Brenda Cooper [Ruby's Song 01 The Creative Fire (v5.0) (epub)

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.The ship kept tearing, metal pulling and screeching away from metal above her head.The roof opened almost directly above her, a slit longer than five or six people and as wide as one.Ruby clutched the tree and looked up.The wind had picked up so much her shirt flapped against her belly and her hair stung her neck.Through the crack, details competed for her attention.Stairs and corridors and handholds and flooring, all off kilter.Figures running away from the rent, grasping handholds and pulling themselves out of her vision.A light winked off.Another winked on, illuminating a humanoid robot that gripped the hand of a compact man in a blue uniform, keeping him from falling.The sky of the new level was black, dead black.The roof above her and the roof above that, all black.The few lights above her were small points of white.She’d learned from drill instructions that power would be stripped from unnecessary things in an emergency, but her sky had never been black.Broken pipes and wires protruded from the space between the levels.A woman’s scream came from far away.The park jerked again.The surface under her feet canted further, and she spared a glance for the bench just as it tilted almost straight up.A hole, like the one above her.Gravity hadn’t fallen quite low enough for her to float.Besides, all the drills said hold on, hold on, hold on.There were stories of people caught in gravity fluxes who floated up and then smashed down.Below, only the tall, cluttered service floor and beyond that, between her and the great rushing void of space, the cargo pods, and outside of those, the wall of the ship itself.If the outer shell of the Fire had been breached, she would already be dead.She needed to stay calm in spite of the ever-cooler air rushing about and the thinness of her breath.The hole in the floor of the park was immediate and close.It mattered now.She redoubled her grip on the tree, whispering, “Please don’t fall, please don’t, please stay.”Another shudder opened the crack further.The bench dangled.The bolts that held it to the floor ripped away and it clattered below.Ruby looked up.Where there had been birds, the man the robot had been reaching for fell through the rent in the roof.The ripped reflective surface of the roof flapped loose.The man caught it, swinging in slow motion, reaching impossibly toward the place he had come from.The metal man reached for him, then overreached.It tumbled slowly through the opening, its trajectory taking it right to the man, bumping him.Both fell slowly.The pod jerked again.The tree stayed in place.Ruby maintained her grip, holding her feet on the ground.The man and the robot fell, the two forms separating in the air.Above them, the torn roof bled misshapen spheres of water and other fluids that refracted the emergency lights in shifting prisms behind the tumbling figures.The man tried to flap his arms like a bird, a reflexive silliness in the low gravity.He looked incredulous, his mouth open but not screaming as he fell through the air, now twenty feet above her.She hung on with one hand and reached toward him even though he was too far away to grab.All lights switched off, except for three or four thin beams.The gravity generator activated and she was suddenly heavy.The man thudded to the surface of the park with a grunt, a whoosh of breath escaping his lungs.He lay between her and the hole the bench had slipped through, the surface canted slightly toward the opening, like one of her shallow oil funnels.The robot fell feet first down the hole, reaching for an edge and missing.The expression on its face showed the placidity of all humanoid bots, and Ruby choked back a nervous giggle at the absurd vision.Then her weight felt right.The gravgens balanced.She reached a hand out to the man.“Here,” she called.He twisted to look at her, his eyes wide.“I’m hurt.”“What? Can you reach me?”The muffled ring of metal on metal told her the robot had collided with the floor far below.The man slid sideways toward the hole, using one leg but not the other.“My foot.”“You have to,” she said.He crawled toward her, his face contorted with the effort.She forced her hands free of the tree trunk and went to him, pulling him up.His right leg buckled, taking him to his knees.“I can’t.Walk.”“You must [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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