Falling Free

“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 comm 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 back-up 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 fell 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.

“Almost complete.”

“Oh, really?” Van Atta brightened. “Well, that’s something, at least.”

“You’ll be amazed at how totally the Habitat can be recycled,” Leo promised with perfect truth. “So will the company brass.”

“And fast?”

“Just as soon as we get the go-ahead. I’ve got it laid out like a war game.” He closed his teeth on further double entendres. “You still planning the Grand Announcement to the rest of the staff at 1300 tomorrow?” Leo inquired casually. “In the main lecture module? I really want to be in on that, I have a few visual aids to present when you’re done.”

“Naw,” said Van Atta.

“What?” Leo gulped. He missed a step, and the springs slammed him painfully down on one knee on the treadmill, padded against just such clumsiness. He struggled back to his feet.

“Did you hurt yourself?” said Van Atta. “You look funny.…”

“I’ll be all right in a minute,” He stood, leg muscles straining against the elastic pull, regaining his breath and equilibrium in the face of pain and panic. “I thought—that was how you were going to drop the shoe. Get everybody together, just go over the facts once.”

“After Minchenko, I’m tired of arguing about it,” said Van Atta. “I’ve told Yei to do it. She can call them into her office in small groups, and hand out the individual and department evacuation schedules at the same time. Much more efficient.”

And so Leo and Silver’s beautiful scheme for peacefully detaching the downsiders, hammered out through four secret planning sessions, was blown away on a breath. Wasted was the flattery, the oblique suggestion, that had gone into convincing Van Atta that it was his idea to gather, unusually, the entire Habitat downsider staff at once and make his announcement in a speech persuading them all they were being commended, not condemned…

The shaped charges to cut the lecture module away from the Habitat at the touch of a button were all in