And there had been other projects too. Every day, from one end of the wormhole nexus to the other, countless accidents of structural failure did not occur because he, and people he’d trained, had done their jobs well. The work of a harried week, the early detection of the propagating micro-cracks in the reactor coolant lines at the great Beni Ra orbital factory alone had saved, perhaps, three thousand lives. How many surgeons could claim to save three thousand lives in ten years of their careers? On that memorable inspection tour, he’d done it once a month for a year. Invisibly, unsung; disasters that never happen don’t normally make headlines. But he knew, and the men and women who worked alongside him knew, and that was enough.

He regretted slugging Bruce. The moment’s red joy had certainly not been worth risking his job for. The eighteen years of accumulating pension benefits, the stock options, the seniority, yes, maybe; with no family to support, they were all Leo’s, to piss into the wind if he chose. But who would take care of the next Beni Ra?

When they returned to the Habitat, he would cooperate. Apologize handsomely to Bruce. Redouble his training efforts, increase his care. Bite his tongue, speak only when spoken to. Be polite to Dr. Yei. Hell, even do what she told him.

Anything else was impossibly risky. There were a thousand kids up there. So many, so varied—so young. A hundred five-year-olds, a hundred and twenty six-year-olds alone, cramming the creche modules, playing games in their free-fall gym. No one individual could possibly take responsibility for risking all those lives on something chancy. It would be endless, all-consuming. Impossible. Criminal. Insane. Revolt—where could it lead? No one could possibly forsee all the consequences. Leo couldn’t even see around the next corner. No one could. No one.

They docked at the Habitat. Van Atta shooed Claire and Andy and the nurse ahead of him through the hatchway, as Leo slowly unfastened his seat harness.

“Oh, no,” Leo heard Van Atta say. “The nurse will take Andy to the creche. You will return to your old dormitory. Taking that baby downside was criminally irresponsible. It’s clear you are totally unfit to have charge of him. I can guarantee, you’ll be struck from the reproduction roster, too.”

Claire’s weeping was so muffled as to be nearly inaudible.

Leo closed his eyes in pain. “God,” he asked, “why me?”

Releasing his last restraint, he fell blindly into his future.

“Leo!” Silver anchored one hand and pounded softly and frantically with the other three on the door to the engineer’s sleeping quarters. “Leo, quick! Wake up, help!” She laid her cheek against the cold plastic, muffling her bursting howl to a small, sliding “Leo?” She dared not cry louder, lest she attract more than Leo’s ear.

His door slid open at last. He wore red T-shirt and shorts, barefoot. His sleep sack against the far wall hung open like an empty cocoon, and his thinning sandy hair stuck out in odd directions. “What the hell… Silver?” His face was rumpled with sleep, eyes dark-ringed but focusing fast.

“Come quick, come quick!” Silver hissed, grabbing his hand. “It’s Claire. She tried to go out an airlock. I jammed the controls. She can’t get the outer door open, but I can’t get the inner door open either, and she’s trapped in there. Our supervisor will be back soon, and then I don’t know what they’ll do to us…”

“Son-of-a…” he allowed her to draw him into the corridor, then lurched back into his cabin to grab a tool belt. “All right, go, go, lead on.”

They sped through the maze of the Habitat, offering strained bland smiles to those quaddies and downsiders they flew past in the corridors. At last, the familiar door to “Hydroponics D” closed behind them.

“What happened? How did this happen?” Leo asked her as they brushed through the grow-tubes to the far end of the module.

“They wouldn’t let me go see Claire day before yesterday, when you brought her back on the shuttle, even though we were both in the Infirmary. Yesterday we were on different work teams. I think it was on purpose. Today I made Teddie trade with me.” Silver’s voice smeared with her distress. “Claire said they won’t even let her into the creche to see Andy on her off-shift. I went to get fertilizer from –Stores to charge the grow-tubes we were working on, and when I came back, the lock was just starting to cycle.…” If only she hadn’t left Claire alone—if only she had not let the shuttle take them downside in the first place—if only she had not betrayed them to Dr. Yei’s drugs—if only they’d been born downsiders—or not been born at all.…

The airlock at the end of the hydroponics module was almost never used, merely waiting to become the airseal door to the next module that future growth might demand. Silver pressed her face to the observation window. To her immense relief, Claire was still within.

But she was ramming herself back and forth between door and door, her face smeared with tears and blood, fingers reddened. Whether she gulped for air or only screamed Silver could not tell, for all sound was silenced by the barrier door, like a turned-down holovid. Silver’s own chest seemed so tight she could scarcely breathe.

Leo glanced in. His lips drew back in a fierce scowl in his whitened face, and he turned to hiss at the lock mechanism, scrabbling at his tool belt. “You fixed it but good, Silver…”

“I had to do something quick. Shorting it that way blocked the alarm from going off in Central Systems.”

“Oh…” Leo’s hands hesitated briefly. “Not so random a stab as it looks, then.”

“Random? In an airlock control box?” She stared at him in surprise, and some indignation. “I’m not a five-year-old!”

“Indeed not.” A crooked grin lightened his tense face for a moment. “Any quaddie of six would know better. My apologies, Silver. So the problem then, is not how to open the door, but how to do so without tripping the alarm.”

“Yes, right.” She hovered anxiously.

He looked the mechanism over, glanced up rather more hesitantly at the airlock door, which vibrated to the thumping from within. “You sure Claire doesn’t need—more help anyway?”

“She may need help,” snapped Silver, “but what she’ll get is Dr. Yei.”

“Ah… right.” His grin thinned out altogether. He clipped a couple of tiny wires and rerouted them. With one last doubtful look at the lock door, he tapped a pressure plate within the mechanism.

The inner door slid open and Claire tumbled out, gasping rawly, “… let me go, let me go, oh, why didn’t you let me go—I can’t stand this…” She curled up in a huddled ball in midair, face hidden.

Silver darted to her, wrapped her arms around her. “Oh, Claire! Don’t do things like that. Think—think how Tony would feel, stuck in that hospital downship, when they told him…”

“What does it matter?” demanded Claire, muffled against Silver’s blue T-shirt. “They’ll never let me see him again. I might as well be dead. They’ll never let me see Andy…”

“Yes,” Leo chimed in, “think of Andy. Who will protect him, if you’re not around? Not just today, but next week, next year…”

Claire unwound, and fairly screamed at him. “They won’t even let me see him! They threw me out of the creche…”

Leo seized her upper hands. “Who? Who threw you out?”

“Mr. Van Atta…”

“Right, I might have known. Claire, listen to me. The proper response to Bruce isn’t suicide, it’s murder.”

“Really?” said Silver, her interest sparking. Even Claire was drawn out of her tight wad of misery enough to meet Leo’s eyes directly for the first time. “Well… perhaps not literally. But you can’t let the bastard grind you down. Look, we’re all smart here, right? You kids are smart—I’ve been known to knock down a problem or two, in my time—we’ve got to be able to think our way out of this mess, if we try. You’re not alone, Claire. We’ll help. I’ll help.”