by James Axler
Kane used to wonder why Lakesh hadn't removed the sign, but the old man probably applied the same reasons to keeping the illustration of the three-headed hound intact. Nostalgia could take very curious forms.
The destination-lock coordinates had already been entered into the interphase computer program, so simply by closing the chamber door automatic jump-initiator circuits would be engaged.
They took their places, and Kane pulled the door closed. He noted that breathing rates increased, including his own. Traveling the quantum stream always induced apprehension, if not fear.
Kane glanced over toward Grant. "Aren't you going to say it?"
"Say what?" His tone, like his expression, was stony. He used the heel of one gloved hand to wipe away the lipstick on his faceplate and succeeded in only smearing it.
"You know, what you always say before we make a jump."
"It's a bad habit I've been trying to break. Besides, I'm used to it now."
The familiar yet still slightly unnerving hum arose, muted due to the helmets. The hum climbed in pitch to a whine, then to a cyclonic howl. The hexagonal floor and ceiling plates shimmered silver. A fine, faint mist gathered at their feet and drifted down from the ceiling. Thready static discharges, like tiny lightning bolts, arced through the vapor.
The mist thickened, blotting out everything. Shadows seemed to creep into Kane's vision from all corners. The sound of breathing faded, ebbing away into silence. Right before Kane's hearing shut down altogether, Grant's strained, faraway whisper reached him. "I hate these fucking things."
Chapter 14
Stepping into a mat-trans chamber, losing consciousness, then awakening in another always seemed like dying and being born again.
From the hyperdimensional nonspace through which they had been traveling, they seemed to fall through vertiginous abysses. There was a microinstant of non-existence, then a shock and their senses returned.
Kane stared up at the pattern of silver disks on the ceiling and realized sluggishly that something was wrong with them. A moment later, his stumbling thoughts amended that observation. Not wrong, just different. They were smaller, diamond shaped rather than the familiar hexagonal configuration.
Trying to focus through the last of the mist wisping over his faceplate, Kane became aware of the rasp of labored respiration in his ears. Nausea churned and rolled in his stomach, and he fought it down, almost panicky at the notion of vomiting inside his helmet.
In a strained, hoarse whisper, Brigid asked, "Is everybody all right?"
Kane turned his head, squeezing his eyes shut against the momentary wave of vertigo that blurred his vision. When he opened them, he saw Grant and Brigid carefully hiking themselves up to sitting positions. The floor-plate pattern duplicated that of the ceiling. The jump chamber was small, about half the standard size.
The dark blue color of the armaglass walls allowed only the dimmest light to penetrate.
Grant got to his feet first. To Kane's eyes, it looked like he kicked himself up from a crouch, as if he were performing a broad jump. He lunged the width of the chamber, slamming a shoulder hard into a wall. Catching himself on the palms of his hands, he pushed himself backward and stumbled, crashing into the back wall.
He snarled in bewilderment. "What the fuck is going on?"
Kane gingerly rose to a knee, realizing his body felt oddly light, as if it weighed half of what it should.
Brigid said, "We're dealing with maybe half a G here. Be careful."
Both she and Kane took care as they stood up. Kane rocked experimentally on the balls of his feet. "I don't feel as hot," he remarked.
"The suits' thermal controls must've adjusted to the external temperature," replied Brigid. "It's probably about twenty or twenty-five degrees colder here than in Cerberus."
"What about the air?" Grant asked.
She opened the kit slung from a shoulder and removed a small air sampler. She waved the sensor stem around, gauging the reading on the glass-covered face. "Thin," she announced. "It's recycled, but breathable. It'd take some getting used to. There's a trifle more carbon dioxide in it, so we'd have headaches for a while."
Grant consulted the motion detector around his left wrist. "No movement. It's safe to leave."
Kane walked the short distance to the door, planting his feet firmly on the floor plates. He heaved up on the staple-shaped handle and used his shoulder to push it open. Even with its counterbalanced hinges, he was surprised by how little effort it required.
A single overhead light, sunk in a ceiling socket, illuminated the familiar anteroom with its prerequisite table. The far door was up, and Kane saw the flickering lights of computer consoles.
Kane, Brigid and Grant moved out in single file, not speaking. Except for the small size of the gateway unit itself, the rest of the layout conformed to the standard dimensions. Most of the computer screens were dark, and the few that glowed displayed only shifting columns of numbers.
Brigid murmured, "This place is clean, in good repair. Somebody's been using it recently."
"That's what I was afraid you were going to say," responded Grant.
Kane passed a large VGA monitor screen, a twin of the one in the Cerberus control complex. The power indicator below it was lit, so on impulse, he stroked a key. Instantly an image flickered across it, filling the four-foot square of ground glass.
The image swiftly acquired sharp focus, but it still took Kane a moment of staring to understand what he was looking at. Brigid said, "An exterior view of the station, probably transmitted from some sort of vid sat in synchronous orbit with it."
Kane realized she was right, but the sight didn't awe or particularly impress him. The screen showed it clearlya round, slowly rotating mass, like a floating coin seen edge-on. Illuminated by sunlight, it looked ancient, rust pitted, slapped together. Some sections were completely skeletal with no outer sheathings at all, metal frameworks exposed to the void.
"This is really something," said Brigid.
"What is?" Grant wanted to know.
She waved to the image on the screen, then to the room around them. Voice quivering with excitement, Brigid declared, "We may be the first Earth people to step off the planet in two hundred years. It's historic in a way."
Kane glanced at the screen and smiled sourly. Parallax Red looked like such an unfinished, godforsaken hunk of junk, he couldn't help but wonder why anyone visualized it as a Utopia or even why predark scientists had thought it worth building at all. Visiting it certainly didn't meet his criteria of historic.
A few months back, Lakesh had showed them a satellite shot of Earth, taken from two thousand miles up. The view had depressed Kane, showing a forlorn planet that the rest of the universe had forgotten about a long time ago. Parallax Red had that same dismal, bleak look about it.
The upper right corner of the monitor screen showed a sweeping, rocky curve, the white pumice desert of the Moon's far side glaring in the merciless light of Sol. The harsh sunlight reflected from the Moon was so intense it overwhelmed the twinkling specks of stars.
"It doesn't look like much," Grant intoned softly. "Nothing of the historic about it if you ask me."
Brigid sighed wearily and just a bit exasperatedly.
Kane moved on to the closed exit door, his point-man's sixth sense suddenly edgy and restless. A wheel lock jutted out from a circular hatch-port, surrounded by two interlocking collars of dark metal and thick flanges.
"An air lock." Brigid's voice was low. "Probably to keep the jump chamber isolated if the rest of the station lost atmosphere."
Grant took a motion reading and clicked his tongue against his teeth. "No readings."
"No movement?" questioned Kane.
"No readings. Whatever that hatch is made of, it's too damn dense for the sensor beam to penetrate it."
"Maybe that's what happened here," Brigid stated. "The station lost its atmosphere and they sealed this part off. If we open the door, we might get sucked out into a vacu
um and decompress."
All of them thought that over for a moment, then Kane said with forced cheeriness, "There's only one way to find out. We didn't travel a quarter of a million miles to just look at the front stoop, did we?"
He put both hands on the lock, fancying he could feel the frigid metal even through the insulation of his gloves. "I'll go slow," he said. "At the first sign we've got problems, I'll button her up again."
Slowly he twisted the wheel lock, hand over hand, half turns with a few seconds interval in between. The wheel spun easily, and Kane guessed it had been used frequently and recently.
The lock completed its final cycle, and he heard the metallic snapping of solenoids even through his helmet. Before pushing it open, he threw a questioning glance over his shoulder at his companions.
Pointing the air analyzer at the hatch, she said, "No change in either content or pressure."
Grant shook his wrist. "Still no motion readings."
"All right," declared Kane, leaning his weight against the hatch cover. "Here we go."
The disk of heavy metal swung outward smoothly. As it did, the bottom lip of the encircling collars low-ered automatically, making a seamless, flat span of flooring. Kane tensed, hand ready to receive his Sin Eater. The opening of the portal revealed a long, curving stretch of corridor, pitching down at an ever increasing slant.
The passageway resembled the inside of a tube, but with a flat floor. Kane estimated its height and breadth to be twelve by twelve. Halos of ghostly yellow light from ceiling fixtures illuminated it every ten or so feet.
Grant swept the motion detector back and forth. "No movement." Nodding to the corridor, he added, "I guess it's safe to go down there." He didn't sound particularly eager about it.
"We won't really be going down," Brigid assured him. "It feels and looks that way to our senses because of the station's rotation."
Kane took the first tentative step over the threshold, understanding what she meant. It did feel like he was walking down a gentle slope, and he unconsciously leaned his upper body backward.
After a few yards, he grew accustomed to the sensation, and his pace became more confident. The flooring material looked like a kind of shiny plastic, or maybe some sort of porous, varnished concrete. It felt hard and unyielding beneath his boots.
A large, deeply recessed niche on the right-hand wall held a mass of scraggly vegetation, most of it yellow, though bearing a few green patches.
"Looks like moss," Grant observed.
"It is," Brigid replied. "It's an old idea of supplying oxygen to spacecraft and habitats with plants that breathe carbon dioxide and give off oxygen as waste."
She checked her air sampler. "In fact, the oxygen content is a bit richer in this vicinity."
't The three of them continued along the curving corridor. Twice they forgot about the low gravity and stumbled forward, nearly sailing headfirst into the ceiling.
They came abreast of a rectangular, round-cornered metal panel spanning a dozen feet of the left wall. Two recessed buttons protruded from a plate beneath it. When Kane paused to examine it, Brigid said, "Probably an observation port."
He thumbed the top button, and the shutter rose swiftly upward into a thin slot. Cold white light exploded from the transparent portal beyond it. The polarized filters of their helmets reacted instantly, but not fast enough to keep their optic nerves from being overwhelmed by the incandescent blaze of the Sun.
Kane's helmet filled with profanity-seasoned outcries from Brigid and Grant, and he frantically groped for the second button. His tear-leaking eyes saw nothing but a steady, flaring radiance. He depressed the button, whirling away from the nova of light, hearing Grant say bitterly,' 'Real intelligent, Kane. Just because you see a damn button, it isn't an open invitation for you to push it."
The panel slid shut over the port, blocking out the fierce, dazzling blaze.
"Sorry," Kane said. "Won't happen again."
He blinked, trying to clear his vision, wishing he could rub his stinging eyeballs. Even with his lids screwed up tight, all he saw was a molten afterimage of the Sun. By degrees, his sight returned, in a hazy, piecemeal fashion. The first thing his eyes fixed on was the troll.
Ithecrouched on the opposite side of the corridor, his heavy-jawed face sunk between the broad yoke of his shoulders. His beady black eyes glittered from the shadows of deep sockets. Coarse, straight black hair fell over his retreating forehead.
Kane wasn't so much nonplussed by the troll's unexpected presence as he was by the multilinked length of chain he gripped in his gnarled right fist. It terminated in a splayed, three-pronged grapnel. Even to Kane's fogged eyes, the points looked very sharp.
Though the chain looked more like a tool than a weapon, Kane's Sin Eater blurred into his palm, nevertheless. He had no chance to fire it.
Bright floaters still swam in his eyes, so he caught only a glimpse of the troll hunching down, then leaping upward as if shot from a cannon, powerful leg muscles propelling him from the floor.
Something hard yet flexible whipped down across the nerve center in Kane's right arm, just below his elbow. He cried out in anger and pain, seeing only a fragmented image of the grapnel hooks snaking out of his range of vision. His arm seemed to fade out of existence, dropping limply to his side, weighed down by the Sin Eater.
Brigid and Grant were alerted to the danger too late. Their vision still impaired, they heard Kane's outcry, but barely a second before they were struck by the troll and his steel flail.
By Kane's perceptions, the stunted creature moved as if he were on a vid tape sped up to an inhumanly fast, frenzied rhythm. The troll sprang outward, nearly brushing the ceiling with the crown of his head, and whipped the length of chain down at Grant in the same motion. The grapnel claws and links struck sparks from his helmet.
The troll landed on Brigid's shoulders, bouncing off them, using her body as a springboard to launch another of his fantastic leaps. Grant and Brigid cried out simultaneously, more in alarm than pain. Grant staggered sideways, and Brigid fell to her hands and knees.
The troll landed in a squat, lips writhing over stumpy teeth. His breath puffed out before him in a cloud. He said something, a word Kane couldn't hear through his headpiece, then he bounded at him again, snapping out the hooks in front of him.
Kane kicked himself down the passageway as the prongs missed impacting with his faceplate by a fraction of an inch. He half staggered, half drifted along the corridor, arms windmilling as he tried to regain his balance.
The troll's leap dropped him to within three feet of Kane. He gave the chain an expert, snapping jerk, pulling it back. Kane got his boots planted solidly beneath him, gathered his muscles and dived forward.
The troll tried a backward bound, but Kane's left hand tangled in his dirty jumpsuit, fingers digging into the hard muscles beneath.
Mouth open in a silent snarl, the troll struck at his face with the hooks. As Kane swiftly lowered his head, they clanged loudly against the top of the helmet and the two of them tumbled headlong down the passageway.
The troll fought savagely, with muscles of surprising strength and with reflexes just shy of superhuman swiftness. In a revolving whirl of limbs and bodies, they rolled from one curving wall to the other. Due to the reduced gravity, Kane felt exhilaratingly buoyant.
The troll's free hand clawed for the air-circulation assembly on the back of Kane's helmet, but he forced the little man's hand away. He dropped onto his back, the troll on top of him. Placing both boot soles flat against the troll's pelvis, he bent his knees, then straightened out his legs in a powerful, levering kick.
Like an arrow loosed from a bowstring, the troll shot straight up, the top of his head crashing into a ceiling light. It shattered in a brief flurry of sparks. The troll slammed to the deck, hitting it spread-eagled on his back. A few shards of glass sprinkled down onto him.
The little creature wasn't dead or even unconscious, but his black eyes bore a dazed sheen as he
tried to push himself up. He managed to achieve a sitting position, but not before Brigid lunged forward, jamming the short barrel of the Ingram against the side of his head.
"Settle down, Frog-boy," she said, even though he couldn't hear her.
The troll felt the pressure of the blaster bore and remained where he was, chest rising and falling. His respiration rate was ragged, labored.
Getting to his feet, Kane kneaded feeling back into his arm. His knife wounds stung and pulled, and his sore knee throbbed. Grant glared at the little man, pointing his Sin Eater at his face. The troll glared back, fearlessly and defiantly.
"He's one tough little monkey," Kane commented. "Where'd he come from?"
Grant pointed to a double set of open doors a few yards down the corridor. "He rnust've come from that elevator while we were still blind."
"Think he speaks Englishor at all?" Brigid inquired.
"If he does," Grant said dourly, "we'll have to yell so he can hear us through our helmets."
Brigid stood up, gesturing with the Ingram for the troll to do the same. Regarding them with a sulky stare, he did so. Kane pointed to the open doors, then to the three of them.
Nodding, the troll began a shambling, leg-spraddled walk to the elevator, listing slightly from side to side. If he had slouched a little, his knuckles would have dragged on the floor. Kane attributed his curious gait to the elongated thumb near his heel.
"He looks pretty clumsy," Grant commented.
"He's fast and strong," replied Kane. "Never saw anything like the way he jumped around."
"He knows how to use the lighter gravity to his advantage," Brigid commented.
The elevator car was fairly spacious, and the troll stood impassively against the rear wall, abnormally long arms crossed over his chest. He pretended to take no notice of the three blaster barrels trained on him.
Four glowing buttons studded a stainless-steel panel near the door frame. They were marked, A through D. The B button flashed in a regular rhythm. Raising his eyebrows in a silent question, Kane looked at the dwarf, hand hovering over the buttons.