The quaddie girl and Leo stared at each other in equal horror. “Certainly not,” the engineer choked. He looked around “Another quaddie will. Claire…?”
After a barracuda-like investigation, Andy chose this moment to begin wailing protests at the lack of expected milk from his mother’s breasts. Claire tried to soothe him, patting his back; she felt like crying herself for his disappointment.
“I don’t suppose,” Dr. Minchenko interjected mildly, “that you would care to come along with us, Liz? There would be no going back, of course.”
“Us?” Mama Nilla regarded him sharply. “Are you going along with this nonsense?”
“I rather think so.”
“That’s all right, then.” She nodded.
“But you can’t—” Leo began.
“Graf,” Dr. Minchenko said, “did your little de-pressurization drama just now give these ladies any reason to think they were still going to have air to breathe if they stayed with their quaddies?”
“It shouldn’t have,” said Leo.
“I didn’t even think about it,” said one of the creche mothers, looking suddenly dismayed.
“I did,” said the other, frowning at Leo. “I knew there were emergency air supplies in the gym module,” said Mama Nilla, “it’s in the regular drill, after all. The whole department ought to have come here.”
“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She nodded, looking withdrawn, as if the bottomless complexity of the task before her was just beginning to dawn.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.