Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [36]
He opened the door and stepped out, without bothering to look back at Konstantin Milyukov.
NINE
The man with the sidearm was still waiting patiently outside, as Matthew had expected. He seemed slightly surprised to see Matthew emerge unaccompanied, but he nodded readily enough when Matthew asked to be taken to see Andrei Lityansky. He took a phone from his belt and thumbed the buttons. He didn’t put it to his ear: the text-display obviously told him what he wanted to know.
“He’s not in the lab just now,” Riddell reported, “but I’ve paged him. He’ll meet us there as soon as he can. This way.”
Once they’d rounded a couple of bends and taken a branching corridor Matthew could no longer tell whether they were heading in the same direction as the one from which they had come or a completely different one, but he took note of the fact that there were not nearly as many people about now that he had been fed the captain’s point of view.
He glanced behind several times, catching glimpses of another man who was obviously heading for the same destination but seemed to prefer that the curves of the corridors obscured him from sight. The follower did not seem to be carrying a gun.
Having no idea how long the journey would be, Matthew felt constrained to act quickly. He waited until they came abreast of one of the blacked-out corridors, and then turned on Riddell without warning, grabbing him by the throat and attempting to slam the man’s head against the corridor wall. Had he been fully fit the power of his muscles would have been easily adequate to the task, but his coordination was awry. Riddell sustained a nasty bump but he ducked far enough forward to make sure that he was not knocked out.
Knowing that reinforcements would arrive within seconds rather than minutes, Matthew brought his knee up into the other man’s groin, then threw his whole body sideways in order to slam his victim into the wall for a second time.
It was ugly and untidy, but it worked. Riddell went limp.
Matthew grabbed at the gun, but he was far too clumsy to be able to snatch it out of the holster. Indeed, he was so far off balance in the unfamiliar gravity regime that he slammed into the wall himself, bruising his arm. He had no time to nurse the bruise—he had to regain his footing immediately in order to respond to the follower’s rapid approach. Knowing that brute force was his only option, he lashed out with his uninjured arm. The attacker tried to duck, but he had been in too much of a hurry. The punch caught him under the nose, and snapped his head back with a horrible click.
Matthew cursed volubly, fearing that he had broken at least one of his knucklebones, but he still had the presence of mind to hurl himself into the dark corridor and run as fast as he could along it.
No lights came on as he passed through the corridor; it was presumably dark because the lighting had failed. That was his first stroke of luck. His second was that he did not cannon into anything solid before stabilizing his lurching run and sticking out a hand so that he could trail the fingers along the wall, tracking its contours.
Running blind was more difficult than he had anticipated, but he slowed to a walk quickly enough. He took a left turn, then a right, then backtracked to avoid light up ahead. He was already completely lost, in an environment whose layout and dimensions were utterly unknown to him, but knew that if he failed in what he was trying to do he could always surrender to the crew.
In the meantime, he just kept moving, clinging to the darkness.
The darkness, he now assumed, must be a result of Shen Chin Che’s “sabotage.” The darkness was where the territory that Shen had reclaimed from Milyukov had to be. There might, however, be an awful lot of darkness. If Hope had the floor space of a sizable Earthly town, there might be a lot of empty space to which no one had bothered