“Now we wait and see why they've left us alive.”
“All hands!” Captain Esmeraude's voice exploded over the intercom. “Cut and run! I repeat, cut and run! Reassemble at the main hangar!”
“Name of God!” Commander Rudu King shot out of his chair.
The rest of his crew was on their feet with him. His heart beat out of control. All twelve of them were expert at their jobs, but right now they were all looking right at him to ask what to do about a … What? Mutiny? Revolt?
Anger flared inside him. If their guests wanted the ship, they were going to have to work for it.
“You heard the order. Get to the hangars.” He threw open the locker door and grabbed a pair of magnetic slippers. “I'm going to dump the grid.” He kicked off his shoes and shoved the slippers on over his boots.
The crew looked at each other. He saw them thinking: Dump? He's going to shut the gravity down?
“It'll do the most damage and be impossible for them to undo.” He drew the command word out of its slot in the central table and tucked it into an inner pocket of his coverall.
Each tractor unit held a toroid of fast-rotating neutral particles. If charged particles were dumped into the mix, the carefully balanced particle doughnuts would start to burn out, letting loose X rays and good, old-fashioned heat. Lots and lots of heat. If you had to shut a tractor down, you were supposed to do it with the shields down and the area cleared. Shut them all down at once, without the proper precautions, and you could fry all six maintenance decks.
“Commander, it's not worth it,” said Elisha, a good gravitor with a lousy singing voice that he exercised whenever he thought no one was listening.
“I say it is.” King yanked open the floor hatch to the inner stairway. “Now, get out of here. Make it look like we all just ran for it.”
Rudu climbed down the ladder into the grid shaft. It was a glass tube that was never as well lit as he'd like. The work platforms that stuck out at regular intervals all had their own little sources of white light. All around him, through the glass, he could see the tractors in their yokes. Their familiar push-and-pull buffeted at his body and his senses.
Gravity at this level was tricky. With luck, that would slow the Dedelphi down. If they got into the wrong sections, the opposing forces and sudden flip-flops might actually make them sick and take them out of action. Most first-year gravitors puked their guts out for weeks.
On the other hand, the Dedelphi were incredible swimmers. Half possum, half seal, someone had once said. Who knew if the sensations of falling and not being upright would bother them as much as ground-based Humans.
King redoubled his speed.
At its least subtle, the gravity would turn you upside down if you climbed down too far. The grid was actually two grids, one for the A side, and one for the B side. Each grid pulled the objects on the surface toward the decks. So, when you crossed the ship's equator, up and down reversed themselves and no matter what your eyes told you, your whole body told you your feet now pointed at the ceiling. There was a red line at the switch-over point, but it didn't do anything to ease the transition.
This shaft took him down between sections AX-12/AY-12; 12/12 stretched into Pogo Town. From any one of the work platforms, he could angle the tractors out of phase, send gravity in all directions, shoving people sideways into the sides of buildings, or plaster them against the top of the dome. Do that first? Create some confusion?
No. It'd throw off any security actions. Worse, if he got it wrong, he could send one of those apartment buildings shooting through the dome like a rocket and endanger all their allies as well as their enemies. Anyway, rotating the tractors was something the Dedelphi could undo with the help of the computer, or a scared engineer.
No, shut off gravity and see how they liked dealing with all that water and everything from Dedelphi, to fish, to furniture, not to mention the soil, and all those plants rooted in it going into uncontrolled free fall, and as a bonus having the ship's vital works turned into one gigantic oven.
Bioverse would be taking the damage out of his pay from now ’til Doomsday, but he was not leaving his ship to the pogos. He was not.
Overhead, the hatch clanged shut, cutting off the shaft of light from the main control chamber. Somebody must have shut him in. The pogos must have made it down to gravitor's ops. If that hatch opened now, they'd see him, or they'd hear him. There was nowhere to hide.
Except maybe there was.
There was a platform just above the changeover line. King opened the gate in the safety rails and climbed onto it. Above him, over the humming of the grid, he heard someone crank open the hatch.
King swung over the safety rail. He lowered himself over the platform's edge until he hung by his hands and his body dangled straight down the shaft. His feet were still a good meter from the changeover line. He prayed he was close enough and raised his legs until his toes touched the underside of the platform. He felt a slight push underneath him, like he was sitting on water, and he let go.