"It's not going on enough power to kill, but I can keep hurting you," Sura shouted back, waving the gun at him, "so get up!"
The man climbed back to his feet, wincing in pain and feeling around his back to the point where he had been burned. As he turned his head to see Sura his look was venomous.
"I was right about the people here," he growled through gritted teeth, then turned back and carried on walking.
They continued along the walkway bordering the hanger to the nearest corner. So far there was no sign of pursuit - the people chasing them would need to check every hangar and every floor, which gave them some time. Nobody suspicious could be seen on the walkway levels above or below them.
Around the corner they took the second passage stretching out into the main hangar void. There were numerous exit points along its length, airlocks that sometimes had short tubes attached between them and a docked ship. The pilot stopped outside one that connected to a small wedge-shaped vessel, laser scars marking its surface and corrosion pitting some parts of its hull.
"What a piece of junk!" Sura exclaimed. Its owner just grunted in reply and slid the card into a slot next to the airlock. It opened.
The ship appeared to be orientated vertically to them - the tube attached to a hatch on its top surface. With Sura watching him the pilot stepped into the ship, caught hold of a bar, and swung himself through ninety degrees. Sura watched in amazement at his manoeuvres in the suddenly zero gravity environment just a few feet away from her. The appearance of the battered vessel was disquieting, and the prospect of entering its dark and weightless interior even more so. She hesitated, once again on the verge of running away, when out of the corner of her eye she saw a distant lift door open, spilling figures into the hanger. She darted forward into the waiting Gecko fighter.
Chapter 5 - Spaceborne
As Sura plunged through the hatch her stomach churned within her and she went careering through, completely out of control. The zero-gravity interior had caught her completely unprepared, if it was possible to prepare herself for an experience she had never encountered before, and she paid the price for it as her body crashed into the opposite wall. The pilot, hidden just out of sight in the shadows, leapt forward and smashed a fist into the side of her head, leaving her already muddled senses utterly confused in a pit of dark and sickness.
The pilot grabbed Sura's shoulders and pushed her towards the exit, but this act threw him off his balance, and he crashed back into a bulkhead as Sura's semi-conscious form hit the ceiling. He swore loudly at his clumsiness and started to try again, but tensed and stopped at a sound outside the ship. There were footsteps and voices from somewhere nearby, and he wasted no time guessing about who they belonged to as he abandoned Sura and moved into the body of the ship.
Sura's mind and body were reeling. Pain exploded through her head and her side was sore, and she felt sick, utterly disorientated. One leg seemed to be pinned to something, and somehow dragged her down without moving her. Only she had no sense of down, or any other direction other than one of darkness and one of light. The leg was somewhere in the light
With flailing arms she managed to catch hold of something, and pulled herself towards this reference point, dragging her heavy leg suddenly free. The ship she had seen - the ship she had entered, and the confusion she had felt, before that bastard had hit her - that was where she was, although the fact that inside it there was no noticeable gravity, unlike on the station walkway, had not registered with her.
Then she heard the people outside. Once again, the significance of this did not immediately hit her; the voices and rapidly approaching footsteps were just background noise to the part of her that was vaguely thinking, but something about them caused a flutter of panic in her even amidst the turmoil of her current state.
The voices were cut off suddenly, along with the light. Scant seconds later the shocks of objects hitting the hull rang out from near by to her, but they quickly stopped. Her right hand was still clinging to something, something that seemed to twist in her loose grip, although the the way other areas of her body that had been touching walls moved showed her that it was she who was twisting. The direction changed suddenly, swinging her around against a solid wall, knocking her breath out of her and tearing her hand away from its grip.
Sura curled up as she was thrown about in the confined and black space. Most of the movements were not severe, but came from unexpected directions and she met the invisible walls anyhow. The nightmarish flinging occupied all of Sura's world, so that she was unaware of time, other than the fact that it had been going on for too long, and could not end soon enough.
The wild ride calmed down, the ship now just making small twitches, and a gradual pressure in one direction suggesting either a slight roll or acceleration. Once Sura had forced her feet against a flat surface that the ship's motion made feel like "down" some of the nausea dispersed, although she was also having to push her arms up against something to maintain the position against any movement she might make.
Sura hung there, helpless. She was dimly aware that all she was doing was blundering from one bad situation, brought down on herself, to the next, but her mind was screaming that down with anger, pain, and fear, and leaving her wanting to lash out and run away at the same time. She had no idea how to do either. Running away was impossible - there was nowhere to go, now that the ship had, she guessed, left the station. It was certainly going somewhere, but that concern had not yet crossed her mind. The pilot was still on the ship, but in the dark weightlessness she did not have a clue about how to get to him.
The people who had chased them were simply shadowy figures, too vague to be a direct focus for Sura's current state of mind. Other faces crossed her imagination, people she silently cursed for her situation. The pilot of this ship. Alex Ardith. The pilot of the shuttle that had brought her here. Injit Nah. None of them really responsible for her situation, but easy targets for blame.
Calmed down, or at least with the edge removed from her fury, Sura started to feel her way around the compartment. It seemed much smaller than she had thought, barely more than a large cupboard. There was a large, flat, recessed surface, probably a door, although she could find no way of opening it. Not a single light blinked to suggest a control. Did she even want to open it? One surface must be the hatch that now closed the entrance she had come through, and was all that stood between her and the vacuum.
She froze in her aimless searching by a noise - mechanical motion of some kind. It was quickly repeated, nearer, louder. Light flashed into the room from behind Sura. Dazzled by the sudden brightness she was unable to react before hands caught hold of her and threw her through the doorway.
There was another blow against a wall, and arms and legs sprawling against hard surfaces, then something else grabbed her and slammed her against a hard surface. It was a second before she realised that she was not pinned to a wall, but, judging from what else she could see of the room she was in, lying on a floor. Not far away a chair was sat in front of shimmering control panels and display screens. She tried to struggle to her feet but collapsed in a wave of dizziness.
When the pilot strode in a second later Sura cringed back in panic, completely at the mercy of an enraged stranger. Still dazzled by the light, she could see little more than his silhouette towering above her.
"Hah!" he spat at her. "Not so cocky now, eh?" He spat on her again, a sticky gob of mucus catching the side of her face. Sura seemed too paralysed to wipe it off.