Falling Free

that. We can still use the original story about your wheelchair being Lost Luggage, and we’re on our way to try and get it back. They’ll believe that. Come on.” Leo backed up to her. “All aboard.” Her upper arms twined around his neck, and her lowers clamped around his waist with slightly paranoid pressure, as she cautiously entrusted her newfbund weight to him. Her breath was warm, and tickled his ear.

They ducked through the flex tube and into the Transfer Station proper. Leo headed for the elevator stack that ran up—or down—the length of the spoke to the rim where the transient rest cubicles were to be found.

Leo waited for an empty elevator. But it stopped again, and others boarded. Leo had a brief spasm of terror that Silver might try to strike up a friendly conversation—he should have told her explicitly not to talk to strangers —but she maintained a shy reserve. Transfer Station personnel gave them a few uncomfortable covert stares, but Leo gazed coldly at the wall and no one attempted to broach the silence.

Leo staggered, exiting the elevator at the outer rim where the gee forces were maximized. Little though he wished to admit it, three months of null-gee deconditioning had had its inevitable effect. But at half-gee, Silver’s weight didn’t even bring their combined total up to his Earthside norm, Leo told himself sternly. He shuffled off as rapidly as possible away from the populated foyer.

Leo knocked on the numbered cubicle door. It slid open. A male voice, “Yeah, what?” They had cornered the Jump pilot. Leo plastered an inviting smile on his face, and they entered.

Ti was propped up on the bed, dressed in dark trousers, T-shirt, and socks, idly scanning a hand-viewer. He glanced up in mild irritation at Leo, unfamiliar to him, then his eyes widened as he saw Silver. Leo dumped Silver as unceremoniously as a cat on the foot of the bed, and plopped into the cubicle’s sole chair to catch his breath. “Ti Gulik. Gotta talk to you.”

Ti had recoiled to the head of the bed, knees drawn up, hand viewer rolled aside and forgotten. “Silver! What the hell are you doing here? Who’s this guy?” He jerked a thumb at Leo.

“Tony’s welding teacher. Leo Graf,” answered Silver smearily. Experimentally, she rolled over and pushed her torso upright with her upper hands. “This feels weird.” She raised her upper hands, balancing, Leo thought, for all the world like a seal on a tripod formed by her lower arms. “Huh.” She returned her upper hands to the bed, to lend support, achieving a dog-like posture, fine hair flattened, all her grace stolen by gravity. No doubt about it, quaddies belonged in null-gee.

“We need your help, Lieutenant Gulik,” Leo began as soon as he could. “Desperately.” “Who’s we?” asked Ti suspiciously. “The quaddies.”

“Hah,” said Ti darkly. “Well, the first thing I would like to point out is that I am not Lieutenant Gulik any more. I’m plain Ti Gulik, unemployed, and quite possibly unemployable. Thanks to the quaddies. Or at any rate, one quaddie.” He frowned at Silver.

“I told them it wasn’t your fault,” said Silver. “They wouldn’t listen to me.”

“You might at least have covered for me,” said Ti petulantly. “You owed me that much.”

He might as well have hit her, from the look on her face. “Back off, Gulik,” Leo growled. “Silver was drugged and tortured to extract that confession. Seems to me any owing in here goes in the other direction.”

Ti flushed. Leo bit back his annoyance. They couldn’t afford to piss the Jump pilot off, they needed him too much. Besides, this wasn’t the conversation Leo had rehearsed. Ti should be leaping through hoops for those morning-glory eyes of Silver’s, the psychology of reward and all that—surely he must respond to a plea for her good. If the young lout didn’t appreciate her, he didn’t deserve to have her—Leo forced his thoughts back to the matter at hand.

“Have you heard about this new artificial gravity field technology yet?” Leo began again.

“Something,” admitted Ti warily.

“Well, it’s killed the Cay Project. GalacTech’s dropping out of the quaddie business.”

“Huh. Yeah, well, that makes sense.”

Leo waited a beat for the next logical question, which didn’t come. Ti wasn’t an idiot, he was therefore being deliberately dense. Leo pushed on relentlessly. “They plan to ship the quaddies downside to Rodeo, to an abandoned workers’ barracks—” he repeated the forgotten-to-death scenario he had described to Pramod a week earlier, and looked up to gauge its effect.

The pilot’s face was closed and neutral. “Well, I’m very sorry for them,” Ti did not look at Silver, “but I totally fail to see what I’m supposed to do about it. I’m leaving Rodeo in six hours, never to return—which is just fine with me, by the way. This place is a pit.”

“And Silver and the quaddies are being dropped into that pit and the lid clamped over them. And the only crime they’ve committed is to become technologically obsolete. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” cried Leo heatedly.

Ti bolted upright indignantly. “You want to talk about technological obsolescence? I’ll show you technological obsolescence. This!” His hand touched the implant plugs at midforehead and temples, the can-nula at the nape of his neck. “This! I trained for two years and waited in line for a year for the surgery to implant my Jump set. It’s a tensor bit-code version, because that’s the Jump system GalacTech uses, and they underwrote part of the cost of it. Trans-Stellar Transport and a few independents also use it. Everybody else in the universe is gearing up to Necklin color-drive. You know what my chances of being hired by TST are, after being fired by GalacTech? Zilch. Zero. Nada. If I want a Jump pilot’s job, I need this surgically removed and a new implant. Without a job, I can’t afford an implant. Without an implant, I can’t get a job. Screw you, Ti Gulik!” He sat, panting.

Leo leaned forward. “I’ll give you a pilot’s berth, Gulik,” he said clearly. “On the biggest Jump ship ever to fly.” Rapidly, before the pilot could interrupt, he detailed his vision of the Habitat converted to colony ship. “It’s all here. All we need is a pilot. A pilot who can plug into the GalacTech drive system. All we need—is you.”

Ti looked perfectly appalled. “You’re not just talking grand lunacy—you’re talking grand larceny! Do you realize what the cash value of the total configuration would be? They wouldn’t let you out of jail till the next millennium!”

“I’m not going to jail. I’m going to the stars with the quaddies.”

“Your cell will be padded.”

“This isn’t crime. This is—war, or something. Crime is turning your back and walking away.”

“Not by any legal code I know of.”

“All right then; sin.”

“Oh, brother.” Ti rolled his eyes. “Now it comes out. You’re on a mission from God, right? Let me off at the next stop, please.”

God’s not here. Somebody’s got to fill in. Leo backed off hastily from that line of thought. Padded cells, indeed. “I thought you were in love with Silver. How can you abandon her to a slow death?”

“Ti’s not in love with me,” interrupted Silver in surprise. “Whatever gave you that idea, Leo?”

Ti gave her an unsettled look. “No, of course not,” he agreed faintly. “You, ah—you always knew, right? We just had a mutually beneficial little arrangement, is all.”

“That’s right,” confirmed Silver. “I got books and vids, Ti got relief from physiological stress. Downsider males need sex to stay healthy, you know, they can’t cope with stress. It makes them disruptive. Wild genes, I suppose.”

“Where did that line of bullshit come from—?” Leo began, and broke off. “Never mind.” He could guess. He closed his eyes, pressed them with his fingertips, and groped for his lost argument. “Right. So to you, Silver is just… disposable. Like a tissue. Sneeze in her and toss her away.”

Ti looked stung. “Give it up, Graf. I’m no worse than anyone else.”

“But I’m giving you the chance to be better, don’t you see—”

“Leo,” Silver interrupted again. She was now sprawled on her stomach on the bed, her chin propped awkwardly on one upper hand. “After we get to our asteroid belt—wherever it turns out to be—what are we going to do with the Superjumper?”

“The Superjumper?”

“We’ll be detaching the Habitat and opening it out again, surely—building on to it—the Jumper unit would just be sitting there in parking orbit. Can’t we give it to Ti?”

“What?” said Leo and Ti together. “As payment. He jumps us to our destination, he gets to keep the Jump