Lois Bujold - Falling Free

She watched on the control booth’s vid display in miserable paralysis as the shuttle kicked away from the Habitat and began to drop toward Rodeo’s swirling atmosphere.

The dim cargo bay seemed to groan all around Claire as deceleration strained its structure. Buffeting, accompanied by a hissing whistle, vibrated through the shuttle’s metal skin.

“What’s wrong?” gasped Claire. She released an anchoring hand upon the plastic crate behind which they had hidden to double her grasp of Andy and hold him closer. “Are we sideswiping something? What’s that funny noise?”

Tony hurriedly licked a ringer and held it out. “No draft to speak of.” He swallowed, testing his eustachican tubes. “We’re not depressurizing.” Yet the whistle was rising.

Two mechanical ka-chunks, one after the other, that were nothing at all like the familiar thump and click of a hatch seal seating itself properly, shot terror through Claire. The deceleration went on and on, much too long, confused by a strange new vector of thrust that seemed to emanate from the shuttle’s ventral side. The side of the cargo bay to which the crates were anchored seemed to push against her. She nervously put her back to it, and cushioned Andy upon her belly.

The baby’s eyes were round, his mouth an echoing “o” of bewilderment. No, please, don’t start crying! She dared not release the cry locked in her own throat; it would set him off like a siren. “Patty cake, patty cake, baker’s man,” Claire choked. “Microwave a cake as fast as you can…” She tickled his cheek, flicking her eyes at Tony in mute appeal.

Tony’s face was white. “Claire—I think this shuttle’s going downside! I bet those bangs were the airfoils deploying.”

“Oh, no! Can’t be. Silver checked the schedule—”

“It looks like Silver made a big mistake.”

“I checked it too. This shuttle was supposed to be picking up a load of stuff at the Transfer Station, then going downside.”

“Then you both made a big mistake.” Tony’s voice was harsh and shaking, anger masking fear.

Oh, help, don’t yell at me—if I don’t stay calm, neither will Andy—this wasn’t my idea…

Tony rolled over on his stomach and levered his body away from the thrusting surface of the—the floor, downsiders called the direction from which the vector of gravitational force came—and crept to the nearest window, pulling himself alongside it. The light that poured through it was taking on a strange diffuse quality, diminishing. “It’s all white—Claire, I think we must be entering a cloud!”

Claire had watched clouds from orbit above forl hours, as they slowly billowed in the convection of Rodeo’s atmosphere. They had always seemed massive as moons. She longed to go look.

Andy was clutching her blue T-shirt. She rolled over, as Tony had, palms to the surface, and pushed up. Andy, turning his head toward his father, reached out with his upper hands and tried to shove off from Claire with his lowers. The floor leaped up and smacked him.

For a moment he was too stunned to howl. Then his little mouth went from round to square and poured out the vibrating scream of true pain. The sound knifed through every nerve in Claire’s body.

Tony too jerked at the noise, and scrambled down from the window and back toward them. “Why did you drop him? What do you think you’re doing? Oh, make him be quiet, quick!”

Claire rolled onto her back again, pulling Andy onto the elastic softness of her abdomen, and patted and kissed him frantically. The timbre of his screams began to change from the frightening high-pitched cry of pain to the less piercing bellows of indignation, but the volume was just as loud.

“They’ll hear him all the way up in the pilot’s compartment!” Tony hissed in anguish. “Do something!”

“I’m trying,” Claire hissed back. Her hands shook. She tried to push Andy’s head toward her breast, standard comfort, but he turned his head away and screamed louder. Fortunately, the sound of the atmosphere rushing over the shuttle’s skin had risen to a deafening thunder. By the time the noise peaked and faded, Andy’s cries had become whimpering hiccups. He rubbed his face, slimy with tears and mucous, mournfully against Claire’s T-shirt. His weight on Claire’s stomach and diaphragm half stopped her breath, but she dared not lay him down.

Another set of clunks reverberated through the shuttle. The engines’ vibrations changed their pitch, and Claire was plucked this way and that by changing acceleration vectors, none as strong as the one emanating from the floor. She spared two hands from comforting Andy to brace herself against the plastic crates. Tony lay beside them, biting his lips in helpless anxiety. “We must be coming down to land on the surface.”

Claire nodded. “At one of the shuttleports. There’ll be people there—downsiders—maybe we can tell them we got trapped aboard this shuttle by accident. Maybe,” she added hopefully, “they’ll send us right back up home.”

Tony’s right upper hand clenched. “No! We can’t give up now! We’d never get another chance!”

“But what else can we do?”

“We’ll sneak off this ship and hide, until we can 1 get on another one, one that’s going to the Transfer Station.” His voice turned earnest with urgent pleading as a puff of dismay escaped Claire’s parted lips, j “We did it once, we can do it again.”

She shook her head doubtfully. Further argument I was interrupted by a startling series of thumps that I shook the whole ship and then blended into a low continuous rumble. The light falling through the window shifted its beam around the cargo bay as the shuttle landed, taxied, and turned. Then it winked out, the cargo bay dimmed, and the engines whined to an equally startling silence.

Claire cautiously unbraced herself. Of all the acceleration vectors, only one remained. Isolated, it became overwhelming.

Gravity. Silent, implacable, it pressed against her back—she struggled with a nasty illusion that it might suddenly cease, and the thrust it imparted slam her into the ceiling above, smashing Andy between. In an accompanying optical illusion, the whole cargo bay seemed to be chugging in a slow circle around her. She closed her eyes in self-defense.

Tony’s hand tightened warningly on her left lower wrist. She looked up and froze as the outside cargo bay door at the forward end of the compartment slid open.

A pair of downsiders wearing company maintenance coveralls entered. The access door in the center of the shuttle’s fuselage dilated, and Ti the shuttle co-pilot stuck his head through.

“Hi, guys. What’s the big rush-rush?”

“We’re supposed to have this bird turned around and reloaded in an hour, that’s what,” replied the maintenance man. “You have just time to pee and eat lunch.”

“What’s the cargo? I haven’t seen this much hopping around since the last medical emergency.”

“Equipment and supplies for some sort of show they’re supposed to be putting on up at your Habitat for the Vice President of Operations.”

“That’s not till next week.”

The maintenance man snickered. “That’s what everybody thought. The VP just flew in a week early on her private courier, with a whole commando squad of accountants. Seems she likes surprise inspections. Management, naturally, is overjoyed.”

“Don’t laugh too soon,” Ti warned. “Management has ways of sharing their joy with the rest of us.”

“Don’t I know it,” the maintenance man groaned. “C’mon, c’mon, you’re blocking the door…” The three of them clattered forward.