Saul looked up at Ould-Harrad. It was easy to read the African’s silently moving lips, shaping words in Arabic. Saul knew that the prayers were only partly for Oakes, but also for the new, reluctant commander, Suleiman Ould-Harrad himself.
VIRGINIA
“Damn! I wouldn’t put it past him to have done this on purpose!”
Virginia paced back and forth in her tiny laboratory. It was difficult to do in less than a milligee, but she managed by holding on to a nearby console. Her velcro soles scritched softly as she walked from one end of the room to the other, tossing her hair and muttering to herself.
“Carl planned this. I know it!”
The main holo screen rippled. A face appeared, but the “man” was no member of the Halley Expedition… nor indeed any man at all. The visage was long-cheeked, with reddish locks and a curling, salty mustache.
“Sure an’ ’tis a churlish deed, liken to the way Queen Maeve was deprived of her beloved,” the figure agreed.
Virginia sniffed. “Oh, cram it, Ossian. I don’t need sympathy from literary simulacrums, I need Saul! And I don’t want him blasting off in a stripped-down, overaged spaceship that needs fifty years of overhaul before it’ supposed to fly again!”
The display flickered. Another face formed… a graying eminence in scarlet robes. The woman on the screen held up a sign of beneficence. “It is a mission of mercy, my dear child. Forty souls are at stake…”
“Don’t you think I know that?” Virginia’s feet left the floor as she smacked the tabletop. “Cardinal Teresa, off! I don’t need logic or appeals to my better nature. I need a reason why…”
A last image appeared, drawn from deep within—an early simulation, seldom called up for the pain it brought. A smiling man with a small gray beard and eyes that crinkled as they smiled warn-fly down at her.
“Anuenue, little rainbow. Reasons do not help at a time like this, daughter. Feelings have a logic all their own.”
Virginia buried her face in her hands. She floated against a storage cabinet and slowly settled toward the floor.
“I was happy, Daddy. I really was, in all this hell. I was happy”
A slender, lambent, transparent hand reached down, as if to touch her. The voice was strong with gentle wisdom.
“I know, darling. I know.”
CARL
—E Alulike!—the strawboss urged. And the crew pulled together filling the chosen comm channel with their chant.
—Ki au au, Ki au au
Huki au au, Huki au au!—
The Hawaiians heaved at the hawser as the main cargo unit of the Edmund Halley lifted out of the vessel’s body. Massive and immense as it was, the section climbed swiftly toward the top of the spindly A-frame, where a spacesuited figure gestured in exaggerated semaphore.
—Easy, easy. Okay, you Indonesians and Danes over there, you draw radially!—
Carl had not seen Jeffers so happy since the man had been unslotted. The man had hated work in the tunnels, preferring by far the hard glimmer of space and the oily tang of metal and machines.
Carl couldn’t really blame him, at that. Almost anything beat the doom and gloom down below. That was a major reason why he had pushed for the Newburn rescue attempt. He was convinced that the benefits to morale would do more for general health than all of Akio Matsudo’s traditional therapy and Saul Lintz’s laboratory concoctions.
He adjusted his visor to magnification 4 and looked toward Scorpio, where the comet’s fading dust tail was now barely a faint glow in the infrared. A few speckles told of grains big enough to reflect light still from the diminishing sun. One of the biggest of those speckles, he knew now for certain, was the slot tug Newburn.
If she had not existed, we would have had to invent her.
There came a cheer over the open-background comm as the storage unit met Halley’s surface with a soft puff of vapor. Jeffers wrung his hands over his head in nonchalant triumph. Carl had to smile.
This was his favorite of the three shifts working to refurbish and strip down the Edmund. Sure, he felt at home with Sergeov’s purely Percell team. But the mixed volunteers were the most cheerful lot.
Especially the Danes and Hawaiians. They didn’t seem to give a hoot if a man was an Ortho or a Percell… or a Denebian Glebhound… just as long as he wasn’t a purple or a goddamn Arcist.
Virginia is Hawaiian, he remembered. No wonder she was such an unrepentant Orthophile. Ortho-lover. Obviously, she didn’t see anything wrong with shacking up with one.
The thought lingered and made him feel a bit guilty as Lani Nguyen passed by, carrying a nickel-iron brace that would have crushed her anywhere with gravity, even on the moon.
—Hey, handsome—she sent. —You busy for the next three months?—
“What’ve you got in mind?” he said, leering back amiably. And she managed to put a little wag into her walk as she passed. Her unicorn tabard grinned back at him.
Oh, hell, Carl reminded himself, there are some good Orthos.
Lani had volunteered for the rescue mission in a flash. Good old Lani. She was so patient with him, never rebuking him at all for showing up at her cubicle every now and then, looking for company, then disappearing or keeping things strictly comradely for weeks at a stretch.
If only she were more what I’m looking for. More intellectual. More sensual. A Percell.
More like Virginia, in other words.
Only one Arcist was on duty right now. Each faction had a “watcher” to keep an eye on the others’ shifts… an unofficial designation, to be sure, but one more and more common at important functions such as slottings and unslottings.
Helga Steppins viewed the proceedings carefully, using a laser transit to double-check everything done by Jeffers’s crew. As Carl approached, she stepped to one side warily, as if he could infect her through two spacesuits and three meters of vacuum.
“You know, it’d be a lot easier to get at the Edmund’s science cluster if you’d let us remove the hydroponics modules first,” he told her. “It’d probably save two days.”
The taciturn, blond Austrian woman shook her head.
—Stupid trick, Osborn. We both know the launch date is set by when the fuel is ready. That’s at least next Tuesday.—
He balled his fists in disgust over this obstinacy. “Why, in the name of the Black, would I want to trick you? You people are the ones to insist on an insanely huge fuel reserve for a simple three-month rendezvous and return! We’ll have a stripped ship, and we don’t need more than six kilometers per second delta-V!”
The Arcist woman shrugged. —Safer if the tanks are topped off. Only au idiot sets sail without proper stores.—
“But…
—You don’t like it? Complain to that Percephile, Ould-Harrad.—
Carl snorted. Ould-Harrad? A Percell lover? Ha!
“Look, if we lower just the number-one hydroponics module now…”
—No!—She whirled on him, gripping the laser transit tightly. —The whole colony depends on that farm!—
“But the new dome is almost ready. All the fittings…”