Mirror Space - Marianne de Pierres [9]
They crashed to the floor together, Jo-Jo using his advantage to get astride her.
He got his hands to her neck and lifted her head, pounding it against the floor - a crack good enough to knock anyone out, if the floor had been concrete or wood or metal. But the floor was ‘zoon, spongy and resilient. Her head almost bounced back and hit him.
He half-expected to feel the hands of Catchut and Latourn on his shoulders but they stayed put.
What he didn’t expect was Randall’s boot in the back of his head. The blow, as she kicked up hard and fast from behind, knocked him over her shoulder. In a single, agile move their positions reversed. Suddenly she had him pinned to the floor, her knees weighing down on his elbows. She’d punched him twice before he even began to struggle. Her next punch, though, loosened all his teeth. Jo-Jo’s world disorientated, and haze spots appeared before his eyes.
He smelt the beer on Randall’s breath as she leant her face close to his. ‘You ever try and take me again and I’ll finish it.’
Jo-Jo wet his lips. ‘But then she won’t have to choose between us . . . and you’ll never really know,’ he whispered.
A moment passed; one of those unpredictable pauses where things could have gone either way.
Jo-Jo waited, not really caring one way or the other.
Then her weight lifted abruptly from his shoulders.
Jo-Jo raised his head off the floor but before he could sit up, Rast had gone.
Catchut and Latourn lurched out of their chairs.
‘What’d you say to the Capo?’ demanded Latourn.
Catchut crouched down like a compacted spring.
Jo-Jo ignored them both. He picked himself up, cupping his throbbing jaw with his hand, and fumbled in the carton for a couple of tubes of beer. Nursing them in the crook of his other arm, he left the cucina and headed to the viaduct.
No way in hell was he sailing like a sitting duck into Extro space.
He’d finished both tubes by the time he’d reached the buccal and the pain in his jaw was beginning to recede. Temporary, but he’d take it. He pushed his fist into the centre of the pucker and waited for it to retract.
Nothing.
Again. Harder this time, more like a soft punch.
Zip.
This time he ground his fist around and pushed with all his strength. A mild shock crackled up his arm to his shoulder and jolted him backwards against the opposite wall.
He recovered his footing and glared helplessly. The ‘zoon had locked him out.
He stalked back along the central stratum to the cucina. Latourn and Catchut had gone, leaving their mess of tubes and the stink of overripe cheese behind them. Jo-Jo snatched up the half-empty carton and took it back to his room, where he drank it in a short space of time. They were in Extro space heading straight into the teeth of disaster and there wasn’t a frickin’ thing he could do about it.
Except get drunker.
MIRA
Mira opened her eyes. The taste in her mouth; the heaviness behind her eyes - the Extro had drugged her. She lay very still, trying to put pieces of recent events together but the past rose up and swamped her.
Trinder Pellegrini had raped her. Raped.
Adrenalin poured through her body as she remembered.
Right afterwards she’d been in shock. Anger hadn’t come till later, when she escaped Araldis aboard Insignia. But it had stayed with her; a hidden river of it, constantly on the point of overflowing.
She sat up and stared wildly around the Extro cell, feeling the years of exercising restraint and manners breaking away.
This . . . this . . . abduction . . .
She jumped off the bed and kicked over the water container. Then she began to overturn anything unfixed. She threw herself at the wall of her prison, clawing at it and screaming. She didn’t care about her madness or the self-harm.
I will not be kept like this!
Wanton-poda hastened towards her from the adjacent chamber, passing through the wall to spray her with more sedation vapour.
She tried to hit the