Falling Free

Chapter 9

Leo stretched for a look out the viewport of the cargo pusher at the rapidly-enlarging Transfer Station. Damn. The weekly passenger ship from Orient IV was already docked at the hub of the wheel. Newly arrived, it was doubtless still in the off-loading phase, but nothing seemed more likely to Leo than for a pilot—or ex-pilot—like Ti to invite himself aboard early, to kibbitz.

The Jump ship was blocked from view as they spiraled around the station to their own assigned shuttle hatch. The quaddie piloting the pusher, a dark-haired, copper-skinned girl named Zara in the purple T-shirt and shorts of the pusher crews, brought her ship smartly into alignment and clicked it delicately into the clamps on the landing spoke. Leo was encouraged toward belief in her top rating among the pusher pilots after all, despite his qualms about her age, barely fifteen.

The mild acceleration vector of the Station’s spin at this radius tugged at Leo, and his padded chair swung in its gimbals to the newly-defined “upright” position. Zara grinned over her shoulder at Leo, clearly exhilarated by the sensation. Silver, in the quaddie-formfit acceleration couch beside Zara, looked more dubious.

Zara completed the formal litany of cross-checks with Transfer Station traffic control, and shut down her systems. Leo sighed illogical relief that traffic control hadn’t questioned the vaguely-worded purpose of their filed flight plan—”Pick up material for the Cay Habitat.” There was no reason they should have. Leo wasn’t even close to exceeding his powers of authorization. Yet.

“Watch, Silver,” said Zara, and let a light-pen fall from her fingers. It fell slowly to the padded strip on the wall-now-floor, and bounced in a graceful arc. Zara’s lower hand scooped it back out of the air.

Leo waited resignedly while Silver tried it once too, then said, “Come on. We’ve got to catch Ti.”

“Right.” Silver pulled herself up by her upper hands on her headrest, swung her lowers free, and hesitated. Leo shook out his pair of grey sweat pants he’d brought for the purpose, and gingerly helped her pull them over her lower arms and up to her waist. She waved her hands and the ends of the pant legs flopped and flapped over them. She grimaced at the unaccustomed constraint of the bundled cloth upon her dexterity.

“All right, Silver,” said Leo, “now the shoes you borrowed from that girl running Hydroponics.”

“I gave them to Zara to stow.”

“Oh,” said Zara. One of her upper hands flew to her lips.

“What?”

“I left them in the docking bay.”

“Zara!”

“Sorry…”

Silver blew out her breath against Leo’s neck. “Maybe your shoes, Leo,” she suggested.

“I don’t know…” Leo kicked out of his shoes, and Zara helped Silver slip her lower hands into them.

“How do they look?” said Silver anxiously.

Zara wrinkled her nose. “They look kinda big.”

Leo sidled around to catch their reflection in the darkened port. They looked absurd. Leo regarded his feet as though he’d never seen them before. Did they look that absurd on him? His socks seemed suddenly like enormous white worms. Feet were insane appendages. “Forget the shoes. Give ‘em back. Just let the pant legs cover your hands.”

“What if someone asks what happened to my feet?” Silver worried aloud.

“Amputated,” suggested Leo, “due to a terrible case of frostbite suffered on your vacation to the Antarctic Continent.”

“Isn’t that on Earth? What if they start asking questions about Earth?”

“Then I’ll—I’ll quash them for rudeness. But most people are pretty inhibited about asking questions like that. We can still use the original story about your wheelchair being Lost Luggage, and we’re on our way to try and get it back. They’ll believe that. Come on.” Leo backed up to her. “All aboard.” Her upper arms twined around his neck, and her lowers clamped around his waist with slightly paranoid pressure, as she cautiously entrusted her newfbund weight to him. Her breath was warm, and tickled his ear.

They ducked through the flex tube and into the Transfer Station proper. Leo headed for the elevator stack that ran up—or down—the length of the spoke to the rim where the transient rest cubicles were to be found.

Leo waited for an empty elevator. But it stopped again, and others boarded. Leo had a brief spasm of terror that Silver might try to strike up a friendly conversation—he should have told her explicitly not to talk to strangers—but she maintained a shy reserve. Transfer Station personnel gave them a few uncomfortable covert stares, but Leo gazed coldly at the wall and no one attempted to broach the silence.

Leo staggered, exiting the elevator at the outer rim where the gee forces were maximized. Little though he wished to admit it, three months of null-gee deconditioning had had its inevitable effect. But at half-gee, Silver’s weight didn’t even bring their combined total up to his Earthside norm, Leo told himself sternly. He shuffled off as rapidly as possible away from the populated foyer.

Leo knocked on the numbered cubicle door. It slid open. A male voice, “Yeah, what?” They had cornered the Jump pilot. Leo plastered an inviting smile on his face, and they entered.

Ti was propped up on the bed, dressed in dark trousers, T-shirt, and socks, idly scanning a hand-viewer. He glanced up in mild irritation at Leo, unfamiliar to him, then his eyes widened as he saw Silver. Leo dumped Silver as unceremoniously as a cat on the foot of the bed, and plopped into the cubicle’s sole chair to catch his breath. “Ti Gulik. Gotta talk to you.”

Ti had recoiled to the head of the bed, knees drawn up, hand viewer rolled aside and forgotten. “Silver! What the hell are you doing here? Who’s this guy?” He jerked a thumb at Leo.

“Tony’s welding teacher. Leo Graf,” answered Silver smearily. Experimentally, she rolled over and pushed her torso upright with her upper hands. “This feels weird.” She raised her upper hands, balancing, Leo thought, for all the world like a seal on a tripod formed by her lower arms. “Huh.” She returned her upper hands to the bed, to lend support, achieving a dog-like posture, fine hair flattened, all her grace stolen by gravity. No doubt about it, quaddies belonged in null-gee.

“We need your help, Lieutenant Gulik,” Leo began as soon as he could. “Desperately.” “Who’s we?” asked Ti suspiciously. “The quaddies.”

“Hah,” said Ti darkly. “Well, the first thing I would like to point out is that I am not Lieutenant Gulik any more. I’m plain Ti Gulik, unemployed, and quite possibly unemployable. Thanks to the quaddies. Or at any rate, one quaddie.” He frowned at Silver.

“I told them it wasn’t your fault,” said Silver. “They wouldn’t listen to me.”

“You might at least have covered for me,” said Ti petulantly. “You owed me that much.”

He might as well have hit her, from the look on her face. “Back off, Gulik,” Leo growled. “Silver was drugged and tortured to extract that confession. Seems to me any owing in here goes in the other direction.”

Ti flushed. Leo bit back his annoyance. They couldn’t afford to piss the Jump pilot off, they needed him too much. Besides, this wasn’t the conversation Leo had rehearsed. Ti should be leaping through hoops for those morning-glory eyes of Silver’s, the psychology of reward and all that—surely he must respond to a plea for her good. If the young lout didn’t appreciate her, he didn’t deserve to have her—Leo forced his thoughts back to the matter at hand.

“Have you heard about this new artificial gravity field technology yet?” Leo began again.

“Something,” admitted Ti warily.

“Well, it’s killed the Cay Project. GalacTech’s dropping out of the quaddie business.”

“Huh. Yeah, well, that makes sense.”

Leo waited a beat for the next logical question, which didn’t come. Ti wasn’t an idiot, he was therefore being deliberately dense. Leo pushed on relentlessly. “They plan to ship the quaddies downside to Rodeo, to an abandoned workers’ barracks—” he repeated the forgotten-to-death scenario he had described to Pramod a week earlier, and looked up to gauge its effect.

The pilot’s face was closed and neutral. “Well, I’m very sorry for them,” Ti did not look at Silver, “but I totally fail to see what I’m supposed to do about it. I’m leaving Rodeo in six hours, never to return—which is just fine with me, by the way. This place is a pit.”

“And Silver and the quaddies are being dropped into that pit and the lid clamped over them. And the only crime they’ve committed is to become technologically obsolete. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” cried Leo heatedly.

Ti bolted upright indignantly. “You want to talk about technological obsolescence? I’ll show you technological obsolescence. This!” His hand touched the implant plugs at midforehead and temples, the can-nula at the nape of his neck. “This! I trained for two years and waited in line for a year for the surgery to implant my Jump set. It’s a tensor bit-code version, because that’s the Jump system GalacTech uses, and they underwrote part of the cost of it. Trans-Stellar Transport and a few independents also use it. Everybody else in the universe is gearing up to Necklin color-drive. You know what my chances of being hired by TST are, after being fired by GalacTech? Zilch. Zero. Nada. If I want a Jump pilot’s job, I need this surgically removed and a new implant. Without a job, I can’t afford an implant. Without an implant, I can’t get a job. Screw you, Ti Gulik!” He sat, panting.

Leo leaned forward. “I’ll give you a pilot’s berth, Gulik,” he said clearly. “On the biggest Jump ship ever to fly.” Rapidly, before the pilot could interrupt, he detailed his vision of the Habitat converted to colony ship. “It’s all here. All we need is a pilot. A pilot who can plug into the GalacTech drive system. All we need—is you.”

Ti looked perfectly appalled. “You’re not just talking grand lunacy—you’re talking grand larceny! Do you realize what the cash value of the total configuration would be? They wouldn’t let you out of jail till the next millennium!”

“I’m not going to jail. I’m going to the stars with the quaddies.”

“Your cell will be padded.”

“This isn’t crime. This is—war, or something. Crime is turning your back and walking away.”

“Not by any legal code I know of.”

“All right then; sin.”

“Oh, brother.” Ti rolled his eyes. “Now it comes out. You’re on a mission from God, right? Let me off at the next stop, please.”

God’s not here. Somebody’s got to fill in. Leo backed off hastily from that line of thought. Padded cells, indeed. “I thought you were in love with Silver. How can you abandon her to a slow death?”

“Ti’s not in love with me,” interrupted Silver in surprise. “Whatever gave you that idea, Leo?”

Ti gave her an unsettled look. “No, of course not,” he agreed faintly. “You, ah—you always knew, right? We just had a mutually beneficial little arrangement, is all.”

“That’s right,” confirmed Silver. “I got books and vids, Ti got relief from physiological stress. Downsider males need sex to stay healthy, you know, they can’t cope with stress. It makes them disruptive. Wild genes, I suppose.”

“Where did that line of bullshit come from—?” Leo began, and broke off. “Never mind.” He could guess. He closed his eyes, pressed them with his fingertips, and groped for his lost argument. “Right. So to you, Silver is just… disposable. Like a tissue. Sneeze in her and toss her away.”

Ti looked stung. “Give it up, Graf. I’m no worse than anyone else.”

“But I’m giving you the chance to be better, don’t you see—”

“Leo,” Silver interrupted again. She was now sprawled on her stomach on the bed, her chin propped awkwardly on one upper hand. “After we get to our asteroid belt—wherever it turns out to be—what are we going to do with the Superjumper?”

“The Superjumper?”

“We’ll be detaching the Habitat and opening it out again, surely—building on to it—the Jumper unit would just be sitting there in parking orbit. Can’t we give it to Ti?”

“What?” said Leo and Ti together. “As payment. He jumps us to our destination, he gets to keep the Jump ship. Then he can go off and be a pilot-owner, set up his own transport business, whatever he likes.” “In a stolen ship?” yipped Ti. “If we’re far enough away that GalacTech can’t catch up with us, we’re far enough away that GalacTech can’t catch up with you,” said Silver logically. “Then you’ll have a ship that fits your neural implant, and nobody will be able to fire you again, because you’ll be working for yourself.”

Leo bit his tongue. He’d brought Silver along expressly to help persuade Ti—so what if it wasn’t the blandishment he’d envisioned? From the blitzed look on the pilot’s face, they’d gotten through to his launch-button at last. Leo lidded his eyes and smiled encouragement at her.

“Besides,” she went on, her eyelashes fluttering in return, “if we do succeed in Jumping out of here, Habitat and all, Mr. Van Atta’s going to be left looking an awful fool.” She let her head flop back on the bed and smiled sideways at Ti.

“Oh,” said Ti in a tone of enlightenment. “Ah…”

“Are your bags all packed?” asked Leo helpfully.

“Over there,” Ti nodded to a pile of luggage in the corner. “But… but… dammit, if this thing crashes, they’ll crucify me!”

“Ah,” said Leo. “Here, see…” he opened his red coveralls at the neck and drew out the laser-solderer concealed in an inner pocket. “I jimmied the safety on this thing; it’ll fire an extremely intense beam for quite a distance now, until the atmosphere dissipates it—farther than the distance across this room, certainly.” He waved it negligently; Ti ducked, eyes widening. “If we end up under arrest, you can truthfully testify that you were kidnapped at gunpoint by a crazed engineer and his mad mutant assistant and made to cooperate under duress. You may be a hero one way—or another.”

The mad mutant assistant smiled blindingly at Ti, her eyes like stars.

“You, ah—wouldn’t really fire that thing, would you?” choked Ti cautiously.

“Of course not,” Leo said jovially, baring his teeth. He put the solderer away.

“Ah.” Ti’s mouth twitched briefly in response. But his eye returned often thereafter to the lump in Leo’s coveralls.

When they made it back to the shuttle hatch where the pusher was docked, Zara was gone.

“Oh, God,” moaned Leo. Had she wandered off? Gotten lost? Been forcibly removed? A frantic inventory found no message left on the comm, no note pinned anywhere.

“Pilot, she’s a pilot,” Leo reasoned aloud. “Is there anything she could have needed to do? We’ve plenty of fuel—communicating with traffic control is done right from here…” He realized, with a cold chill, that he hadn’t actually forbidden her to leave the pusher. It had been so self-evident that she was to stay out of sight, and on guard. Self-evident to himself, Leo realized. Who could say what was self-evident to a quaddie?

“I could fly this thing, if necessary,” said Ti in a most unpressing tone, looking over the control deck. “It’s all manual.”

“That’s not the point,” said Leo. “We can’t leave without her. The quaddies aren’t supposed to be over here at all. If she gets picked up by the Station authorities and they start asking questions—always assuming she hasn’t been picked up by something worse…”

“What worse?”

“I don’t know what worse, that’s the trouble.”

Silver meanwhile had rolled off the acceleration couch to the deck strip. After a moment of thoughtful experimentation, she achieved a four-handed forward shuffle, and marched off past Leo’s knees, pant legs trailing.

“Where are you going?”

“After Zara.”

“Silver, stay with the ship. We don’t need two of you lost, for God’s sake,” Leo ordered sternly. “Ti and I can move much faster, we’ll find her.”

“I don’t think so,” murmured Silver distantly. She reached the flex tube, stared up and down the corridor which curved away to right and left, ringing the spoke. “You see, I don’t think she’s gone far.”

“If she got on the elevator, she could be practically anywhere on the Station by now,” said Ti.

Silver reared up on her tripoded lower arms, raised her uppers over her head, and narrowed her eyes for a look around the elevator foyer to her left. “The controls would be hard for a quaddie to reach. Besides, she’d know she was more likely to run into downsiders there. I think she went this way.” She raised her chin and shuffled determinedly off to her right on all fours. After a moment she picked up speed by changing her gait to a series of gazelle-like bounds in the low-gee of the spoke. Leo and Ti, of necessity, bounded after her. Leo felt absurdly like a man chasing a runaway pet. It was an optical illusion of the quadrimanual locomotion—quaddies even looked more human in free fall.

A strange rumbling noise approached around the curve of the corridor. Silver hooted, and skidded to one side against the outer wall.

“Oh, sorry!” cried Zara, whizzing past torso-down and chin up on a low roller-pallet, all four hands going like paddle wheels to propel her along the deck. Braking proved more difficult than acceleration, and Zara fetched up beside Silver with a crash.

Leo, horrified, bounded over to them, but Zara was already disentangling herself and sitting up cheerfully. Even the roller pallet was undamaged.

“Look Silver,” Zara said, flipping the pallet over, “wheels! I wonder how they’re beating the friction, inside those casings? Feel, they’re not hot at all.”

“Zara,” cried Leo, “why did you leave the ship?”

“I wanted to see what a downsider toilet chamber looked like,” said Zara, “but there wasn’t one on this level. All I found was a closet full of cleaning supplies, and this,” she patted the roller pallet. “Can I take the wheels apart and see what’s inside?” “No!” roared Leo.

She looked quite put-out. “But I want to know!” “Bring it along,” Silver suggested, “and take it apart later.” Her eyes flicked up and down the corridor; Leo was slightly consoled that at least one quaddie shared his sense of urgency.

“Yes, later,” Leo agreed, for the sake of expediency. “Let’s go now.” He tucked the roller pallet firmly under his arm, to thwart further experimentation. The quaddies, he reflected, didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of private property. Probably came from a lifetime spent in a communal space habitat, with its tight ecology. Planets were communal in the same way, really, except that their enormous size put so much slack in their systems, it was disguised.

Habits of thought, indeed. Here he was worried over the theft of a roller pallet, while planning the greatest space heist in human history. Ti almost bolted when he found out what the rest of the assignment they had planned for him was to be. Leo, prudently, didn’t fill in these details until the pusher was safely launched from the Transfer Station and halfway back to the Habitat.

“You want me to hijack the Superjumper!” yelped Ti.

“No, no,” Leo soothed him. “You’re only going along as an advisor. The quaddies will take the ship.”

“But my ass will depend on whether or not they can—”

“Then I suggest you advise well.”

“Ye gods.”

“The trouble with you, Ti,” lectured Leo kindly, “is that you lack teaching experience. If you had, you’d have faith that the most unlikely people can learn the most amazing things. After all, you weren’t born knowing how to pilot a Jump—yet lives depended on your doing it right the first time, and every time thereafter. Now you’ll know how your instructors felt, that’s all.”

“How do instructors feel?”

Leo lowered his voice and grinned. “Terrified. Absolutely terrified.”

A second pusher, packed with fuel and supplies for its long-range excursion, was waiting in the slot next to theirs as they docked at the Habitat. Leo resisted a strong urge to take Ti aside and fill his ear with advice and suggestions for his mission. Alas, their experience in criminal theft was all too comparable—zero equalled zero no matter how unequal the years each was multiplied by.

They floated through the hatch into the docking module to find several anxious quaddies waiting for them.

“I’ve modified more solderers, Leo,” Pramod began unnecessarily—three of his four hands clutched the improvised arsenal to his torso. “One each for five people.”

Claire, hovering at his shoulder, eyed the weapons with dread fascination.

“Good. Give them to Silver, she’ll have charge of them until the pusher gets to the wormhole,” said Leo.

They made their way down the hand grips to the next hatch. Zara swung within to begin her pre-flight checks.

Ti craned his neck after her nervously. “Are we leaving right now?”

“Time is critical,” said Leo. “We don’t have more than four hours till you’re missed at the Transfer Station.”

“Shouldn’t there be a—a briefing, or something?” Ti too, Leo appreciated, was having trouble committing himself to falling free. Well, jumped or was pushed, after the initial impulse it would make no practical difference.

“You’ll have almost twenty-four hours, boosting at one gee to midpoint and then flipping and braking the rest of the way, to work out your plan of attack. Silver will be depending on your knowledge of the Superjumpers. We’ve already discussed various methods of achieving surprise. She’ll fill you in.” “Oh, is Silver going?”

“Silver,” Leo enlightened him gently, “is in command.”

Ti’s face flickered through an array of expressions, settled on dismay. “Screw this. There’s still time for me to go back and catch my ship—”

“And that,” Leo overrode him, “is precisely why Silver is in charge. Your capture of a cargo Jumper is the signal for a quaddie uprising here on the Habitat. And that uprising is their death warrant. When GalacTech discovers it cannot control the quaddies, it will almost certainly be frightened into an attempt to violently exterminate them. Escape must be assured before we tip our hand. The ship you must catch is out that way.” Leo pointed. “I can depend on Silver to remember that. You,” Leo smiled thinly, “are no worse than anyone else.” Ti subsided at that, although not happily. Silver, Zara, Siggy, a particularly husky quaddie from the pusher crews named Jon, and Ti. Five, crammed into a ship meant for a crew of two and not designed for overnight use in any case. Leo sighed. The Superjumpers carried a pilot and an engineer. Five-to-two wasn’t altogether bad odds, but Leo wished he could have loaded them even more overwhelmingly in the quaddies’ favor.

They filed through the flex tube into the pusher. Silver, at the end, paused to embrace Pramod and Claire, who had lingered to see them off.

“We’re going to get Andy back,” Silver murmured to Claire. “You’ll see.”

Claire nodded, and hugged her hard.

Silver turned last to Leo, who was gazing doubtfully at the flex tube through which the crew he’d drafted had gone.

“I thought the quaddies were going to be the weak link in this hijacking operation,” jittered Leo, “now I’m not so sure. Don’t let Ti cave on you, eh, Silver? Don’t let him bring you down. You have to succeed.”

“I know. I’ll try. Leo… why did you think Ti was in love with me?”

“I don’t know… You were intimate—the power of suggestion, maybe. All those romances.”

“Ti doesn’t read romances, he reads Ninja of the Twin Stars.”

“Weren’t you in love with him? At first, anyway?”

She frowned. “It was exciting, to be beating the rules with him. But Ti is… well, is Ti. Love like in the books—I always knew it wasn’t really real. When I got to looking around, at our own downsiders, nobody was like that. I guess I was stupid, to like those stories so much.”

“I suppose they’re not realistic—I haven’t read them either, to tell you the truth. But it’s not stupid to want something more, Silver.”

“More than what?”

More than to be worked over by a lot of self-centered legged louts, that’s what. We’re not all like that… are we? Why, after all, was he being moved now to lay a load of his own on her, when she needed all her concentration for the task ahead? Leo shook his head. “Anyway, don’t let Ti get confused between his Ninja-whatsit and what you’re trying to do, either.”

“I don’t think even Ti could mistake a company Jumpship crew for the Black League of Eridani,” said Silver.

Leo could have wished for more certainty in her tone. “Well…”he cleared his throat, inexplicably blocked, “take care. Don’t get hurt.”

“You be careful too.” She did not hug him, as she had Pramod and Claire.

“Right.”

And don’t ever believe, his mind cried after her as she vanished into the flex tube, that nobody could love you, Silver… But it was too late to call the words aloud. The airseal doors shut with a sigh like regret.