The welder advanced in its tracks across the workpiece, stitching a flange for the last clamp to hold the new vortex mirror in place in its housing. A light on the beam welder's top flashed from red to green, the welder shut itself off, and Pramod moved in to detach it. Bobbi floated up immediately behind to check the weld with a sonic scan. "It's good, Leo. It'll hold."

"All right. Clear the stuff out and bring the mirror in."

His quaddies moved fast. Within minutes the vortex mirror was fitted into its insulated clamps, its alignment checked. "All right, gang. Let's move back and let Ti run the smoke test."

"Smoke test?" Ti's voice came over the com. "What's that? I thought you wanted a ten-percent power-up."

"It's an ancient and honorable term for the final step in any engineering project," Leo explained. "Turn it on, see if it smokes."

"I should have guessed," Ti choked. "How very scientific."

"Use is always the ultimate test. But power up slowly, eh? Gently does it. We've got a delicate lady here."

"You've said that about eight or ten times, Leo. Is that sucker in spec or out?"

"In. On the surface, anyway. But the internal crystalline structure of the titanium—well, it just isn't as controlled as it would have been in a normal fabrication."

"Is it in spec or out? I'm not going to jump a thousand people to their deaths, dammit. Especially if I'm included."

"In, in," Leo spoke through his teeth. "But just—don't horse it around, huh? For the sake of my blood pressure, if nothing else."

Ti muttered something; it might have been, Screw your blood pressure, but Leo wasn't sure. He didn't ask for a repeat.

Leo and his quaddie work gang gathered their equipment and jetted a safe distance from the Necklin rod arm. They hung a hundred meters or so above Home. The light of Rodeo's sun was pale and sharp here within an hour of the wormhole jump point; more than a bright star, but far less than the nuclear furnace that had warmed the Habitat in Rodeo orbit.

Leo seized the moment to gaze upon their cobbled-together colony ship from this rare exterior vantage. Over a hundred modules had finally been bundled together along the ship's axis, all carrying on—more or less—their previous functions. Damned if the design didn't look almost intended, in a lunatic-functional sort of way. It reminded Leo a bit of the thrilling ugliness of the early space probes of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries.