Falling Free (Vorkosigan Saga)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “It’s not your land rover.” Silver fiddled with the resolution. The slanting sunlight poured through the dust, turning it into a glowing red smokescreen. “I think … it’s a GalacTech Security groundcar.”

  “Oh, dear.” Madame Minchenko sat up straight. “Now what?”

  “We don’t open the hatches, anyway. No matter what.”

  In a few minutes the groundcar pulled up about fifty meters from the shuttle. An antenna rose from its roof and quivered demandingly. Silver switched on the com—it was so irritating, not to have the full use of her lower arms—and called up a menu of the com channels from the computer. The shuttle seemed to have access to an inordinate number of them. Security audio was 9999. She tuned them in.

  “—by God! Hey, you in there—answer!”

  “Yes, what do you want?” said Silver.

  There was a spluttery pause. “Why didn’t you answer?”

  “I didn’t know you were calling me,” Silver answered logically.

  “Yeah, well—this freight shuttle is the property of GalacTech.”

  “So am I. So what?”

  “Eh … ? Look, lady, this is Sergeant Fors of GalacTech Security. You have to disembark and turn this shuttle over to us.”

  A voice in the background, not quite sufficiently muffled, inquired, “Hey, Bern—d’you think we’ll get the ten percent bonus for recovering stolen property on this one?”

  “Dream on,” growled another voice. “Nobody’s gonna give us a quarter million.”

  Madame Minchenko held up a hand, and leaned forward to cut in, quavering, “Young man, this is Ivy Minchenko. My husband, Dr. Minchenko, has commandeered this craft in order to respond to an urgent medical emergency. Not only is this his right, it’s his legally compelled duty—and you are required by GalacTech regulation to assist, not hinder him.”

  A somewhat baffled growl greeted this. “I’m required to take this shuttle back. Those are my orders. Nobody told me anything about any medical emergency.”

  “Well, I’m telling you!”

  The background voice again, “… it’s just a couple of women. Come on!”

  The sergeant: “Are you going to open the hatch, lady?”

  Silver did not respond. Madame Minchenko raised an inquiring eyebrow, and Silver shook her head silently. Madame Minchenko sighed and nodded.

  The sergeant repeated his demands, his voice fraying—he stopped just short, Silver felt, of degenerating into obscenities. After a minute or two he broke off.

  After a few more minutes the doors of the groundcar winged up and the three men, now wearing breath masks, clambered out to stamp over and stare up at the hatches of the shuttle high over their heads. They returned to the groundcar, got in—it circled. Going away? Silver hoped against hope. No, it came up and parked again under the forward shuttle hatch. Two of the men rummaged in the back for tools, then climbed to the car’s roof.

  “They’ve got some kind of cutting things,” said Silver in alarm. “They must be going to try to cut their way in.”

  Banging reverberated through the shuttle.

  Madame Minchenko nodded toward the laser-solderer. “Is it time for that?” she asked fearfully.

  Silver shook her head unhappily. “No. Not again. Besides, I can’t let them damage the ship either—it’s got to stay spaceworthy or we can’t get home.”

  She had watched Ti… . She inhaled deeply and reached for the shuttle controls. The foot pedals were hopelessly awkward to grope for; she would have to get along without them. Right engine, activate; left engine, activate—a purr ran through the ship. Brakes—there, surely. She pulled the lever gently to the release’ position. Nothing happened.

  Then the shuttle lurched forward. Frightened at the abrupt motion, Silver hit the brake lever again and the ship rocked to a halt. She searched the outside monitors wildly. Where—?

  The shuttle’s starboard airfoil had swept over the roof of the security groundcar, missing it by half a meter. Silver realized with a guilty shudder that she should have checked its height before she began to move. She might have torn the wing right off, with ghastly chaining consequences to them all.

  The security guards were nowhere to be seen—no, there they were, scattered out onto the dry lake bed. One picked himself up out of the dirt and started back toward the groundcar. Now what? If she parked, or even rolled some distance and parked, they would only try again. It couldn’t take too many more attempts till they got smart and shot out the shuttle’s tires or otherwise immobilized it. A dangerously unstable stand-off.

  Silver sucked on her lower lip. Then, leaning forward awkwardly in a seat never designed for quaddies, she released the brakes partway and powered up the port engine. The shuttle shuddered a few meters farther forward, skidding and yawing. Behind them, the monitor showed the groundcar half-obscured by orange dust kicked up by the exhaust, its image wavering in the heat of it.

  She set the brakes as hard as they would go and powered up the port engine yet more. Its purr became a whine—she dared not bring it to the howling pitch Ti had used during landing, who knew what would happen then?

  The groundcar’s plastic canopy cracked in a crazed starburst and began to sag. If Leo had been right in his description of that hydrocarbon fuel they used downside here for their vehicles, in just a second more she ought to get …

  A yellow fireball engulfed the groundcar, momentarily brighter than the setting sun. Pieces flew off in all directions, arcing and bouncing fantastically in the gravity field. A glance at her monitors showed Silver the security men now all running in the other direction.

  Silver powered down the port engine, released the brakes, and let the shuttle roll forward across the hard-baked mud. Fortunately, the old lake bed was quite uniform, so she didn’t have to worry about the fine points of shuttle operation such as steering.

  One of the security men ran after them for a minute or two, waving his arms, but he fell behind quickly. She let the shuttle roll on for a couple of kilometers, braked again, and shut the engines off.

  “Well,” she sighed, “that takes care of them.”

  “It certainly does,” said Madame Minchenko faintly, adjusting the monitor magnification for a last glance behind. A column of black smoke and a dying orange glow in the distant gathering dusk marked their former parking place.

  “I hope all their breath masks were well filled,” Silver added.

  “Oh, dear,” said Madame Minchenko. “Perhaps we ought to go back and … do something. Surely they’ll have the sense to stay with their car and wait for help, though, and not try to walk off into the desert. The company safety vids always emphasize that. ‘Stay with your vehicle and wait for Search and Rescue.’ ”

  “Aren’t they supposed to be Search and Rescue?” Silver studied the tiny images in the monitor. “Not much vehicle left. But they all three seem to be staying there. Well …” She shook her head. “It’s too dangerous for us to try and pick them up. But when Ti and the doctor get back with Tony, maybe the security guards could have your land rover to go home in. If, um, nobody else gets here first.”

  “Oh,” said Madame Minchenko, “that’s true. Good idea. I feel much better.” She peered reflectively into the monitor. “Poor fellows.”

  *

  Ice.

  Leo watched from the sealed control booth overlooking the Habitat freight bay as four work-suited quaddies eased the intact vortex mirror taken from the D-620’s second Necklin rod through the hatch from Outside. The mirror was an awkward object to handle, in effect an enormous shallow titanium funnel, three meters in diameter and a centimeter thick at its broad lip, mathematically curved and thickening to about two centimeters at the central, closed dip. A lovely curve, but definitely nonstandard, a fact Leo’s refabrication ploy must needs cope with.

  The undamaged mirror was jockeyed into place, nested into a squiggle of freezer coils. The space-suited quaddies exited. From the control booth,
Leo sealed the Outside hatch and set the air to pump back into the loading bay. In his anxiety Leo literally popped out of the control booth, with a whoosh of air from the remaining pressure differential, and had to work his jaw to clear his ears.

  The only freezer coils big enough to be adequate to the task had been found by Bobbi in a moment of inspiration, once more in Nutrition. The quaddie girl running the department had moaned when she saw Leo and his work gang approach again. They had ruthlessly ripped the guts out of her biggest freezer compartment and carried them off to their work space, in the largest available docking module now installed as part of the D-620. Less than a quarter of the final Habitat reassembly was left to go, Leo estimated, despite the fact that he’d pulled a dozen of the best workers onto this project.

  In a few minutes three of his quaddies joined Leo in the freight bay. Leo checked them over. They were bundled up in extra T-shirts and shorts and long-sleeved coveralls left by the evicted downsiders, with the legs wrapped tight to their lower arms and secured by elastic bands. They had scrounged enough gloves to go around, good; Leo had been worried about frostbite with all those exposed fingers. His breath smoked in the chilled air.

  “All right, Pramod, we’re ready to roll. Bring up the water hoses.”

  Pramod unrolled several lengths of tubing and gave them to the waiting quaddies; another quaddie ran a final check of their connections to the nearest water spigot. Leo switched on the freezer coils and took a hose.

  “All right, kids, watch me and I’ll show you the trick of it. You must bleed the water slowly onto the cold surfaces, avoiding splash into the air; at the same time you must keep it going constantly enough so that your hoses don’t freeze up. If you feel your fingers going numb, take a short break in the next chamber. We don’t need any injuries out of this.”

  Leo turned to the back side of the vortex mirror, nestled among but not touching the freezer coils. The mirror had been in the shade for the last several hours Outside, and was good and cold now. He thumbed his valve and let a silvery blob of water flow onto the mirror’s surface. It spread out in swift feathers of ice. He tried some drops on the coils; they froze even faster.

  “All right, just like that. Start building up the ice mold around the mirror. Make it as solid as you can, no air pockets. Don’t forget to place the little tube to let the air evacuate from the die chamber, later.”

  “How thick should it be?” asked Pramod, following suit with his hose and watching in fascination as the ice formed.

  “At least one meter. At a minimum the mass of the ice must be equal to the mass of the metal. Since we’ve only got one shot at this, we’ll go for at least twice the mass of the metal. We aren’t going to be able to recover any of this water, unfortunately. I want to double-check our water reserves, because two meters thick would certainly be better, if we can spare it.”

  “However did you think of this?” asked Pramod in an awed tone.

  Leo snorted, as he realized Pramod had the impression that he was making up this entire engineering procedure out of his head in the heat of the moment. “I didn’t invent it. I read about it. It’s an old method they used to use for preliminary test designs, before fractal theory was perfected and computer simulations improved to today’s standards.”

  “Oh.” Pramod sounded rather disappointed.

  Leo grinned. “If you ever have to make a choice between learning and inspiration, boy, choose learning. It works more of the time.”

  I hope. Critically, Leo drew back and watched his quaddies work. Pramod had two hoses, one in each set of hands, and was rapidly alternating between them, blob after blob of water flowing onto the coils and the mirror, the ice already starting to thicken visibly. So far he hadn’t lost a drop. Leo heaved a weary sigh of relief; it seemed he could safely delegate this part of the task. He gave Pramod a high sign, and left the bay to pursue a part of the job he dared not delegate to anyone else.

  *

  Leo got lost twice, threading his way through the Habitat to Toxic Stores, and he’d designed the reconfiguration himself. It was no wonder he passed so many bewildered-looking quaddies on the way. Everyone seemed frantically busy; on the principle of misery-loves-company, Leo could only approve.

  Toxic Stores was a chill module sharing no connections whatsoever with the rest of the Habitat but a triple-chambered and always-closed airlock of thick steel. Leo entered to meet one of his own welding and joining gang quaddies still assigned to Habitat reconfiguration on his way out.

  “How’s it going, Agba?” Leo asked him.

  “Pretty good.” Agba looked tired. His tan face and skin were marked with red lines, telltales of recent and prolonged time in his work suit. “Those stupid frozen clamps were really slowing us up, but we’re just about to the end of them. How’s your thing going?”

  “All right so far. I came in to prepare the explosive. We’re that far along. Do you remember where the devil in all this”—the module’s curved walls were packed with supplies—“we keep the slurry explosive?”

  “It was over there,” Agba pointed.

  “Good—” Leo’s stomach shrank suddenly. “What do you mean, was?” He only means it’s been moved, Leo suggested hopefully to himself.

  “Well, we’ve been using it up at a pretty good clip, blowing open clamps.”

  “Blowing them open? I thought you were cutting them off.”

  “We were, but then Tabbi figured out how to pack a small charge that cracked them apart on the line of the vacuum fuse. About half the time they’re reusable. The other half they’re no more ruined than if we’d cut ‘em.” Agba looked quite proud of himself.

  “You haven’t used it all for that, surely!”

  “Well, there was a little spillage. Outside, of course,” Agba, misapprehending, added in response to Leo’s horrified look. He held out a sealed half-liter flask to Leo’s inspection. “This is the last of it. I figure it will just about finish the job.”

  “Nng!” Leo’s snatching hands closed around the bottle and clutched it to his stomach like a man smothering a grenade. “I need that! I have to have it!” I have to have ten times that much! his thought howled silently.

  “Oh,” said Agba. “Sorry.” He gave Leo a look of limpid innocence. “Does this mean we have to go back to cutting clamps?”

  “Yes,” squeaked Leo. “Go,” he added. Yes, before he exploded himself.

  Agba, with an uncertain smile, ducked back out the airlock. It sealed, leaving Leo alone a moment to hyperventilate in peace.

  Think, man, think, Leo told himself. Don’t panic. There was something, some elusive fact or factor in the back of his mind, trying to tell him this wasn’t the end, but he could not at present recall … Unfortunately, a careful mental review of his calculations, keeping track on his fingers (oh, to be a quaddie!) only confirmed his initial fear.

  The explosive fabrication of the titanium blank into the complex shape of the vortex mirror required, besides an assortment of spacers, rings, and clamps, three main parts; the ice die, the metal blank, and the explosive to marry the two. Shotgun wedding indeed. And what is the most important leg of a three-legged stool? The one that is missing, of course. And he’d thought the slurry explosive was going to be the easy part …

  Forlorn, Leo began systematically going around the Toxic Stores module, checking its contents. An extra flask of slurry explosive might have been misplaced somewhere. Alas, the quaddies were all too conscientious in their inventory control. Each bin contained only what its label proclaimed, no more, no less. Agba had even updated the label on the bin just now: Contents, Slurry Explosive Type B-2, one-half-liter flasks. Quantity, 0.

  About this time Leo stumbled, literally, over a barrel of gasoline. No, some six barrels of the damn stuff, which had somehow washed up here, now strapped firmly to the walls. God knew where the rest of the hundred tons had gone. Leo wished it all in Hell, where it might at least be of some conceivable use. He would gladly trade the whole hun
dred tons of it for four aspirins. A hundred tons of gasoline, of which—

  Leo blinked, and let out an “aaah” of exultation.

  Of which a liter or so, mixed with tetranitro methane, would make an even more powerful explosive.

  He would have to look it up, to be sure—he would have to look up the exact proportions in any case—but he was certain he had remembered aright. Learning and inspiration, that was the best combination of all. Tetranitro methane was used as an emergency oxygen source in several Habitat and pusher systems. It yielded more O2 per cc than liquid oxygen, without the temperature and pressure problems of storage, in a highly refined version of the early tetranitro methane candles which, when burned, gave off oxygen. Now—oh, God—if only the TNM hadn’t all been used by somebody, to—to blow up balloons for quaddie children or some damn thing—they had been losing air during the Habitat reconfiguration … Pausing only to put the flask back in its bin and arrange a sign on the barrels reading, in large red print, THIS IS LEO GRAF’S GASOLINE. IF ANYONE ELSE TOUCHES IT HE WILL BREAK ALL THEIR ARMS, he raced out of the Toxic Stores module and away to find the nearest working library computer terminal.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Twilight lingered on the dry lake bed, the luminous bowl of the sky darkening gradually through a deep turquoise to a star-flecked indigo. Silver found her attention constantly distracted from horizon-scan by the entrancing color changes of the planetary atmosphere seen through the ports. What subtle variety downsiders enjoyed: bands of purple, orange, lemon, green, blue, with cobalt feathers of water vapor melting in the western sky. It was with some regret that Silver switched the scan to infrared. Its computer-enhanced colors gave clarity to her vision, but seemed crude and garish after the real thing.

  At last came the sight her heart desired: a land rover, bouncing over the distant hilly pass and skidding down the last rocky slopes, then peeling out over the lake bed at maximum acceleration. Madame Minchenko hurried out of the pilot’s compartment to let down the hatch stairs as the land rover roared to a halt beside the shuttle.