“You might at least have covered for me,” said Ti petulantly. “You owed me that much.”

He might as well have hit her, from the look on her face. “Back off, Gulik,” Leo growled. “Silver was drugged and tortured to extract that confession. Seems to me any owing in here goes in the other direction.”

Ti flushed. Leo bit back his annoyance. They couldn’t afford to piss the Jump pilot off, they needed him too much. Besides, this wasn’t the conversation Leo had rehearsed. Ti should be leaping through hoops for those morning-glory eyes of Silver’s, the psychology of reward and all that—surely he must respond to a plea for her good. If the young lout didn’t appreciate her, he didn’t deserve to have her—Leo forced his thoughts back to the matter at hand.

“Have you heard about this new artificial gravity field technology yet?” Leo began again.

“Something,” admitted Ti warily.

“Well, it’s killed the Cay Project. GalacTech’s dropping out of the quaddie business.”

“Huh. Yeah, well, that makes sense.”

Leo waited a beat for the next logical question, which didn’t come. Ti wasn’t an idiot, he was therefore being deliberately dense. Leo pushed on relentlessly. “They plan to ship the quaddies downside to Rodeo, to an abandoned workers’ barracks—” he repeated the forgotten-to-death scenario he had described to Pramod a week earlier, and looked up to gauge its effect.

The pilot’s face was closed and neutral. “Well, I’m very sorry for them,” Ti did not look at Silver, “but I totally fail to see what I’m supposed to do about it. I’m leaving Rodeo in six hours, never to return—which is just fine with me, by the way. This place is a pit.”

“And Silver and the quaddies are being dropped into that pit and the lid clamped over them. And the only crime they’ve committed is to become technologically obsolete. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” cried Leo heatedly.

Ti bolted upright indignantly. “You want to talk about technological obsolescence? I’ll show you technological obsolescence. This!” His hand touched the implant plugs at midforehead and temples, the can-nula at the nape of his neck. “This! I trained for two years and waited in line for a year for the surgery to implant my Jump set. It’s a tensor bit-code version, because that’s the Jump system GalacTech uses, and they underwrote part of the cost of it. Trans-Stellar Transport and a few independents also use it. Everybody else in the universe is gearing up to Necklin color-drive. You know what my chances of being hired by TST are, after being fired by GalacTech? Zilch. Zero. Nada. If I want a Jump pilot’s job, I need this surgically removed and a new implant. Without a job, I can’t afford an implant. Without an implant, I can’t get a job. Screw you, Ti Gulik!” He sat, panting.

Leo leaned forward. “I’ll give you a pilot’s berth, Gulik,” he said clearly. “On the biggest Jump ship ever to fly.” Rapidly, before the pilot could interrupt, he detailed his vision of the Habitat converted to colony ship. “It’s all here. All we need is a pilot. A pilot who can plug into the GalacTech drive system. All we need—is you.”

Ti looked perfectly appalled. “You’re not just talking grand lunacy—you’re talking grand larceny! Do you realize what the cash value of the total configuration would be? They wouldn’t let you out of jail till the next millennium!”

“I’m not going to jail. I’m going to the stars with the quaddies.”

“Your cell will be padded.”

“This isn’t crime. This is—war, or something. Crime is turning your back and walking away.”

“Not by any legal code I know of.”

“All right then; sin.”

“Oh, brother.” Ti rolled his eyes. “Now it comes out. You’re on a mission from God, right? Let me off at the next stop, please.”

God’s not here. Somebody’s got to fill in. Leo backed off hastily from that line of thought. Padded cells, indeed. “I thought you were in love with Silver. How can you abandon her to a slow death?”

“Ti’s not in love with me,” interrupted Silver in surprise. “Whatever gave you that idea, Leo?”

Ti gave her an unsettled look. “No, of course not,” he agreed faintly. “You, ah—you always knew, right? We just had a mutually beneficial little arrangement, is all.”

“That’s right,” confirmed Silver. “I got books and vids, Ti got relief from physiological stress. Downsider males need sex to stay healthy, you know, they can’t cope with stress. It makes them disruptive. Wild genes, I suppose.”

“Where did that line of bullshit come from—?” Leo began, and broke off. “Never mind.” He could guess. He closed his eyes, pressed them with his fingertips, and groped for his lost argument. “Right. So to you, Silver is just… disposable. Like a tissue. Sneeze in her and toss her away.”

Ti looked stung. “Give it up, Graf. I’m no worse than anyone else.”

“But I’m giving you the chance to be better, don’t you see—”

“Leo,” Silver interrupted again. She was now sprawled on her stomach on the bed, her chin propped awkwardly on one upper hand. “After we get to our asteroid belt—wherever it turns out to be—what are we going to do with the Superjumper?”

“The Superjumper?”

“We’ll be detaching the Habitat and opening it out again, surely—building on to it—the Jumper unit would just be sitting there in parking orbit. Can’t we give it to Ti?”

“What?” said Leo and Ti together. “As payment. He jumps us to our destination, he gets to keep the Jump ship. Then he can go off and be a pilot-owner, set up his own transport business, whatever he likes.” “In a stolen ship?” yipped Ti. “If we’re far enough away that GalacTech can’t catch up with us, we’re far enough away that GalacTech can’t catch up with you,” said Silver logically. “Then you’ll have a ship that fits your neural implant, and nobody will be able to fire you again, because you’ll be working for yourself.”

Leo bit his tongue. He’d brought Silver along expressly to help persuade Ti—so what if it wasn’t the blandishment he’d envisioned? From the blitzed look on the pilot’s face, they’d gotten through to his launch-button at last. Leo lidded his eyes and smiled encouragement at her.

“Besides,” she went on, her eyelashes fluttering in return, “if we do succeed in Jumping out of here, Habitat and all, Mr. Van Atta’s going to be left looking an awful fool.” She let her head flop back on the bed and smiled sideways at Ti.

“Oh,” said Ti in a tone of enlightenment. “Ah…”

“Are your bags all packed?” asked Leo helpfully.

“Over there,” Ti nodded to a pile of luggage in the corner. “But… but… dammit, if this thing crashes, they’ll crucify me!”

“Ah,” said Leo. “Here, see…” he opened his red coveralls at the neck and drew out the laser-solderer concealed in an inner pocket. “I jimmied the safety on this thing; it’ll fire an extremely intense beam for quite a distance now, until the atmosphere dissipates it—farther than the distance across this room, certainly.” He waved it negligently; Ti ducked, eyes widening. “If we end up under arrest, you can truthfully testify that you were kidnapped at gunpoint by a crazed engineer and his mad mutant assistant and made to cooperate under duress. You may be a hero one way—or another.”

The mad mutant assistant smiled blindingly at Ti, her eyes like stars.

“You, ah—wouldn’t really fire that thing, would you?” choked Ti cautiously.

“Of course not,” Leo said jovially, baring his teeth. He put the solderer away.

“Ah.” Ti’s mouth twitched briefly in response. But his eye returned often thereafter to the lump in Leo’s coveralls.

When they made it back to the shuttle hatch where the pusher was docked, Zara was gone.

“Oh, God,” moaned Leo. Had she wandered off? Gotten lost? Been forcibly removed? A frantic inventory found no message left on the comm, no note pinned anywhere.

“Pilot, she’s a pilot,” Leo reasoned aloud. “Is there anything she could have needed to do? We’ve plenty of fuel—communicating with traffic control is done right from here…” He realized, with a cold chill, that he hadn’t actually forbidden her to leave the pusher. It had been so self-evident that she was to stay out of sight, and on guard. Self-evident to himself, Leo realized. Who could say what was self-evident to a quaddie?