vehicles were all around him, motionless. But something was moving…
A distant car bumped, screeched like tearing metal and went up.
Huh?
No. It had grounded against the upper ring of cells. The whole Sargasso was sinking uniformly through space.
One by one, noisily, the cars and flying packs docked and were left behind.
Louis’s ’cycle smacked jarringly into concrete, turned half around in the turbulence of electromagnetic forces, and toppled. Louis let go and rolled clear.
Immediately he was trying to get to his feet. But he couldn’t get his balance; he couldn’t stay upright. His hands were claws, contorted with pain, useless. He lay panting on his side, thinking that it must already be too late. Speaker’s flycycle must have landed on Speaker.
Speaker’s flycycle, easily recognizable, lay on its side two tiers up. Speaker was there—and he wasn’t under the ’cycle. He must have been under it before the ’cycle fell on its side; but even then the balloons would have protected him to some extent.
Louis reached him by crawling.
The kzin was alive and breathing, but unconscious. The weight of the flycycle had not broken his neck, possibly because he didn’t really have a neck. Louis clawed the flashlight-laser from his belt, used its green needle beam to free Speaker from his balloons.
Now what?
Louis remembered that he was dying of thirst.
His head seemed to have stopped spinning. He stood, wobbly-legged, to look for the only functional water source he knew.
The cell block was all concentric circular ledges, each ledge the roof of a ring of cell blocks. Speaker had grounded on the fourth ring from the center.
Louis found one ’cycle with tattered crash-balloon fabric draped across it. There was another, one tier down and across the central pit, equipped with a human-style saddle. The third—
Nessus’s ’cycle—had grounded a tier below Speaker’s.
Louis went down to it. His feet jarred him as they hit the steps. His muscles were too tired to absorb the shock.
He shook his head at the sight of the dashboard. Nobody would be stealing Nessus’s flycycle! The controls were incredibly cryptic. But he did identify the water spout.
The water was warm, tasteless as distilled water, and utterly delicious.
When Louis had quenched his thirst, he tried a brick from the kitchen slot. It tasted very strange. Louis decided not to eat it yet. There might be additives deadly to human metabolism. Nessus would know.
He carried water to Speaker in his shoe, the first container he thought of. He dribbled it into the kzin’s mouth, and the kzin swallowed it in his sleep, and smiled. Louis went back for another load, and ran out of stamina before he could reach the puppeteer’s flycycle.
So he curled up on the flat construction plastic and closed his eyes.
Safe. He was safe.
He should have been asleep instantly, the way he felt. But something nagged at him. Abused muscles, cramps in hands and thighs, the fear of falling that would not let him go even now…and something more…
He sat up. “No justice,” he mumbled.
Speaker?
The kzin was sleeping curled around himself, with his ears tight to his head and his Slaver weapon hugged tight to his belly so that only the double snout showed. His breathing was regular, but very fast. Was that good?
Nessus would know. Meanwhile, let him sleep.
“No justice,” Louis repeated under his breath.
He was alone and lonely, without the advantage of being on sabbatical. He was responsible for the well-being of others. His own life and health depended on how well Nessus gulled the crazy, half-bald woman who was keeping them prisoner. Small wonder if he couldn’t sleep.
Still…
His eyes found it and locked. His own flycycle.
His own flycycle with the broken crash balloons trailing, and Nessus’s flycycle here beside him, and Speaker’s flycycle beside Speaker, and the flycycle with the human-shape saddle and no crash balloons. Four-flycycles.
Frantic for water, he’d missed the implications the first time round. Now…Teela’s flycycle. It must have been behind one of the bigger vehicles. And no crash balloons. No crash balloons.
She must have fallen off when the ’cycle turned over.
Or been torn away when the sonic fold failed at Mach 2.
What was it Nessus had said? Her luck is clearly undependable. And Speaker: If her luck had failed her just once, she would be dead.
She was dead. She must be.
I came with you, because I love you.
“Bad luck,” said Louis Wu. “Bad luck you met me.”
He curled up on the concrete and slept.
Much later, he woke with a jolt to find Speaker-To-Animals looking down into his face. The lurid orange fur mask