Falling Free (Vorkosigan Saga)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  “The littlest ones are by Door C,” said her dorm mate. “I’ve been expecting you.” After a quick visual check to be sure her flight plan didn’t violently intersect anyone else’s taking a similar shortcut, her dorm mate helped her launch herself in that direction by the most direct route, across the diameter of the big chamber.

  The buxom figure in pink coveralls Claire sought was practically buried in a swarm of excited, frightened, chattering, crying five-year-olds. Claire felt a twinge of real guilt, that it had been judged too dangerous to their secrecy to warn the younger quaddies in advance of the great changes about to sweep over them. The little ones didn’t get a vote, either, she thought.

  Andy was tethered to Mama Nilla, weeping miserably. Mama Nilla was desperately trying to pacify him with a squeeze bottle of formula with one hand while holding a reddening gauze pad to the forehead of a crying five-year-old with the other. Two or three more clung for comfort to her legs as she tried to verbally direct the efforts of a sixth to help a seventh who had torn open a package of protein chips too wide and accidentally allowed the contents to spill into the air. Through it all her calm familiar drawl was only slightly more compressed than usual, until she saw Claire approaching. “Oh, dear,” she said in a weak voice.

  “Andy!” Claire cried.

  His head swiveled toward her, and he launched himself away from Mama Nilla with frantic swimming motions, only to fetch up at the end of his tether and rebound back to the crèche mother’s side. At this point he began screaming in true earnest. As if by resonance, the bleeding boy started crying harder too.

  Claire braked by the wall and closed in on them.

  “Claire, honey, I’m sorry,” said Mama Nilla, twitching her hips around to eclipse Andy, “but I can’t let you have him. Mr. Van Atta said he’d fire me on the spot, twenty years or no twenty years—and God knows who they’d get then—there’s so few I can really trust to have their heads screwed on right—” Andy interrupted her by launching himself again; he batted the proffered bottle violently out of her hand and it spun away, a few drops of formula adding tangentially to the general environmental degradation. Claire’s hands reached for him.

  “—I can’t, I really can’t—oh, hell, take him!” It was the first time Claire had ever heard Mama Nilla swear. She unhooked the tether, and her freed left side was instantly set upon by the waiting five-year-olds.

  Andy’s screams faded at once to a muffled weeping, as his little hands clamped her fiercely. Claire folded him to her with all four arms no less fiercely. He rooted in her shirt—uselessly, she realized. Just holding him might be enough for her, but the reverse was not necessarily true. She nuzzled in his scant hair, delighting in the clean baby smell of him, tender sculptured ears, translucent skin, fine eyelashes, every part of his wriggling body. She wiped his nose happily with the edge of her blue shirt.

  “It’s Claire,” she overheard one of the five-year-olds explaining knowledgeably to another. “She’s a real mommy.” She glanced up to catch them gravely inspecting her; they giggled. She grinned back. A seven-year-old from an adjoining group had retrieved the bottle, and hung about watching Andy with interest.

  The cut on the little quaddie’s forehead having clotted enough, Mama Nilla was at last able to carry on a conversation. “You don’t happen to know where Mr. Van Atta is, do you?” she asked Claire in worry.

  “Gone,” said Claire joyously, “gone forever! We’re taking over.”

  Mama Nilla blinked. “Claire, they won’t let you …”

  “We have help.” She nodded across the gym, where Leo in his red coveralls caught her eye—he must have just arrived. With him was another legged figure in white coveralls. What was Dr. Minchenko still doing here? A sudden fear twinged through her. Had they failed to clear the Habitat of downsiders after all? For the first time it occurred to her to question Mama Nilla’s presence. “Why didn’t you go to your safe zone?” Claire asked her.

  “Don’t be silly, dear. Oh, Dr. Minchenko!” Mama Nilla waved to him. “Over here!”

  The two downsider men, lacking the free-flying confidence of the quaddies, crossed the chamber via a rope net hung across a farther arc, and made their way toward Mama Nilla’s group.

  “I’ve got one here who needs some biotic glue,” Mama Nilla, hugging the cut quaddie, said to Dr. Minchenko as soon as he drew near enough to hear. “What’s going on? Is it safe to take them back to the crèche modules yet?”

  “It’s safe,” replied Leo, “but you’re going to have to come with me, Ms. Villanova.”

  “I don’t leave my kids till my relief arrives,” said Mama Nilla tartly, “and nine-tenths of the department seems to have evaporated, including my department head.”

  Leo frowned. “Have you had your briefing from Dr. Yei yet?”

  “No …”

  “They were saving the best for last,” said Dr. Minchenko grimly, “for obvious reasons.” He turned to the crèche mother. “GalacTech has just terminated the Cay Project, Liz. Without even consulting me!” Bluntly, he outlined the termination scenario for her. “I was writing up protests, but Graf here beat me to it. Rather more effectively, I suspect. The inmates are taking over the asylum. He thinks he can convert the Habitat into a colony ship. I think … I choose to believe he can.”

  “You mean you’re responsible for this mess?” Mama Nilla glared at Leo, and looked around, clearly stunned. “I thought Claire was babbling …” The other two downsider crèche mothers had come over during the explanation and hung in the air looking equally nonplussed. “GalacTech’s not giving you the Habitat … are they?” Mama Nilla asked Leo faintly.

  “No, Ms. Villanova,” said Leo patiently. “We are stealing it. Now, I wouldn’t ask you to get involved in anything illegal, so if you’ll just follow me to the life pod—”

  Mama Nilla stared around the gym. A few groups of youngsters were already being herded out by some older quaddies. “But these kids can’t handle all these kids!”

  “They’re going to have to,” said Leo.

  “No, no—I don’t think you have the foggiest idea how labor-intensive this department is!”

  “He doesn’t,” confirmed Dr. Minchenko, rubbing his lips thoughtfully with a forefinger.

  “There’s no choice,” said Leo through his teeth. “Now kids, let go of Ms. Villanova,” he addressed the quaddies clutching her. “She has to leave.”

  “No!” said the one wrapped around her left knee. “She’s gotta read our stories after lunch, she promised.” The one with the cut began crying again. Another one tugged her left sleeve and whispered loudly, “Mama Nilla! I gotta go to the toilet!”

  Leo ran his hands through his hair, unclenched them with a visible effort. “I need to be suited up and Outside right now, lady, I don’t have time to argue. All of you”—his glare took in the other two crèche mothers—“move it!”

  Mama Nilla’s eyes glinted. She held out her left arm with the quaddie attached, blue eyes peering in fright at Leo around Mama Nilla’s sturdy bicep. “Are you going to take this little girl to the bathroom, then?”

  The quaddie girl and Leo stared at each other in equal horror. “Certainly not,” the engineer choked. He looked around “Another quaddie will. Claire … ?”

  After a barracuda-like investigation, Andy chose this moment to begin wailing protests at the lack of expected milk from his mother’s breasts. Claire tried to soothe him, patting his back; she felt like crying herself for his disappointment.

  “I don’t suppose,” Dr. Minchenko interjected mildly, “that you would care to come along with us, Liz? There would be no going back, of course.”

  “Us?” Mama Nilla regarded him sharply. “Are you going along with this nonsense?”

  “I rather think so.”

  “That’s all right, then.” She nodded.

  “But you can’t—” Leo began.

  “Graf,” Dr. Minchenko said, “did your little depressuri
zation drama just now give these ladies any reason to think they were still going to have air to breathe if they stayed with their quaddies?”

  “It shouldn’t have,” said Leo.

  “I didn’t even think about it,” said one of the crèche mothers, looking suddenly dismayed.

  “I did,” said the other, frowning at Leo.

  “I knew there were emergency air supplies in the gym module,” said Mama Nilla, “it’s in the regular drill, after all. The whole department ought to have come here.”

  “I diverted ‘em,” said Leo shortly.

  “The whole department should have told you to go screw yourself,” Mama Nilla added evenly. “Allow me to speak for the absent.” She smiled icily at the engineer.

  One of the crèche mothers addressed Mama Nilla in distress. “But I can’t come with you. My husband works downside!”

  “Nobody’s asking you to!” roared Leo.

  The other crèche mother, ignoring him, added to Mama Nilla, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Liz, I just can’t. It’s just too much.”

  “Yes, exactly.” Leo’s hand hesitated over a lump in his coveralls, abandoned it, and switched to trying to herd them all along with broad arm-waving gestures.

  “It’s all right girls, I understand,” Mama Nilla soothed their evident anxiety. “I’ll stay and hold the fort, I guess. Got nobody waiting for this old body, after all,” she laughed. It was a little forced.

  “Will you take over the department, then?” Dr. Minchenko confirmed with Mama Nilla. “Keep it going any way you can—come to me when you can’t.”

  She nodded, looking withdrawn, as if the bottomless complexity of the task before her was just beginning to dawn.

  Dr. Minchenko took charge of the quaddie boy with the still-oozing cut on his forehead; Leo at last successfully pried loose the other two downsider women, saying, “Come on. I have to go empty the vegetable cooler next.”

  “With all this going on, what is he doing spending time cleaning out a refrigerator?” Mama Nilla muttered under her breath. “Madness …”

  “Mama Nilla, I gotta go now.” The little quaddie wrapped all her arms tightly around her torso by way of emphasis, and Mama Nilla perforce broke away.

  Andy was still wailing his indignant disappointment in intermittent bursts.

  “Hey, little fellow,” Dr. Minchenko paused to address him, “that’s no way to talk to your mama… .”

  “No milk,” explained Claire. Glumly, feeling dreadfully inadequate, she offered him the bottle, which he batted away. When she attempted to detach him momentarily in order to dive after it, he wrapped himself around her arm and screamed frantically. One of the five-year-olds twisted up and put all four of his hands over his ears, pointedly.

  “Come with us to the infirmary,” said Dr. Minchenko with an understanding smile. “I think I have something that will fix that problem. Unless you want to wean him now, which I don’t recommend.”

  “Oh, please,” said Claire hopefully.

  “It will take a couple of days to get your systems interlocked again,” he warned, “the biofeedback lag time being what it is. But I haven’t had a chance to examine you two since I came up anyway …”

  Claire floated after him with gratitude. Even Andy stopped crying.

  *

  Pramod hadn’t been joking about the clamps, Leo thought with a sigh, as he studied the fused lump of metal before him. He punched up the specs on the computer board floating beside him, a bit slowly and clumsily with his pressure-gloved hands. This particular insulated pipe conducted sewage. Unglamorous, but a mistake here could be just as much a disaster as any other.

  And a lot messier, Leo thought with a grim grin. He glanced up at Bobbi and Pramod hovering at the ready beside him in their silvery work suits; five other quaddie work teams were visible along the Habitat’s surface, and a pusher jockeyed into position nearby. Rodeo’s sunlit crescent wheeled in the background. Well, they must certainly be the galaxy’s most expensive plumbers.

  The mess of variously-coded pipes and tubing before him formed the umbilical connections between one module and the next, shielded by an outer casing from microdust pitting and other hazards. The task at hand was to realign the modules in uniform longitudinal bundles to withstand acceleration. Each bundle, strapped together like the cargo pods, would form a sturdy, self-supporting, balanced mass, at least in terms of the relatively low thrusts Leo was contemplating. Just like driving a team of yoked hippopotamuses. But realigning the modules entailed realigning all their connections, and there were lots and lots and lots of connections.

  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 countermoves. 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 Thirteen

  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 marshaling 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 com controllers. “Can you punch me through to the Cay Habitat at all?”

  “They’re not answering our calls,” said the com 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.