The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [203]
My first word was probably “Ow!” It would have been a lot more aggressive if I’d recovered command of my consonants a little sooner.
The light was dim, but there was enough of it to allow me to recognize the face of my persecutor.
I was not in the least surprised to find that the person who had been hitting me was Solantha Handsel. She obviously had an obsessive-compulsive personality. I felt a little queasy at the thought of taking her secondhand air into my lungs, so I tried not to think about it for more than an instant.
I tried to sit up, but was not immediately successful. I was glad I hadn’t pushed harder when I realized that the gravity was very low indeed. Polaris, I remembered, was very tiny, and the people who’d abandoned it after making a start on converting it to a microworld hadn’t got around to spinning it.
Solantha Handsel stopped hitting me. She looked down at me with fierce and naked resentment.
“If we get out of this alive, we’re even!” she told me. “Even, okay? You got that?”
I must have contrived some feeble gesture of concession, because she accepted that I had, indeed, got it.
By the time I did manage to sit up, very carefully indeed, the bodyguard was no longer looming over me. She had already finished looking around for anyone else who might be in need of a thorough beating and had taken refuge close to a wall, where she had something to hang on to. Lowenthal was there too. He seemed to be busy. Everybody seemed to be busy, but it was difficult to count them because there was so much mess everywhere.
Whoever had filled this space with supplies had been in far too much of a hurry to do so in an orderly manner. The mess looked strangely familiar, but it took me a couple of minutes to work out that this was because I had seen most of it before, aboard Charity. The supplies that Eido and Alice Fleury had laid in for our support had been rescued — or hijacked — along with us.
That was a comforting thought. It meant that we probably had enough food and water to sustain us for quite a while. We also had light, albeit slightly gloomy light — and we had tolerable heat, and a breathable atmosphere. The ambient temperature was comfortable, and the air — now I could actually suck it into my own lungs — seemed very adequately oxygenated.
“You’d better put these on,” said a voice from the shadows, informing me that I was naked. I looked down at my body. I found it unexpectedly difficult to be grateful for the fact that it was there at all, but I was relieved to observe that it was still in one piece. It looked awful, although the worst of the slime with which it was liberally covered was already turning to a flaky crust.
The dead clothes that fluttered around me as the low gravity discreetly brought them to rest looked exactly like the ones that I had been wearing when I woke up on Charity, having obviously been drawn from the same uniform stock. Not wishing to put them on while I was still so messy I let them lie where they fell and looked back at the wreckage of the cocoon from which I had recently been evicted.
It looked a great deal worse than I did, although there were no conspicuous signs of decay; the viruses that had destroyed la Reine had not traveled in a fashion that permitted them to bring organic companions. The cocoon was dead, but it hadn’t killed me. If I had come closer to death than any of my companions, it was because of what I’d seen, not because of any malfunction of my life-support cell.
“Do you need any help, Madoc?” The speaker — Christine Caine — emerged from the shadows, traveling very gingerly indeed in gravity far less than Excelsior’s, perhaps no more than the moon’s. Even that, I deduced, must be faked by spin.
“I’m okay,” I assured her, although I still didn’t feel confident that I could put the shirt