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"Fuck, I can't control the attitude!" Jess shouted. "We're starting to spin!"
I felt the g-forces shift until I was pushed all the way over onto my side. Pratt hung out of her chair at what had to be a painful angle. Harding managed to hang onto the console long enough to push some buttons, and then she too was pushed over sideways in her seat by the force of the Orion's spin.
"Can't ... you do ... something?" Pratt gasped through the effort of speaking.
"You ... try!" Harding gritted back.
My check was being pressed into the dimpled metal floor. I knew I'd have an impression of the dimples on my skin if I survived this. I'm not sure why that made me laugh.
"You ... think ... this is ... funny?" Pratt panted at me.
"E're ... all ... onna ... die," I said around my gag and laughed.
"Kick ... her ... for ... me," Harding muttered.
"I would ... if I ... could ... reach."
And then we hit the ground. Metal screeched, the floor rumbled beneath my cheek, cupboard doors banged open, items fell down on top of me, Mikaela grunted as something hit her, Jess might have passed out, something exploded, something wet sloshed across the floor and almost drowned me, something else caught fire.
I'm not sure how long it went on for, but by the time we stopped, my ears were ringing, my body had taken yet another beating, and I realised the liquid I was coated in was blue and that probably meant it was from the lavatory.
"Great," I muttered, tasting something foul. I was mortified to realise the gag had soaked up some of the loo's chemical water and I was swallowing it down. "Urgh!" I managed and rolled over onto my back.
Harding did indeed look unconscious, but she was coming around. Pratt just looked confused and insulted. Any minute now, she'd be pissed off.
The Orion ticked and clicked and hissed and creaked. None of it sounded like an Orion should sound like on landing. I wasn't sure if this thing wouldevermake it back to RATS. Oh hell, was I going to be stranded in my own time with Mikaela Pratt and Jessica Harding? There was no way either of them could handle the twenty-first century. Nor, I thought, could the twenty-first century handle Harding and Pratt.
"Oh my God," Harding said, sitting upright again. "I feel like I've been run over by a dump truck."
"That'd be the smell of the bog breaking," Pratt told her. "Heh. Would you look at that? Slugger took a dipping in loo liquid. She looks like a Smurf and smells like the sewer. Couldn't have done it better myself." She patted the Orion in congratulations of a job well done.
"Orr fy'ing ack in dis," I said.
"What did she say?"
"Who cares? We might be fucked, Mikaela."
"Don't tell me you broke it, Jess."
"Ibroke it?! It was broken before I stepped in here!" She spun to glare down at me. "By her, in fact! Don't blame me for this mess. Blameher!"
"Well," Pratt said, unbuckling. Why did she have to make that look so damn easy? "That's easily remedied."
She picked me up by the collar of my flight suit and stomped across the Orion toward the hatch.
"Ot ar oo doing?" I screamed behind my gag.
"Get the door for me, Jess. She's heavier than she looks. Fat bitch."
Harding stood from her chair, favouring her side, and starting spinning the wheel.
"We shifted planes yet?" Pratt asked her.
"Just done it."
"Ah, that's a shame. We could've left her one plane away from reality. Wouldn't that have been the ultimate last laugh?"
"Time's fucked up enough as it is, Mikaela."
