Lois Bujold - Falling Free

“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?”

“Thank you, Leo,” she sniffed. “I’m sorry about the pusher. And the fuel.”

“We’ll take care of it.” He winked heroically. “Get some sleep, huh? There’ll still be plenty of work to do when you wake up, you’re not going to miss anything. Uh… nighty-night.”

“ ‘Night…”

In the corridor he rubbed his hands over his face. “Nng…”

Three-fourths of the Habitat inaccessible? It was more like nine-tenths by now. And all the module bundles were running on emergency power, waiting to be reattached to the main power supply as they were loaded into the Superjumper. It was vital to the safety and comfort of those trapped aboard various sub-units that the Habitat be fully reconfigured and made operational as swiftly as possible.

Not to mention everyone’s having to start to learn their way around a new maze. Multiple compromises had driven the design—creche units, for example, could go in an interior bundle; docks and locks had to be positioned facing out into space; some garbage vents were unavoidably cut off, power mods had to be positioned just so, the nutrition units, now serving some three thousand meals a day, required certain lands of access to storage… Getting everyone’s routines readjusted was going to be an unholy mess for a while, even assuming all the module bundles were loaded in right-side-up and attached head-end-round when Leo wasn’t personally supervising—or even when he was watching, Leo admitted to himself. His face was numb.

And now the kicker-question—should they continue loading at all onto a Superjumper that was, just possibly, fatally disabled? The vortex mirror, God. Why couldn’t she have rammed one of the normal space thruster arms? Why couldn’t she have run over Leo himself?

“Leo!” called a familiar male voice.

Floating down the corridor, his arms crossed angrily, came the jump pilot, Ti Gulik. Silver starfished from hand-grip to hand-grip behind him, trailed by Pramod. Gulik grabbed a grip and swung to a halt beside Leo. Leo’s gaze crossed Silver’s in a frustratingly brief and silent Hello! before the jump pilot pinned him to the wall.

“What have your damned quaddies done to my Necklin rods?” sputtered Ti. “We go to all this trouble to catch this ship, bring it here, and practically the first thing you do is start smashing it up—I barely got it parked!” His voice faded “Please—tell me that little mutant,” he waved at Pramod, “got it wrong…?”

Leo cleared his throat. “One of the pusher attitude jets apparently got stuck in an ‘on’ position, throwing the pusher into an uncontrollable spin. The term ‘unpreventable accident’ is not in my vocabulary, but it certainly wasn’t the quaddie’s fault.”

“Huh,” said Ti. “Well, at least you’re not trying to pin it on the pilot… but what was the damage, really?”