Elaine felt a massive thump throughout her body, which ripped her arms from the table, sent her flying back out of her chair and onto the floor. Further muscular convulsions racked her limbs, but it didn't matter that much as she was already unconscious.
Mancomb lasted longer - his eyes bulged and his whole body shook as his hands tightened into claws gripping the armrests of his chair. He turned his head, slowly, to look blindly at Lane. He couldn't move. His arms wouldn't obey him. Mancomb moved his lips, trying to speak, then his head slumped forward.
The Hermit opened his mouth wide, and seemed to have frozen solid - then slowly fell to one side.
A scent of burning plastic filled the room.
It had worked, then. Lane had hooked-up this new security system just five months ago. Unlike the others, he'd made sure he wasn't touching any metal surface: sitting on a plastic chair, his boots a thickened plastic polymer.
Then something unexpected happened.
The electricity charging the interior walls of XStation had been slowly weakening the adhesive bonds of Lane's homemade wallpaper. Now electrostatic forces thrust the sheets of paper away from the wall. First one, then a dozen, and in less than a second the entire room was a blizzard of fluttering scraps of papers.
Guybrush and Wally were caught totally by surprise.
The airlock seal had mild insulative properties, but they were still connected to XStation. And Boss Hog was not built to withstand a total electronic immersion.
Instantly every computer-controlled component aboard Boss Hog shut down. The shipboard computer died, and all the lights went out.
At the same time a massive force pushed Guybrush and Wally out of their seats and up against the ceiling. The ceiling pushed back at them even harder, sending their bodies flying. They hit the walls, bounced along the floor, crashed into each other.
"The whole ship's been electrified!" shouted Wally. "The antigrav unit must have failed!"
Guybrush was too disoriented to even speak. He grabbed out blindly, grasped something. It didn't bite back at him. He sensed rather than saw Wally flying past, reached out, and held him fast.
A few seconds later, a red glow slowly lit up the room. Guybrush saw he was grasping the cloth-backed captain's seat, his feet pointing up at the ceiling, and Wally holding to his arm beside him.
Some of the more important computer displays were booting up, their bloops and monochrome green glow welcomingly prosaic. Emergency power. They could see and do shipboard maintenance, but otherwise they were, for the moment, stuck.
"What happened?" said Guybrush.
"I just said-"
"Elaine!" shouted Guybrush. That ended the conversation. Guybrush tested a wall with the point of his finger: the electrical charge had gone. Battling the disorienting effects of zero gravity, he pulled his blaster from the floor, checked the charge, set it for highest lethality and holstered the weapon in his belt. Wally searched around on the floor, picking up a foot-long monkey wrench.
Thus armed, they moved out to the airlock.
The smile collapsed from Lane's face; his foot fell away from the switch
embedded in the floor. "No," he whispered.
Paper flew past his face, stuck to his arms, cut his fingers. He pulled a sheet from the air, and stared frantically at the black scrawls.
Meaningless. His life, rendered null and void.
Lane howled. He fell back from the table, then turned on his heels and ran.
Elaine saw him go. Slowly, she returned to awareness, with a memory of
pain like lightning bolts pulsing through her body, her forearms a
fiery lattice of sharp agony.
Dimly she saw a shapeless figure slip out through the whirlwind of paper, guessed it was Lane, and decided for no reason she could name she had to follow him.
Adrenaline helped. Ignoring the pain she got to her feet, and stumbled after him.
Lane was heading down a narrow ladder, paying little head to anything around him. Elaine reached the ladder, stared at it dumbly as if it represented an insurmountable obstacle, then jumped straight down the hole.
The impact of her boots on the floor rang out like a shot in the hallway. She fell to one knee, but stayed upright. Lane stood ahead of her, outlined in a doorway. He glanced back at the sudden noise, then disappeared from view.
Elaine got up again, and ran to the open doorway.
It led to another staircase down, bolted against the lower wall, and a large storage room twice the size of that in Boss Hog. Right in the the middle of the room sat a portal stone.
Lane stood by it, a blaster in one hand. He stared defiantly at Elaine, his lower lip trembling. A couple of times his mouth opened as if about to speak, then he turned from her, pressed the blaster against the portal stone, and pulled the trigger.
There was a -click- as the chamber discharged, and a brief glow on the portal stone where the energy bolt had struck. But nothing else happened.
Lane gaped at the portal stone, disbelievingly. "No, you can't..." he sobbed. "Please..."
It refused to budge.
He looked around the room, all bearings gone. Then his eyes focused on the figure in the doorway. A mad smile appeared on his face as he raised his blaster to shoot Elaine.