“Says here… it’s from a transcript, um, of the therapy sessions you had last year.”
“How the hell could you get your hands on that?”
“I couldn’t. But if the Coordinators want something, they can generally get it.”
“You want me to believe that one of the Coordinators sat down and went through confidential medical records, just in case something useful might show up?”
“Of course not; it was done by someone in my office. But under the Coordinators’ authority. It was a simple computer search, semantic association—and we didn’t single you out. Everybody’s records were searched.”
“That’s nice to know. Nobody has civil rights.”
“It’s temporary. You have to admit that the situation—”
“I guess we don’t have time to argue about it. But if you want me because I can supposedly handle violence, you didn’t read that record very thoroughly. That’s why I was in therapy.”
“All I personally know is what’s on this piece of paper. That you’ve carried guns and fired them—”
“No plural. Once. I carried a gun once, in my lap, trying to get to the Cape when the war started. I also fired it only once.”
“That’s one more time than the rest of us.”
She looked back at the cube. “You mainly want people who’ve been on Earth.”
“That’s right; the more recently, the better. There won’t be any time to get accustomed to it.” He paused and leaned forward.
“You fit other criteria: we need people who are young and physically strong, who have experience working in spacesuits. And people without children.”
“That’s encouraging.” She returned to the chair and slumped into it. “I suppose you also want people who are relatively useless, who won’t be missed.”
He shook his head. “That’s not a factor at all. In fact, the expedition’s leader is the Engineering Coordinator.”
“That’s not very smart.”
“It was her decision.” He crumpled up the piece of paper with O’Hara’s data on it and tossed it into the recycler. “What’s yours?”
“Oh…I suppose I have to do it.”
“No one’s forcing you.”
“That’s not exactly what I mean.”
3 
She wasn’t even allowed to say good-bye. They taped a message for her to leave for Daniel and John, that she and several others were going back into isolation, but not to worry, it wasn’t the plague.
The lift to the hub was empty. O’Hara put on her sticky slippers and pushed the middle button, marked “0.”
The sensation of weight decreased as the lift rose, or fell, toward the hub. When it stopped she was weightless, which of course was no novelty. The doors slid open and a man walked in upside-down and stood on the ceiling, also with Velcro slippers. They nodded and O’Hara walked down the short corridor, making a little ripping sound each time she lifted a foot. A sign said 
it would be more natural to use handholds and float through the corridor, but you were liable to collide with somebody coming around a corner or through a door.
She went into the locker room and checked out the spacesuit she’d been assigned last year, and a bundle of those damned diapers, and floated into the Operations Room.
There were four men there, her age or younger, and one woman, Coordinator Sandra Berrigan. Their space-suits were hanging in midair by the opposite wall; O’Hara pushed hers gently in that direction.
O’Hara swam over and introduced herself. She already knew one of them, Ahmed Ten, but hadn’t recognized him at first. A short black man, back on Earth he’d worn his gray hair long, in a huge frizzy cloud; now he was shaven bald. It made him look younger.
“Two more to come,” Berrigan told her. “We’ll hold off the actual briefing until we’re aboard the shuttle. Good-man, you want to show O’Hara how the guns work?” She’d wondered about that; by statute, there were no weapons in New New.
Goodman was a beefy youngster with a quick grin. He beckoned for O’Hara to follow him through the airlock door.
The shuttle floated huge in the pressurized bay. There was a strange smell in the air, burnt metal, like the smell around a welder.
“What they done,” Goodman said, “was take an oxy gun and put a fuel feed on her, then put a sparker at the nozzle. Fuel’s a mixture of vegetable oil and powdered aluminum.” He brought her an oxy gun with an extra tank and a ceramic extension on the nozzle. “Point her down there and give the trigger a quick one.”
She aimed down the long dimension of the bay and pinched the trigger. A squirt of bright flame roared out twenty or thirty meters, orange shot through with blinding blue-white. The noise of it echoed around the chamber. Recoil from the blast pushed O’Hara gently back against the airlock door.
“We all have these?”
“You and me and two others. They wasn’t time to make more.”
“Let’s hope we don’t have to use them. That’s terrible.”
“Yeah, awful,” Goodman said, without too much conviction. “Remember, it won’t go in a straight line on Earth. You got to aim high, for the gravity.”
“Right.” O’Hara wondered what virtue the computer had divined in Goodman.
The airlock opened and Berrigan peered in. “Everybody’s here. O’Hara, come give us a hand. Goodman, you have two more customers.”
All that was left to be loaded were the spacesuits and some paper crates of food. They put them in nets and hooked the nets one at a time to a centrifuge device, to weigh them. Berrigan entered their masses into a console inside the shuttle.
There was nothing dramatic about taking off. Pumps hammered, fading away as they drew air from the chamber. Then the outer lock irised open, there was a tiny push of acceleration, and they drifted, slower than a walk, out into space.
“Change orbit in an hour and twenty minutes,” Berrigan said. “Let’s go over our plan, such as it is.”
She switched on a cube and tapped in some instructions. A flat map of the Zaire spaceport came up. “All we really have to do is leave this ship here,” she said, pointing to the end of the runway, “disabling it so that it can’t be refueled and used against us. Then we just walk down this track to where the shuttle’s waiting.
“That’s where it gets a little complicated. If it looks like there’ll be any trouble, we get aboard in a hurry and leave. Assuming the ship does work.
“If we have free run of the place, though, there are some interesting things we might do. First, Goodman and O’Hara run up to the operations center, here, and burn anything that looks important. We don’t want to leave them with any launch capability at all.”
“What about us?” Ahmed Ten asked. “Can this Mercedes take off without any launch support?”
She laughed. “With a trained monkey at the controls. Everybody’ll get a chance to study the manual for it, but basically all you have to do is ask the computer for a catalog, punch in your destination and launch time, and strap yourself in.
“While you two are having fun, the rest will be down in this building here. That’s a cryogenic storage area, and it appears to be intact. Cryogenics means nitrogen; we’ll take as much as we can. Goodman and O’Hara will keep their eyes open for a vehicle. But even if we have to hand-carry it, we should be able to move a few tonnes, to bring back to the farms.
“I’ll go straight to the shuttle and do a systems check on it. It should only take a few minutes to find out whether it’s still working.”
“If it isn’t, we’re all dead?” O’Hara said.
“There’s a chance not. This isn’t a suicide mission.