In reflection, on his almost dark screen, his eyes widened further, while his hands came up, in reflex action, to claw at his own neck, trying to dislodge the belt. Not a chance. What there was a chance of, was my killing him. Which would be a problem.
I've had an easy time with machinery and electronics since I could remember, but these controls looked a little complex to learn before I blew myself up on the next ripe powerpod. So I had to be careful, and bring my prey within sight of his own death without pushing him over.
This required my knee at his back, in between his shoulder blades; my hands pulling just enough to keep him struggling without making him lose consciousness. I watched his eyes. As soon as he looked dazed enough, I would let go and I . . .
His foot kicked at a lever on the floor. I had a millisecond to wonder if it was reflexive action. In the next moment his hand let go of his neck and he unbuckled himself from the seat. And we floated.
No gravity. No gravity. I whimpered, as my feet lost all contact with the distant floor, and there was no floor, no ceiling. My stomach twisted.
The creature freed himself from the belt, and growled something that sounded like another language under his breath. He turned around, mouth in a snarl. His hand, massive and square, positioned just below my breasts and pushed. I went back and spun.
I tried to fight. I've fought many men, many who should fight better than I or who were stronger. This was like fighting a shadow. He moved . . . He was everywhere. He slid past me, fast. Fast like being in a dream where people change positions before you can track them.
I tried to kick but never made contact. I tried to claw and scratch, but it seemed to have no effect. His features were frozen in stony anger, his teeth clamped together and showing between his drawn lips which had, in turn, gone pale. And he was muttering something that was little more than a growl, as he pushed me back and back and back, and pinned me against one of the walls.
I bit him, hard, on the arm that held me pinned. He grabbed the back of my hair and pulled till my mouth opened and I let go. He didn't give his bleeding arm more than a glance.
Glaring at me, his lips drawn into a rictus of fury, he muttered things, of which only a few words were understandable. "Earthworm . . . . vicious . . . uncontrolled . . . . . . . I was going to let you live. I was going to . . . . Tell me why in Blazing Light I shouldn't space you?
I opened my mouth, but no sound came. My throat felt dry and abraded, as if I'd been screaming for a long time. Whatever he was, he wasn't human. He certainly wasn't normal human. He wasn't . . . No one could move like that. I swallowed, but there was no saliva to soothe my throat. Instead of words, a pitiful whimper came out of my mouth.
I didn't think being cute was going to save me this time. He wasn't even touching anywhere near my breasts. Though my slip was split open, the halves floating, his hand pushed solidly between my breasts and my stomach. And in his odd eyes there was no sign at all of masculine appreciation for curves.
"Tell me," he said, his voice more understandable, but not for that much calmer. "Now."
Something exploded. At first I thought it my head—such the sense of pressure and danger, such the need to answer, somehow. And then I realized it came from outside the ship. And then we started rolling, rolling, end on end, accompanied by thuds and pops of hitting something—several some things outside.
I had time to think of the dimatough trunks, the explosive powerpods. My companion clearly thought of the same, as he let go of me, and said, "Oh, hell."
And then the lights went very bright, then dark, then normal. Gravity reasserted itself and I fell. I saw my playfellow on the floor, pulling at the lever with both hands.
So the lever was gravity was it? I'd never seen a ship that could turn gravity off and on that easily and I wondered why. But he wasn't paying any attention to me. Which might be a good time to attack him, only, of course, I wasn't sure I could win. I also didn't know anything else to do. It wasn't like he was just going to forget I'd tried to strangle him. Was he?
He sat down in his seat, and buckled himself with what seemed to be a reflex motion. He ran his hands along the keyboard, and along a panel next to it, where a series of raised dots shifted places quickly—whether in response to his touch, I didn't know.
Words still came from him, under his breath, but now they seemed to be more the muttering of someone who is cursing fate. "Can you see the screen?" he asked me. "Can you see anything on the screen?"
I'd thought we were not on speaking terms, but I squinted at the screen, and could make out, amid the prevailing darkness, some twisting darker lines and some brighter spots. "Pods and trunks?" I asked.
"So you're not completely stupid," he said. "Can you tell me how to get out of here?"
"Why . . . why . . ."
He made a sound on the back of his throat. "Because I'm blind. The flash of light blinded me. Temporarily. My eyes are light sensitive. It's part of my elfing."
His . . . elfing. Oh, no. I wasn't going to ask. He could be any mythical critter he wanted. I was not going to ask at all.
He mistook my silence for something else. "Don't even think about it. I can beat you, even blind. Besides, if you don't help me, we're going to run into something and die. As far as I can tell, from my memory of where we were and how we rolled, we're in a cul de sac, surrounded by pods and trunks. How do we get out?"
I wasn't thinking of anything. I knew he could beat me with his eyes closed. And probably without hands. It was a novel experience, meeting someone who could do this. Aloud I said, "Forward . . . um . . . the way you're facing. At least if the screen is the same orientation we are. Slowly."
He obeyed, his hands dancing on the keyboard with eerie precision when one realized he couldn't see. We slowly advanced amid the cul the sac of branches. I could now see—well, sort of see, a lot of the screen took guessing—that we were surrounded above and below as well.
"There's a branch at the end too," I said. "We're going to have to squeeze out."
He only grunted.
"Slightly down," I said. "Down, down, down. A little more. Faster than that, damn it."
And we were in the gullet, we were squeezing out. Squeezing. A scraping sound from outside, a faltering in the sound of motors I hadn't even noticed before, and then the sound picked up again, on a higher note, and a muscle jumped in my . . . captor's jaw.
But we were out and I directed him: "Up now. Now forward. Now down."
We wound like a bit of string through the knotted trunks of the powertree ring. The thing is, though it's called a ring, it is no such thing. It is more like a ball of yarn, thick and huge, an artificial satellite the twin of the moon. It might have been a ring in the time of the Mules but for the last two hundred and fifty years it had been fed overtime to feed the ever-larger craving for energy from Earth populations. Add to that the random blowing up and re-seeding of ripe, unharvested pods, and you had . . . a cat's cradle for a particularly large and radioactive cat.
We wound through it, and spit out the other side, into what the screen showed as a space free of pods and trunks.
My captor turned his sightless eyes—huge and more bewilderingly cat-like than ever—towards me. "How good are you with machines?" he asked.
"Why? Why . . ." I asked.
"Because if you can't go outside and fix the node we scraped off in that tight place, we're going to die."