Falling Free

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "You be careful too." She did not hug him, as she had Pramod and Claire.

  "Right."

  And don't ever believe, his mind cried after her as she vanished into the flex tube, that nobody could love you, Silver . . . But it was too late to call the words aloud. The airseal doors shut with a sigh like regret.

  Chapter Ten

  The freight shuttle docking bay was chilly, and Claire rubbed all her hands together to warm them. Only her hands seemed cold; her heart beat hot with anticipation and dread. She looked sideways at Leo, floating as seeming-stolid as ever by the airseal doors with her.

  "Thanks, for pulling me off my work shift for this," Claire said. "Are you sure you won't get into trouble, when Mr. Van Atta finds out?"

  "Who's to tell him?" said Leo. "Besides, I think Bruce is losing interest in tormenting you. Everything's so obviously futile. All the better for us. Anyway, I want to talk to Tony too, and I figure I'll have a better chance of getting his undivided attention after you've got the reunion-bit over with." He smiled reassuringly.

  "I wonder what condition he'll be in?"

  "You may be sure he's much better, or Dr. Minchenko wouldn't be subjecting him to the stresses of travel, even to keep him close under his eye."

  A thump, and the whir and grind of machinery, told Claire that the shuttle had arrived in its clamps. Her hands reached out, drew in self-consciously. The quaddie manning the control booth waved to two others in the bay, and they locked the flex tubes into position and sealed them. The personnel tube opened first. The shuttle's engineer stuck his head through to double check everything, then whipped back out of sight. Claire's heart lurched in her chest, and her dry throat constricted.

  Dr. Minchenko emerged at last and hovered a moment, one hand anchored to a grip by the hatch. A leathery-faced, vigorous man, his hair was as white as the GalacTech medical service coveralls he wore. He had been a big man, now shrunken to his frame like a withered apricot, but, like a withered apricot, still sound. Claire had the impression he only needed to be rehydrated and he'd pop back to like-new condition.

  Dr. Minchenko shoved off from the hatchway and crossed the bay toward them, landing accurately by the grips around the airseal doors. "Why, hullo, Claire," he said in a surprised voice. "And, ah—Graf," he added less cordially. "You're the one. Let me tell you, I don't appreciate being leaned on to authorize violation of sound medical protocol. You are to spend double time in the gym for the duration of your extension, you hear?"

  "Yes, Dr. Minchenko, thank you," said Leo promptly, who was not, as far as Claire knew, spending any time in the gym at all these days. "Where's Tony? Can we help you get him to the infirmary?"

  "Ah." He looked more closely at Claire. "I see. Tony's not with me, dear; he's still in hospital downside."

  Claire stifled a gasp. "Oh, no—is he worse?"

  "Not at all. I had fully intended to bring him with me. In my opinion, he needs free fall to complete his recovery. The problem is, um, administrative, not medical. And I'm on my way right now to resolve it."

  "Did Bruce order him kept downside?" asked Leo.

  "That's right." He frowned at Leo. "And I'm not pleased to have my medical responsibilities interfered with, either. He'd better have a mighty convincing explanation. Daryl Cay wouldn't have permitted a screw-up like this."

  "You, um . . . haven't heard the new orders yet, then?" said Leo carefully, with a warning glance at Claire—hush. . . .

  "What new orders? I'm on my way to see the little schmuck—that is, the man right now. Get to the bottom of this . . ." He turned to Claire, switching firmly to a kinder tone. "It's all right, we'll get it straightened out. All Tony's internal bleeding is stopped, and there's no further sign of infection. You quaddies are tough. You hold your health much better in gravity than we downsiders do in free fall. Well, we explicitly designed you not to undergo deconditioning. I could only wish the confirming experiment hadn't happened under such distressing conditions. Of course," he sighed, "youth has something to do with it. . . . Speaking of youth, how's little Andy? Sleeping better for you now?"

  Claire almost burst into tears. "I don't know," she squeaked, and swallowed hard.

  "What?"

  "They won't let me see him."

  "What?"

  Leo, studying his fingernails distantly, put in, "Andy was removed from Claire's care. On charges of child-endangering, or some such thing. Didn't Bruce tell you that either?"

  Dr. Minchenko's face was darkening to a brick-red hue. "Removed? From a breast-feeding mother—obscene!" His eyes swept back over Claire.

  "They gave me some medicine to dry me up," explained Claire.

  "Well, that's something . . ." His mollification seemed slight. "Who did?"

  "Dr. Curry."

  "He didn't report it to me."

  "You were on leave."

  " 'On leave' doesn't mean 'incommunicado.' You, Graf! Spit it out. What the hell's going on around here? Has that pocket-martinet lost his mind?"

  "You really haven't heard. Well, you'd better ask Bruce. I'm under direct orders not to discuss it."

  Minchenko gave Leo a stabbing glare. "I shall." He pushed off and entered the corridor through the airseal doors, muttering under his breath.

  Claire and Leo were left looking at each other in dismay.

  "How are we going to get Tony back now?" cried Claire. "It's less than twenty-four hours till Silver's signal!"

  "I don't know—but don't cave now! Remember Andy. He's going to need you."

  "I'm not going to cave," Claire denied. She took a steadying gulp of air. "Not ever again. What can we do?"

  "Well, I'll see what strings I can pull, to try and have Tony brought up—bullshit Bruce, tell him I have to have Tony to supervise his welding gang or something—I'm not sure. Maybe Minchenko and I together can work something, though I don't want to risk rousing Minchenko's suspicions. If I can't"—Leo inhaled carefully—"we'll have to work out something else."

  "Don't lie to me, Leo," said Claire dangerously.

  "Don't leap to conclusions. Yes, I know—you know—the possibility exists that we won't be able to retrieve him, all right, I said it, right out loud. But please note any, er, alternative scenarios depend on Ti to pilot a shuttle for us, and must wait until we reconnect with the hijack crew. At which point we will have captured a jumpship, and I will begin to believe that anything is possible." His brows bent, stressed. "And if it's possible, we'll try it. Promise."

  There was a growing coldness in her. She firmed her lips against their tremble. "You can't risk everybody for the sake of just one. That's not right."

  "Well . . . there are a thousand things that can go wrong between now and some—point of no return for Tony. It may turn out to be quite academic. I do know, dividing our energies among a thousand what-ifs instead of concentrating them for the one sure next-step is a kind of self-sabotage. It's not what we do next week, it's what we do next that counts most. What must you do next?"

  Claire swallowed and tried to pull her wits back together. "Go back to work . . . pretend like nothing's going on. Continue the secret inventory of all possible seed stocks. Uh, finish the plan of how we're going to hook up the grow-lights to keep the plants going while the Habitat is moved away from the sun. And as soon as the Habitat is ours, start the new cuttings and bring the reserve tubes online, to start building up extra food stocks against emergencies. And, uh, arrange cryo-storage of samples of every genetic variety we have on board, to restock in case of disaster—"

  "That's enough!" Leo smiled encouragement. "The next step only! And you know you can do that."

  She nodded.

  "We need you, Claire," he added. "All of us, not just Andy. Food production is one of the fundamentals of our survival. We'll need every pair, er, every set of expert hands. And you'll have to start training youngsters, passing on that how-to knowledge that the library, no matter how technically complete, can't duplicate."

  "I am not going to cave,"
Claire reiterated through her teeth, answering the undercurrent, not the surface, of his speech.

  "You scared me, that time in the airlock," he apologized, embarrassed.

  "I scared myself," she admitted.

  "You had a right to be angry. Just remember, your true target isn't in here—" he touched her collarbone, above her heart, fleetingly. "It's out there."

  So, he had recognized it was rage, rage blocked and turned inward, and not despair that had brought her to the airlock that day. In a way, it was a relief to put the right name to her emotion. In a way it was not.

  "Leo . . . that scares me too."

  He smiled quizzically. "Welcome to the human club."

  "The next step," she muttered. "Right. The next reach." She gave Leo a wave and swung into the corridor.

  * * *

  Leo turned back to the freight bay with a sigh. The next-step speech was all very well, except when people and changing conditions kept switching your route around in front of you while your foot was in the air. His gaze lingered a moment on the quaddie docking crew, who had connected the flex tube to the shuttle's large freight hatch and were unloading the cargo into the bay with their power handlers. The cargo consisted of man-high gray cylinders that Leo did not at first recognize.

  But the cargo wasn't supposed to be unrecognizable.

  The cargo was supposed to be a massive stock of spare cargo-pusher fuel rods. "For dismantling the Habitat," Leo had sung dulcetly to Van Atta, when jamming the requisition through. "So I won't have to stop and reorder. So what if we have leftovers, they can go to the transfer station with the pushers when they're relocated. Credit them to the salvage."

  Disturbed, Leo drifted over to the cargo workers. "What's this, kids?"

  "Oh, Mr. Graf, hello. Well, I'm not quite sure," said the quaddie boy in the canary-yellow T-shirt and shorts of Airsystems Maintenance, of which Docks & Locks was a subdivision. "I don't think I've ever seen it before. It's massive, anyway." He paused to unhook a report panel from his power-handler and gave it to Leo. "There's the freight manifest."

  "It was supposed to be cargo-pusher fuel rods. . . ." The cylinders were about the right size. They surely couldn't have redesigned them. Leo tapped the manifest keypad—item, a string of code numbers, quantity, astronomical.

  "They gurgle," the yellow-shirted quaddie added helpfully.

  "Gurgle?" Leo looked at the code number on the report panel more closely, glanced at the gray cylinders—they matched. Yet he recognized the code for the pusher rods—or did he? He entered 'Fuel Rods, Orbital Cargo Pusher Type II, cross ref, inventory code.' The report panel blinked and a number popped up. Yes, it was the same—no, by God! G77618PD, versus the G77681PD emblazoned on the cylinders. Quickly he tapped in 'G77681PD.' There was a long pause, not for the report panel but for Leo's brain to register.

  "Gasoline?" Leo croaked in disbelief. "Gasoline? Those idiots actually shipped a hundred tons of gasoline to a space station . . . ?"

  "What is it?" asked the quaddie.

  "Gasoline. It's a hydrocarbon fuel used downside, to power their land rovers. A freebie by-product from the petrochemical cracking. Atmospheric oxygen provides the oxidant. It's a bulky, toxic, volatile, flammable—explosive! —liquid at room temperature. For God's sake don't let any of those barrels get open."

  "Yes, sir," promised the quaddie, clearly impressed with Leo's list of hazards.

  The legged supervisor of the orbital pusher crews arrived at that moment in the bay, trailed by a gang of quaddies from his department.

  "Oh, hello, Graf. Look, I think it was a mistake letting you talk me into ordering this load—we're going to have a storage problem—"

  "Did you order this?" Leo demanded.

  "What?" the supervisor blinked, then took in the scene before him. "What the—where are my fuel rods? They told me they were here."

  "I mean did you, personally, place the order. With your own little fingers."

  "Yes. You asked me to, remember?"

  "Well"—Leo took a breath, and handed him the report panel—"you made a typo."

  The super glanced at the report panel and paled. "Oh, God."

  "And they did it," Leo gibbered, running his hands through what was left of his hair. "They filled it—I can't believe they filled it. Loaded all this stuff onto the shuttle without once questioning it, sent a hundred tons of gasoline to a space station without once noticing that it was utterly absurd. . . ."

  "I can believe it," sighed the super. "Oh, God. Oh, well. We'll just have to send it back, and reorder. It'll probably take about a week. It's not like our fuel rod stocks are really low, in spite of the rate you've been using them up for that 'special project' you're so hushy-hush about."

  I don't have a week, thought Leo frantically. I have twenty-four hours, maybe.

  "I don't have a week," Leo found himself raging. "I want them now. Put it on a rush order." He lowered his voice, realizing he was becoming conspicuous.

  The super was offended enough to overcome his guilt. "There's no need to throw a fit, Graf. It was my mistake and I'll probably have to pay for it, but it's plain stupid to charge my department for a rush shuttle trip on top of this one when we can perfectly well wait. This is going to be bad enough as it is." He waved at the gasoline. "Hey, kids," he added, "stop unloading! This load's a mistake, it's all gotta go back downside."

  The shuttle pilot was just exiting the personnel hatch in time to hear this. "What?" He floated over to them, and Leo gave him a brief explanation in very short words of the error.

  "Well, you can't send it back this trip," said the shuttle pilot firmly. "I'm not fueled up to take a full load. It'll have to wait." He shoved off to take his mandatory safety break in the cafeteria.

  The quaddie cargo handlers looked quite reproachful, as the direction of their work was reversed for the second time. But they limited their implied criticism to a plaintive, "Are you sure now, sir?"

  "Yes," sighed Leo. "But find some place to store this stuff in a detached module. You can't leave it in here."

  "Yes, sir."

  Leo turned again to the pusher crew supervisor. "I've still got to have those fuel rods."

  "Well, you'll just have to wait. I won't do it. Van Atta's going to have enough of my blood for this already."

  "You can charge it to my special project. I'll sign for it."

  The super raised his eyebrows, slightly consoled. "Well . . . I'll try, all right, I'll try. But what about your blood?"

  Already sold, thought Leo. "That's my look-out, isn't it?"

  The super shrugged. "I guess." He exited, muttering. One of the pusher crew quaddies, trailing him, gave Leo a significant look; Leo returned a severe shake of his head, emphasized by a throat-cutting gesture with his index finger, indicating, Silence!

  He turned and nearly rammed Pramod, waiting patiently at his shoulder. "Don't sneak up on me like that!" he yelped, then got better control of his fraying nerves. "Sorry, you startled me. What is it?"

  "We've run into a problem, Leo."

  "But of course. Who ever tracks me down to impart good news? Never mind. What is it?"

  "Clamps."

  "Clamps?"

  "There're a lot of clamped connections Outside. We were going over the flow chart for the Habitat disassembly, for, um, tomorrow, you know—"

  "I know, don't say it."

  "We thought a little practice might speed things up."

  "Yes, good . . ."

  "Hardly any of the clamps will unclamp. Even with power tools."

  "Uh . . ." Leo paused, taken aback, then realized what the problem was. "Metal clamps?"

  "Mostly."

  "Worse on the sun side?"

  "Much worse. We couldn't get any of those to come at all. Some of them are visibly fused. Some idiot must have welded them."

  "Welded, yes. But not by some idiot. By the sun."

  "Leo, it doesn't get that hot—"

  "Not directly. What you're seeing is spontaneous
vacuum diffusion welding. Metal molecules are evaporating off the surfaces of the pieces in the vacuum. Slowly, to be sure, but it's a measurable phenomenon. On the clamped areas they migrate into their neighboring surfaces and eventually achieve quite a nice bond. A little faster for the hot pieces on the sun side, a little slower for the cold pieces in the shade—but I'll bet some of those clamps have been in place for twenty years."

  "Oh. But what do we do about them?"

  "They'll have to be cut."

  Pramod's lips pursed in worry. "That will slow things down."

  "Yeah. And we'll have to have a way set up to reclamp each connection in the new configuration, too . . . gonna need more clamps, or something that can be made to work as clamps. . . . Go round up all your off-shift work gang. We're going to have to have a little emergency scrounging session."

  Leo stopped wondering if he was going to survive the Great Takeover, and started wondering if he was going to survive until the Great Takeover. He prayed devoutly that Silver was having an easier time of it than himself.

  * * *

  Silver hoped earnestly that Leo was having an easier time of it than herself.

  She hitched herself around in the acceleration couch, increasingly uncomfortable after their first eight hours of flight, and rested her chin on the padding to regard her crew, crammed in the pusher's cabin. The other quaddies were drooped and draped as she was; only Ti seemed comfortable, feet propped up and leaning back in his seat in the steady gee-forces.

  "I saw this great holovid"—Siggy waved some hands enthusiastically—"that had a boarding battle. The marines used magnetic mines to blow holes like bubble cheese in the side of the mothership and just poured through." He added a weird ululating cry for sound effects. "The aliens were running every which way, stuff flying everywhere as the air blew out—"

  "I saw that one," said Ti. "Nest of Doom, right?"

  "You got it for us," reminded Silver.

  "Did you know it had a sequel?" said Ti aside to Siggy. "The Nest's Revenge."