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min-time profile, and with over half the skycycle s fuel gone, pushed her in the back with a half gee of
deceleration. It was the heaviest she d ever been outside of the gym, but she almost didn t notice.
Come on, Peetie, she thought. Be there for me. Please be there for me.
Avram worked the rendezvous out to not waste a second. Just as the skycycle matched trajectories
Celinda unstrapped and launched herself at the drifting skycycle like a wire-guided missile, trailing her
tether.
She could see Mike s arms stuck out in the relaxed position. Peetie s hands seemed to be holding
something, but he wasn t moving. His buddy hose was connected to Mike.
Peetie! she screamed.
Celinda, Avram said in a low but still tense voice, control, now.
He was right. She had to think about first things first. Roger.
First was landing on the other skycycle. It was dead in space as far as she could tell, drifting like a space
boulder. So that s how she d have to rendezvous. She located the center of tumble, marked it with an
eye blink, and headed toward the central truss. Her suit jetted CO2 until the skycycle stopped drifting
across her visor display a constant angle for intercept. Then she turned herself to land feet first.
Looking between her legs, she made sure her feet weren t headed toward anything vital.
She d landed on a bare section of truss, and absorbed the energy of her jump with bent knees as her
boot claws grabbed the truss frame. She looped her tether around the frame so that Avram could pull the
two skycycles together.
She could think about Peetie now, and hauled herself around to the top of the skycycle.
There was no sign of violence except that Peetie s comm module was missing from his backpack. She
looked at his hands he had been trying to do something to a comm module and Mike s was
missing fromhis backpack.
At least you never quit trying, she muttered. Moving like a machine, resigned to the worst, she put her
head against Peetie s helmet held her breath and listened.
There was a hiss. That meant his suit was still alive and recycling CO2 in a minimum power mode.
Trembling, she attached her own buddy hose to Peetie s backpack and cranked up the oxygen level.
After about twenty seconds of that, she held her helmet hard against his and shouted Peetie!
He moved. Dizzy with oxygen and relief, she shook him gently.
He yawned, then recognized where he was. Then his arms were around her and he called her name over
and over again between sobs.
There were more groans as Mike started to come around, and a lurch as Avram docked their skycycle
on the bottom of Mike s.
& Dad says we kids never go out alone, Peetie chattered, fully awake now. He was sitting in front of
Celinda, doubled up on the skycycle s rear seat, and she had her arms wrapped around him to keep
their helmets in contact so that she could hear him.
Mike was strapped to the cargo rack, sedated. His blue-tinged babble about bad luck and mechanical
conspiracies had stopped when Avram had applied a vac-hypo to the gluteus max right through Mike s
overclothes and shipsuit. Celinda forgave Avram that bit of brother battering.
& so, Peetie continued, I said I had to go with him, orDemocritus wouldn t let us out. Then I tried to
tell him he couldn t take a skycycle. He said to stifle it or he d turn off my radio. I should have called
Democritus for help right then, but Mike s bigger than I am and I thought he was kidding.
I guess he meant it about the radio, because I felt a bump on my back and when we got outside, my
radio module was gone. I couldn t get back in without being able to talk toDemocritus , so I guess I had
to go with him.
When we got to the skycycle, he started pulling modules out of the skycycle and stuck his own in. He
did okay driving it at first real gentle. But it got to be fun, and instead of going right to the Van
Doren s spaceship, he started doing acrobatic maneuvers. Then he screwed up and spun us around, got
mad and yanked on the controller stick and it came off. He tried to fix it by sticking things in the hole
left when the stick broke, and we kept going faster. I was getting real scared. I thought if I could just stop
Mike from doing crazy things, someone could catch us, so I turned down his oxygen when he wasn t
looking.
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