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.