The nacelle housing was deeply dented where the pusher had collided with it. Leo tried to reassure himself. It's only a housing. It's put there to protect the guts from accidents just like this, right? Hissing in dismay, he pulled himself around to shine his work-suit light into the man-high dark aperture at one end of the housing.

Oh, God.

The vortex mirror was cracked. Over three meters wide at its elliptical lip, mathematically shaped and polished to angstrom-unit precision, it was an integral control surface of the jump system, reflecting, bleeding or amplifying the Necklin field generated by the main rods at the will of the pilot. Not just cracked—shattered in a starry burst, cold titanium deformed past its limits. Leo moaned.

A second light shone in past him. Leo glanced around to find Pramod at his shoulder.

"Is that as bad as it looks?" Pramod's voice choked over the suit com.

"Yes," sighed Leo.

"You can't—do a welded repair on those, can you?" Pramod's voice was rising. "What are we going to do?"

Fatigue and fear, the worst possible combination—Leo kept his own tired voice flat. "My suit supply-level readout says we're going to go Inside and take a break right now. After that we'll see."

To Leo's immense relief, by the time he had unsuited, Vatel had retrieved the errant pusher and brought it back to dock at its Habitat module. They unloaded a frightened, bruised quaddie pilot.

"It locked on, I couldn't get it off," she wept. "What did I hit? Did I hit somebody? I didn't want to dump the fuel—it was the only way I could think of to kill the jet. I'm sorry I wasted it. I couldn't shut it off . . ."

She was, Leo guessed, all of fourteen years old. "How long have you been on work shift?" he demanded.

"Since we started," she sniffed. She was shaking, all four of her hands trembling, as she hung in air sideways to him. He resisted an urge to straighten her 'up'.

"Good God, child, that's over twenty-six hours straight. Go take a break. Eat something and go sleep."

She looked at him in bewilderment. "But the dorm units are all cut off and bundled with the crèches. I can't get there from here."

"Is that why . . . ? Look, three-fourths of the Habitat is inaccessible right now. Stake out a corner of the suit locker room or anywhere you can find." He gazed at her tears in bafflement a moment, then added, "It's allowed." She clearly wanted her own familiar sleep sack, which Leo was in no position to supply.

"All by myself?" she said in a very small voice.