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.
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