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something with his long fingers and occasionally selecting one of the squeeze tubes from the collection clamped to his forearms. I thought about getting on the radio and asking what he was doing, but decided against it. He clearly knew his business, and there didn’t seem any point in distracting him with a lot of questions. I made a mental note topick up a set of zoomable hull cameras at our next stop.
    The whistle from the radio speaker was so unexpected that Shawn and I both jumped, a movement that the zero gee magnified embarrassingly. “There it is,” Chort said as I grabbed my restraint straps and pulled myself firmly down into the chair again. “A small pressure ridge only. Easily repaired.”
    He set to work with his squeeze tubes again. “I’ll never understand about that stuff,” Shawn commented. “If it’s so good at fixing hull cracks and ridges, why not coat the whole hull with it?”
    “Good question,” I agreed, throwing him another surreptitious glance. Calm, friendly, and now even making intelligent conversation. I made another mental note, this one to restrict all my future interactions with him until after he’d had his morning coffee or whatever.
    If Chort was a representative example of Craean spacewalking ability, it was no wonder they were so much in demand. In less than ten minutes he’d sealed the ridge, tracked two jaglines radiating from that spot, and fixed them as well. “All secure,” he announced. “I will check the rest of the sphere, but I believe this is the only problem.”
    “Sounds good,” I said. “Before you go any farther forward, you might as well go aft and run a quick check on the cargo and engine sections.”
    “Acknowledged,” Chort said, turning around and heading back over the side of the cargo sphere. He paused once, moved down the side toward the wraparound—
    And suddenly, with another stomach-wrenching disorientation, I fell down hard into my chair.
    Shawn yelped in surprise and pain as he dropped like a rock to the deck beside me. But I hardly noticed. Incredibly, impossibly, the
Icarus
’s gravity field had gone back on.
    And as I watched in helpless horror, Chort slammed against the side of the cargo sphere, caromed off the wraparound, and disappeared off the monitor screen.
    “Revs!” I barked toward the intercom, twisting the camera control hard over. “Turn it off!”
    “I didn’t turn it on,” he protested.
    “I don’t give a damn who turned it on!” I snarled. I had Chort on the screen now, hanging limply like a puppet on a string at the end of his secondary line at the bottom of the artificial “down” the
Icarus
’s gravity generator had imposed on this small bubble of space. “Just shut it
down
.”
    “I can’t,” he bit back. “The control’s not responding.”
    I ground my teeth viciously. “Tera?”
    “I’m trying, too,” her voice joined in. “The computer’s frozen up.”
    “Then cut all power to that whole section,” I snapped. “You can do
that
, can’t you? One of you?”
    “Working on it,” Nicabar grunted.
    “Computer’s still frozen,” Tera added tautly. “I can’t see him—is he all right?”
    “I don’t know,” I told her harshly. “And we
won’t
know until we get him back—”
    I broke off suddenly, my breath catching horribly in my throat. Concentrating first on Chort’s fall, and then on getting the gravity shut down, it hadn’t even occurred to me to wonder why Chort had fallen that far in the first place. Why Jones hadn’t had the slack in the primary line properly taken up, or for that matter why he hadn’t already begun reeling the Craea back into the wraparound.
    But now, looking at the outside of the entryway for the first time since the accident, I could see why. Hanging limply over the sill of the hatchway beside the equally limp primary line was a vacsuited hand. Jones’s hand.
    Not moving.
    “Revs, do you have a suit back there?” I called, cursing under my breath,