Page 17 of Alien Peacock

Arelion winds up and slams the end of the stick into the glass. It shatters with a loud bang.

I half expect the air to be sucked out of the corridor with the force of a hurricane, but nothing like that happens.

Arelion slams the stick into the door again and again, making a hole big enough for him to pass through. When he’s satisfied, he stands back and lets me climb through the opening before he follows right after.

“Here’s your stick.” He holds it out to me with a theatrical flourish, balancing it on its end on the flat of his palm.

I grab it. “Thanks.”

“Notice that I am trustworthy, too. Now we have to go.” He grabs my wrist and drags me with him.

“I never said you weren’t,” I protest as I try to keep my balance. I can’t help but wonder where all these twisted metal parts come from. “The talk about sneakiness was allyou.” Behind us, I hear excited voices and hard bangs as the gangsters shoot at us.

I turn the flashlight off so they have a harder time aiming. The shooting stops, but I keep worrying about them coming after us. They must know this station much better than we do. So this may be just postponing the fight to the death.

It’s still dark, and the glow from Arelion’s wingtips isn’t enough light to see by. We’re moving so fast that I don’t know where we’re going. I have enough trouble staying on my feet and notstumbling. But I do notice that the air keeps getting more and more stale and smelling worse and worse.

When the floor gives in under Arelion’s feet and he falls through it, I try to stay up. But while he has let go of my hand, the floor must have been really weak, because it crumbles under me, too. With a yelp I fall through the floor, frantically trying to grasp at sharp metal edges to stay up.

But nothing is within reach, and I drop to the next level and land on top of Arelion. The landing knocks the wind out of me, but I notice that I’m not dead. That’s because his many feathers helped me land softly. Only my elbow is sore.

Arelion gets up and brushes debris off himself. “The whole station is rotting. I must ask: did youhaveto land on your elbow? It’s unusually pointy.”

“Sorry,” I gasp as I just recover my ability to breathe. “I had no choice.”

“Now we have no choice but to get away from here,” he says and drags me to my feet. “Before they start?—”

His sentence is broken off by a volley of gunshots from above. Bullets zip around us for a second before Arelion unceremoniously tosses me twenty feet down the hallway and sprints the same distance himself, then drags me further along. “We should be out of sight of them here.”

They’ve stopped shooting. In the flashes from their shots, I was able to make out that this is not a corridor, but a big room that’s more like a debris field. There’s broken glass and small pieces of metal debris all over the place, as well as sand that on closer inspection is glass that’s been ground really small. It smells strongly of mold and exotic chemicals.

I want to stay in one place, afraid to put a foot wrong in the dark and step into something dangerous.

Arelion walks further along the floor, glass cracking under his boots. “Are you going to settle down here?”

“Not if I can help it.” I follow, reasoning that if I stay approximately in his footsteps, I can’t get injured that bad unless the floor collapses again.

“That’s strange,” Arelion mutters. “It’s as if—void!”

I freeze. His voice seemed to travel upwards…

There’s a terrible noise as if from a metal plate being hit by a short, but intense hailstorm. Then there’s a hard crash from above. I fumble for the flashlight, but the floor vanishes from under my feet. “Shit!”

I brace for the landing, but there’s not much I can do before I land on a firm, warm heap of feathers.

“You and your damned elbow!” Arelion groans under me. I scramble off him, get to my feet, and turn on the flashlight. I don’t know what just happened.

The light cone travels along the floor, finding debris and rubble. But now the door is close to the ceiling…

“We fell upwards,” Arelion growls as he gets to his feet, holding his side. “The gravity changed.”

He’s right. We’re standing on the ceiling. Above us is the floor, and the door doesn’t reach all the way up here.

Now all the debris that was on the floor is stuck to the ceiling, just like we are. That was the terrible noise. This crazy variable gravity was something I was told about, because on spacestations, the gravity is all artificial and it can malfunction. But I didn’t know it would be as dramatic as this.

It’s a weird feeling when my floor is the actual ceiling, and my brain struggles with it. “I landed on you again. Sorry.”

“Your elbow should be classified as a lethal weapon,” he growls as he gets to his feet. “It’s like a hatchet.” He stands there unsteadily for a moment, and I wonder if he’s badly injured.

---