Along our path: Stocky guy. Leotard. Beginner movements but with a smug expression. He was overconfident. He’d do.
As I plotted my impending action, Myka did the dumb thing of grabbing the handcuffs with her free hand, trying to get the spin to stop. Basic zero-g error. Spin increased in angular velocity as you pulled the paired masses towards each other.
“Let it go!” I snapped, hoping she’d hear me over the din of the gym.
She shook her head as sweat dewed her face. Her jaw clenched as she grasped the handcuffs for dear life.
No time to explain. Mr. Leotard was within proximity, and I had to do a little physics. I came around the arc of rotation, aligning on a perfect course to just pass him by, like a considerate gym-goer. He even gave us a little smile.
Then I grabbed him by the stretchy chest and shoved him away from me. Opposite direction.
He fell backwards with a startled look before trying to make it work with a weird pirouette.
And thus ended the spin. I dragged Myka to me and held her as she panted into my shoulder.
“Please don’t puke on me,” I whispered.
She didn’t answer, which probably meant she was fighting that puke down. I left her to her struggle to figure out my next move: correcting our trajectory. We were way off course, and we couldn’t waste time wall-crawling up to the employee entrance. Shoving Mr. Leotard had halted the spin, but it hadn’t changed our path. We were at a sixty-degree angle from where we needed to be.
I scanned our path and noted the bodies that would intersect it. I needed someone big to give us enough mass to push off of. Thank the gods Myka was tiny.
During the war I’d worked with an engineer named Delice. She had run circles around me when it came to jury-rigging a new axial rotator coupler for a dodgy Goddard R/Evolution engine. She was also moon-size. Completely massive. During wait times while doing off-ship maintenance, we would fight boredom with that mass. I’d push off her, barely making a dent on her trajectory. Then me and Dabby—the other mechanic—would cling onto each of Delice’s plank-like shoulders and shove away. We were all tethered, so no risk of flying out during these exciting physics games.
If you wanted to change direction in zero-g without a pulse firer, you had to use another mass to push yourself off of. Walls were useful, as were ship hulls. People? Trickier. You could shift your trajectory, but the extent to which you could do so would be determined by your relative masses. On the fly, easiest way was to find a similar mass and push off them in the opposite direction from where you wanted to go. And right now, the mass I needed to shift consisted of two people: me and Myka. So I’d need a two-person-sized person to get us rerouted.
I needed Delice right now.
I found her spiritual twin. A guy who was large enough to roughly equal the mass of Myka and me. Downside: His trajectory was slightly off, and we wouldn’t intercept him on this course. Not good enough.
I had to nudge things. I flicked on the grav board, counting down to get just the right moment, and our path shifted to even out in a straight line to the nearest wall. Then I turned the grav board off. Perfect. This was perfect.
“What are you doing?” Myka was recovering from her bout of motion sickness, but her voice was drained.
I shushed her. The stocky guy had two kids with him—one old enough to be a teen, the other at the child side of puberty. I was about to be a real piece of shit.
My Delice stand-in noticed our impending collision, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He waved his hand in an attempt to shoo us away. “We’re gonna hit each other,” he said, as if that were an undesirable outcome.
“Why are those two ladies handcuffed together?” The kid innocently asked before I grabbed his dad and shoved him in the inverse direction from my desired trajectory.
“Kids, take care of each other!” The dad called out as he fell into that Yexy Corp cloud.
“That’s our dad!” the teen cried after us, revealing crucial information.
Unaffected by their family tragedy, Myka and I headed straight for the employee door. Fast. We hit the wall a few meters away. I was gonna brag about that precision next time I was at the bar. Now the uncertain bit. The roof. What were we gonna do on the roof? Why do people always go to a roof? The only option there would be to…
…jump to the next fucking building. Dammit.
Myka scrambled through the door, hitting the gravitied floor on her hands and knees with a weird grateful moan. I handled the transition more gracefully, though the return of gravity was rough on my janky leg. A large lost and found bin was piled with all the refuse you’d expect. Multiple handsets, shoes, jewelry, a melted ice cream cone, two anti-grav pogo sticks…
Two anti-grav pogo sticks.
I grabbed them both. Wasn’t sure why except that that packrat center in my brain lit up at the site of them. Anti-grav pogo sticks were exactly what they sounded like: pogo sticks that used anti-grav technology to give you a bounce. Much more oomph than a spring, and they’re absolutely not appropriate for kids.
“Pogo sticks?” Myka yelled as I ran past her.
I reached the end of our tether and pulled her along. “They might be useful!” At the very least, we could use them as blunt weapons.
Myka turned on her sprinter’s speed and overtook me. Three flights of stairs to get to the roof. One flight up, I heard heavy footsteps clattering behind us. Sev Tech
