Grant’s cough turned into a strangulated spasm, and he floated over Kane’s head, knees bent double and drawn up to his midriff. Kane reached out, caught an ankle and drew him close. He held him until Grant got his coughing under control.
They still wore their environmental suits, and judg-ing by how cold the air felt on his face, Kane figured he and Grant would have succumbed to hypothermia without them. He didn’t see their helmets, blasters, web belts or Brigid anywhere. He felt a flash of fear, but he tried to ignore it.
Both of them snapped at air, desperately trying to drag the thin oxygen into their lungs.
Kane forced himself to speak, though his words issued from his lips in a wheeze. “Where do you figure we are?”
“Lakesh said the central axis might have no gravity at all,” Grant managed to half gasp. “I figure that’s where we’ve been stuck.”
Kane closed his eyes. He felt thirsty and sleepy. “Why didn’t they chill us?”
Grant shrugged, and the motion sent him drifting toward the ceiling or the floor. Neither one of them had any idea which was which, no sense of up or down. “What did they use on us? I heard something like harp music.”
Kane remembered the op to Ireland and how he had fled the agony-inducing music strummed by Aifa. Bap-tiste had theorized that the instrument utilized sound waves in certain frequencies and harmonies that could have deleterious or benign effects on matter. Still, it made no sense that monkey-pawed trolls were mincing around the enormous space station playing the same kind of deadly harps.
Grant braced his hands against a curving wall, truculently knitting his brow. “Don’t feel like talking?”
“Not much, I don’t.”
Grant inhaled harshly. “If there’s a way out of this place, we’ve got to find it and soon. For all we know, we’re in Parallax Red’s trash hatch, left here to die or to be jettisoned into space.”
It wasn’t a comforting possibility. Kane stretched out his arms and legs. He floated at the midway point in the chamber, where the curvature of the walls was the deepest. Peering around the darkness, he felt ineffectual, indecisive.
“I don’t think that’s the plan,” he said at length. “I think they put us in storage to give them time to figure out what to do with us.”
Without warning, the ovular room seemed to split open in sections. Bright light dazzled their eyes, and they glimpsed a tumble of shapes, silhouetted black against the white. The cell seemed suddenly filled with a foul smell.
Kane pressed his back against the wall, squinting against the sudden glare. The light actually wasn’t all that bright, and his eyes swiftly adjusted to it. Seven trolls floated around them, six men and one woman. Like the males, the female was a squat creature with pushed-in, bulldog features. She wore a threadbare olive smock that left most of her stumpy, thickly thewed legs bare.
Gripped between her unshod feet was an object that resembled a lopsided wedge made of a glassy, iridescent gold. The leading edge was strangely elongated, like the neck of a glass bottle that had been heated and stretched out.
Kane looked at it closely, noting how the device vaguely resembled a small harp, but with a set of double-banked strings. The opposable toes of the woman hovered menacingly over them.
Two of the men grasped a length of heavy rope in their feet, tie bars knotted to it at regular intervals. The
I
rope dangled upward into a star-shaped aperture. The troll Brigid had christened “Frog-boy” paddled close to Kane. He scowled ferociously and pointed at the rope. “Climb.”
His voice was a squeak, like that of a small child or an adult who had been sucking on a helium-filled balloon. Despite the situation, Grant and Kane couldn’t help but exchange smirks.
The woman’s foot-thumb stroked the harp strings. Something rippled out of the bottleneck, a force that shocked both of them. For a sliver of an instant, both had the impression of being stung by a hundred waspsnot the tiny, predark variety, but the big, black mutie brutes with six-inch wingspans. The flaming agony seemed to erupt from the nerve roots outward.