Miles, Mutants and Microbes - Lois McMaster Bujold [68]
"I am not going to cave," Claire reiterated through her teeth, answering the undercurrent, not the surface, of his speech.
"You scared me, that time in the airlock," he apologized, embarrassed.
"I scared myself," she admitted.
"You had a right to be angry. Just remember, your true target isn't in here—" he touched her collarbone, above her heart, fleetingly. "It's out there."
So, he had recognized it was rage, rage blocked and turned inward, and not despair that had brought her to the airlock that day. In a way, it was a relief to put the right name to her emotion. In a way it was not.
"Leo . . . that scares me too."
He smiled quizzically. "Welcome to the human club."
"The next step," she muttered. "Right. The next reach." She gave Leo a wave and swung into the corridor.
Leo turned back to the freight bay with a sigh. The next-step speech was all very well, except when people and changing conditions kept switching your route around in front of you while your foot was in the air. His gaze lingered a moment on the quaddie docking crew, who had connected the flex tube to the shuttle's large freight hatch and were unloading the cargo into the bay with their power handlers. The cargo consisted of man-high gray cylinders that Leo did not at first recognize.
But the cargo wasn't supposed to be unrecognizable.
The cargo was supposed to be a massive stock of spare cargo-pusher fuel rods. "For dismantling the Habitat," Leo had sung dulcetly to Van Atta, when jamming the requisition through. "So I won't have to stop and reorder. So what if we have leftovers, they can go to the transfer station with the pushers when they're relocated. Credit them to the salvage."
Disturbed, Leo drifted over to the cargo workers. "What's this, kids?"
"Oh, Mr. Graf, hello. Well, I'm not quite sure," said the quaddie boy in the canary-yellow T-shirt and shorts of Airsystems Maintenance, of which Docks & Locks was a subdivision. "I don't think I've ever seen it before. It's massive, anyway." He paused to unhook a report panel from his power-handler and gave it to Leo. "There's the freight manifest."
"It was supposed to be cargo-pusher fuel rods. . . ." The cylinders were about the right size. They surely couldn't have redesigned them. Leo tapped the manifest keypad—item, a string of code numbers, quantity, astronomical.
"They gurgle," the yellow-shirted quaddie added helpfully.
"Gurgle?" Leo looked at the code number on the report panel more closely, glanced at the gray cylinders—they matched. Yet he recognized the code for the pusher rods—or did he? He entered 'Fuel Rods, Orbital Cargo Pusher Type II, cross ref, inventory code.' The report panel blinked and a number popped up. Yes, it was the same—no, by God! G77618PD, versus the G77681PD emblazoned on the cylinders. Quickly he tapped in 'G77681PD.' There was a long pause, not for the report panel but for Leo's brain to register.
"Gasoline?" Leo croaked in disbelief. "Gasoline? Those idiots actually shipped a hundred tons of gasoline to a space station . . . ?"
"What is it?" asked the quaddie.
"Gasoline. It's a hydrocarbon fuel used downside, to power their land rovers. A freebie by-product from the petrochemical cracking. Atmospheric oxygen provides the oxidant. It's a bulky, toxic, volatile, flammable—explosive!—liquid at room temperature. For God's sake don't let any of those barrels get open."
"Yes, sir," promised the quaddie, clearly impressed with Leo's list of hazards.
The legged supervisor of the orbital pusher crews arrived at that moment in the bay, trailed by a gang of quaddies from his department.
"Oh, hello, Graf. Look, I think it was a mistake letting you talk me into ordering this load—we're going to have a storage problem—"
"Did you order this?" Leo demanded.
"What?" the supervisor blinked, then took in the