The Duke Of Uranium by John Barnes Page A

Sesh clasped hands as their four feet touched surface, hitting the gravity just as it went perpendicular at perhaps .01 g. As they bounced away, the gravity shifted about sixty degrees and decreased by half. They took advantage of that, shooting into a big swing, orbiting each other joined by outstretched arms, and then releasing into one of their signature moves, the double Immelman.
    At least that was what Jak thought they were going to do. He arched into the big arc, belly outward, embracing a circle about five meters in diameter, and came around. When he reached over his head, looking up to catch Sesh in a trapeze-grab, there was no one there.
    He tucked and spun, processing, tumbling so that he could look for her. He expected to find that either some oaf had forced Sesh out of her flight path, or some gweetz had tried to cut in (and that Sesh had already given him an educational clop to the chops).
    Instead, below and to the side, well away from anywhere Sesh would have gone naturally, he saw her struggling with four men, all of them much too old to be in here. They were dragging her to an emergency exit.
    One of them, his back turned toward Jak, had her head locked in his armpit. One was fighting to get her wrists together to bind them, one was just in process of tying her ankles, and the fourth was airswimrning a tow line toward the emergency exit.
    Jak didn’t hesitate; he felt his mind become cool, blank, and alert as it did in the Disciplines, and he tucked and dove, taking advantage of another shift of the great tumbling ball that was Centrifuge. He
     
    airswam as fast as he could, building up as much momentum as twenty meters would allow.
    They were paying no attention to him, so he went after the one holding Sesh’s head. Jak came in on his back, as fast as he could, hitting with the classic sucker block, the way that a defensive back in slamball does when the offside slammer loses track of the defense.
    Jak’s shoulder rammed against the backs of the man’s thighs. He grabbed the back of the man’s shirt and spun. The man flipped backward abruptly, and as Jak released him, his face swung into place to be a perfect target for a two-footed kick. With all his strength, Jak drove his heels into the man’s cheeks.
    The reaction shot Jak out of the fight and into a return loop, while hurling his opponent away in a backward end-for-end spin, probably unconscious. One malph out of the melee, anyway.
    As Jak swung around in his return loop, his hands biting air as hard as he could, something bright-colored streaked through his peripheral vision, screaming like a cat on fire. Dujuv was getting into the fight.
    Jak finished his loop and closed in on the heet who had been airswimming the line; Duj swooped down on the man tying Sesh’s ankles, snagging a grip on his coat to carry the man along, putting him on the outside of a recurved turn, and hurling him away with the split-reed throw, all but instantly. The man was probably not out of the fracas for good but it would take some seconds for him to get back to it.
    In the background, Jak could hear someone shouting, “All in now’t Panth! They have a panth!” Now he was a bare two meters from his opponent. He coiled to attack.
    The back of Jak’s head seemed to cave in and he started to tumble. The pain was horrible and he could barley focus his eyes. He caught a glimpse of Dujuv tangled in a net, two men holding the lines, a third one whaling away at the bagged panth with a jointed bat. Duj was screaming with rage and thrashing fiercely, but he was helpless.
    Jak’s tumbling arc brought him up against the outer surface, awkwardly, making his back sting and his head ring even more. He saw Sesh, again, and sprang off the wall, trying to get back into the brawl.
    There were now six of them surrounding her. Jak’s back was still numb from impact. His head wasn’t what it should be after the blow he had taken there. As he closed in, the men airswimming to meet him