Free Plague Year by Jeff Carlson Page B

shrugging with one upturned palm. The new Ruth was quite ladylike and certainly not inflammatory.
    Too bad that rotating after Mills had put her at an odd angle compared to everybody else. They’d all grown accustomed to entering a new section of the ISS and finding someone standing on what appeared to be the ceiling or a wall, but only Gustavo readily conversed with people before wheeling around to share their alignment. The mind balked at making sense of facial expressions turned sideways or bottom-up.
    No one acknowledged her attempt at eloquence and she felt a dull frustration as ungiving as the walls. The pale, elongated habitation module was about the size of a racquetball court, just large enough for both Mills and Gus to put five feet between themselves and anybody else, Gus claiming the deep end, Mills hovering by the only exit.
    Ruth would have preferred to meet inside the Endeavour — the power of suggestion might have helped her argument—but Mills discouraged anyone from entering the shuttle, which he’d made into his private quarters. Ruth understood. She felt the same edgy possessiveness about her lab and had decided not to risk adding to the pilot’s discomfort. But she was never going to convince him to take his last flight.
    She looked at Ulinov. His frown was a warning. Ruth chose not to notice and said, “I know it won’t be a cakewalk without ground support. We can still get down.”
    “You wanna ditch her?”
    “—ditch the shuttle!”
    Mills and Wallace spoke at the same time. It might have been funny if each of them hadn’t interpreted her words in the worst possible way.
    Contingencies existed, she knew, for crews to parachute from a damaged or malfunctioning shuttle if it could first be brought to subsonic speeds. There was even a massive lake just two miles west of Leadville—she had been studying a lot of film—and Ruth supposed they could intentionally strike the water to avoid the dense refugee population camped throughout the region. Of course, her computers and MAFM might not fare so well.
    “No way,” she said. “The shuttle’s worth too much. We can use the highway north of the city, there’s a stretch that runs straight and mostly flat for almost three miles.”
    Mills said, again, “It’s not like landing a plane.”
    “But there must be—”
    “Why do you keep thinking you know more about our jobs than we do?” Deborah Reece, M.D., Ph.D., sniffed in a way that gave both her words and the set of her chin a haughty, imperial manner. The bitterly dry air had left Doc Deb’s sinuses in a state of permanent irritation and for months now she’d been a walking phlegm-farm. Ruth had suggested that decongestants might be the answer, but Deb replied that her body was generating mucus for a good reason—to protect her aggravated tissues. So she oozed. Constantly. It was just gross.
    “Look,” Ruth said, trying again, “sooner or later we have to leave. We have to go down.”
    Ulinov’s frown never changed. “The president ordered us.”
    “Orders are to beat the locust. Your orders are to support me in any way. That’s all that’s important.”
    “So quit wasting time,” Deb said behind her.
    In the beginning Ruth had been vaguely glad to have another woman aboard. She’d even smiled when Deb and Gustavo became an item. Then Gus broke it off in a storm of silence. The two of them got back together, swore it was over, reunited again. Ruth recognized the pattern. They just needed something to do.
    Maybe what happened next was inevitable, given the close quarters and their complete separation from any normal society. Deb had bounced to Derek Mills. Back to Gus.
    Ulinov tried to stop it. He talked to each of the men and he made jokes about American customs and he threatened to inform Colorado. Sexual promiscuity went against all their training, and rightly so. It had turned each of them, in different ways, into the components of a time bomb.
    Ruth was hardly