COUNTERPOINT
CHAPTER 2: THE PILOT
PART 11
By Mya Thevendra
The first attempt was, as expected, the least successful, not to mention fairly painful. After hauling herself onto her feet, Kimiko was quite unprepared at how easily her knees buckled under her weight; a tumble forward ended with her clouting her head against the door of the storage cell, and then collapsing backwards onto the floor. Not one to be deterred by such a trivial thing as gravity, however, she tried again. And again. And on the fourth time, she managed to hold a position vaguely resembling upright. While she balanced herself, Kimiko briefly pondered the wonderful things that people take for granted: the ability to remain vertical, for example.
Valerie had been gone for ten minutes or so, and Kimiko was growing anxious. According to what Valerie had said, the junkers wouldn't return for a couple of hours, but the one they left asleep in the canteen could wake up at any moment; if he did, two girls, one starved and the other partially paralysed, wouldn't pose much trouble to him. Hobbling back over towards the door, Kimiko carefully opened it, and looked through the gap. She had heard Valerie turn right down the corridor, back towards the room where she had been imprisoned, and she remembered the junkers say that the others cadets had been held in "Freight two", apparently yet another storage area. Rather than wait in uncertainty, Kimiko chose to make her unsteady way through the dim, wrecked passageway to find the others.
She moved slowly, and cautiously at first, using the passage's wall to support herself, but she felt stronger with each step, and realising that there was little danger with the station now being all but deserted, she hurried on. Passing her former cell, she glanced briefly inside, and then ahead into the gloom; in front was a weakly lit sign, above the doors to a stairwell, which read "Freight Holding and Habitat". Kimiko quietly slid the doors open, and after a moment's hesitation, she descended to the level below. It was a little brighter on the station's Habitat ring, and following the large, stencilled numbering on the walls, she soon found Freight Hold Two. The chamber was sectioned off behind a large, heavy-set sliding door; Kimiko gave it a push, but it held fast, still securely locked. Looking through the grill, she could see nothing on the other side save darkness, and she heard no sound other than the dull, distant thrumming of the station's reactor core. Valerie was nowhere to be seen.
Kimiko stood still against the door, peering into the shadows beyond. Valerie had left her maybe fifteen minutes ago now, and yet there was no sign of her. A sudden, and very alarming thought struck Kimiko, and following another illuminated sign, she shuffled frantically towards the canteen.
It opened out at the end of a short corridor; a fairly wide space compared to the cramped compartments and passageways elsewhere aboard the station. A few metal tables with plastic chairs were arranged within, and there were trolleys of cutlery and dinner trays lying against the wall, or tipped over onto the floor. Kimiko stopped dead. One of the junkers was seated at a table near the centre of the room, his head laid upon folded arms, evidently fast asleep. Standing above him, and reaching down towards him with a very shaky hand, was Valerie. Kimiko very nearly screamed out there and then. It was as she had feared; Valerie had apparently lost her bottle, and had resolved to try and reason with one of their captors. Mouthing a silent curse, Kimiko waved her arms in the air to attract Valerie's attention. Like an animal spied in the dark, she stared up, her face frozen in surprise, and then held up her hand, as if to warn Kimiko off.
"No, damn it!" Kimiko hissed under her breath.
But Valerie didn't stop. She moved closer and closer, and then to Kimiko's surprise, she reached down towards the man's hip. Kimiko stood rooted to the spot, terrified to move, or to make a sound, when Valerie finally drew back her hand, and Kimiko realised at last what she had come to the canteen for. Moving as slowly and as carefully as she could, and with breath held, Valerie turned, brandishing between thumb and forefinger a ring of thick metal keys.
Obviously the keys to Freight Two hadn't been discarded nearby, as was the case with the ones to Kimiko's cell, and Valerie had reckoned, correctly, on the junker having them. Kimiko gestured at her, urging her to hurry; Valerie began to move away from the table, and allowed herself a cautious grin, which suddenly contorted into a grimace of shock, as two of the keys on the ring clinked sharply together. She froze, paralysed with fright. For a second, it seemed as though the junker was still lost in his drooling slumber, and she took another step forward, but then in the corner of her eye, he stirred, and slowly looked up. He said nothing at first, and simply stared at Valerie with glassy, half open eyes. It was in the next moment that he exploded out of his chair, knocking it to the ground, and lunged at her. Valerie squealed, and started away from him; with a feral grunt, he thrust a greasy hand into her matted hair, and held it tight, dragging her screaming to the floor.
"Whaddya doin'? Hunh?" he barked, as he brutally yanked her mane.
She winced, and out of sheer desperation dug the heel of her boot into the man's shin. He hissed and staggered; Valerie fell to the side and tried to free herself from his slackening grip, but she was too weak. A look of blind rage fell across the junker's face, and once again his hand clenched tight around her hair.
At this point, Kimiko would ideally have liked to cannonball headfirst into the creep's stomach; she'd seen it in a videodisk film once, and had been suitably impressed with the results. As things were, with shaky legs, and a somewhat diminished sense of balance, she fell slightly short of her target. Uttering a shrill war cry, she barrelled forward, tripped, and crumpled into a dazed heap at the junker's feet; this was bad enough in itself, but it was the rasping, scornful laughter which followed, that served to push Kimiko over the edge.
She'd read somewhere that the human jaw muscles were strong enough to support nearly a hundred and eighty pounds, roughly the whole weight of a grown man. It was thoughts like these that kept Kimiko warm at night. With little, or most likely no regard for her own safety, she reached up and sunk her teeth into the junker's thigh; Valerie hit the floor hard as he cast her aside, and lay still. Even though Kimiko still hadn't recovered fully from the Terlazine, there was enough strength in her jaws to cause a deep and grisly wound; blood soaked through the junker's overalls, and streamed down Kimiko's chin, and she held tight as he flailed and thrashed, roaring in pain. She gave a muffled grunt as he cuffed her across the side of the head, and was unable to resist him forcing her flat onto the ground. Straddling her across the chest, he began to throttle her. It was an appalling sight, both had been reduced to tears, and neither was willing to yield to the other. With her eyes shut tight, Kimiko summoned what strength she could, and bit deeper still. She felt the weight of her assailant on top of her, his warm, oily fingers tightening around her throat, and imagined that this might very well be the end of her, when suddenly she heard a noise like a bell being rung. The man's grip relaxed, and his weight slowly slid off her to the side; opening her eyes, Kimiko looked up. Standing above the junker's limp form was Valerie, shivering from fear, and wielding a rather badly dented metal dinner tray.
"Jesus, are you all right?"
Kimiko rubbed her neck, and spat a wad of blood onto the floor.
"Oh yeah Mailer," she croaked, "I'm peachy, absolutely fucking peachy."
She hobbled to her feet with Valerie's help, and jabbed the toe of her boot into the unconscious junker's ribs.
"Asshole."
"Come on," said Valerie, tugging Kimiko's arm, "I've got the keys."
Kimiko had already forgotten the hasty conclusion which she had reached mere moments ago, and Valerie said nothing, although she suspected as much. With each supporting the other, the two weary cadets trudged back down the flickering corridor to free their classmates.