“Oh, no! Can’t be. Silver checked the schedule—”
“It looks like Silver made a big mistake.”
“I checked it too. This shuttle was supposed to be picking up a load of stuff at the Transfer Station, then going downside.”
“Then you both made a big mistake.” Tony’s voice was harsh and shaking, anger masking fear.
Oh, help, don’t yell at me—if I don’t stay calm, neither will Andy—this wasn’t my idea…
Tony rolled over on his stomach and levered his body away from the thrusting surface of the—the floor, downsiders called the direction from which the vector of gravitational force came—and crept to the nearest window, pulling himself alongside it. The light that poured through it was taking on a strange diffuse quality, diminishing. “It’s all white—Claire, I think we must be entering a cloud!”
Claire had watched clouds from orbit above forl hours, as they slowly billowed in the convection of Rodeo’s atmosphere. They had always seemed massive as moons. She longed to go look.
Andy was clutching her blue T-shirt. She rolled over, as Tony had, palms to the surface, and pushed up. Andy, turning his head toward his father, reached out with his upper hands and tried to shove off from Claire with his lowers. The floor leaped up and smacked him.
For a moment he was too stunned to howl. Then his little mouth went from round to square and poured out the vibrating scream of true pain. The sound knifed through every nerve in Claire’s body.
Tony too jerked at the noise, and scrambled down from the window and back toward them. “Why did you drop him? What do you think you’re doing? Oh, make him be quiet, quick!”
Claire rolled onto her back again, pulling Andy onto the elastic softness of her abdomen, and patted and kissed him frantically. The timbre of his screams began to change from the frightening high-pitched cry of pain to the less piercing bellows of indignation, but the volume was just as loud.
“They’ll hear him all the way up in the pilot’s compartment!” Tony hissed in anguish. “Do something!”
“I’m trying,” Claire hissed back. Her hands shook. She tried to push Andy’s head toward her breast, standard comfort, but he turned his head away and screamed louder. Fortunately, the sound of the atmosphere rushing over the shuttle’s skin had risen to a deafening thunder. By the time the noise peaked and faded, Andy’s cries had become whimpering hiccups. He rubbed his face, slimy with tears and mucous, mournfully against Claire’s T-shirt. His weight on Claire’s stomach and diaphragm half stopped her breath, but she dared not lay him down.
Another set of clunks reverberated through the shuttle. The engines’ vibrations changed their pitch, and Claire was plucked this way and that by changing acceleration vectors, none as strong as the one emanating from the floor. She spared two hands from comforting Andy to brace herself against the plastic crates. Tony lay beside them, biting his lips in helpless anxiety. “We must be coming down to land on the surface.”
Claire nodded. “At one of the shuttleports. There’ll be people there—downsiders—maybe we can tell them we got trapped aboard this shuttle by accident. Maybe,” she added hopefully, “they’ll send us right back up home.”
Tony’s right upper hand clenched. “No! We can’t give up now! We’d never get another chance!”
“But what else can we do?”
“We’ll sneak off this ship and hide, until we can 1 get on another one, one that’s going to the Transfer Station.” His voice turned earnest with urgent pleading as a puff of dismay escaped Claire’s parted lips, j “We did it once, we can do it again.”
She shook her head doubtfully. Further argument I was interrupted by a startling series of thumps that I shook the whole ship and then blended into a low continuous rumble. The light falling through the window shifted its beam around the cargo bay as the shuttle landed, taxied, and turned. Then it winked out, the cargo bay dimmed, and the engines whined to an equally startling silence.
Claire cautiously unbraced herself. Of all the acceleration vectors, only one remained. Isolated, it became overwhelming.
Gravity. Silent, implacable, it pressed against her back—she struggled with a nasty illusion that it might suddenly cease, and the thrust it imparted slam her into the ceiling above, smashing Andy between. In an accompanying optical illusion, the whole cargo bay seemed to be chugging in a slow circle around her. She closed her eyes in self-defense.
Tony’s hand tightened warningly on her left lower wrist. She looked up and froze as the outside cargo bay door at the forward end of the compartment slid open.
A pair of downsiders wearing company maintenance coveralls entered. The access door in the center of the shuttle’s fuselage dilated, and Ti the shuttle co-pilot stuck his head through.
“Hi, guys. What’s the big rush-rush?”
“We’re supposed to have this bird turned around and reloaded in an hour, that’s what,” replied the maintenance man. “You have just time to pee and eat lunch.”
“What’s the cargo? I haven’t seen this much hopping around since the last medical emergency.”
“Equipment and supplies for some sort of show they’re supposed to be putting on up at your Habitat for the Vice President of Operations.”
“That’s not till next week.”
The maintenance man snickered. “That’s what everybody thought. The VP just flew in a week early on her private courier, with a whole commando squad of accountants. Seems she likes surprise inspections. Management, naturally, is overjoyed.”
“Don’t laugh too soon,” Ti warned. “Management has ways of sharing their joy with the rest of us.”
“Don’t I know it,” the maintenance man groaned. “C’mon, c’mon, you’re blocking the door…” The three of them clattered forward.
“Now,” whispered Tony, with a nod at the open cargo bay door.
Claire rolled to her side and laid Andy gently on the deck. His face crumpled, working up to a cry. Claire quickly rolled onto her palms, tested her balance. Her right lower arm seemed to be the one she could most easily spare. She scooped Andy back up one-handed and held him under her torso.
Plastered against the planet-ward side of the cargo bay by the dreadful gravity, she began a three-handed crawl toward the door. Andy’s weight pulled at her arm as though a strong spring were drawing him to the floor, and his head bobbed backwards at an alarming angle. Claire inched her palm up under his head to support it, painfully awkward for her arm.
Beside her, Tony too achieved a three-handed stance. With his free hand he jerked the cord to their pack of supplies. The pack, stuck to the downside surface as if by suction, didn’t budge.
“Shit,” Tony swore under his breath. He swarmed over the pack, gripped and lifted it, but it was too bulky to carry under his belly. “Double-shit.”
“Can we give up yet?” Claire asked in a tiny voice, knowing the answer.
“No!” He grabbed the pack backwards over both shoulders with his upper hands and rocked forward violently. It came up and balanced precariously on his back. He kept his left upper hand on it to steady it and hopped forward on his right, his lower palms shuffling along under his hips. “I got it, go, go!”
The shuttle was parked in a cavernous hangar, a vast dim gulf of space roofed by girders. The girders behind the overhead lights would have been an excellent hiding place, if only one could swoop up there. But everything not rigidly fastened was doomed to fly to the one side of the room only, and stick there until forcibly removed. There was a lopsided fascination to it.…
“Oh…” Claire hesitated. Leading from the hatch to the hangar floor was a kind of corrugated ramp. Clearly, it was designed to break down the dangerous fight with the omnipresent gravity into little manageable increments. “Stairs.” Claire paused, head down. Her blood seemed to pool dizzyingly in her face. She gulped.