by James Axler
Elle blinked again and tittered girlishly. "You kinda cute for a big 'un."
Grant managed to control a shiver of horror, muttering, "So I've been told. Can't say the same for you."
He threw the book straight at Elle's forehead. He threw it to land spine first, and Elle staggered the width of the tunnel, uttering a piping squeak of confused pain, like a mouse with its tail caught in a trap. The wall kept her from falling, though she struck it hard.
Grant made a dive through the open hatch, both hands outstretched for the harp. He grabbed the elbow and wrist of her right arm and the muscles beneath his fingers felt as solid as steel. Elle squawked, struggling, wrenching her entire body back and forth. Grant twisted her arm as though he were wringing out a wet towel.,
Elle's hand opened, and the harp fell to the floor and bounced, twanging discordantly. Grant flung the little transadapt away from him and lunged for the instrument. Shockingly, his lunge turned into a low-altitude soar. He dived weightlessly along the tunnel, a couple of feet above the floor.
Despite his astonishment, he secured a grip on the harp as he flew over it. He knew, on an instinctive, gut level, that the gravity hadn't vanished due to an accident. Or if it had, the accident's name was Kane.
Squealing in rage, Elle kicked herself off one wall, jhen the other, powerful leg muscles propelling her toward him in froglike leaps. Despite her drunken state, she still knew how to ambulate in nulI-G conditions.
Managing to twist over onto his back, Grant pointed the bottleneck of the harp in her direction and plucked frantically at the double-banked strings. The sound exploding out of the instrument bore no resemblance to a melody, but Elle sprang right into its directed, vibra-tional path.
As if she had slammed headlong into an invisible barrier, the transadapt woman performed a complete somersault, her malformed feet reversing positions with her head. She spun end over end down the passageway, making no outcry or an attempt to check her spinning motion.
Grant stared, nonplussed, wondering if the harp sound had rendered Elle unconscious. When she made another midair turn, he caught a glimpse of her face and winced.
Elle's mouth gaped open, and from between slack lips drifted a scattering of dark ivory crumbs mixed with little scarlet globules. Her teeth and very likely all the bones in her face had been pulverized by his single desperate strumming of the strings.
Grant didn't go after her to find out if she was alive or dead. He extended his arms at a level with his shoulders and paddled the air with his hands, as if he were swimming through the air. He tried to maintain a short, safe distance from the floor in case the gravity returned with the same abruptness with which it had vanished.
Brigid started to spin and she spread her arms and legs wide to achieve equilibrium. Sindri's expression of befuddlement hadn't changed even as he rose from the floor, his penis bobbing out in front of him.
Loose objects drifted up from the floor. The shattered remains of the glass filtration network and the puddle of chemicals began to float. The liquid formed little mercurylike blobs. Sindri's walking stick arose, twirling end over end.
Angrily Sindri rasped, "The gravity generator has gone outno, I still hear it. Goddammit, it's been tampered with!"
Brigid kicked her feet, trying to put as much distance between her and Sindri as the size of the room allowed. She struggled to slip her arms back into the sleeves of her suit. The effort sent her bumping into the ceiling.
Sindri regarded her with a hard, humorless grin. "Don't bother, Miss Brigid. I've always wanted to try zero-G copulation. Another item the humans here denied me."
He looked ludicrous floating in midair with his organ drifting out before him, but Brigid didn't feel inclined to laugh. She swam sideways a score of feet, using her arms as rudders. Watching her, Sindri barked out a derisive laugh.
"There's an art to managing weightlessness, Miss
Brigid. One you'll not have the opportunity to master. The generator's reset controls will kick in shortly."
Smiling scornfully, he worked his legs as if he were running in place. Gracefully he turned to plant his feet against a wall and bounced from it to the ceiling in a zigzag fashion. Brigid swam toward the overhead light fixture hanging from the highest point of the ceiling.
Bracing herself as best she could, she lashed out at it with both feet. Though the motion sent her rocketing backward, the glass shattered explosively. Sharp shards and splinters danced in the air like a cloud between her and Sindri.
Sindri avoided plunging through it by braking himself with hands slapped flat against the ceiling. Brigid hit the wall on her right side with bruising force. Immediately she began pulling herself down toward the floor, using her treaded boot soles to achieve a degree of traction.
Hissing in frustrated fury, Sindri crept along the curved ceiling, circling the outermost edge of broken glass. Brigid knew that once he circumvented it, he would launch himself off the ceiling and swoop down on her like a bird of prey.
Kane heard the drunken laughter and cracked, off-key singing before he negotiated a bend in the tunnel wall. The four trolls who had escorted Brigid and Sindri bobbed and pirouetted in the null gravity. One of the little men appeared to be sitting in an invisible boat, making clumsy, jerking, back-and-forth movements with his arms. At the same time, Kane recognized the song they were croaking as a hopelessly mangled rendition of "Row Your Boat." He would have laughed at the scene, except he knew the hatch they floated before and ostensibly were supposed to guard led to the medical facility. Sindri and Brigid had to be inside.
Reining in his impulse to charge among them and lay them out with his fists and feet, Kane imitated the trolls' slack-jacked, giddy expressions. He floated negligently toward them, singing a song he had heard Lakesh give voice to more than once. He couldn't remember all the lyrics, but as he approached the trans-adapts, he sang loudly about luck being a lady tonight.
The trolls accepted his participation in their spontaneous sing-along, their hatred of humans subsumed by an overindulgence in oxygen. They greeted him with grins and hoots of appreciative laughter, clapping their hands and feet.
Kane gently bumped a pair of trolls aside as he reached out to trigger the photoelectric sensor beam that would open the hatch.
"Hey, youfuckin' big 'un," snapped one of the trolls in a surly, challenging tone. "You can't go in there."
Kane turned to face him, maintaining a friendly smile. The little man didn't return it. He scowled ferociously. Kane knew from experience that every group of drunks had at least one member who turned nasty when under the influence, whether the intoxicant was home-brewed whiskey or oxygen-rich air.
This particular transadapt was a mean drunk and, even if a loathsome big 'un hadn't appeared, he probably would have picked a fight with one of his friends.
The troll reached for Kane's shoulder. He struck out at the little man with his left fist. It caught the trans-adapt in the sternum, and his swart features seemed to squeeze together like a fireplace bellows.
Uttering a strangulated wheeze, the troll catapulted straight back, cannonading against the opposite wall. The double impacts drove consciousness from his gimlet-hard eyes with the suddenness of a light being switched off.
The laughter and singing of the trolls instantly died. They looked at the slumped, floating form of their comrade with dazed eyes and sober faces. They flicked their gaze to Kane, staring at him with mounting horror and realization.
He waved his hand in front of the door sensor, and before the hatch had fully irised open, he lunged through it. The lunge, which began in zero gravity, ended in a limb-heavy, clumsy, face-first collapse to the floor. He realized in midfall that his fear the gravity generator would reset itself had been borne out.
Objects crashed and tinkled all around him. He raised his head just in time to glimpse a small naked man plummet straight down from the highest point of the ceiling. Behind him he heard the surprised grunts and gasps of the transadapts as they d
ropped heavily to the tunnel floor.
Kane struggled to his feet, turning around to face the enraged troll bounding through the portal. Unsteady on his feet, he leaped straight into Kane's upraised right boot. His jawbone made an eggshell crunching sound as he careened sideways, his body slapping down hard on the floor.
The other two transadapts howled in maddened fury, their teeth champing, as they closed in on Kane from either side. Because of the gravity, they couldn't indulge their habit of high jumping, but they were still strong. One ducked Kane's down-pistoning left hook and head-butted him in the groin. Though the protec-tive suit cushioned the force of the blow somewhat, pain flared through his tender testicles and bile leaped up his throat.
Staggering back, TCane forced himself to remain erect, fighting the impulse to double over. From the corner of his eye, silver flashed in a blurring arc. Metal cracked loudly on bone, and the little man who had butted him wheeled sideways, howling in pain, hands clasped over a bleeding laceration in his scalp. He dropped to his knees, then to his side, curling up in a fetal position.
Brigid stood at Kane's side, half-revealed breasts heaving, eyes blazing with a hot, emerald anger. She gripped Sindri's walking stick in both hands and swung it at the remaining transadapt, bringing it high over her head, then down on his skull.
Despite the rage in her eyes, Kane noted how she checked the swing at the last half instant. The silver knob connected against the crown of the troll's head and knocked him senseless to the floor.
Repressing both a groan and the urge to massage his crotch, Kane wheezed, "Thanks, Baptiste. Are you all right?"
She nodded grimly, fingering away a drop of blood on her lower lip. "You?"
"I won't know for sure until the next time I take a leak. What was going on in here? Where's Sindri?"
In response, she heeled about and strode across the room. Kane followed her to a point where she stopped and stared at a small spattering of wet crimson on the floor.
Brigid pointed the tip of the cane at it, and he saw how it trembled slightly in her grip. "This is where he fell. There must be another way out of here. I guess he's not hurt too badly."
She sounded disappointed. Half-turning, she indicated the small fawn-colored bodysuit lying on the floor. "And he didn't have time to get dressed."
"He's running around naked? What was he doing with his clothes off?"
Brigid zipped up her suit to her throat. Flatly, coldly she replied, "He was trying to rape me."
Kane didn't say anything for a moment, considering the comparative sizes of the parties involved and trying to visualize the scene. Finally he said incredulously, "Little three-foot-tall Sindri?"
"Not all of him is small," she retorted, casting away the walking stick as if it had suddenly occurred to her it was contaminated. "But all of him is twisted. We've got to get out of here, back to Parallax Red ."
"No shit," rumbled Grant, stepping through the hatch. He rubbed his right shoulder with his left hand. "Damn near ended up like Domi when the gravity came back on."
They saw the harp tucked under his right arm and held against his side. Kane demanded, "Where'd you get that?"
"Where else? Elle. Used it on her, too. I think the payback was terminal."
He scanned the room quickly, then focused on Kane. "I sure as hell hope you've done more in the last half hour than to make the trolls drunk and figured out how to dick around with the gravity."
"Anybody else would think that was enough. But, yeah, I have."
Kane moved toward the hatch. "I'll bring you up-to-date as we go."
As Grant preceded him out into the tunnel, Kane cast a questioning look at Brigid. "You sure you're all right?"
Testily she said, "I said he tried to rape me. He didn't succeed, didn't impregnate me, if that's what's worrying you."
He stepped through the hatch. "It's not."
As Brigid followed him out, she asked, "Would it make much of a difference if he had?"
Kane heard the bitterness in her tone, but rather than inquire about it, he replied matter-of-factly, "To him it would. I would've chilled him long and slow, even it meant I had to spend the rest of my life here."
Chapter 29
They jogged down the tunnel, Grant taking the point, holding the harp in both hands. They encountered no more of the transadapts before the passageway ended in a hatch.
"If the chart was right," Kane said as it hissed open, "this is Dome W. On the other side is X and, if we're lucky, the gateway."
As they piled through the portal, Brigid said tightly, "We'd better be more than lucky. We'd better be blessed."
"Why?" asked Grant as they loped along the hallway.
Quickly, curtly Brigid related what Sindri had revealed to her about how he planned to use the GRASER cannon. Both Grant and Kane were doubtful, if not exactly disbelieving.
"Destroy one planet and wreck another?" Grant's voice held a highly skeptical note. "Damn big order for such a tiny pissant of a man."
"Do you believe him?" Kane asked Brigid.
"I believe he'll try it."
Turning a bend in the tunnel, Kane said musingly, "If it works, it may not be such a bad idea. Sindri would be doing our jobs for us, giving the boot to the barons and the Directorate."
She pierced him with a hard stare. "And most of humankind, too. Besides, the results he's hoping for are speculative at best. Even if it all goes according to plan, do you think Sindri is a better candidate to rule the planet than the barons or the Directorate?"
"Hell, no," Grant barked. "Then we'd just have to get rid of him."
Kane said no more, but he couldn't deny he found the image of flaming meteors crashing into the villes and toppling the Administrative Monoliths very appealing. Still, Sindri was not too far removed, behav-iorally and emotionally, from Baron Sharpe. Then again, with his high-handed assumptions that all his actions were sanctified in the name of the greater good, he wasn't all that different from Lakesh, either.
The route through Dome W was deserted. Kane suspected Sindri may have gone to the circulation station to correct the air mixture, and he cautioned his companions that if they met more trolls, they might not be oxygen drunk.
When they reached the hatch that led to their destination, Kane's sixth sense, his pointman's instinct, suddenly bristled in full, suspicious alert.
"Let me go first," he said, reaching out to take the harp from Grant.
Distrustfully Grant commented, "You don't know how to play this thing."
"Neither do you. You just got lucky."
Reluctantly Grant passed over the instrument. Kane stepped before the sensor, and the iris segments of the hatch slid open. He stepped into Dome X, sweeping the bottleneck of the harp in short left-to-right arcs.
Almost immediately he felt his nape hairs prickle. Although the tunnel stretching before them looked exactly like all the others they had passed through, he felt a surge of unreasoning fear. Dark stains marred the smooth surface of the floor.
Much blood had been spilled here; many people had died brutally. The dome reeked with the same miasma of terror and despair as Redoubt Papa.
Kane hurried forward and, unconsciously lowering his voice, said over his shoulder, "We'll have to check every room here."
The first hatch they came to opened into a partitioned office suite filled with desks and computer terminals. Tacked on to a bulletin board near the door were dozens of memos, each one bearing the legend By Order Of The Committee Of One Hundred.
Though they knew that it was more than likely a waste of time, they fanned out across the suite, searching for another exit. They found none and returned to the tunnel.
The second hatch opened up into a big room that had apparently served as a council chamber. A raised dais supported a lectern, looking out over ten rows of chairs. They didn't bother to count them, assuming they probably numbered exactly one hundred.
A swift search of the chamber turned up no adjacent room, so they went back into t
he tunnel. The third hatch they found didn't respond to the blocking of the photoelectric sensor. All three of them made numerous attempts, but the portal stayed shut.
Kane declared, "This has got to be it."
"How are we going to get in there?" Grant demanded.
Aligning the bottleneck of the harp with the center of the iris pattern, he said, "Stand back."
Brigid began to protest, but her words were swallowed up by a discordant wail as Kane stroked the strings, experimentally at first, then harder and faster. The notes rolled, slapping against the hatch metal, building higher and higher until the tunnel seemed to vibrate in unison with them.
Grant and Brigid stood on either side of the frame, hands over their ears, watching pain slowly twisting Kane's face. He stood fast, strumming and plucking the threads of the harp. The disharmonious music flooded the passageway, beating against the portal in invisible waves, splashing back over him.
He felt a crushing weight pressing against his body, and his eardrums seemed to push inward. He labored for breath. It became intolerably hot, heat radiating in hazy shimmers from the hatch.
The metal segments cracked, a pattern of jagged lines bisecting them, widening and lengthening. Flakes of alloy showered down, then small chunks. The panels shivered, a violent tremor shaking them within the frame.
Kane removed his fingers from the strings, but he still felt, if not exactly heard, the echoes of the musical notes. Gritting his teeth, he swung his right foot at the center of the hatch. The sole of his boot struck it hard, and a corresponding vibration jolted up through his leg, like an electrical shock. He almost cried out from the unexpected pain.
The hatch buckled a bit, more pieces crumbling and falling from it. Kane limped back, his leg numb from the tips of his toes to his knee.
Grant pushed him aside, tucked his chin against his shoulder and sprang forward, slamming all of his 220-plus pounds against the portal.
Fatigued metal shrieked and burst inward in a clashing rain of fragments. Grant landed heavily in the room beyond, skidding forward a few feet atop a large curved segment.
