Ark Angel - Anthony Horowitz [99]
And it got worse. Alex stopped spinning and found himself floating in the very centre of the module. Either he was moving very slowly or he wasn’t moving at all. The rails and Velcro straps were now uselessly high above his head. He stretched out his arms and discovered that the walls were a couple of centimetres out of reach. It was like some terrible nightmare. Every time he strained forward, his body moved back. He was quite literally stranded, floating helplessly, going nowhere.
What now? How did he make himself go up or down? He jerked his body and pedalled with his legs. It didn’t help. He tried waving his arms like a bird in a bad cartoon. Nothing.
Alex started to panic. Nobody had warned him about this. He was stuck in zero gravity and he began to wonder if he wasn’t doomed to remain like this until Ark Angel blew itself apart. He couldn’t move!
It took him what seemed like an eternity to work it out. It was amazing really that a physics lesson on a damp Wednesday at Brookland School should suddenly come to mind and save his life. He took off his shoes and threw them with all his strength. The forward motion produced an opposite reaction, a bit like the recoil from a gun. Alex was thrown back and managed to grab hold of a handrail. He clung there for a moment, breathing heavily. It had been a nasty moment and he would have to be very careful it didn’t happen again.
He had to get moving. He hadn’t been able to see the observation module and the remaining stages of Gabriel 7 on the far side of the space station, but he knew they were there. The rocket had docked automatically almost an hour ago and had brought with it an activated bomb. He looked at his watch again. Twenty-five minutes had passed! There was barely an hour left. If the bomb exploded at the right time and in the right place, he would be vaporized, and a four hundred tonne missile would begin its deadly journey back to earth. Alex thought back to the map of Ark Angel he had been shown and knew that he had to navigate his way through an interlocking series of modules to reach his destination. He remembered what Ed Shulsky had told him.
“Don’t try to defuse it unless you’re sure you know what you’re doing, Alex. You press the wrong button, you’ll be doing Drevin’s work for him. Just move it into the sleeping area. That’s all you have to do. Move it and then get the hell out. Fast.”
It was ticking right now. Alex could imagine it. Just the two of them. Him and a bomb on a space station orbiting the earth.
He was about to set off when he heard something. The clang of a hatch closing. It was quite unmistakable. He stopped and listened. Nothing. What next? Martians? He must have imagined it. Alex pushed off with his feet, as gently as possible, trying to steer himself towards the next module. Once again he had pushed too hard. His shoulder hit the roof – or the floor – of the node and for a second time he found himself spinning out of control.
He reached out with his hands to steady himself and found himself holding onto a lever that jutted out of the wall. It was a shutter release. Unable to contain his curiosity, he opened it, wondering if it would give him a view of the earth. But the space station was facing the wrong way. Alex reeled back, almost blinded, as brilliant light burst into the module. Professor Sing had warned him not to look directly into the sun. Even in that brief instant, Alex had almost blinded himself.
He closed the shutter again and waited