“I could fly this thing, if necessary,” said Ti in a most unpressing tone, looking over the control deck. “It’s all manual.”

“That’s not the point,” said Leo. “We can’t leave without her. The quaddies aren’t supposed to be over here at all. If she gets picked up by the Station authorities and they start asking questions—always assuming she hasn’t been picked up by something worse…”

“What worse?”

“I don’t know what worse, that’s the trouble.”

Silver meanwhile had rolled off the acceleration couch to the deck strip. After a moment of thoughtful experimentation, she achieved a four-handed forward shuffle, and marched off past Leo’s knees, pant legs trailing.

“Where are you going?”

“After Zara.”

“Silver, stay with the ship. We don’t need two of you lost, for God’s sake,” Leo ordered sternly. “Ti and I can move much faster, we’ll find her.”

“I don’t think so,” murmured Silver distantly. She reached the flex tube, stared up and down the corridor which curved away to right and left, ringing the spoke. “You see, I don’t think she’s gone far.”

“If she got on the elevator, she could be practically anywhere on the Station by now,” said Ti.

Silver reared up on her tripoded lower arms, raised her uppers over her head, and narrowed her eyes for a look around the elevator foyer to her left. “The controls would be hard for a quaddie to reach. Besides, she’d know she was more likely to run into downsiders there. I think she went this way.” She raised her chin and shuffled determinedly off to her right on all fours. After a moment she picked up speed by changing her gait to a series of gazelle-like bounds in the low-gee of the spoke. Leo and Ti, of necessity, bounded after her. Leo felt absurdly like a man chasing a runaway pet. It was an optical illusion of the quadrimanual locomotion—quaddies even looked more human in free fall.

A strange rumbling noise approached around the curve of the corridor. Silver hooted, and skidded to one side against the outer wall.

“Oh, sorry!” cried Zara, whizzing past torso-down and chin up on a low roller-pallet, all four hands going like paddle wheels to propel her along the deck. Braking proved more difficult than acceleration, and Zara fetched up beside Silver with a crash.

Leo, horrified, bounded over to them, but Zara was already disentangling herself and sitting up cheerfully. Even the roller pallet was undamaged.

“Look Silver,” Zara said, flipping the pallet over, “wheels! I wonder how they’re beating the friction, inside those casings? Feel, they’re not hot at all.”

“Zara,” cried Leo, “why did you leave the ship?”

“I wanted to see what a downsider toilet chamber looked like,” said Zara, “but there wasn’t one on this level. All I found was a closet full of cleaning supplies, and this,” she patted the roller pallet. “Can I take the wheels apart and see what’s inside?” “No!” roared Leo.

She looked quite put-out. “But I want to know!” “Bring it along,” Silver suggested, “and take it apart later.” Her eyes flicked up and down the corridor; Leo was slightly consoled that at least one quaddie shared his sense of urgency.

“Yes, later,” Leo agreed, for the sake of expediency. “Let’s go now.” He tucked the roller pallet firmly under his arm, to thwart further experimentation. The quaddies, he reflected, didn’t seem to have a very clear idea of private property. Probably came from a lifetime spent in a communal space habitat, with its tight ecology. Planets were communal in the same way, really, except that their enormous size put so much slack in their systems, it was disguised.

Habits of thought, indeed. Here he was worried over the theft of a roller pallet, while planning the greatest space heist in human history. Ti almost bolted when he found out what the rest of the assignment they had planned for him was to be. Leo, prudently, didn’t fill in these details until the pusher was safely launched from the Transfer Station and halfway back to the Habitat.

“You want me to hijack the Superjumper!” yelped Ti.

“No, no,” Leo soothed him. “You’re only going along as an advisor. The quaddies will take the ship.”

“But my ass will depend on whether or not they can—”

“Then I suggest you advise well.”

“Ye gods.”

“The trouble with you, Ti,” lectured Leo kindly, “is that you lack teaching experience. If you had, you’d have faith that the most unlikely people can learn the most amazing things. After all, you weren’t born knowing how to pilot a Jump—yet lives depended on your doing it right the first time, and every time thereafter. Now you’ll know how your instructors felt, that’s all.”

“How do instructors feel?”

Leo lowered his voice and grinned. “Terrified. Absolutely terrified.”

A second pusher, packed with fuel and supplies for its long-range excursion, was waiting in the slot next to theirs as they docked at the Habitat. Leo resisted a strong urge to take Ti aside and fill his ear with advice and suggestions for his mission. Alas, their experience in criminal theft was all too comparable—zero equalled zero no matter how unequal the years each was multiplied by.

They floated through the hatch into the docking module to find several anxious quaddies waiting for them.

“I’ve modified more solderers, Leo,” Pramod began unnecessarily—three of his four hands clutched the improvised arsenal to his torso. “One each for five people.”

Claire, hovering at his shoulder, eyed the weapons with dread fascination.

“Good. Give them to Silver, she’ll have charge of them until the pusher gets to the wormhole,” said Leo.

They made their way down the hand grips to the next hatch. Zara swung within to begin her pre-flight checks.

Ti craned his neck after her nervously. “Are we leaving right now?”

“Time is critical,” said Leo. “We don’t have more than four hours till you’re missed at the Transfer Station.”

“Shouldn’t there be a—a briefing, or something?” Ti too, Leo appreciated, was having trouble committing himself to falling free. Well, jumped or was pushed, after the initial impulse it would make no practical difference.

“You’ll have almost twenty-four hours, boosting at one gee to midpoint and then flipping and braking the rest of the way, to work out your plan of attack. Silver will be depending on your knowledge of the Superjumpers. We’ve already discussed various methods of achieving surprise. She’ll fill you in.” “Oh, is Silver going?”

“Silver,” Leo enlightened him gently, “is in command.”

Ti’s face flickered through an array of expressions, settled on dismay. “Screw this. There’s still time for me to go back and catch my ship—”

“And that,” Leo overrode him, “is precisely why Silver is in charge. Your capture of a cargo Jumper is the signal for a quaddie uprising here on the Habitat. And that uprising is their death warrant. When GalacTech discovers it cannot control the quaddies, it will almost certainly be frightened into an attempt to violently exterminate them. Escape must be assured before we tip our hand. The ship you must catch is out that way.” Leo pointed. “I can depend on Silver to remember that. You,” Leo smiled thinly, “are no worse than anyone else.” Ti subsided at that, although not happily. Silver, Zara, Siggy, a particularly husky quaddie from the pusher crews named Jon, and Ti. Five, crammed into a ship meant for a crew of two and not designed for overnight use in any case. Leo sighed. The Superjumpers carried a pilot and an engineer. Five-to-two wasn’t altogether bad odds, but Leo wished he could have loaded them even more overwhelmingly in the quaddies’ favor.

They filed through the flex tube into the pusher. Silver, at the end, paused to embrace Pramod and Claire, who had lingered to see them off.

“We’re going to get Andy back,” Silver murmured to Claire. “You’ll see.”