• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Oh, God.

The vortex mirror was cracked. Over three meters wide at its elliptical lip, mathematically shaped and polished to angstrom-unit precision, it was an integral control surface of the jump system, reflecting, bleeding or amplifying the Necklin field generated by the main rods at the will of the pilot. Not just cracked—shattered in a starry burst, cold titanium deformed past its limits. Leo moaned.

A second light shone in past him. Leo glanced around to find Pramod at his shoulder.

"Is that as bad as it looks?" Pramod's voice choked over the suit com.

"Yes," sighed Leo.

"You can't—do a welded repair on those, can you?" Pramod's voice was rising. "What are we going to do?"

Fatigue and fear, the worst possible combination—Leo kept his own tired voice flat. "My suit supply-level readout says we're going to go Inside and take a break right now. After that we'll see."

To Leo's immense relief, by the time he had unsuited, Vatel had retrieved the errant pusher and brought it back to dock at its Habitat module. They unloaded a frightened, bruised quaddie pilot.

"It locked on, I couldn't get it off," she wept. "What did I hit? Did I hit somebody? I didn't want to dump the fuel—it was the only way I could think of to kill the jet. I'm sorry I wasted it. I couldn't shut it off . . ."

She was, Leo guessed, all of fourteen years old. "How long have you been on work shift?" he demanded.

"Since we started," she sniffed. She was shaking, all four of her hands trembling, as she hung in air sideways to him. He resisted an urge to straighten her "up".

"Good God, child, that's over twenty-six hours straight. Go take a break. Eat something and go sleep."

She looked at him in bewilderment. "But the dorm units are all cut off and bundled with the crèches. I can't get there from here."

"Is that why . . . ? Look, three-fourths of the Habitat is inaccessible right now. Stake out a corner of the suit locker room or anywhere you can find." He gazed at her tears in bafflement a moment, then added, "It's allowed." She clearly wanted her own familiar sleep sack, which Leo was in no position to supply.

"All by myself?" she said in a very small voice.

She'd probably never slept with less than seven other kids in the room in her life, Leo reflected. He took a deep, controlling breath—he would not start screaming at her, no matter how wonderfully it would relieve his own feelings—how had he gotten sucked into this children's crusade, anyway? He could not at the moment recall.

"Come along." He took her by the hand off to the locker room, found a laundry bag to hook to the wall, and helped stuff her into it along with a packaged sandwich. Her face peered from the opening, making him feel for a weird moment like a man in process of drowning a sack of kittens.

"There." He forced a smile. "All better, huh?"

"Thank you, Leo," she sniffed. "I'm sorry about the pusher. And the fuel."

"We'll take care of it." He winked heroically. "Get some sleep, huh? There'll still be plenty of work to do when you wake up. You're not going to miss anything. Uh . . . nighty-night."

" 'Night . . ."

In the corridor he rubbed his hands over his face. "Nng . . ."

Three-fourths of the Habitat inaccessible? It was more like nine-tenths by now. And all the module bundles were running on emergency power, waiting to be reattached to the main power supply as they were loaded into the superjumper. It was vital to the safety and comfort of those trapped aboard various sub-units that the Habitat be fully reconfigured and made operational as swiftly as possible.

Not to mention everyone's having to start to learn their way around a new maze. Multiple compromises had driven the design—crèche units, for example, could go in an interior bundle; docks and locks had to be positioned facing out into space; some garbage vents were unavoidably cut off, power mods had to be positioned just so, the nutrition units, now serving some three thousand meals a day, required certain kinds of access to storage.