Chaos Space - Marianne de Pierres [40]
Jo-Jo suddenly felt exhausted. He hated all the crap that went with worlds. If he hadn’t followed that manipulative little cunt Tekton here he would never have got slammed in confinement. No confinement -no wrong place, wrong time—no scrabbling around this toxic craphole looking for a way off. He spat on the filthy acid-scoured floor.
‘Josef?’
Beth’s anxious face appeared beneath the pipes.
He waved his hand at the display above the hatch. ‘Savvy’s gone.’
She made a despairing sound.
Mau squeezed under to join them. Sweat streamed from his face. His skin was as crimson as an Araldisian native’s and his breath came in irregular grunting gasps.
‘We’ll have to go back,’ said Jo-Jo.
But then a noise above them had them all craning their necks. Two of the aliens were on the high platform.
‘They look like slugs,’ said Jo-Jo.
‘Not slugs,’ said Bethany. ‘Maybe arthropods of some type. They have an exoskeleton. And they can see.’
‘Call ‘em what you like, Beth. Mau? Ideas?’
‘Go out onto dock.’ Petalu Mau leaned past them and banged the hatch panel. It popped its seal with a sucking sound.
The noise carried high.
‘They’ve seen us,’ said Beth. ‘Josef.’ She grabbed his chin between her hands and forced him to look into her eyes. ‘In case . . . promise me you’ll find my daughter and tell her that I tried to come after her, that I didn’t abandon her. Promise me.’
Jo-Jo pulled away, perturbed by the strength in her fingers and by her emotion. ‘I don’t do promises, Beth.’
Her head went up and she gave him a fierce look. ‘Promise me or I’ll—’
‘Hatch stuck,’ Mau interrupted.
‘Shit!’ Jo-Jo added his effort to the battle against the malfunctioning safety mechanism until the aperture was wide enough for Bethany to get through.
‘Go down the tube,’ Jo-Jo instructed her. ‘There’ll be a secondary hatch somewhere along it. Stick your head outside it and see what’s there. There’s got to be some other way off this piece of crap.’
She nodded and disappeared while he and Mau continued to push at the door. It opened wide enough for Jo-Jo but not for Mau.
Mau suddenly stopped pushing, exhausted, and fell back against the pipe. His face crumpled, looking as though he might cry. He pointed upward. ‘You tell Mama Petalu that Mau died brave. Tell her not let my little Kia handfast with Toki Lomas. No good, that family.’
Jo-Jo groaned and glanced roofwards. The arthropods were over halfway down the ramp. Goading Mau again might work or…Mau just might kill him.
Short on options, he took a deep breath. ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. But I figured you could handle tough situations, man. Turns out you’re green as that stuff you’ve been pissing. I’m reckoning Beth’s got bigger balls than—’
The muscles in Mail’s neck corded in fury. His big fists came up from where they had dropped by his sides. He charged at Jo-Jo who ducked to one side.
Mau caught the corner of the hatch at full tilt. His momentum sprang the hatch—and cracked his collarbone. He doubled over, moaning, but Jo-Jo didn’t give him a chance to suck in the pain. He pulled him through the door and into the docking tube.
Halfway along, Bethany was leaning out through a flexi-hatch. She heard them and turned awkwardly around in their direction. ‘What’s wrong with Mau?’
Jo-Jo didn’t answer. He squashed down next to her and peered out of the hatch.
The dock was grime on grime. Rubbish filled every corner of the chamber and metal littered the floor space like a shower of food scraps.
From what he could see the berths at each of the four flexi-tubes were empty. The Savvies had most certainly gone.
Jo-Jo jumped down onto the floor and felt the crunch of crystallised corrosion under his feet. He skirted the perimeter of the chamber, praying that his soft detention bootees would survive whatever was eating away at the floor. He couldn’t think of many worse places to die.
Soon his feet began to tingle. He lifted