“Don’t lie to me, Leo,” said Claire dangerously. “Don’t leap to conclusions. Yes, I know—you know—the possibility exists that we won’t be able to retrieve him, all right, I said it, right out loud. But please note any, er, alternative scenarios depend on Ti to pilot a shuttle for us, and must wait until we re-connect with the hijack crew. At which point we will have captured a Jumpship, and I will begin to believe that anything is possible.” His brows quirked, stressed. “And if it’s possible, well try it. Promise.”

There was a growing coldness in her. She firmed her lips against their tremble. “You can’t risk everybody for the sake of just one. That’s not right.”

“Well… there are a thousand things that can go wrong between now and some—point of no return for Tony. It may turn out to be quite academic. I do know, dividing our energies among a thousand what-ifs instead of concentrating them for the one sure next-step is a kind of self-sabotage. It’s not what we do next week, it’s what we do next, that counts most. What must you do next?”

Claire swallowed, and tried to pull her wits back together. “Go back to work… pretend like nothing’s going on. Continue the secret inventory of all possible seed stocks. Uh, finish the plan of how we’re going to hook up the grow-lights to keep the plants going while the Habitat is moved away from the sun. And as soon as the Habitat is ours, start the new cuttings and bring the reserve tubes on-line, to start building up extra food stocks against emergencies. And, uh, arrange cryo-storage of samples of every genetic variety we have on board, to re-stock in case of disaster—”

“That’s enough!” Leo smiled encouragement. “The next step only! And you know you can do that.”

She nodded.

“We need you, Claire,” he added. “All of us, not just Andy. Food production is one of the fundamentals of our survival. We’ll need every pair, er, every set of expert hands. And you’ll have to start training youngsters, passing on that how-to knowledge that the library, no matter how technically complete, can’t duplicate.”

“I am not going to cave,” Claire reiterated through her teeth, answering the undercurrent, not the surface, of his speech.

“You scared me, that time in the airlock,” he apologized, embarrassed.

“I scared myself,” she admitted.

“You had a right to be angry. Just remember, your true target isn’t in here—” he touched her collarbone, above her heart, fleetingly. “It’s out there.”

So, he had recognized it was rage, rage blocked and turned inward, and not despair, that had brought her to the airlock that day. In a way, it was a relief to put the right name to her emotion. In a way it was not.

“Leo… that scares me too.”

He smiled quizzically. “Welcome to the human club.”

“The next step,” she muttered. “Right. The next reach.” She gave Leo a wave, and swung into the corridor.

Leo turned back to the freight bay with a sigh. The next-step speech was all very well, except when people and changing conditions kept switching your route around in front of you while your foot was in the air. His gaze lingered a moment on the quaddie docking crew, who had connected the flex tube to the shuttle’s large freight hatch and were unloading the cargo into the bay with their power handlers. The cargo consisted of man-high grey cylinders, that Leo did not at first recognize.

But the cargo wasn’t supposed to be unrecognizable.

The cargo was supposed to be a massive stock of spare cargo-pusher fuel rods. “For dismantling the Habitat,” Leo had sung dulcetly to Van Atta, when jamming the requisition through. “So I won’t have to stop and reorder. So what if we have leftovers, they can go to the Transfer Station with the pushers when they’re relocated. Credit them to the salvage.”

Disturbed, Leo drifted over to the cargo workers. “What’s this, kids?”

“Oh, Mr. Graf, hello. Well, I’m not quite sure,” said the quaddie boy in the canary-yellow T-shirt and shorts of Airsystems Maintenance, of which Docks & Locks was a subdivision. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. It’s massive, anyway.” He paused to unhook a report panel from his power-handler and gave it to Leo. “There’s the freight manifest.”

“It was supposed to be cargo-pusher fuel rods.…” The cylinders were about the right size. They surely couldn’t have redesigned them. Leo tapped the manifest keypad—item, a string of code numbers, quantity, astronomical.

“They gurgle,” the yellow-shirted quaddie added helpfully.

“Gurgle?” Leo looked at the code number on the report panel more closely, glanced at the grey cylinders—they matched. Yet he recognized the code for the pusher rods—or did he? He entered ‘Fuel Rods, Orbital Cargo Pusher Type II, cross ref, inventory code.’ The report panel blinked and a number popped up. Yes, it was the same—no, by God! G77618PD, versus the G77681PD emblazoned on the cylinders. Quickly he tapped in ‘G77681PD.’ There was a long pause, not for the report panel but for Leo’s brain to register.

“Gasoline?” Leo croaked in disbelief. “Gasoline?

Those idiots actually shipped a hundred tons of gasoline to a space station…?”

“What is it?” asked the quaddie.

“Gasoline. It’s a hydrocarbon fuel used downside, to power their land rovers. A freebie by-product from the petrochemical cracking. Atmospheric oxygen provides the oxidant. It’s a bulky, toxic, volatile, flammable—explosive!—liquid at room temperature. For God’s sake don’t let any of those barrels get open.”

“Yes, sir,” promised the quaddie, clearly impressed with Leo’s list of hazards.

The legged supervisor of the orbital pusher crews arrived at that moment in the bay, trailed by a gang of quaddies from his department.

“Oh, hello, Graf. Look, I think it was a mistake letting you talk me into ordering this load—we’re going to have a storage problem—” “Did you order this?” Leo demanded. “What?” the supervisor blinked, then took in the scene before him. “What the—where are my fuel rods? They told me they were here.”

“I mean did you, personally, place the order. With your own little fingers.”

“Yes. You asked me to, remember?”

“Well,” Leo took a breath, and handed him the report panel, “you made a typo.”

The super glanced at the report panel, and paled. “Oh, God.”

“And they did it,” Leo gibbered, running his hands through what was left of his hair, “they filled it—I can’t believe they filled it. Loaded all this stuff onto the shuttle without once questioning it, sent a hundred tons of gasoline to a space station without once noticing that it was utterly absurd.…”

“I can believe it,” sighed the super. “Oh, God. Oh, well. Well just have to send it back, and reorder. It’ll probably take about a week. It’s not like our fuel rod stocks are really low, in spite of the rate you’ve been using them up for that ‘special project’ you’re so hushy-hush about.”

I don’t have a week, thought Leo frantically. / have twenty-four hours, maybe.

“I don’t have a week,” Leo found himself raging. “I want them now. Put it on a rush order.” He lowered his voice, realizing he was becoming conspicuous.

The super was offended enough to overcome his guilt. “There’s no need to throw a fit, Graf. It was my mistake and I’ll probably have to pay for it, but it’s plain stupid to charge my department for a rush shuttle trip on top of this one when we can perfectly well wait. This is going to be bad enough as it is.” He waved at the gasoline. “Hey, kids,” he added, “stop unloading! This load’s a mistake, it’s all gotta go back downside.”

The shuttle pilot was just exiting the personnel hatch in time to hear this. “What?” He floated over to them, and Leo gave him a brief explanation in very short words of the error.

“Well, you can’t send it back this trip,” said the shuttle pilot firmly. “I’m not fueled up to take a full load. It’ll have to wait.” He shoved off, to take his mandatory safety break in the cafeteria.