Miles, Mutants and Microbes - Lois McMaster Bujold [88]
Claire floated after him with gratitude. Even Andy stopped crying.
Pramod hadn't been joking about the clamps, Leo thought with a sigh, as he studied the fused lump of metal before him. He punched up the specs on the computer board floating beside him, a bit slowly and clumsily with his pressure-gloved hands. This particular insulated pipe conducted sewage. Unglamorous, but a mistake here could be just as much a disaster as any other.
And a lot messier, Leo thought with a grim grin. He glanced up at Bobbi and Pramod hovering at the ready beside him in their silvery work suits; five other quaddie work teams were visible along the Habitat's surface, and a pusher jockeyed into position nearby. Rodeo's sunlit crescent wheeled in the background. Well, they must certainly be the galaxy's most expensive plumbers.
The mess of variously-coded pipes and tubing before him formed the umbilical connections between one module and the next, shielded by an outer casing from microdust pitting and other hazards. The task at hand was to re-align the modules in uniform longitudinal bundles to withstand acceleration. Each bundle, strapped together like the cargo pods, would form a sturdy, self-supporting, balanced mass, at least in terms of the relatively low thrusts Leo was contemplating. Just like driving a team of yoked hippopotamuses. But re-aligning the modules entailed re-aligning all their connections, and there were lots and lots and lots of connections.
A movement caught the corner of Leo's eye. Pramod's helmet followed the tilt of Leo's.
"There they go," Pramod remarked. Both triumph and regret mingled in his voice.
The life pod with the last remnant of downsiders aboard fled silently into the void, a flash of light winking off a port even as it shrank from sight around Rodeo's curvature. That was it, then, for the legged ones, bar himself, Dr. Minchenko, Mama Nilla, and a slightly demented young supervisor waving a spanner they'd pried out of a duct who declared his violent love for a quaddie girl in Airsystems Maintenance and refused to be budged. If he came to his senses by the time they reached Orient IV, Leo decided, they could drop him off. Meantime it was a choice between shooting him or putting him to work. Leo had eyed the spanner, and put him to work.
Time. The seconds seemed to wriggle over Leo's skin like bugs, beneath his suit. The remnant group of evicted downsiders must soon catch up with the bewildered first batch and start comparing notes. It wouldn't be long after that, Leo judged, that GalacTech must start making its counter-moves. It didn't take an engineer to see a thousand ways in which the Habitat was vulnerable. The only option left to the quaddies now was speedy flight.
Phlegmatic calm, Leo reminded himself, was the key to getting out of this alive. Remember that. He turned his attention back to the job at hand. "All right, Bobbi, Pramod, let's do it. Get ready with the emergency shut-offs on both ends, and we'll get this monster horsed around . . ."
Chapter 13
His fellow refugees gave way before him as Bruce Van Atta stormed out of the boarding tube and into the passenger arrival lounge of Rodeo Shuttleport Three. He had to pause a moment, hands braced on his knees, to overcome a wave of dizziness induced by his abrupt return to planetside gravity. Dizziness and rage.
For several hours during the ride around Rodeo orbit in the cut-off lecture module Van Atta had been horribly certain that Graf was intending to murder them all, despite the contrary evidence of the breath masks. If this was war, Graf would never make a good soldier. Even I know better than to humiliate a man like this, and then leave him alive. You'll be sorry you double-crossed me, Graf; sorrier still you didn't kill me when you had the chance. He restrained his rage with an effort.
Van Atta had ordered himself aboard the first available shuttle down from a transfer station overburdened