“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 creche 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 creche 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She nodded, looking withdrawn, as if the bottomless complexity of the task before her was just beginning to dawn.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 worksuits; 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 re-align 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 re-aligning the modules entailed re-aligning 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 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—w
e’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?”
“We’re monitoring the situation. I have not yet received orders to do anything about it.”
“Why not? Where’s Norris?” Norris was Operations manager for the entire Rodeo local space area; he ought to be on this thing. True, the Cay Project was not in his chain of command proper, as Van Atta reported directly to company Ops.
“Dr. Norris,” said Chalopin, “is attending a materials development conference on Earth. In his absence, I am acting Operations manager. Captain Bannerji and I have discussed the possibility of his taking his men and the Shuttleport Three Security and Rescue shuttle and attempting to board the hijacked ship. We’re still not sure who these people are or what they want, but they appear to have taken a hostage, compelling caution on our part. So we’ve let them continue to decrease their range while we attempt to gain more information about them. This,” she eyed him beadily, “brings us to you, Mr. Van Atta. Is this incident somehow connected to your crisis at the Cay Habitat?”
“I don’t see how—” Van Atta began, and broke off, because suddenly he did see how. “Son-of-a-bitch…” he whispered.
“Lord Krishna,” Dr. Yei said, and wheeled to stare again at the live vid of the Habitat half-dismantled in orbit far above them. “It can’t be…”
“Graf’s crazy. He’s crazy, the man’s a flaming megalomaniac. He can’t do this—” The engineering parameters paraded inexorably through Van Atta’s mind. Mass—power—distance—yes, a pared-down Habitat, a percentage of its less-essential components dropped, might just barely be torqued by a Superjumper into wormhole space, if it could be wrestled into position at the distant jump point. The whole damn thing… “They’re hijacking the whole damn thing!” Van Atta cried aloud.
Yei wrung her hands, half-circling the vid. “They’ll never manage. They’re barely more than children! He’ll lead them to their deaths! It’s criminal!”
Captain Bannerji and the shuttleport administrator glanced at each other. Bannerji pursed his lips and opened his hand to her, as if to say, Ladies first.
“Do you think the two incidents are connected, then?” Chalopin pressed.
Van Atta too paced back and forth, as if he could so coax an angle from flat view of the Habitat. “… the whole damn thing!”
Yei answered for him, “Yes, we think so.”
Van Atta paced on. “Hell, and they’ve got it apart already! We aren’t going to have time to starve ‘em out. Got to stop ‘em some other way.”
“The Cay Project workers were very upset at the abrupt termination of the Project,” Yei explained. “They found out about it prematurely. They were afraid of being remaindered downside, being unaccustomed to gravity. I never had a chance to introduce the idea gradually. I think they may actually be trying to—run away, somehow.”
Captain Bannerji’s eyes widened. He leaned across the console on one hand and stared into the vid. “Consider the lowly snail,” he muttered, “who carries its house on its back. On cold rainy days when it goes for a walk, it never has to backtrack.…”
Van Atta put an extra half meter of distance between himself and the suddenly poetic Security captain.
“Weapons,” Van Atta said. “What kind of weapons does Security have on tap?”
“Stunners,” answered Bannerji, straightening up and studying his right thumbnail. Was there a flash of mockery in his eyes? No, he wouldn’t dare.
“I mean on your shuttle,” said Van Atta irritably. “Ship-mounted weapons. Teeth. You can’t make a thre
at without teeth.”
“There are two medium-power ship-mounted laser units. Last time we used them was—let me see—to burn through a log snag that had backed up flood waters threatening an exploration camp.”
“Yes, well, it’s more than they have, anyway,” said Van Atta excitedly. “We can attack the Habitat—or the Superjumper—either, really. The main thing is to keep them from connecting with each other. Yes, get the Jumpship first. Without it the Habitat is a sitting target we can polish off at our leisure. Is your security shuttle fueled up and ready to go, Bannerji?”
Dr. Yei had paled. “Hold on! Who’s talking about attacking anything? We haven’t even made verbal contact yet. If the hijackers are indeed quaddies, I’m sure I could persuade them to listen to reason—”
“It’s too late for reason. This situation calls for action.” Van Atta’s humiliation burned hot in his stomach, fueled by fear. When the company brass found out how totally he had lost control—well, he’d better be firmly back in control by then.
“Yes, but…” Yei licked her lips, “it’s all very well to threaten, but the actual use of force is dangerous—maybe destructive—hadn’t you better get some kind of authorization first? If something went horribly wrong, you wouldn’t want to be left holding the bag, surely.”
Van Atta paused. “It would take too much time,” he objected at last. “Maybe a day, to reach District HQ on Orient IV and return. And if they decided it was too hot and bounced it all the way to Apmad on Earth, it could be several days before we got a reply.”
“But it’s going to be several days, isn’t it?” said Yei, watching him intently. “Even if they succeed in fitting the Habitat to the Superjumper, they aren’t going to be able to swing it around and boost it like a fast courier. It would never stand the strain, it would use too much fuel—there’s lots of time yet. Wouldn’t it be better to get authorization, to be safe? Then, if anything went wrong—it wouldn’t be your fault.”
Falling Free (barrayar) Page 20