was the heart of it. Men adapted to free fall, it was the going back that crippled them.
“I am a quaddie,” Leo whispered in wonder. He regarded his hands, clenched and spread his fingers. “Just a quaddie with legs.” He wasn’t going back.
As for that initial baseâhe was floating in it right now. It merely required relocating. His cascading thought clicked over the connections too rapidly to analyze. He didn’t need to hijack a spaceship; he was in one. All it needed was a bit of power.
And the power lay ready-to-hand in Rodeo orbit, being gratuitously wasted even at this moment to shove mere bulk petrochemicals out of orbit. What might a petrochemical pod-bundle mass, compared to a chunk of the Cay Habitat? Leo didn’t know, but he knew he could find out. The numbers would be on his side, anyway, whatever their precise magnitudes.
The cargo thrusters could handle the Habitat, if it were properly reconfigured, and anything the thrusters could handle, one of the monster cargo superjumpers could manage too. It was all there, allâfor the taking.
For the taking …
Chapter Eight
It took an hour of stalking before Leo was able to catch Silver alone, in a monitor blind spot in a corridor leading from the free fall gym.
“Is there someplace we can talk in private?” he asked her. “I mean really private.”
Her wary glance around confirmed that she understood him perfectly. Still she hesitated. “Is it important?”
“Vital. Life or death for every quaddie. That important.”
“Well … wait a minute or two, then follow me.”
He trailed her slowly and casually through the Habitat, a
flash of shimmering hair and blue jersey at this or that cross-branching. Then, down one corridor, he suddenly lost her. “Silver … ?”
“Sh!” she hissed at his ear. A wall panel hinged silently inward, and one of her strong lower hands reached out to yank him in like a fish on a line.
It was dark and narrow behind the wall for only a moment, then airseal doors parted with a whisper to reveal an odd-shaped chamber perhaps three meters across. They slipped within.
“What’s this?” asked Leo, stunned.
“The Clubhouse. Anyway, we call it that. We built it in this little blind pocket. You wouldn’t notice it from Outside unless you were looking for it at just the right angle. Tony and Pramod did the outside walls. Siggy ran the ductwork in, others did the wiring … the airseals we built from spare parts.”
“Weren’t they missed?”
Her smile was not in the least innocent. “Quaddies do the computer records entry, too. The parts just sort of ceased to exist in inventory. A bunch of us worked together on itâwe just finished it about two months ago. I was sure Dr. Yei and Mr. Van Atta would find out about it, when they were questioning me”âher smile faded to a frown in memoryâ“but they never asked just the right question. Now the only vids we have left are the ones that happened to be stored in here, and Darla doesn’t have the vid system up yet.”
Leo followed her glance to a dead holovid set, obviously in process of repair, fixed to the wall. There were other comforts: lighting, handy straps, a wall cabinet that proved to be stuffed with little bags of dried snacks abstracted from Nutritionâraisins, peanuts and the like. Leo orbited the room slowly, nervously examining the workmanship. It was tight. “Was this place your idea?”
“Sort of. I couldn’t have done it alone, though. You understand, it’s strictly against our rules for me to bring you in here,” Silver added somewhat truculently. “So this better be good, Leo.”
“Silver,” said Leo, “it’s your uniquely pragmatic approach to rules that makes you the most valuable quaddie in the Habitat right now. I need youâyour daring, and all the other qualities that Dr. Yei would doubtless call antisocial. I’ve got a job to do that I can’t do alone either.” He took a deep breath. “How would you quaddies like to have your own asteroid belt?”
Falling Free (Vorkosigan Saga) Page 17
