Falling Free

A movement caught the corner of Leo’s eye. Pramod’s helmet followed the tilt of Leo’s.

“There they go,” Pramod remarked. Both triumph and regret mingled in his voice.

The life pod with the last remnant of downsiders aboard fled silently into the void, a flash of light winking off a port even as it shrank from sight around Rodeo’s curvature. That was it, then, for the legged ones, bar himself, Dr. Minchenko, Mama Nilla, and a slightly demented young supervisor waving a spanner they’d pried out of a duct who declared his violent love for a quaddie girl in Airsystems Maintenance and refused to be budged. If he came to his senses by the time they reached Orient IV, Leo decided, they could drop him off. Meantime it was a choice between shooting him or putting him to work. Leo had eyed the spanner, and put him to work.

Time. The seconds seemed to wriggle over Leo’s skin like bugs, beneath his suit. The remnant group of evicted downsiders must soon catch up with the bewildered first batch and start comparing notes. It wouldn’t be long after that, Leo judged, that GalacTech must start making its counter-moves. It didn’t take an engineer to see a thousand ways in which the Habitat was vulnerable. The only option left to the quaddies now was speedy flight.

Phlegmatic calm, Leo reminded himself, was the key to getting out of this alive. Remember that. He turned his attention back to the job at hand. “All right, Bobbi, Pramod, let’s do it. Get ready with the emergency shut-offs on both ends, and we’ll get this monster horsed around…”

Chapter 13

His fellow refugees gave way before him as Bruce Van Atta stormed out of the boarding tube and into the passenger arrival lounge of Rodeo Shuttleport Three. He had to pause a moment, hands braced on his knees, to overcome a wave of dizziness induced by his abrupt return to planetside gravity. Dizziness and rage.

For several hours during the ride around Rodeo orbit in the cut-off lecture module Van Atta had been horribly certain that Graf was intending to murder them all, despite the contrary evidence of the breath masks. If this was war, Graf would never make a good soldier. Even I know better than to humiliate a man like this, and then leave him alive. You’ll be sorry you double-crossed me, Graf; sorrier still you didn’t kill me when you had the chance. He restrained his rage with an effort.

Van Atta had ordered himself aboard the first available shuttle down from a Transfer Station overburdened by the surprise arrival of almost three hundred unexpected bodies. He had not slept in the twenty hours since the detached lecture module’s airlock had, with agonizing glitches and delays, finally been married to that of a Station personnel carrier. He and the other Cay Habitat employees had disembarked in disorganized batches from their cramped prison-mobile and been ferried to the Transfer Station, where yet more time had been wasted.

Information. It had been almost a full day since they had been evicted from the Cay Habitat. He must have information. He boarded a slide tube and headed for Shuttleport Three’s administration building, with its communications center. Dr. Yei pattered after him, wimping about something; he paid little attention.

He caught sight of his own wavering reflection in the plexiplastic walls of the tube as he was carried along above the shuttleport tarmac. Haggard. He straightened, and sucked in his gut. It would not do to appear before other administrators looking beaten or weak. The weak went under.

He gazed through his pale image and across the shuttleport laid out below. On the far side of the tarmac at the monorail terminal cargo pods were already starting to pile up. Ah, yes: the damned quaddies were a link in that chain, too. A weak link, a broken link, soon to be replaced.

He arrived at the communications center at the same moment as Shuttleport Three’s chief administrator, Chalopin. She was trailed by her Security captain, what’s-his-name, oh, yes, that idiot Bannerji.

“What the hell is going on here?” Chalopin snapped without preamble. “An accident? Why haven’t you requested assistance? They told us to hold all flights—we’ve got a major production run backed up halfway to the refinery.”

“Keep holding it, then. Or call the Transfer Station. Moving your cargo is not my department.”

“Oh, yes it is! Orbital cargo marshalling has been under Cay Project aegis for a year.”

“Experimentally.” He frowned, stung. “It may be my department, but it’s not my biggest worry right now. Look, lady, I got a full-scale crisis here.” He turned to one of the comm controllers. “Can you punch me through to the Cay Habitat at all?”

“They’re not answering our calls,” said the comm controller doubtfully. “Almost all of the regular telemetry has been cut off.”

“Anything. Telescopic sighting, anything.”

“I might be able to get a visual off one of the comsats,” said the controller. He turned to his panel, muttering. In a few minutes his screen coughed up a distant flat view of the Cay Habitat as seen from synchronous orbit. He stepped up the magnification.

“What are they doing?” asked Chalopin, staring.

Van Atta stared too. What insane vandalism was this? The Habitat resembled a complex three-dimensional puzzle pulled apart by an idle child. Detached modules seemed spilled carelessly, floating at all angles in space. Tiny silver figures jetted among them. The solar power panels had mysteriously shrunk to a quarter of their normal area. Was Graf embarked on some nutty scheme for fortifying the Habitat against counterattack, perhaps? Well, it would do him no good, Van Atta swore silently.

“Are they… preparing for a siege or something?” Dr. Yei asked aloud, evidently following a similar line of thought. “Surely they must realize how futile it would be…”

“Who knows what that damn fool Graf thinks?” Van Atta growled. “The man’s run mad. There are a dozen ways we can stand off at a distance and knock that installation to bits even without military supplies. Or just wait and starve them out. They’ve trapped themselves. He’s not just crazy, he’s stupid.”

“Maybe,” said Yei doubtfully, “they mean to just go on quietly living up there, in orbit. Why not?”

“The hell you say. I’m going to hook them out of there, and double-quick, too. Somehow… No bunch of miserable mutants are going to get away with sabotage on this scale. Sabotage—theft— terrorism…” “They are not mutants,” began Yei, “they are genetically-engineered childr—”

“Mr. Van Atta, sir?” piped up another comm controller. “I have an urgent memo for you listed on my all- points. Can you take it here?” Yei, cut off, spread her hands in frustration.

“Now what?” Van Atta muttered, seating himself before the comm unit.

“It’s a recorded message from the manager of the cargo marshalling station out at Jumppoint. I’ll put it on- line,” said the tech.

The vaguely familiar face of the Jump point station manager wavered into focus before Van Atta. Van Atta had met him perhaps once, early in his stint here. The small Jumppoint station was manned from the Orient IV side, and was under Orient IV’s operations division, not Rodeo’s. Its employees were regular Union downsiders and did not normally have contact with Rodeo, nor with the quaddies once destined to replace them.

The station manager looked harried. He gabbled through the preliminary ID’s, then came abruptly to the meat of his matter; “What the hell is going on with you people, anyway? A crew of mutant freaks just came out of nowhere, kidnapped a Jump pilot, shot another, and hijacked a GalacTech cargo Super-jumper. But instead of jumping out, they’ve headed back with it toward Rodeo. When we notified Rodeo Security, they indicated the mutants probably belonged to you. Are there more out there? Are they running wild or something? I want answers, dammit. I’ve got a pilot in the infirmary, a terrorized engineer, and a crew on the verge of panic.” From the look on his face the station manager was on the verge of panic himself. “Jumppoint Station out!”

“How old is this memo?” said Van Atta rather blankly.

“About,” the comm tech checked his monitor, “twelve hours, sir.”

“Does he think the hijackers are quaddies? Why wasn’t I informed—” Van Atta’s eye fell on Bannerji, standing blandly at attention by Chapolin’s elbow, “why wasn’t I informed of this at once by Security?”

“At the time the incident was first reported, you were unavailable,” said the Security captain, devoid of expression. “Since then we’ve been tracking the D-620, and it’s continued to boost straight toward Rodeo. It doesn’t answer our calls.”

“What are you doing about it?”