Falling Free

ship. Then he can go off and be a pilot-owner, set up his own transport business, whatever he likes.” “In a stolen ship?” yipped Ti. “If we’re far enough away that GalacTech can’t catch up with us, we’re far enough away that GalacTech can’t catch up with you,” said Silver logically. “Then you’ll have a ship that fits your neural implant, and nobody will be able to fire you again, because you’ll be working for yourself.”

Leo bit his tongue. He’d brought Silver along expressly to help persuade Ti—so what if it wasn’t the blandishment he’d envisioned? From the blitzed look on the pilot’s face, they’d gotten through to his launch-button at last. Leo lidded his eyes and smiled encouragement at her.

“Besides,” she went on, her eyelashes fluttering in return, “if we do succeed in Jumping out of here, Habitat and all, Mr. Van Atta’s going to be left looking an awful fool.” She let her head flop back on the bed and smiled sideways at Ti.

“Oh,” said Ti in a tone of enlightenment. “Ah…”

“Are your bags all packed?” asked Leo helpfully.

“Over there,” Ti nodded to a pile of luggage in the corner. “But… but… dammit, if this thing crashes, they’ll crucify me!”

“Ah,” said Leo. “Here, see…” he opened his red coveralls at the neck and drew out the laser-solderer concealed in an inner pocket. “I jimmied the safety on this thing; it’ll fire an extremely intense beam for quite a distance now, until the atmosphere dissipates it—farther than the distance across this room, certainly.” He waved it negligently; Ti ducked, eyes widening. “If we end up under arrest, you can truthfully testify that you were kidnapped at gunpoint by a crazed engineer and his mad mutant assistant and made to cooperate under duress. You may be a hero one way—or another.”

The mad mutant assistant smiled blindingly at Ti, her eyes like stars.

“You, ah—wouldn’t really fire that thing, would you?” choked Ti cautiously.

“Of course not,” Leo said jovially, baring his teeth. He put the solderer away.

“Ah.” Ti’s mouth twitched briefly in response. But his eye returned often thereafter to the lump in Leo’s coveralls.

When they made it back to the shuttle hatch where the pusher was docked, Zara was gone.

“Oh, God,” moaned Leo. Had she wandered off? Gotten lost? Been forcibly removed? A frantic inventory found no message left on the comm, no note pinned anywhere.

“Pilot, she’s a pilot,” Leo reasoned aloud. “Is there anything she could have needed to do? We’ve plenty of fuel—communicating with traffic control is done right from here…” He realized, with a cold chill, that he hadn’t actually forbidden her to leave the pusher. It had been so self-evident that she was to stay out of sight, and on guard. Self-evident to himself, Leo realized. Who could say what was self-evident to a quaddie?

“I could fly this thing, if necessary,” said Ti in a most unpressing tone, looking over the control deck. “It’s all manual.”

“That’s not the point,” said Leo. “We can’t leave without her. The quaddies aren’t supposed to be over here at all. If she gets picked up by the Station authorities and they start asking questions—always assuming she hasn’t been picked up by something worse…”

“What worse?”

“I don’t know what worse, that’s the trouble.”

Silver meanwhile had rolled off the acceleration couch to the deck strip. After a moment of thoughtful experimentation, she achieved a four-handed forward shuffle, and marched off past Leo’s knees, pant legs trailing.

“Where are you going?”

“After Zara.”

“Silver, stay with the ship. We don’t need two of you lost, for God’s sake,” Leo ordered sternly. “Ti and I can move much faster, we’ll find her.”

“I don’t think so,” murmured Silver distantly. She reached the flex tube, stared up and down the corridor which curved away to right and left, ringing the spoke. “You see, I don’t think she’s gone far.”

“If she got on the elevator, she could be practically anywhere on the Station by now,” said Ti.

Silver reared up on her tripoded lower arms, raised her uppers over her head, and narrowed her eyes for a look around the elevator foyer to her left. “The controls would be hard for a quaddie to reach. Besides, she’d know she was more likely to run into downsiders there. I think she went this way.” She raised her chin and shuffled determinedly off to her right on all fours. After a moment she picked up speed by changing her gait to a series of gazelle-like bounds in the low-gee of the spoke. Leo and Ti, of necessity, bounded after her. Leo felt absurdly like a man chasing a runaway pet. It was an optical illusion of the quadrimanual locomotion—quaddies even looked more human in free fall.

A strange rumbling noise approached around the curve of the corridor. Silver hooted, and skidded to one side against the outer wall.

“Oh, sorry!” cried Zara, whizzing past torso-down and chin up on a low roller-pallet, all four hands going like paddle wheels to propel her along the deck. Braking proved more difficult than acceleration, and Zara fetched up beside Silver with a crash.

Leo, horrified, bounded over to them, but Zara was already disentangling herself and sitting up cheerfully. Even the roller pallet was undamaged.

“Look Silver,” Zara said, flipping the pallet over, “wheels! I wonder how they’re beating the friction, inside those casings? Feel, they’re not hot at all.”

“Zara,” cried Leo, “why did you leave the ship?”

“I wanted to see what a downsider toilet chamber looked like,” said Zara, “but there wasn’t one on this level. All I found was a closet full of cleaning supplies, and this,” she patted the roller pallet. “Can I take the wheels apart and see what’s inside?” “No!” roared Leo.

She looked quite put-out. “But I want to know!” “Bring it along,” Silver suggested, “and take it apart later.” Her eyes flicked up and down the corridor; Leo was slightly consoled that at least one quaddie shared his sense of urgency.

“Yes, later,” Leo agreed, for the sake of expediency. “Let’s go now.” He tucked the roller pallet firmly under his arm, to thwart further experimentation. The quaddies, he reflected, didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of private property. Probably came from a lifetime spent in a communal space habitat, with its tight ecology. Planets were communal in the same way, really, except that their enormous size put so much slack in their systems, it was disguised.

Habits of thought, indeed. Here he was worried over the theft of a roller pallet, while planning the greatest space heist in human history. Ti almost bolted when he found out what the rest of the assignment they had planned for him was to be. Leo, prudently, didn’t fill in these details until the pusher was safely launched from the Transfer Station and halfway back to the Habitat.

“You want me to hijack the Superjumper!” yelped Ti.

“No, no,” Leo soothed him. “You’re only going along as an advisor. The quaddies will take the ship.”

“But my ass will depend on whether or not they can —”

“Then I suggest you advise well.”

“Ye gods.”

“The trouble with you, Ti,” lectured Leo kindly, “is that you lack teaching experience. If you had, you’d have faith that the most unlikely people can learn the most amazing things. After all, you weren’t born knowing how to pilot a Jump—yet lives depended on your doing it right the first time, and every time thereafter. Now you’ll know how your instructors felt, that’s all.”

“How do instructors feel?”

Leo lowered his voice and grinned. “Terrified. Absolutely terrified.”

A second pusher, packed with fuel and supplies for its long-range excursion, was waiting in the slot next to theirs as they docked at the Habitat. Leo resisted a strong urge to take Ti aside and fill his ear with advice and suggestions for his mission. Alas, their experience in criminal theft was all too comparable—zero equalled zero no matter how unequal the years each was multiplied by.

They floated through the hatch into the docking module to find several anxious quaddies waiting for them.