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.”