Lois Bujold - Falling Free

After about twenty minutes spent muttering to himself in the dim light, he decided to scan his accumulated electronic mail. His usual office routine had gone to pot these last few weeks anyway, and of course the events of the last two days had blown it entirely to hell. Perhaps a dose of boring routine would calm him enough to consider sleep after all.

Obsolete memos, out-of-date requests for instructions, irrelevant progress reports—the quaddie downside barracks, he noted with a grim snort, was advertised as ready for occupancy at fifteen percent over budget. If he could catch any quaddies to put in them. Instructions from HQ viz wrapping up the Cay Project, unsolicited advice upon salvage and disposal of its various parts…

Van Atta stopped abruptly, and backed up two screens on his vid. What had that said again?

Item: Post-fetal experimental tissue cultures. Quantity: 1000. Disposition: cremation by IGS Standard Biolab Rules.

He checked the source of the order. No, it hadn’t come through Apmad’s office, as he’d first guessed. It came from General Accounting & Inventory Control, part of a long computer-generated list including a variety of lab stores. The order was signed by a human, though, some unknown middle manager in the GA&IC back on Earth.

“By damn,” Van Atta swore softly, “I don’t think this twit even knows what quaddies are.” The order had been signed some weeks before.

He read the opening paragraph again. The Project Chief will oversee the termination of this project with all due speed. The quick release of personnel for other assignments is particularly desirable. You are authorized to make whatever temporary requisitions of material or personnel from adjacent divisions you require to complete this termination by 6/1.

After another minute his lips drew back in a furious grin. Carefully, he pulled the precious message disc from the machine, pocketed it, and left to go find Chalopin. He hoped he might rout her out of bed.

“Aren’t you about done out there yet?” Ti’s taut voice crackled through Leo’s worksuit comm.

“One last weld, Ti,” Leo answered. “Check that alignment one more time, Tony.”

Tony waved a gloved hand in acknowledgement and ran the optical laser check up the line that the electron beam welder would shortly follow. “You’re clear, Pramod,” he called, and moved aside.

The welder advanced in its tracks across the work-piece, stitching a flange for the last clamp to hold the new vortex mirror in place in its housing. A light on the beam welder’s top flashed from red to green, it shut itself off, and Pramod moved in to detach it. Bobbi floated up immediately behind to check the weld with a sonic scan. “It’s good, Leo. It’ll hold.”

“All right. Clear the stuff out and bring the mirror in.”

His quaddies moved fast. Within minutes the vortex mirror was fitted into its insulated clamps, its alignment checked. “All right, gang. Let’s move back and let Ti run the smoke test.”

“Smoke test?” Ti’s voice came over the comm. “What’s that? I thought you wanted a ten-percent power-up.”

“It’s an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project,” Leo explained. “Turn it on, see if it smokes.”

“I should have guessed,” Ti choked. “How very scientific.”

“Use is always the ultimate test. But power-up slowly, eh? Gently does it. We’ve got a delicate lady here.”

“You’ve said that about eight or ten times, Leo. Is that sucker in spec or out?”

“In. On the surface, anyway. But the internal crystalline structure of the titanium—well, it just isn’t as controlled as it would have been in a normal fabrication. “

“Is it in spec or out? I’m not going to Jump a thousand people to their deaths, dammit. Especially if I’m included.”

“In, in,” Leo spoke through his teeth. “But just—don’t horse it around, huh? For the sake of my blood pressure, if nothing else.”

Ti muttered something; it might have been, Screw your blood pressure, but Leo wasn’t sure. He didn’t ask for a repeat.

Leo and his quaddie work gang gathered their equipment and jetted a safe distance from the Necklin rod arm. They hung a hundred meters or so above Home. The light of Rodeo’s sun was pale and sharp here within an hour of the wormhole Jump point; more than a bright star, but far less than the nuclear furnace that had warmed the Habitat in Rodeo orbit. Leo seized the moment to gaze upon their cobbled-together colony ship from this rare exterior vantage. Over a hundred modules had finally been bundled together along the ship’s axis, all carrying on—more or less—their previous functions. Damned if the design didn’t look almost intended, in a lunatic-functional sort of way. It reminded Leo a bit of the thrilling ugliness of the early space probes of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries.

Miraculously, it had held together under two days’ steady acceleration and deceleration. Inevitably items here and there Inside had been found to have been overlooked. The younger quaddies had crawled about bravely, cleaning up; Nutrition had managed to get everyone fed something, though the menu was a trifle random; thanks to yeoman efforts on the part of the young airsystems maintenance supervisor who had stayed on and his quaddie work gang, they no longer had to cease accelerating periodically for the plumbing to work. For a while Leo had been convinced the potty stops were going to be the death of them all, not that he hadn’t grabbed the opportunities himself for the final touching-up on their vortex mirror.

“See any smoke?” Ti’s voice inquired in his ear.

“Nope.”

“That’s it, then. You people better get your asses Inside. And as soon as you’ve got everything nailed down, Leo, I’d appreciate it if you’d come up to Nav and Com.”

Something in the timbre of Ti’s voice chilled Leo. “Oh? What’s up?”

“There’s a Security shuttle closing on us from Rodeo. Your old buddy Van Atta’s aboard, and ordering us to halt and desist. I don’t think there’s much time left.”

“You’re still maintaining comm silence, I trust?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. But that doesn’t prevent me from listening, eh? There’s a lot of chatter from the Jump Station—but that doesn’t worry me as much as what’s coming up from behind. I, um… don’t think Van Atta handles frustration too well.”

“On edge, is he?”

“Over the edge, I think. Those Security shuttles are armed, y’know. And a lot faster than this monster in normal space. Just ‘cause their lasers are classed as ‘light weaponry’ doesn’t mean it’s exactly healthy to stand around in front of ‘em. I’d just as soon Jump before they got in range.”

“I read you.” Leo waved his work gang toward the entry hatch to the worksuit locker module.

So it was coming at last. Leo had devised a dozen defenses in his mind, upended beam welders, explosive mines, for the long-anticipated physical confrontation with GalacTech employees trying to retake the Habitat. But all his time had been gobbled up by the vortex mirror, and as a result only the most instant of weapons, such as the beam welders, were now available, and even they would have no use Indoors in a boarding battle. He could just picture one missing its target and slicing through a wall into an adjoining creche module. Hand-to-hand in free fell the quaddies might have some advantage; weapons cancelled that, being more dangerous to the defenders than the attackers. It all depended on what kind of attack Van Atta launched. And Leo hated depending on Van Atta.

Van Atta swore into the comm one last time, then dealt the off key an angry blow. He had run out of fresh invective hours before, and was conscious of repeating himself. He turned from the comm console and glowered around the Security shuttle’s control compartment.