Miles, Mutants and Microbes - Lois McMaster Bujold [79]
Claire's heart thumped. "Tony—did they get Tony aboard?"
Pramod shook his head, his dark eyes sharing her pain. "No, fuel rods. Leo's really anxious about them. He's afraid that without them we might not have enough power to boost the Habitat all the way out to the wormhole."
"Oh—yes, of course." Claire folded back into herself.
"Stay in here, hang on, and ignore any emergency klaxons you may hear," said Pramod. His lower hands clenched together in a gesture of encouragement, and he withdrew.
Claire settled back to wait. She could have wept with the tension of it, but Patty and Emma didn't need the bad example.
Bruce Van Atta pressed a finger to one side of his nose, squeezing the nostril shut, and sniffed mightily, then switched sides and repeated the procedure. Damn free fall and its lack of proper sinus drainage, among its other discomforts. He could hardly wait to get back to Earth. Even dismal Rodeo would be an improvement. He wondered idly if he could whip up some excuse—go inspect the quaddie barracks being readied, perhaps. That could be stretched out to about five days, if he worked it right.
He drifted over and shored himself across one corner of Dr. Yei's pie-wedge-shaped office, sighting over her desk, his back to a flat inner wall and his feet braced where her magnet-board curved, thick with stuck-on papers and flimsies. Yei's lips tightened with annoyance as she swiveled to face him. He hitched his feet to a comfortably crossed position, deliberately letting them muss her papers, out-psyching the psycher. She glanced back to her holovid display, declining to rise to the bait, and he mussed a few more. Female wimp, he thought. A relief, that they had only a few weeks left to work together, and he didn't have to jolly her up any more.
"So," he prodded, "how far along are we?"
"Well, I don't know how you're doing—in fact," she added rather venomously, "I don't even know what you're doing—"
Van Atta grinned in appreciation. So the worm could wriggle after all. Some administrators might have taken offense at the implied insubordination; he congratulated himself upon his sense of humor.
"—but so far I've finished orienting about half the staff to their new assignments."
"Anybody give you a hard time? I'll play bad guy, if necessary," he offered nobly, "and go lean on the non-cooperative."
"Everybody is naturally rather shocked," she replied, "however, I don't think your . . . direct intervention will be required."
"Good," he said jovially.
"I do think it would have been better to tell them all at once. This business of releasing the information in bits and dribbles invites just the sort of rumor-mongering that is least desirable."
"Yeah, well, it's too late now—"
His words were cut short by the startling hoot of an alarm klaxon, shrilling out over the intercom. Yei's holovid was abruptly overridden by the Central Systems emergency channel.
A hoarse male voice, a strained face—good God, it was Leo Graf—sprang from the display.
"Emergency, emergency," Graf called—where was he calling from?—"we are having a depressurization emergency. This is not a drill. All Habitat downsider staff should proceed at once to the designated safe area and remain there until the all-clear sounds—"
On the holovid, a computer-generated map sketched itself showing the shortest route from this terminal to the designated safe modules—module, Van Atta saw. Holy shit, the pressurization drop must be Habitat-wide. What the hell was going on?
"Emergency, emergency, this is not a drill," Graf repeated.
Yei too was staring bug-eyed at the map, looking more like a frog than ever. "How can that be? The sealing system is supposed to isolate the problem area from the rest—"
"I bet I know," spat Van Atta. "Graf's been messing with the Habitat's structure, preparatory to salvage—I'll bet he, or his quaddies, just screwed something up royally. Unless it was that idiot Wyzak did something—come on!"
"Emergency, emergency," Graf's voice droned on, "this is not a drill. All Habitat downsider staff should proceed at once—son-of-a-bitch!"