Miles, Mutants, and Microbes

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  "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 s
eeing 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 re-clamp 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."

  "No, really? Do you suppose—"

  "First of all," said Silver, "nobody has found any intelligent aliens yet, hostile or not, secondly, we don't have any magnetic mines," thanks be, "and thirdly, I don't think Ti wants a lot of unsightly holes blown in the side of his ship."

  "Well, no," conceded Ti.

  "We will go in through the airlock," said Silver firmly, "which was designed for just that purpose. I think the jumpship crew will be surprised enough when we put them in their escape pod and launch it, without, um, frightening them into doing who-knows-what with a lot of premature whooping. Even if Colonel Wayne in Nest of Doom led his troops into battle with his rebel yell over their com links, I don't think real marines would do that. It would be bound to interfere with their communications." She frowned Siggy into submission.

  "We'll just do it Leo's way," Silver went on, "and point the laser-solderers at them. They don't know us—they wouldn't know whether we'd fire or not." How, after all, could strangers know what she didn't know herself? "Speaking of which, how do we know which superjumper to," she groped for terminology, "cut out of the herd? It ought to be easier to get permission to come aboard if the crew's someone Ti knows well. On the other hand, it might be harder to . . ." She trailed off, disliking the thought. "Especially if they tried to fight back."

  "Jon could wrestle them into submission," offered Ti. "That's what he's here for, after all."

  Husky Jon gave him a woeful look. "I thought I was here as the pusher backup pilot. You wrestle them if you want—they're your friends. I'll hold a solderer."

  Ti cleared his throat. "Anyway, I'd like to get D771, if it's there. We aren't going to have much choice, though. There's only likely to be a couple of superjumpers working this side of the wormhole at any one time anyway. Basically, we go for whatever ship that's just jumped over from Orient IV and dumped its empty pod bundles, and hasn't started to load on new ones yet. That'll give us the quickest getaway. There's not that much to plan, we just go do it."

  "The real trouble will start," said Silver, "when they've figured out what we're really up to and start trying to take the ship back."

  A glum silence fell. For the moment, even Siggy had no suggestions.

  Leo found Van Atta in the downsiders' gym, tramping determinedly on the treadmill. The treadmill was a medical torture device like a rack in reverse. Spring-loaded straps pulled the walker toward the tread surface, against which his or her feet pushed, for an hour or more a day by prescription, an exercise designed to slow, if not stop, the lower body deconditioning and long bone demineralization of free fall dwellers.

  By the expression on Van Atta's face he was stamping out the measured treads today with considerable personal animosity. Cultivated irritation was indeed one way to muster the energy to tackle the boring but necessary task. After a moment's thoughtful study Leo decided upon a casual and oblique approach. He slipped out of his coveralls and velcroed them to the wall-strip, retaining his red T-shirt and shorts, and floated over and hooked himself into the belt and straps of the unoccupied machine next to Van Atta's.

  "Have they been lubricating these things with glue?" he puffed, grasping the hand holds and straining to start the treads moving against his feet.

  Van Atta turned his head and grinned sardonically. "What's the matter, Leo? Did Minchenko the medical mini-dictator order a little physiological revenge on you?"

  "Yeah, something like that . . ." He got it started at last, his legs flexing in an even rhythm. He had skipped too many sessions lately. "Have you talked to him since he came up?"

  "Yeah." Van Atta's legs drove against his machine, and angry whirring spurted from its gears.

  "Have you told him what's going to be happening to the Project yet?"

  "Unfortunately, I had to. I'd hoped to put him off to the last, with the rest. Minchenko is probably the most arrogant of Cay's Old Guard—he's never made it a secret that he thought he should have succeeded Cay as Head of Project, instead of bringing in an outsider, namely me. If he hadn't been slated for retirement in a year, I'd damn well have taken steps to get rid of him before this,"

  "Did he, ah—voice objections?"

  "You mean, did he yowl like a stuck pig? You bet he did. Carried on like I was personally responsible for inventing the damned artificial gravity. I don't need this shit." Van Atta's treadmill moaned in counterpoint to his words.

  "If he's been with the Project from the beginning, I guess the quaddies are practically his life's work," allowed Leo reasonably.

  "Mm." Van Atta marched. "It doesn't give him the right to go on strike in a snit, though. Even you had more sense, in the end. If he doesn't show signs of a more cooperative attitude when he's had a chance to calm down and think through how useless it is, it may be easier to extend Curry's rotation and just send Minchenko back downside."

  "Ah." Leo cleared his throat. This didn't exactly smell like the good opening he'd been hoping for. But there was so little time. "Did he talk to you about Tony?"

  "Tony!" Van Atta's treadmill buzzed like a hornet for a moment. "If I never see that little geek again in my life it will be too soon. He's been nothing but trouble, trouble and expense."

  "I was rather hoping to get some more use out of him, myself," said Leo carefully. "Even if he's not medically ready to go back on regular Outside work shifts, I've got a lot of computer console work and supervisory tasks I could delegate to him, if he was here. If we could bring him up."

  "Nonsense," snapped Van Atta. "You could much more easily tap one of your other quaddie work gang leaders—Pramod, say—or pull any quaddie in the place. I don't care who, that's what I gave you the authorization for. We're going to start moving the little freaks down in just two weeks. It makes no sense to bring up one Minchenko wouldn't let out of the infirmary till then. And so I told him." He glared at Leo. "I don't want to hear one more word about Tony."

  "Ah," said Leo. Damn. Clearly, he should have taken Minchenko aside before
he'd muddied the waters with Van Atta. Too late now. It wasn't just the exercise that was making Van Atta red in the face. Leo wondered what all Minchenko had really said—doubtless pretty choice, it would have been a pleasure to hear. Too expensive a pleasure for the quaddies, though. Leo schooled his features to what he hoped would be read through his puffing and blowing as sympathy for Van Atta.

  "How's the salvage planning going?" asked Van Atta after a while.