Miles, Mutants and Microbes - Lois McMaster Bujold [104]
Silver sucked on her lower lip. Then, leaning forward awkwardly in a seat never designed for quaddies, she released the brakes partway and powered up the port engine. The shuttle shuddered a few meters farther forward, skidding and yawing. Behind them, the monitor showed the groundcar half obscured by orange dust kicked up by the exhaust, its image wavering in the heat of it.
She set the brakes as hard as they would go and powered up the port engine yet more. Its purr became a whine—she dared not bring it to the howling pitch Ti had used during landing, who knew what would happen then?
The groundcar's plastic canopy cracked in a crazed starburst and began to sag. If Leo had been right in his description of that hydrocarbon fuel they used downside here for their vehicles, in just a second more she ought to get . . .
A yellow fireball engulfed the groundcar, momentarily brighter than the setting sun. Pieces flew off in all directions, arcing and bouncing fantastically in the gravity field. A glance at her monitors showed Silver the security men now all running in the other direction.
Silver powered down the port engine, released the brakes, and let the shuttle roll forward across the hard-baked mud. Fortunately, the old lake bed was quite uniform, so she didn't have to worry about the fine points of shuttle operation such as steering.
One of the security men ran after them for a minute or two, waving his arms, but he fell behind quickly. She let the shuttle roll on for a couple of kilometers, braked again, and shut the engines off.
"Well," she sighed, "that takes care of them."
"It certainly does," said Madame Minchenko faintly, adjusting the monitor magnification for a last glance behind. A column of black smoke and a dying orange glow in the distant gathering dusk marked their former parking place.
"I hope all their breath masks were well filled," Silver added.
"Oh, dear," said Madame Minchenko. "Perhaps we ought to go back and . . . do something. Surely they'll have the sense to stay with their car and wait for help, though, and not try to walk off into the desert. The company safety vids always emphasize that. 'Stay with your vehicle and wait for Search and Rescue.' "
"Aren't they supposed to be Search and Rescue?" Silver studied the tiny images in the monitor. "Not much vehicle left. But they all three seem to be staying there. Well . . ." She shook her head. "It's too dangerous for us to try and pick them up. But when Ti and the doctor get back with Tony, maybe the security guards could have your land rover to go home in. If, um, nobody else gets here first."
"Oh," said Madame Minchenko, "that's true. Good idea. I feel much better." She peered reflectively into the monitor. "Poor fellows."
Ice.
Leo watched from the sealed control booth overlooking the Habitat freight bay as four work-suited quaddies eased the intact vortex mirror taken from the D-620's second Necklin rod through the hatch from Outside. The mirror was an awkward object to handle, in effect an enormous shallow titanium funnel, three meters in diameter and a centimeter thick at its broad lip, mathematically curved and thickening to about two centimeters at the central, closed dip. A lovely curve, but definitely non-standard, a fact Leo's re-fabrication ploy must needs cope with.
The undamaged mirror was jockeyed into place, nested into a squiggle of freezer coils. The space-suited quaddies exited. From the control booth, Leo sealed the Outside hatch and set the air to pump back into the loading bay. In his anxiety Leo literally popped out of the control booth, with a whoosh of air from the remaining pressure differential, and had to work his jaw to clear his ears.
The only freezer coils big enough to be adequate to the task had been found by Bobbi in a moment