Shit Head was rising from the floor as I pulled out a three-person vac-raft. This was nothing more than a fabric sphere that was large enough to hold three people in a pressurized environment while they waited for someone else to come and get them. But in its unpressurized condition it was just a limp hunk of Beta cloth fabric. I unzipped the vac-raft and threw it at Shit Head. I got lucky. His arms got entangled in the vac-raft’s open end and multiple hand holds.
His claws tore at the vac-raft and ripped long tears in it as ropes of fabric became entangled with his arms. I looked back into the locker and found a breathing mask with an oxygen bottle. I threw them at Shit Head but he batted them aside, though the reaction made him slip back onto the floor.
The oxygen bottle rolled down the corridor and Tom hurled it back at our guard’s head, which it hit with a satisfying thump. The kzinti lashed out with one free arm, leaving deep gashes in Tom’s chest and sending him tumbling down the corridor.
In a moment Shit Head would be free of the vac-raft. I was pulling out another one when I saw a heavy pry bar that was designed to open sealed doors during power failures. It was over a meter long and had a bulging torqueless ratchet on one end.
Turning back to Shit Head I saw that he was pulling out his communications device. This was not the time to let him call for reinforcements. I grabbed the pry bar and swung it with both hands. It connected with our guard’s arm with a weird snap like glass breaking under water, and the communications device went sliding down the corridor. Tom stepped on it, smashing it into a star of electronic debris.
I tried to bring the pry bar back down on our guard’s head, but he was rising from the floor and coming toward me with his injured arm dangling limply by his side. There wasn’t room to swing the pry bar again so I stabbed at him with it. The impact against his chest knocked the air out of his lungs and almost made me fall backwards. Shit Head swung his good arm against the metal tool and sent it flying out of my hands.
I snatched the weapon I’d dropped, turned and ran, hoping that Shit Head would ignore Tom and follow me. He did.
Running up-spin I could feel my synthetic weight increase slightly as my running speed added to the rotational velocity of the spinning crew section. It was a small effect and I could easily compensate for it. I didn’t think the kzinti chasing me was familiar enough with centripetal acceleration to do the same.
Shit Head lowered his body toward the floor as he chased me. At any moment I expected him to drop down and run on all fours. He was inhumanly fast and gaining on me.
I was holding the second vac-raft. My weapon. I did the only thing I could. I pulled the inflation tab on the vac-raft and tossed it behind me. It expanded to a size that almost filled the corridor. Shit Head ran into the inflated vac-raft and it bounced in front of him like a demented beach ball. He swung the claws of his uninjured hand and the vac-raft exploded with a loud pop. Again he lowered his body toward the floor and closed the gap between us. The raft clung to his claw and dragged behind him until he shook it loose. And then he screamed and leapt with his uninjured arm stretched out before him.
But he hadn’t counted on the effect running would have on his centripetal acceleration or on the fact the floor was gently curved, not flat. Those two small but significant differences between our ship and a planetary surface made him hit the deck sooner than he expected. He went sprawling behind me. That kzinti was ignorant but not stupid; I didn’t think he’d make that same mistake a second time. I had to think of something.
The entrance to one of the cargo transfer tubeways loomed ahead of us. I ran in. The tubeway was a hollow cylinder over six meters in diameter that stretched a hundred meters from the rim of the spinning part of the ship to the weightless transfer hub. A ladder surrounded by a safety cage made of wide spaced metal frames ran up the length of the tubeway and ended in the zero-g area. The lift was parked in the zero-g part of the ship and I didn’t have time to wait for it to come down to me. I ran over to the ladder and started climbing as if my life depended on it.
I had never gone up a ladder as fast as I did just then as I raced for the weightless part of the ship. I only hoped that One Ear had not heard the commotion and come to investigate. The thought of being trapped between two angry kzinti was the stuff of nightmares.
As I rose up the ladder I could feel my weight dropping as I got closer to the rotational axis of the spinning section and the centrifugal force was correspondingly lowered. The effective gravity had fallen to almost half of its normal value when I heard Shit Head enter the tubeway.
I hazarded a look below but did not slow my hurried journey upward. Shit Head saw me with his upraised eyes. In a moment he was on the ladder and following me upward. He was using his injured arm to help maintain his balance on the ladder. I hoped it hurt him. A lot.
Nearing the end of the ladder my effective weight had been reduced to almost nothing and I pulled myself upward in a continuous motion. A lifetime of zero-g reflexes helped me increase the distance between myself and the hungry carnivore that was chasing me. I thought about the times I had played weightless tag with my friends while growing up in orbital habitats in the Belt. Those games had seemed so important to us children, but the stakes were never as high as the game I was playing right now.
Then I thought of something. Spin diving. A Belter child’s game of chicken to see who could jump the farthest down the tubeway of a spinning habitat. If you played it safe you didn’t win, but if you tried to go too far you ran the risk of falling all the way down to the full gravity section of the habitat. The newsnet had carried occasional stories of spin dive games that had ended in deadly tragedy. It had been one of my favorite games while growing up.
As I popped out from the safety cage surrounding the ladder I glanced back down at Shit Head. He was rising rapidly but the lowered gravity was causing problems for his coordination. His pace was no better than it had been back at the lower, and much higher gravity, part of the climb. I chanced a look over at the large hatch leading out of the transfer hub and was relieved to find that One Ear was nowhere to be seen. Finagle must be a Belter because he was surely working on my side right now.
Shit Head was nearing the top of the ladder and his concentration was torn between me and the ladder that he gripped as if he was under full gravity.
I positioned my almost weightless body against the top of the tubeway and compressed my legs while I gauged my upcoming jump. I made a quick double check of the safety placards on the wall and reassured myself that I would be jumping spinward. Shit Head was reaching the top of the ladder when my legs exploded under me and I dove headfirst down the tubeway toward the spinning part of the ship.
A look of surprise raced across Shit Head’s face as I flashed through the air rapidly falling toward the other end of the hundred meter tube. He watched with focused concentration while my body followed a compound curve made up of the linear motion of my jump and the rotational motion of the tubeway.
I slammed into the safety cage just a bit below where I had wanted to land and held on tightly against the forces now pulling on me. Damn! I guess I wasn’t the spin diver I was in my youth. An effective gravity of over half-a-g tugged on my arms as I swung myself inside the safety cage and over to the ladder. I turned my head up to look at Shit Head. He had emerged from the safety cage and was watching me intently, trying to decide what to do next.
I slid down the smooth aluminum ladder so rapidly my hands were burning from the friction and my feet were tingling from tapping them against the rungs of the ladder as I controlled my fall. I felt my weight increase with every second. By now I was almost two-thirds of the way down the tubeway.