A Ravel of Waters

I felt round desperately. My hand touched something metallic that felt like a small dumb-bell. It must have a function in snugging home the sail into the roller. I tried to insinuate myself between the two sail rollers in the same way, as according to Grohman's lies, Captain Mortensen had died. Perhaps the 'dumb-bell' was the blunt instrument whose mark the London pathologist had detected.

I tossed the heavy metal thing carefully through the catwalk ladder opening. At the same moment I thrust myself, back first, between the two sail-covered rollers.

There was a cry, an oath, a scrabbling of feet and a jangle of gun against rung. From the sound of it, Grohman must have slipped and fallen a few rungs. I could plainly hear his rasping breath.

This time he did not waste ammunition. The silence that followed was more gut-tearing than noise. I could picture the man in the darkness, steadying up, getting a grip on his fury before elevating the UZI into a firing position. The gun would have to be held well above his head if he didn't want to blind or maim himself.

The volley came – a cut-off six-rounder. It crashed and screamed through the confined space. There were also noises high above. Some slugs must have travelled all the way up to the masthead. If I had been on the ladder, I'd have been ripped apart from backside to neck.

There were more flashes of flame from the muzzle – I could almost reach down and touch them!

I took the knife from between my teeth and got a firm grip of the haft. My moment would come as Grohman came into the bay at cat-walk level. There the UZI's handiness would be at its most limited.

The light was dim, elusive. The grating poised crisscross like a steel trap waiting for Grohman's head. Red-painted stop-cock valves glowed danger signals. Copper hydraulic tubes writhed like disembowelled viscera. I waited.

It wasn't Grohman's head that came first. I heard a grunt, then his right hand clutching the UZI swung up and over on to the cat-walk. He wasn't much more than a metre from my funk-hole. My reflexes were swifter than my thinking.

In a flash I was out. I stamped on the UZI, pinning the gun-hand to the gratings.

They'd been right in choosing Grohman to lead Group Condor. He was tough; he could take it.

That booted foot must have hurt like hell. He didn't make the mistake of releasing the weapon. Instead, he used my ankle to lever himself into a fighting position. His head and body seemed to explode out of the opening. Crank and bull-whanger had done more damage than I thought. Blood was pouring from a long gash across his head.

With his free hand he swept my other foot from under me. I crashed beside him on the gratings. He rolled sideways, with cat-like agility. I followed, with survival-suit agility. Now the gun was under him; equally, the knife was trapped under my own bulk.

I pawed at him with a right fist, but even a punch-drunk palooka could have dodged the blow. Grohman jack-knifed on to his hunkers..The UZI must have been heavier than I guessed, or else my first savage stamp must have damaged his wrist more than I – or he – thought. He hadn't the strength in his right hand alone to raise the barrel fully to aim. It wavered, wandered off-target. A target bigger than a house.'

The split second more he needed to get his left round to heft up the UZI to fire was too long. I threw the knife. It stuck out from his Adam's apple.

He just knelt there with the UZI raised to blast me, with that obscene brass haft projecting from his throat. Then he pitched forward through the ladder gap.

I heard the body hit the bottom of the mast and the single shot that went off. He must have hung on to the trigger, even in death. I crouched on the cat-walk, gulping air. I seemed to be swimming inside a suit of sweat. My muscles kicked from reaction. Time! The ring charges! Twenty-one metres, seventy feet to go!

I threw myself at the rungs. The anti-blast cap! I stopped, jerked cap and visor over my head and face. Securing the sealing zipper with my outsize fingers seemed to take a year. Up!

I was still scrambling feverishly, blindly, in darkness on the upper mast-head side of the top-gallant bay, heading for the crow's nest, when the charges blew.

My first thought from the concussion's hammer-blow was that I had slipped and fallen the entire length of the mast.

Pilots who eject to safety are heroes; circus human cannons have a soft ride compared to mine from Jetwind.

The cap and visor saved my ear-dreams from blast, my eyes from flash, and my lungs from compression. All I knew was that one moment I was battling upwards and the next I felt a vertebrae-ripping punch in the back. The detonation pinned me like a fly against the steel rungs. The detached mast cartwheeled high into the air.