Keeping one eye on the swerving, circling molecular destabilizer, Kane snatched up his and Grant’s blasters. Sindri bellowed, “Go ahead and shoot me, you smug bastard! But the power buildup of Thor’s Hammer cannot be stopped by bullets. Whether I’m dead or alive, it will still cast a thunderbolt to the programmed target.”
Kane believed him. He pushed the blasters into Brigid’s hands and sprang for the madly wheeling MD. Throwing all of his body weight against its bulk, he steered it toward the control consoles beneath the platform. The machine was very heavy, and it wasn’t until Grant joined him that it was pushed in the right direction.
The molecular destabilizer trundled forward, snapping sparks and glowing with an eerie aura. Grasping the rail, Sindri leaned over and half screamed, ” Don’t , you idiots! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
“The hell I don’t!” Kane shouted in response. “I’m making up more shit as I go along.”
He aimed the harp at the rolling MD and played the strings with fast, violent strokes. The dorsal surface of the machine shuddered, acquiring dents and bulges. A seam popped, spilling out a rainbow-colored nimbus. The concentric storage rings shattered in a cascade of spark-shot vapor.
The harp shivered violently in Kane’s hands, the building vibrations stinging his fingers, shooting up his arms into his neck. His vision blurred, but he saw a hairline crack suddenly cross in his helmet’s faceplate. Swiftly he hurled the instrument at the console, making sure it landed right beneath it. Gauges on the panels erupted in sprays of glass shards. He turned to run.
Sindri shrieked, “You maniac! You son of a”
Whatever else he had to say dissolved in a prolonged, screeching rumble that penetrated their helmets. Coruscating light, like a miniature sun going nova, burst up behind them. As Brigid, Grant and Kane sprinted for the ramp, the deck lurched under their feet. They stumbled but didn’t fall.
A great, cyclonic wind seemed to gust in front of them, trying to swat them back. They fought against it, bending double, nearly dropping to all fours. When they reached the top of the ramp, Kane glanced back.
Through the flares of light mushrooming up from the dynamos, he saw a ragged, ten-foot-long gash ripped in the blister cupping the GRASER cannon. Enclosed and compressed by the armaglass shielding, the destructive fury unleashed by the overloading dynamos had nowhere to go but up. Like a strip of carpet, a long section of the platform’s flooring tore loose from the framework, the alloy fluttering like cloth.
Legs flailing, Sindri clung to a handrail with both hands, his body in a straining vertical posture as he struggled desperately against the relentless drag of de-pressurization. Splinters of glass and metal scraps swirled around him, trapped by the suction created by the breach in the hull.
Kane would have preferred to wait and watch Sindri be sucked into the vacuum of the void, but he couldn’t do so without risking the same fate. He and his companions half rolled and half fell down the ramp. They didn’t discuss tactics but simply ran, following the same route that had brought them there.
They were aware of the great groaning shudders that racked the bulkheads around them and jounced the deck beneath their sprinting feet. None of them voiced the dread all of them sharedthat the sudden and violent decompression would trigger a chain reaction throughout the rattletrap space station, causing either a total power shutdown or making Parallax Red simply fall apart, ejecting them all into space.
By the time they scrambled up the ladder and onto the tier holding the mat-trans unit, the latter hadn’t happened, and lights still glowed in the promenade, though they flickered frequently.
They didn’t dare slow their pace, dashing flat out and side by side up the corridor. When they entered the control room, Kane paused to catch his breath by the big VGA monitor screen. It still displayed an exterior view of Parallax Red .
A white billowing cloud of frozen, escaped atmosphere hung above one of the station’s spokes, very near to the axis. Reflected sunlight glittered from pieces of metal wreckage floating around it. To his disappointment, the range was too great to tell if a small body floated among the debris.