Lois Bujold: Falling Free

Leo glanced around the chamber one last time. Four worksuited quaddies each manned a laser unit braced around the walls, bracketing the titanium mass. Leo’s measuring instruments floated tethered to his belt, ready to his pressure-gloved hands. It was time. Leo touched his helmet control, darkening his faceplate.

“Commence firing,” said Leo into his suit comm. Four beams of laser light lanced out in unison, pouring into the scrap. For the first few minutes, nothing appeared to be happening. Then it began to glow, dark red, bright red, yellow, white—then, visibly, one of the ex-food canisters began to sag, flowing into the jumble. The quaddies continued to pour in the energy.

The mass was beginning to drift slightly, one of Leo’s readouts told him, although the effect was not yet visible to the naked eye. “Unit Four, power-up about ten percent,” Leo instructed. One of the quaddies flashed a lower palm in acknowledgement and touched his control box. The drift stopped. Good, his bracketing was working. Leo had had a horrid vision of the molten mass of metal drifting off into the side wall, or worse, fatally brushing into somebody, but the very beams that melted it seemed enough to control its motion, at least in the absence of stronger sources of momentum.

Now the melt was obvious, the metal becoming a white glowing blob of liquid floating in the vacuum, struggling toward the shape of a perfect sphere. Boy, is that stuff ever going to be pure when we’re done, Leo reflected with satisfaction.

He checked his monitoring devices. Now they were coming up on a moment of critical judgment; when to stop? They must pour in enough energy to achieve an absolutely uniform melt, no funny lumps left in the middle of the gravy. But not too much; even though it was not visible to the eye Leo knew there was metal vapor pouring off that bubble now, part of his calculated loss.

More importantly, looking ahead to the next step—every kilocalorie they dumped into that titanium mass was going to have to be brought back out. Planetside, the shape he was trying to get would have been formed against a copper mold, with lots and lots of water to carry away the heat at the desired rate, in this case rapidly; single-crystal splat-cooling, it was called. Well, at least he’d figured out how to achieve the splat part of it.…

“Cease firing,” Leo ordered.

And there it hung, their sphere of molten metal, blue-white with the violent heat energy contained within it, perfect. Leo checked and re-checked its centered position, and had laser number two give it one more half-second blast not for melt but for momentum’s sake.

“All right,” said Leo into his suit comm. “Now let’s get everything out of this module that’s going out, and double-check everything that’s staying. Last thing we need now is for somebody to drop his wrench in the soup pot, right?”

Leo joined the quaddies in shoving their equipment unceremoniously out the holes torn in the side of the module. Two of his laser operators went with it, two stayed with Leo. Leo checked centering again, and then they all strapped themselves to the walls.

Leo switched channels in his suit comm. “Ready, Zara?” he called.

“Ready, Leo,” the quaddie pilot responded from her pusher, now attached to the gutted module’s stern.

“Now remember, slow and gentle does it. But firm. Pretend your pusher is a scalpel, and you’re just about to operate on one of your friends or something.”

“Right, Leo.” There was a grin in her voice.

Don’t swagger, girl, Leo prayed inwardly. “Go when you’re ready.”

“Going. Hang on up there!” There was at first no perceivable change. Then Leo’s harness straps began to tug gently at him. It was the Habitat module, not the molten ball of titanium, that was moving, Leo reminded himself. The metal did not drift; it was the back wall that moved forward and engulfed it.

It was working, by God it was working! The metal bubble touched the back wall, spread out, and settled into its shallow bowl mold.

“Increase acceleration by the first increment,” Leo called into his comm. The pusher powered up, and the molten titanium circle spread, its edges growing toward the desired diameter some three meters wide, already losing its bright glow. Creating a titanium blank of controlled thickness, ready (after cooling) for explosive molding into its final subtle form. “Steady on. That does it!”

Splat-cooling? Well, not exactly. Leo was uncomfortably aware that they were probably not going to achieve a perfect internal single-crystal freeze. But it would be good, good enough—as long as it was good enough that they didn’t have to melt it down and start all over again, that was the most Leo dared pray for. They might, barely, have time to make one of these suckers. Not two. And when was the threatened response from Rodeo arriving? Soon, surely.

He wondered briefly what the new gravity technology was going to do to fabrication problems in space like this. Revolutionize seemed too mild a term, certainly. Too bad we didn’t have some now, he thought. Still—he grinned, concealed within his helmet—they were doing all right.

He pointed his temperature gauge at the back wall. The piece was cooling almost as rapidly as he had hoped. They were still due for a couple of hours of driving around until it had dumped enough heat to remove from the wall and handle without danger of deformation.

“All right, Bobbi, I’m leaving you and Zara in charge here,” Leo said. “It’s looking good. When the temperature drops to about five hundred degrees centigrade, bring it on back. We’ll try to be ready for the final cooling and the second phase of the shaping.”

Carefully, trying not to add excess vibration to the walls, Leo loosed his harness and climbed to the exit hole. From this distance he had a fine view of the D-620, now more than half loaded, and Rodeo beyond. Better go now, before the view became more distant than his suit jets could close.

He activated his jets and zipped quickly away from the side of the still-gently-accelerating module-and-pusher unit. It chugged off, looking a drunken, jury-rigged wreck indeed, concealing hope in its heart.

Leo aimed toward the Habitat, and Phase II of his Jumpships-Repaired-While-U-Wait scheme.

It was sunset on the dry lake bed. Silver gazed anxiously into the monitor in the shuttle control cabin as it swept the horizon, brightening and darkening each time the red ball of the sun rolled past.

“They can’t possibly be back for at least another hour,” Madame Minchenko, watching her, pointed out, “in the best case.”

“That’s not who I’m looking for,” answered Silver. “Hm.” Madame Minchenko drummed her long, age-sculptured fingers on the console, unlatched and tilted back the co-pilot’s seat, and stared thoughtfully at the cabin roof. “No, I suppose not. Still—if GalacTech traffic control saw you land and sent out a jetcopter to investigate, they should have been here before now. Perhaps they missed your landing after all.”

“Perhaps they’re just not very organized,” suggested Silver, “and they’ll be along any minute.”

Madame Minchenko sighed. “All too likely.” She regarded Silver, pursing her lips. “And what are you supposed to do in that case?”

“I have a weapon.” Silver touched the laser-solderer, lying seductively on the console before the pilot-commander’s seat in which she sprawled. “But I’d rather not shoot anybody else. Not if I can help it.”

“Anybody else?” There was a shade more respect in Madame Minchenko’s voice.

Shooting people was such a stupid activity, why should everybody—anybody!—be so impressed? Silver wondered irritably. You would think she had done something truly great, like discover a new treatment for black stem-rot. Her mouth tightened.