Falling Free (barrayar) Read online

  “Clamps.”

  “Clamps?”

  ‘There’s a lot of clamped connections Outside. We were going over the flow chart for the Habitat disassembly, for, um, tomorrow, you know—”

  “I know, don’t say it.”

  “We thought a little practice might speed things up—”

  “Yes, good…”

  “Hardly any of the clamps will unclamp. Even with power tools.”

  “Uh…” Leo paused, taken aback, then realized what the problem was. “Metal clamps?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Worse on the sun side?”

  “Much worse. We couldn’t get any of those to come at all. Some of them are visibly fused. Some idiot must have welded them.”

  “Welded, yes. But not by some idiot. By the sun.”

  “Leo, it doesn’t get that hot—”

  “Not directly. What you’re seeing is spontaneous vacuum diffusion welding. Metal molecules are evaporating off the surfaces of the pieces in the vacuum. Slowly, to be sure, but it’s a measurable phenomenon. On the clamped areas they migrate into their neighboring surfaces and eventually achieve quite a nice bond. A little faster for the hot pieces on the sun side, a little slower for the cold pieces in the shade—but I’ll bet some of those clamps have been in place for twenty years.”

  “Oh. But what do we do about them?”

  “They’ll have to be cut.”

  Pramod’s lips pursed in worry. “That will slow things down.”

  “Yeah. And we’ll have to have a way set up to re-clamp each connection in the new configuration, too… gonna need more clamps, or something that can be made to work as clamps.… Go round up all your off-shift work gang. We’re going to have to have a little emergency scrounging session.”

  Leo stopped wondering if he was going to survive the Great Takeover, and started wondering if he was going to survive until the Great Takeover. He prayed devoutly that Silver was having an easier time of it than himself.

  Silver hoped earnestly that Leo was having an easier time of it than herself.

  She hitched herself around in the acceleration couch, increasingly uncomfortable after their first eight hours of flight, and rested her chin on the padding to regard her crew, crammed in the pusher’s cabin. The other quaddies were drooped and draped as she was; only Ti seemed comfortable, feet propped up and leaning back in his seat in the steady gee-forces.

  “I saw this great holovid,” Siggy waved some hands enthusiastically, “that had a boarding battle. The marines used magnetic mines to blow holes like bubble cheese in the side of the mothership and just poured through.” He added a weird ululating cry for sound effects. “The aliens were running every which way, stuff flying everywhere as the air blew out—”

  “I saw that one,” said Ti. “Nest of Doom, right?”

  “You got it for us,” reminded Silver. “Did you know it had a sequel?” said Ti aside to Siggy. “The Nest’s Revenge.”

  “No, really? Do you suppose—”

  “First of all,” said Silver, “nobody has found any intelligent aliens yet, hostile or not, secondly, we don’t have any magnetic mines,” thanks be, “and thirdly, I don’t think Ti wants a lot of unsightly holes blown in the side of his ship.”

  “Well, no,” conceded Ti.

  “We will go in through the airlock,” said Silver firmly, “which was designed for just that purpose. I think the jumpship crew will be surprised enough when we put them in their escape pod and launch it, without, um, frightening them into doing who-knows-what with a lot of premature whooping. Even if Colonel Wayne in Nest of Doom led his troops into battle with his rebel yell over their comm links, I don’t think real marines would do that. It would be bound to interfere with their communications.” She frowned Siggy into submission.

  “We’ll just do it Leo’s way,” Silver went on, “and point the laser-solderers at them. They don’t know us, they wouldn’t know whether we’d fire or not.” How, after all, could strangers know what she didn’t know herself? “Speaking of which, how do we know which Superjumper to,” she groped for terminology, “cut out of the herd? It ought to be easier to get permission to come aboard if the crew’s someone Ti knows well. On the other hand, it might be harder to…” she trailed off, disliking the thought. “Especially if they tried to fight back.”

  “Jon could wrestle them into submission,” offered Ti. “That’s what he’s here for, after all.”

  Husky Jon gave him a woeful look. “I thought I was here as the pusher back-up pilot. You wrestle them if you want, they’re your friends. I’ll hold a solderer.”

  Ti cleared his throat. “Anyway, I’d like to get D771, if it’s there. We aren’t going to have much choice, though. There’s only likely to be a couple of Superjumpers working this side of the wormhole at any one time anyway. Basically, we go for whatever ship that’s just jumped over from Orient IV and dumped its empty pod bundles, and hasn’t started to load on new ones yet. That’ll give us the quickest getaway. There’s not that much to plan, we just go do it.”

  “The real trouble will start,” said Silver, “when they’ve figured out what we’re really up to and start trying to take the ship back.”

  A glum silence fell. For the moment, even Siggy had no suggestions.

  Leo found Van Atta in the downsiders’ gym, tramping determinedly on the treadmill. The treadmill was a medical torture device like a rack in reverse. Spring-loaded straps pulled the walker toward the tread surface, against which his or her feet pushed, for an hour or more a day by prescription, an exercise designed to slow, if not stop, the lower body deconditioning and long bone demineralization of free fell dwellers.

  By the expression on Van Atta’s face he was stamping out the measured treads today with considerable personal animosity. Cultivated irritation was indeed one way to muster the energy to tackle the boring but necessary task. After a moment’s thoughtful study Leo decided upon a casual and oblique approach. He slipped out of his coveralls and velcroed them to the wall-strip, retaining his red T-shirt and shorts, and floated over and hooked himself into the belt and straps of the unoccupied machine next to Van Atta’s. “Have they been lubricating these things with glue?” he puffed, grasping the hand holds and straining to start the treads moving against his feet.

  Van Atta turned his head and grinned sardonically. “What’s the matter, Leo? Did Minchenko the medical mini-dictator order a little physiological revenge on you?”

  “Yeah, something like that…”he got it started at last, his legs flexing in an even rhythm. He had skipped too many sessions lately. “Have you talked to him since he came up?”

  “Yeah.” Van Atta’s legs drove against his machine, and angry whirring spurted from its gears.

  “Have you told him what’s going to be happening to the Project yet?”

  “Unfortunately, I had to. I’d hoped to put him off to the last, with the rest. Minchenko is probably the most arrogant of Cay’s Old Guard—he’s never made it a secret that he thought he should have succeeded Cay as Head of Project, instead of bringing in an outsider, namely me. If he hadn’t been slated for retirement in a year, I’d damn well have taken steps to get rid of him before this.”

  “Did he, ah—voice objections?”

  “You mean, did he yowl like a stuck pig? You bet he did. Carried on like I was personally responsible for inventing the damned artificial gravity. I don’t need this shit.” Van Atta’s treadmill moaned in counterpoint to his words.

  “If he’s been with the Project from the beginning, I guess the quaddies are practically his life’s work,” allowed Leo reasonably.

  “Mm.” Van Atta marched. “It doesn’t give him the right to go on strike in a snit, though. Even you had more sense, in the end. If he doesn’t show signs of a more cooperative attitude when he’s had a chance to calm down and think through how useless it is, it may be easier to extend Curry’s rotation and just send Minchenko back downside.”

  “Ah.” Leo cleared hi
s throat. This didn’t exactly smell like the good opening he’d been hoping for. But there was so little time. “Did he talk to you about Tony?”

  “Tony!” Van Atta’s treadmill buzzed like a hornet for a moment. “If I never see that little geek again in my life it will be too soon. He’s been nothing but trouble, trouble and expense.”

  “I was rather hoping to get some more use out of him, myself,” said Leo carefully. “Even if he’s not medically ready to go back on regular Outside work shifts, I’ve got a lot of computer console work and supervisory tasks I could delegate to him, if he was here. If we could bring him up.”

  “Nonsense,” snapped Van Atta. “You could much more easily tap one of your other quaddie work gang leaders—Pramod, say—or pull any quaddie in the place. I don’t care who, that’s what I gave you the authorization for. We’re going to start moving the little freaks down in just two weeks. It makes no sense to bring up one Minchenko wouldn’t let out of the infirmary till then. And so I told him.” He glared at Leo. “I don’t want to hear one more word about Tony.”

  “Ah,” said Leo. Damn. Clearly, he should have taken Minchenko aside before he’d muddied the waters with Van Atta, Too late now. It wasn’t just the exercise that was making Van Atta red in the face. Leo wondered what all Minchenko had really said—doubtless pretty choice, it would have been a pleasure to hear. Too expensive a pleasure for the quaddies, though. Leo schooled his features to what he hoped would be read through his puffing and blowing as sympathy for Van Atta.

  “How’s the salvage planning going?” asked Van Atta after a while.

  “Almost complete.”

  “Oh, really?” Van Atta brightened. “Well, that’s something, at least.”

  “You’ll be amazed at how totally the Habitat can be recycled,” Leo promised with perfect truth. “So will the company brass.”

  “And fast?”

  “Just as soon as we get the go-ahead. I’ve got it laid out like a war game.” He closed his teeth on further double entendres. “You still planning the Grand Announcement to the rest of the staff at 1300 tomorrow?” Leo inquired casually. “In the main lecture module? I really want to be in on that, I have a few visual aids to present when you’re done.”

  “Naw,” said Van Atta.

  “What?” Leo gulped. He missed a step, and the springs slammed him painfully down on one knee on the treadmill, padded against just such clumsiness. He struggled back to his feet.

  “Did you hurt yourself?” said Van Atta. “You look funny.…”

  “I’ll be all right in a minute,” He stood, leg muscles straining against the elastic pull, regaining his breath and equilibrium in the face of pain and panic. “I thought—that was how you were going to drop the shoe. Get everybody together, just go over the facts once.”

  “After Minchenko, I’m tired of arguing about it,” said Van Atta. “I’ve told Yei to do it. She can call them into her office in small groups, and hand out the individual and department evacuation schedules at the same time. Much more efficient.”

  And so Leo and Silver’s beautiful scheme for peacefully detaching the downsiders, hammered out through four secret planning sessions, was blown away on a breath. Wasted was the flattery, the oblique suggestion, that had gone into convincing Van Atta that it was his idea to gather, unusually, the entire Habitat downsider staff at once and make his announcement in a speech persuading them all they were being commended, not condemned…

  The shaped charges to cut the lecture module away from the Habitat at the touch of a button were all in place. The emergency breath masks to supply the nearly three hundred bodies with oxygen for the few hours necessary to push the module around the planet to the Transfer Station were carefully hidden within. The two pusher crews were drilled, their pushers fueled and ready.

  Fool he had been, to lay plans that depended on Van Atta following through on anything… Leo felt suddenly sick.

  It was going to have to be the second-choice plan, then, the emergency one they’d discussed and discarded as too risky, too potentially uncontrolled in its results. Numbly, he detached his springs and harness and hooked them back in their slots on the treadmill frame.

  “That wasn’t an hour,” said Van Atta.

  “I think I did something to my knee,” lied Leo.

  “I’m not surprised. Think I didn’t know you’ve been skipping exercise sessions? Just don’t try to sue GalacTech, ‘cause we can prove personal neglect.” Van Atta grinned and marched on virtuously.

  Leo paused. “By the way, did you know that Rodeo Warehousing just misshipped the Habitat a hundred tons of gasoline? And they’re charging it to us.”

  “What?”

  As Leo turned away he had the small vindictive satisfaction of hearing Van Atta’s treadmill stop and the snap of a too-hastily-detached harness rebounding to slap its wearer. “Ow!” Van Atta cried.

  Leo did not look back.

  Dr. Curry met Claire as she arrived for her appointment at the infirmary. “Oh, good, you’re just on time.”

  Claire glanced up and down the corridor, and her eyes searched the treatment room into which Dr. Curry shoo’d her. “Where’s Dr. Minchenko? I thought he’d be here.”

  Dr. Curry flushed faintly. “Dr. Minchenko is in his quarters. He won’t be coming on duty.”

  “But I wanted to talk to him.…”

  Dr. Curry cleared his throat. “Did they tell you what your appointment was for?”

  “No… I supposed it was for more medication for my breasts.”

  “Ah, I see.”

  Claire waited a moment, but he did not expand further. He busied himself, laying out a tray of instruments by their velcro collars and placing them in the sterilizer, not meeting Claire’s eyes. “Well, it’s quite painless.”

  Once, she might have asked no questions, docilely submitting—she had undergone thousands of obscure medical tests starting even before she had been freed as an infant from the uterine replicator, the artificial womb that had gestated her in a now-closed section of this very infirmary. Once, she had been another person, before the downside disaster with Tony. For a little time thereafter she had hovered close to being no one at all. Now she felt strangely thrilled, as if she trembled on the edge of a new birth. Her first had been mechanical and painless, perhaps that was why it had failed to take root…

  “What—” she began to squeak. Too tiny a voice. She raised it, loud in her own ears. “What is this appointment for?”

  “Just a small local abdominal procedure,” said Dr. Curry airily. “It won’t take long. You don’t even have to get undressed, just roll up your shirt and push down your shorts a bit. I’ll prep you. You have to be immobilized under the sterile-air-flow shield, in case a drop or two of blood gets on the loose.”

  You’re not immobilizing me… “What is the procedure?”

  “It won’t hurt, and will do you no harm at all. Come on over, now.” He smiled, and tapped the shield unit, which folded out from the wall.

  “What?” repeated Claire, not moving.

  “I can’t discuss it. It’s—classified. Sorry. You’ll have to ask—Mr. Van Atta, or Dr. Yei, or somebody. Tell you what, I’ll send you over to Dr. Yei right after, and you can talk to her, all right?” He licked his lips; his smile grew steadily more nervous.

  “I wouldn’t ask…” Claire groped after a phrase she had heard a downsider use once, “I wouldn’t ask Bruce Van Atta for the time of day.”

  Dr. Curry looked quite startled. “Oh.” And muttered, not quite under his breath, “I wondered why you were second on the list.”

  “Who was first on the list?” asked Claire.

  “Silver, but that engineering instructor has her on some kind of assignment. Friend of yours, right? You’ll be able to tell her it doesn’t hurt.”

  “I don’t care—I don’t give a damn if it hurts, I want to know what it is.” Her eyes narrowed, as the connections clicked at last, then widened in outrage. “The sterilizations,” she br
eathed. “You’re starting the sterilizations!”

  “How did you—you weren’t supposed—I mean, whatever makes you think that?” gulped Curry.

  She dodged for the doorway. He was closer and quicker, and sealed it in front of her nose. She caromed off the closing panel.

  “Now, Claire, calm down!” panted Curry, zigzagging after her. “You’ll only hurt yourself, totally unnecessarily. I can put you under a general anesthetic, but it’s better for you to use a local, and just lie still. You do have to lie still. I have to do this, one way or another—”

  “Why do you have to do this?” cried Claire. “Did Dr. Minchenko have to do this—or is that why he isn’t here? Who’s making you, and how, that you have to?”

  “If Minchenko was here, I wouldn’t have to,” snapped Curry, infuriated. “He ducked out, and left me holding the bag. Now come over here and position yourself under the steri-shield, and let me set up the scanners, or I’ll have to get—get quite firm with you.” He inhaled deeply, psyching himself up.

  “Have to,” Claire taunted, “have to, have to! It’s amazing, some of the things downsiders think they have to do. But they’re almost never the same things they think quaddies have to do. Why is that, do you suppose?”

  His breath woofed out, and his lips tightened angrily. He plucked a hypodermic off his tray of instruments.

  He laid it out in advance, Claire thought. He’s rehearsed this, in his mind—he made his mind up before I ever got here…

  He launched himself over to where she hovered, and grabbed her left upper arm, stabbing the needle towards it in a swift silver arc. She grabbed his right wrist, slowing it to a straining standstill; so they were locked for a moment, muscles trembling, tumbling slowly in the air.

  Then she brought up her lower arms to join her uppers. Curry gasped in surprise, and for breath, as she parted his arms wide, overpowering even his young male torso. He kicked, his knees thumping her, but with nothing to push against he couldn’t drive them with enough force to really hurt.

  She grinned in wild exhilaration, brought his arms in, out again at will. I’m stronger! I’m stronger! I’m stronger than him and I never even knew it…