Falling Free

“Damn straight. And to think I almost forgot. That four-armed geek Tony is down here!”

Tony was Graf’s teacher’s pet—and that little cunt Claire’s favorite prick, and she was surely a ringleader—if she couldn’t swing this to his advantage, he was dead in the head. He spun on his heel. “Come on, Yei! Those little suckers are going to answer our calls now!”

Jump pilots might swear their ships were beautiful, but really, Leo thought as the D-620 heaved silently into view, the Superjumper looked like nothing so much as a mutant mechanical squid. A pod-like section at the front end contained the control room and crew quarters, protected from the material hazards encountered during acceleration by an oblate laminated shield and from the hazards of radiation by an invisible magnetic cone. Arcing out behind trailed four enormously long, mutually braced arms. Two housed normal space thrusters, two housed the heart of the ship’s purpose, the Necklin field generator rods that spun the ship through wormhole space during a jump. Between the four arms was a huge empty space normally occupied by cargo pods. The bizarre ship would look more sensible when that space was filled with Habitat modules, Leo decided. At that point he would even break down and call it beautiful himself.

With a jerk of his chin Leo called up a vid of his worksuit’s power and supply levels, displayed on the inside of his faceplate. He would have just time to see the first module bundle pushed into place and attached before being forced to take a break and restock his suit. Not that he hadn’t been ready for a break hours ago. He blinked sand and water from his itching, no-doubt-bloodshot eyes, wishing he could rub them, and sucked another mouthful of hot cofiFee from his drink tube. He wanted fresh cofiFee, too. The stuff he was drinking now had been out here as long as he had, and was growing just as chemically vile, opaque and greenish.

The D-620 sidled near the Habitat, matching velocities precisely, and shut down its engines. The flight lights blinked out and the parking lights, signalling that it was safe to approach, flicked on. Banks of floods suddenly illuminated the vast cargo space, as if to say, Welcome aboard.

Leo’s gaze strayed to the crew’s section, dwarfed by the arcing arms. From the corner of his eye he saw a personnel pod peel away from the Superjumper’s starboard side and ferry off toward the Habitat modules. Somebody heading home—Silver? Ti? He had to talk to Ti as soon as possible. A previously unrealized knot unwound in his stomach. Silver’s back safe. He caught himself up; everybody was back. But not safe yet. He activated his suit jets and caught up with his quaddie crew.

Thirty minutes later Leo’s heart eased as the first module bundle slid smoothly into place in the D-620’s embrace. In a minor nightmare, undispelled by checking and re-checking his figures, he’d envisioned something Not Fitting, followed by endless delays for correction. The fact that they’d heard nothing from downside yet apart from repeated pleas for communication did not reassure him much. GalacTech management on Rodeo had to respond eventually, and there wasn’t a thing he could do to counter that response until it shaped itself. Rodeo’s apparent paralysis couldn’t last much longer.

Meanwhile, it was half past breaktime. Maybe Dr. Minchenko could be persuaded to disgorge something for his throbbing head, to replace the eight hours sleep he wasn’t going to get. Leo punched up his work gang leaders’ channel on his suit comm.

“Bobbi, take over as foreman. I’m going Inside. Pramod, bring in your team as soon as that last strap is bolted down. Bobbi, be sure that second module bundle is tied in solid before you adjust and seal all the end airlocks, right?”

“Yes, Leo. I’m on it.” Bobbi waved acknowledgement from the far end of the module bundle with a lower arm.

As Leo turned away, one of the one-man mini-pushers that had helped tug the module bundle into place detached itself and rotated, preparing to thrust away and help the next bundle already being aligned beyond the Superjumper. One of its attitude jets puffed, then, even as Leo watched, emitted a sudden intense blue stream. Its rotation picked up speed.

That’s uncontrolled! Leo thought, his eyes widening. In the bare moment it took him to call up the right channel on his suit comm, the rotation became a spin. The pusher jetted off wildly, missing colliding with a worksuited quaddie by a scant meter. As Leo watched in horror it caromed off a nacelle on one of the Superjumper’s Necklin rod arms and tumbled into space beyond.

The comm channel from the pusher emitted a wordless scream. Leo bounced channels. “Vatel!” he called the quaddie manning the nearest other little pusher. “Go after her!”

The second pusher rotated and sped past him; he saw the flash of one of Vatel’s gloved hands visually acknowledging the order through the pusher’s wide-angle front viewport. Leo restrained a heart-wrenching urge to jet after them himself. Damn little he could do in a power-depleted worksuit. It was up to Vatel.

Had it been human—or quaddie—error, or a mechanical defect that had caused the accident? Well, he would be able to tell quickly enough once the pusher was retrieved. If the pusher was retrieved … He squelched that thought. Instead he jetted over to the Necklin rod nacelle.

The nacelle housing was deeply dented where the pusher had collided with it. Leo tried to reassure himself. It’s only a housing. It’s put there just to protect the guts from accidents like this, right? Hissing in dismay, he pulled himself around to shine his worksuit light into the man-high dark aperture at one end of the housing.

Oh, God.

The vortex mirror was cracked. Over three meters wide at its elliptical lip, mathematically shaped and polished to angstrom-unit precision, it was an integral control surface of the Jump system, reflecting, bleeding or amplifying the Necklin field generated by the main rods at the will of the pilot. Not just cracked—shattered in a starry burst, cold titanium deformed past its limits. Leo moaned.

A second light shone in past him. Leo glanced around to find Pramod at his shoulder.

“Is that as bad as it looks?” Pramod’s voice choked over the suit comm. “Yes,” sighed Leo.

“You can’t—do a welded repair on those, can you?” Pramod’s voice was rising. “What are we going to do?”

Fatigue and fear, the worst possible combination—Leo kept his own tired voice flat. “My suit supply-level readout says we’re going to go Inside and take a break right now. After that we’ll see.”

To Leo’s immense relief, by the time he had unsuited Vatel had retrieved the errant pusher and brought it back to dock at its Habitat module. They unloaded a frightened, bruised quaddie pilot.

“It locked on, I couldn’t get it off,” she wept. “What did I hit? Did I hit somebody? I didn’t want to dump the fuel, it was the only way I could think of to kill the jet. I’m sorry I wasted it. I couldn’t shut it off…”

She was, Leo guessed, all of fourteen years old. “How long have you been on work shift?” he demanded.

“Since we started,” she sniffed. She was shaking, all four of her hands trembling, as she hung in air sideways to him. He resisted an urge to straighten her “up.”

“Good God, child, that’s over 26 hours straight. Go take a break. Eat something and go sleep.”

She looked at him in bewilderment. “But the dorm units are all cut off and bundled with the creches. I can’t get there from here.”

“Is that why…? Look, three-fourths of the Habitat is inaccessible right now. Stake out a corner of the suit locker room or anywhere you can find.” He gazed at her tears in bafflement a moment, then added, “It’s allowed.” She clearly wanted her own familiar sleep sack, which Leo was in no position to supply.

“All by myself?” she said in a very small voice.

She’d probably never slept with less than seven other kids in the room in her life, Leo reflected. He took a deep, controlling breath—he would not start screaming at her, no matter how wonderfully it would relieve his own feelings—how had he gotten sucked into this children’s crusade, anyway? He could not at the moment recall.

“Come along.” He took her by the hand off to the locker room, found a laundry bag to hook to the wall, and helped stuff her into it along with a packaged sandwich. Her face peered from the opening, making him feel for a weird moment like a man in process of drowning a sack of kittens.

“There.” He forced a smile. “All better, huh?”