"I'm not going to cave," Claire denied. She took a steadying gulp of air. "Not ever again. What can we do?"

"Well, I'll see what strings I can pull, to try and have Tony brought up—bullshit Bruce, tell him I have to have Tony to supervise his welding gang or something—I'm not sure. Maybe Minchenko and I together can work something, though I don't want to risk rousing Minchenko's suspicions. If I can't"—Leo inhaled carefully—"we'll have to work out something else."

"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 reconnect 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 bent, stressed. "And if it's possible, we'll 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 online, 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 restock 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.