"Cease firing," Leo ordered.
And there it hung, their sphere of molten metal, blue-white with the violent heat energy contained within it, perfect. Leo checked and re-checked its centered position, and had laser number two give it one more half-second blast not for melt but for momentum's sake.
"All right," said Leo into his suit com. "Now let's get everything out of this module that's going out, and double-check everything that's staying. Last thing we need now is for somebody to drop his wrench in the soup pot, right?"
Leo joined the quaddies in shoving their equipment unceremoniously out the holes torn in the side of the module. Two of his laser operators went with it, two stayed with Leo. Leo checked centering again, and then they all strapped themselves to the walls.
Leo switched channels in his suit com. "Ready, Zara?" he called.
"Ready, Leo," the quaddie pilot responded from her pusher, now attached to the gutted module's stern.
"Now remember, slow and gentle does it. But firm. Pretend your pusher is a scalpel, and you're just about to operate on one of your friends or something."
"Right, Leo." There was a grin in her voice. Don't swagger, girl, Leo prayed inwardly.
"Go when you're ready."
"Going. Hang on up there!"
There was at first no perceivable change. Then Leo's harness straps began to tug gently at him. It was the Habitat module, not the molten ball of titanium, that was moving, Leo reminded himself. The metal did not drift; it was the back wall that moved forward and engulfed it.
It was working, by God it was working! The metal bubble touched the back wall, spread out, and settled into its shallow bowl mold.
"Increase acceleration by the first increment," Leo called into his com. The pusher powered up, and the molten titanium circle spread, its edges growing toward the desired diameter some three meters wide, already losing its bright glow. Creating a titanium blank of controlled thickness, ready (after cooling) for explosive molding into its final subtle form.
"Steady on. That does it!"
Splat-cooling? Well, not exactly. Leo was uncomfortably aware that they were probably not going to achieve a perfect internal single-crystal freeze. But it would be good, good enough—as long as it was good enough that they didn't have to melt it down and start all over again, that was the most Leo dared pray for. They might, barely, have time to make one of these suckers. Not two. And when was the threatened response from Rodeo arriving? Soon, surely.
He wondered briefly what the new gravity technology was going to do to fabrication problems in space like this. Revolutionize seemed too mild a term, certainly. Too bad we didn't have some now, he thought. Still—he grinned, concealed within his helmet—they were doing all right.
He pointed his temperature gauge at the back wall. The piece was cooling almost as rapidly as he had hoped. They were still due for a couple of hours of driving around until it had dumped enough heat to remove from the wall and handle without danger of deformation.
"All right, Bobbi, I'm leaving you and Zara in charge here," Leo said. "It's looking good. When the temperature drops to about five hundred degrees centigrade, bring it on back. We'll try to be ready for the final cooling and the second phase of the shaping."
Carefully, trying not to add excess vibration to the walls, Leo loosed his harness and climbed to the exit hole. From this distance he had a fine view of the D-620, now more than half loaded, and Rodeo beyond. Better go now, before the view became more distant than his suit jets could close.
He activated his jets and zipped quickly away from the side of the still-gently-accelerating module-and-pusher unit. It chugged off, looking a drunken, jury-rigged wreck indeed, concealing hope in its heart.
Leo aimed toward the Habitat, and Phase II of his Jumpships-Repaired-While-U-Wait scheme.
It was sunset on the dry lake bed. Silver gazed anxiously into the monitor in the shuttle control cabin as it swept the horizon, brightening and darkening each time the red ball of the sun rolled past.
"They can't possibly be back for at least another hour," Madame Minchenko, watching her, pointed out, "in the best case."
"That's not who I'm looking for," answered Silver.
"Hm." Madame Minchenko drummed her long, age-sculptured fingers on the console, unlatched and tilted back the co-pilot's seat, and stared thoughtfully at the cabin roof. "No, I suppose not. Still—if GalacTech traffic control saw you land and sent out a jetcopter to investigate, they should have been here before now. Perhaps they missed your landing after all."
"Perhaps they're just not very organized," suggested Silver, "and they'll be along any minute."
Madame Minchenko sighed. "All too likely." She regarded Silver, pursing her lips. "And what are you supposed to do in that case?"
"I have a weapon." Silver touched the laser-solderer, lying seductively on the console before the pilot-commander's seat in which she sprawled. "But I'd rather not shoot anybody else. Not if I can help it."
"Anybody else?" There was a shade more respect in Madame Minchenko's voice.
Shooting people was such a stupid activity, why should everybody—anybody!—be so impressed? Silver wondered irritably. You would think she had done something truly great, like discover a new treatment for black stem-rot. Her mouth tightened.
Then her lips parted, and she leaned forward to stare into the monitor. "Oh, oh. Here comes a groundcar."
"Not our boys already, surely," said Madame Minchenko in some unease. "Has something gone wrong, I wonder?"
"It's not your land rover." Silver fiddled with the resolution. The slanting sunlight poured through the dust, turning it into a glowing red smokescreen. "I think . . . it's a GalacTech Security groundcar."
"Oh, dear." Madame Minchenko sat up straight. "Now what?"
"We don't open the hatches, anyway. No matter what."
In a few minutes the groundcar pulled up about fifty meters from the shuttle. An antenna rose from its roof and quivered demandingly. Silver switched on the com—it was so irritating, not to have the full use of her lower arms—and called up a menu of the com channels from the computer. The shuttle seemed to have access to an inordinate number of them. Security audio was 9999. She tuned them in.
"—by God! Hey, you in there—answer!"
"Yes, what do you want?" said Silver.
There was a spluttery pause. "Why didn't you answer?"
"I didn't know you were calling me," Silver answered logically.
"Yeah, well—this freight shuttle is the property of GalacTech."
"So am I. So what?"
"Eh . . . ? Look, lady, this is Sergeant Fors of GalacTech Security. You have to disembark and turn this shuttle over to us."
A voice in the background, not quite sufficiently muffled, inquired, "Hey, Bern—d'you think we'll get the ten percent bonus for recovering stolen property on this one?"
"Dream on," growled another voice. "Nobody's gonna give us a quarter million."
Madame Minchenko held up a hand, and leaned forward to cut in, quavering, "Young man, this is Ivy Minchenko. My husband, Dr. Minchenko, has commandeered this craft in order to respond to an urgent medical emergency. Not only is this his right, it's his legally compelled duty—and you are required by GalacTech regulation to assist, not hinder him."
A somewhat baffled growl greeted this. "I'm required to take this shuttle back. Those are my orders. Nobody told me anything about any medical emergency."
"Well, I'm telling you!"
The background voice again, ". . . it's just a couple of women. Come on!"
The sergeant: "Are you going to open the hatch, lady?"
Silver did not respond. Madame Minchenko raised an inquiring eyebrow, and Silver shook her head silently. Madame Minchenko sighed and nodded.
The sergeant repeated his demands, his voice fraying—he stopped just short, Silver felt, of degenerating into obscenities. After a minute or two he broke off.
After a few more minutes the doors of the groun
dcar winged up and the three men, now wearing breath masks, clambered out to stamp over and stare up at the hatches of the shuttle high over their heads. They returned to the groundcar, got in—it circled. Going away? Silver hoped against hope. No, it came up and parked again under the forward shuttle hatch. Two of the men rummaged in the back for tools, then climbed to the car's roof.
"They've got some kind of cutting things," said Silver in alarm. "They must be going to try to cut their way in."
Banging reverberated through the shuttle.
Madame Minchenko nodded toward the laser-solderer. "Is it time for that?" she asked fearfully.
Silver shook her head unhappily. "No. Not again. Besides, I can't let them damage the ship either—it's got to stay spaceworthy or we can't get home."
She had watched Ti. . . . She inhaled deeply and reached for the shuttle controls. The foot pedals were hopelessly awkward to grope for; she would have to get along without them. Right engine, activate; left engine, activate—a purr ran through the ship. Brakes—there, surely. She pulled the lever gently to the "release" position. Nothing happened.
Then the shuttle lurched forward. Frightened at the abrupt motion, Silver hit the brake lever again and the ship rocked to a halt. She searched the outside monitors wildly. Where—?
The shuttle's starboard airfoil had swept over the roof of the security groundcar, missing it by half a meter. Silver realized with a guilty shudder that she should have checked its height before she began to move. She might have torn the wing right off, with ghastly chaining consequences to them all.
The security guards were nowhere to be seen—no, there they were, scattered out onto the dry lake bed. One picked himself up out of the dirt and started back toward the groundcar. Now what? If she parked, or even rolled some distance and parked, they would only try again. It couldn't take too many more attempts till they got smart and shot out the shuttle's tires or otherwise immobilized it. A dangerously unstable stand-off.
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 of inspiration, once more in Nutrition. The quaddie girl running the department had moaned when she saw Leo and his work gang approach again. They had ruthlessly ripped the guts out of her biggest freezer compartment and carried them off to their work space, in the largest available docking module now installed as part of the D-620. Less than a quarter of the final Habitat re-assembly was left to go, Leo estimated, despite the fact that he'd pulled a dozen of the best workers onto this project.
In a few minutes three of his quaddies joined Leo in the freight bay. Leo checked them over. They were bundled up in extra T-shirts and shorts and long-sleeved coveralls left by the evicted downsiders, with the legs wrapped tight to their lower arms and secured by elastic bands. They had scrounged enough gloves to go around; good, Leo had been worried about frostbite with all those exposed fingers. His breath smoked in the chilled air.
"All right, Pramod, we're ready to roll. Bring up the water hoses."
Pramod unrolled several lengths of tubing and gave them to the waiting quaddies; another quaddie ran a final check of their connections to the nearest water spigot. Leo switched on the freezer coils and took a hose.
"All right, kids, watch me and I'll show you the trick of it. You must bleed the water slowly onto the cold surfaces, avoiding splash into the air; at the same time you must keep it going constantly enough so that your hoses don't freeze up. If you feel your fingers going numb, take a short break in the next chamber. We don't need any injuries out of this."
Leo turned to the back side of the vortex mirror, nestled among but not touching the freezer coils. The mirror had been in the shade for the last several hours Outside, and was good and cold now. He thumbed his valve and let a silvery blob of water flow onto the mirror's surface. It spread out in swift feathers of ice. He tried some drops on the coils; they froze even faster.
"All right, just like that. Start building up the ice mold around the mirror. Make it as solid as you can, no air pockets. Don't forget to place the little tube to let the air evacuate from the die chamber, later."
"How thick should it be?" asked Pramod, following suit with his hose and watching in fascination as the ice formed.
"At least one meter. At a minimum the mass of the ice must be equal to the mass of the metal. Since we've only got one shot at this, we'll go for at least twice the mass of the metal. We aren't going to be able to recover any of this wat
er, unfortunately. I want to double-check our water reserves, because two meters thick would certainly be better, if we can spare it."
"However did you think of this?" asked Pramod in an awed tone.
Leo snorted, as he realized Pramod had the impression that he was making up this entire engineering procedure out of his head in the heat of the moment. "I didn't invent it. I read about it. It's an old method they used to use for preliminary test designs, before fractal theory was perfected and computer simulations improved to today's standards."
"Oh." Pramod sounded rather disappointed.
Leo grinned. "If you ever have to make a choice between learning and inspiration, boy, choose learning. It works more of the time."