The Bakery looked even more a mess than before. Every loose object had slid to one side of the module. No one seemed concerned; gravity only added to the fun of Lethe. Scientists and technicians tumbled and frolicked in the multihued mayhem.
Ramsanjawi hoisted himself through the hatch. Something was very wrong. He could not imagine the exact cause of the problem, but he knew one thing very clearly: he was getting the hell out of The Bakery.
Lance stared through the command module’s viewport. The Earth had slipped completely out of view and now the stars slid across his field of vision.
He had done it—seized control of the command module, blasted the station into a cartwheel that would tear it asunder. But there was one minor problem, one detail he hadn’t foreseen: no one seemed to care. Where were the Trikon scientists, the Martians, his fellow crewmen? Why weren’t they jamming the command module, whimpering, pleading, begging for their lives?
He stole a glance at Lorraine, hovering in the area between the command center and the utilities section. Her face was pretty in repose. And she had been so kind when he was sick and when he was troubled. Damnation, why did he always go for the bad ones, the Beckys, the Carla Sues, the ones who looked so fine and talked so fine and stabbed you in the back. Maybe he should save her. There would be more than enough room in the lifeboat.
Suddenly he realized why everyone was avoiding him. They were using psychology. That was it. They were ignoring him. Ignore him and he’ll go away. Ignore him and he’ll stop fussing. Ignore him and he’ll go to sleep. His parents had used that psychology whenever his stomach hurt him. He would hear them from his bed, carefully raising their voices so he would hear. Ignore him and he’ll go to sleep.
He fired off more commands to the translation thrusters. Let them ignore this one!
Ramsanjawi staggered out of The Bakery’s hatch directly in front of O’Donnell. Or maybe it was above him. Goddamn, thought O’Donnell, this place is more confusing with gravity than without it.
Ramsanjawi’s eyes, above the breathing mask, popped wide as he recognized O’Donnell through the tinted visor of his helmet. He scuttled along the wall, one hand clutching a black satchel, the other groping for handholds. O’Donnell tried to tackle him, but the Indian slipped free.
Fuck him, thought O’Donnell as he bent himself through the hatch. The Bakery looked like the aftermath of a fingerpaint fight. In any other context, the sight of grown adults gamboling among the drifting and sloshing wads of color would have been hilarious. But O’Donnell felt cold terror clutching at him. Then he caught sight of his lab and his heart stopped.
The vials, the culture dishes, the test tubes—all of them—broken, smashed. Their contents oozed along the bulkhead in a purplish-gray mass. And someone had tampered with the plants. Each was missing exactly one leaf.
O’Donnell tried to jump out of the lab, but a sudden surge of gravity sent him crashing against the bulkhead. He tried again, and this time managed to claw his way first through the lab door and then out the hatch and into the connecting tunnel.
Across the tunnel, a space-suited figure dangled from the open door of a locker.
“Dan, is that you?” O’Donnell called.
In his helmet earphones he heard, “Yeah.” Dan was breathing hard, trying to climb up the tunnel wall toward the command module.
“You okay?” O’Donnell asked.
Dan grunted. “Yeah.” And kept struggling up the tunnel wall.
Ramsanjawi, meanwhile, was nothing but a saffron dot diminishing toward the other end of the tunnel.
“Bastard stole my work,” huffed O’Donnell as he lurched after him.
Dan had been climbing laboriously. With each upward lunge, he ticked off a possible reason for the station’s predicament. Thruster misfire. Gyroscope damage. CERV engine ignition. Collision with the errant Mars module. But there was another possibility, and given the weird behavior already evident it was also the most likely: someone was trying to destroy the station.
Then came the surge.
It blasted him off the wall and sent him tumbling ass over teakettle down the tunnel until he managed to catch hold of a swinging locker door. Even through his helmet he could hear the station’s metal frame groaning. Roberts, Oyamo, and the four Japanese techs somersaulted past, screaming like a sextet of banshees until they landed in a series of thuds against the bulkhead at the end of the tunnel.
O’Donnell emerged from The Bakery. “Dan, is that you?” he called.
“Yeah.” Dan acknowledged, starting up the tunnel wall again toward the command module.
“You okay?” O’Donnell asked.
“Yeah.”
“Bastard stole my work,” O’Donnell growled. He disappeared down the tunnel.
Alone again, Dan scrambled around until he was belly on the wall, heading for the command module once more. Climbing was tougher, which meant the station was spinning faster. More g-forces, more weight. He heard something go ping! like a taut steel cable snapping. Dan moved a foot, then a hand. Then the other foot and the other hand. Like the old comic-book hero Spiderman scaling the face of a skyscraper. He paused to catch his breath. The force was weakening. A little. He was almost at the command module.
Ramsanjawi felt a sudden giddiness as he scurried past the command module’s hatch. He knew that he was weightless again. But then, just as suddenly, his guts surged and he was bumping headlong toward the far end of the tunnel as if sucked into the maw of a giant vacuum cleaner. Petrified, he clawed at the storage compartments winging past him. Scrambling, fingernails screeching along metal, he banged and thumped against walls and doors until he finally managed to stop himself, bruised, battered, bleeding. But the satchel bounced crazily down, down, down.
“No matter,” he breathed as a bead of sweat rolled down between his eyes and paused itchily at the rim of his oxygen mask. There were lifeboats in that direction as well.
O’Donnell glided through the micro-gee zone where the command module joined the connecting tunnel and felt the artificial gravity grab him from the other side. He could see Ramsanjawi’s kurta bobbing in the distance. No time to rappel down the face of the tunnel, he decided. He tucked himself into a ball and let himself fall like a bomb.
Dan gripped both of his gloved hands securely on the lip of the command module’s hatch. He swung his feet out toward the far end of the tunnel, the momentum ripping one hand from the hatch. Clinging desperately with the remaining hand, he painfully mustered the strength to pull himself inside.
The module was spinning like a fun-house barrel. Lorraine floated limply in the narrow aisle alongside the utilities section. Her eyes were closed and a thread of blood curled away from the corner of her lips. But she was breathing and a pulse was visible in her neck.
A flash of motion reflected in Dan’s helmet visor. Someone clad in an EMU was banging at the keyboard of the main computer. The sonofabitch is deliberately wrecking the station. My station! Deliberately! I’ll kill him!
Dan barreled down the aisle like a heat-seeking missile and struck the EMU solidly in the shoulder, tearing it out of the anchoring loops and sending it crashing against the viewport. Quickly bracing himself with his hands against the console behind him as the space-suited figure righted itself, Dan jackknifed and, with all the fury burning within him, kicked both legs into the soft area of the suit’s midsection. He could feel muscles and ribs giving way beneath the impact of his kick.