Driftmetal (3 page)

‘
You’re rubbing mud on your cheeks instead of
growing a beard,
’ my dear old Dad always used to say. It was
his way of pointing out when I was trying to shortcut things
instead of taking the time to do them right. I felt like I could’ve
said that to him right about then. If he wanted me gone, why hadn’t
he just told me so instead of letting these law-lovers do his dirty
work for him?

“I’m sorry, son.” Speak of the devil again, Dad
emerged from the captain’s quarters and closed the doors behind
him. Wind played at the wisps of graying brown hair that had come
loose from his tieback. His face was stern and cold as always, but
I could see his age lines more in that moment than I ever had
before.

“You
did
betray me,” I said. “How much did it
cost them to earn a law-loving keister like yours?”

“No, I didn’t betray you, son. But I
am
letting this happen. The boys and I have decided we’re going
straight, and I knew you wouldn’t agree with it.”

My heart sank into my stomach and boiled there. I
felt my eyes go wide and start to water. The wind was so strong I
could feel the drips running sideways along my face like rain on a
fast window. I wasn’t crying, but I was worried it looked that way.
“You’re bloody right I wouldn’t agree,” I said, trying not to
shout. The marshals and their guns were the only things keeping me
from blowing a gasket. “You can’t make a decision like that without
me, Dad. You can’t take her away from me.”

I felt like a kid again, a spoiled child stamping
his foot to get his way. I wasn’t just some kid though, and
Ostelle
wasn’t a toy. She was my life. From the moment she’d
gone airworthy a few months back, I’d been dreaming of the hundreds
of new capers and scams I was going to pull. I had things I wanted
to get done, and curse Dad if he thought I was going to do them any
way but mine.

“There’s good, honest money to be made in
privateering,” Dad was saying. “We’ve acquired ourselves an
official Regency sanction, and being sanctioned by the Regency has
its perks.”

“I ain’t no bootlicker, Dad.”

Dad snorted and spat something onto the deck. “See,
I knew you’d never go for it. Some time in lockup will do you good,
son. When you get out, Ma and I will be right here waiting for you.
If you’ve changed your ways by then, you’re welcome back aboard and
you’ll always have a place on my crew. We just think this is the
best thing for you right now. Tough love, as they say.”

By about the second sentence in, his words had
started to blend together into a meaningless porridge of
patronizing gibberish. I bit my lip, shaking my head. “Dad, you and
Ma should’ve stayed home. You never had it in you to sit by while
your son took the reins of a ship you built yourself. I always got
the feeling you regretted giving her to me. Someday soon, you’ll
regret taking her back.”

I bent my will toward getting a reflex response,
hoping the solenoid in my heel wouldn’t make a fool of me again. A
moment of awkward silence and two heartbeats later, it shot out
like a dream and launched me off the deck. I soared over the bow
and into a backward dive as the guns rang out, sending laser bolts
and charged particles and hot shrapnel thrumming past my ears. I
got hit twice, but I wouldn’t realize it until later. In that
moment, I was too busy falling.

2

Gilfoyle’s thugs had ripped a lot out of me, and not
in a figurative sense. There were empty compartments all over my
body where they’d eviscerated awesome, expensive tech I’d bought,
begged, or stolen for. They’d reduced me to a shell of my former
self by the time they tossed me into that hovercell. Now I was
plummeting toward the Churn, its desolation spreading out below me
in every direction, and I was still that same shell.

We’d been between drift-towns when the Civs stopped
us, sort of a no-man’s land where there were no platforms or large
floaters. Now I found with startling certainty that there wasn’t a
single sign of life around, even as far as my telescopic eye could
see. The nearflow was far below me yet, heavy gusts of wind
carrying a field of airborne rubble over the surface.

You should know that driftmetal possesses a quality
called
cumulative anti-gravitational mass
; that is to say,
the bigger it is, the higher it floats. So the longer I fell
without hitting anything, the lower my chances of hitting something
big.

I clamped my eyes shut while I fumbled around in the
pockets of the webgear I’d grabbed from the crew’s quarters. I was
playing the ‘
how-well-do-you-know-your-tech
’ game show where
the grand prize was not dying. I recognized each mod as my fingers
felt their way along: flecker shield, tripwire, proxy remote,
bluewave comm, scrambler, cochlear translator, muscle booster. No,
no, and no.

Wait a minute. The first one.

With the sound of terminal velocity screaming in my
ears, I ripped open the velcro fastener. I got a white-knuckled
grip on the flecker shield and drew it from its pouch, opened the
panel in my forearm, and shoved the mod inside. I tucked my body
into a cannonball and flipped over so I was falling feet-first. I
was plummeting at a frightening rate. When I opened my eyes, the
nearflow wasn’t so far away anymore.

A big floater caught me on the elbow and I cursed to
myself. I would’ve cursed out loud, if the sheer terror of falling
hadn’t made my voice seize up like a clogged chimney. Soon I was
pinballing off floaters the size of coffee tables and ironing
boards, trying to grab hold of whatever I could, but failing.
You’re going to make it
, I reassured myself, failing to
reassure myself.

I waited until the floaters had decreased to the
size of house cats before I bent my wrist back and activated the
flecker shield. It wasn’t a shield I needed, of course. What I
needed was a parachute.

A metal rod shot two feet from my wrist and unfurled
like a circular fan, a pleated metal ring designed to shrug off
flecker particles. I raised it overhead like an umbrella. As I fell
toward the nearflow, debris started to accumulate in the shield’s
underside. I felt myself begin to slow down.

The floaters were coming at me sideways now; the
nearflow felt like being in front of a gigantic fan while someone
was dumping out a bag of gravel. I managed to open one eye for a
second and found myself closer to the ground than I’d imagined. The
shield was helping, but it wasn’t going to be enough to make the
landing comfortable or painless.

I braced myself and hit hard, a bone-jarring impact
I couldn’t roll away from. I sank down to my armpits in loose
Churn, my bare feet plunging through four feet of grit and
gravel.

Yeah, it hurt like the dickens. Whatever the dickens
are.

I ejected the shield and tossed it onto the surface
beside me. All the bits of driftmetal and gravstone it had gathered
began to float away. I yanked the bluewave comm from my webgear and
flicked on the beacon, then tossed it onto the shield. The beacon
would alert the Civs and bring them right to me, but I was starting
to like the idea of prison better than the idea of suffocating in a
sea of powdered stone.

The morning sun was just beginning to rise, but the
air was so thick with dust and rubble down here that it was as dark
as late afternoon. I felt a rumbling beneath me. Everything started
to shake. My augmented eye went haywire, and my solenoid
triggered.

A dozen yards away, the ground spewed a cloud of
pink dust. I sank a little further. A rush of water choked up to my
right and flowed down the side of a shallow hill before soaking
into the ground again. I heard the rush of air as a pocket opened
up behind me. There was a smell like eggs and rotting meat. Earth
fell in and filled the pocket, and I slid a few feet backward.

I flailed my arms above me, trying to wiggle my way
up a little and ease some of the pressure on my chest. This was a
less active part of the Churn than the territory encompassed by
Gilfoyle’s mining operation. The land was coughing up dust and
brown water and foul-smelling gases instead of quicksand and
firespouts and boulders, so it could’ve been worse.

I felt another rumble, this time from somewhere in
the distance. A pair of hoverbikes slipped over the hill where the
dirty water had flowed up, moving fast through the dust haze. Their
riders were hooded and masked, jacketed in long dark trenchers.

The first instinct I had was to fight. Anyone who
made a habit of hanging out down here was, by default, savage,
uncouth, and not to be trusted. Of course, when you can’t trust
your own parents, who can you trust?

I snapped the grapplewire mod into my forearm and
tried to wiggle out far enough to snap off a clean shot. I didn’t
lead the hoverbike enough, and the wire flew wide of its target.
The rider cranked something, and a tent of blue electrical arcs
erupted around him, sucking the errant grappler toward itself like
a magnet.

I tried to retract my wire, but the energy field had
a better grip than my winch had pulling power. The biker hit
another switch. Blue arcs bolted down the wire and zapped me rigid.
My eyelight strobed, and my solenoid triggered three or four
times.

When the shock ended, I went limp. I sank down to my
neck. The gravel was pressing against my chest anew, the sour smell
of electrical smoke in my nostrils and the taste of raw ozone on my
tongue. My arms were poking up like broken antennae, and every
movement I tried to make sent up new clouds of dust for me to
breathe.

The bikers circled around behind me, and I heard
them approach. Their hoverbikes were low to the ground, displacer
engines thrashing the surface like leaf blowers over uncooked
rice.

“What’s a techsoul doing down here?” one said,
yelling over the noise.

It became apparent to me then that these weren’t
just people. They were
human
people. Bona fide
hundred-percenters, the kind without a scrap of synth in their
bodies. As in, one step above Neanderthals.

I wasn’t sure whether the guy was talking to me or
to his friend, but in no uncertain terms, I told them both to mind
their own business.

“That’s an awfully rude thing to say, for a
tool
who’s gotten himself into a bind like you have,” said
the other guy.

Humans call us ‘
tools
’ to make themselves
feel better about being the worst.

Since insulting them hadn’t worked, I resorted to
taunting them instead. “You guys seem to think you’re pretty tough,
picking on a defenseless techsoul when you know I could pound you
into meat squares if this was a fair fight.”

“Who said anything about fighting? You’re the one
who tried to start a fight with that grapplewire of yours,” said
the first one.

“Don’t you try to bamboozle me with your
technicalities. You should’ve seen yourselves, the way you looked
from down here, zipping toward me a like a couple of fiery devils
with hell’s own fury farting out your tailpipes. Either you came
over here to help me, or I’m going to keep thinking you came to
pick a fight. Now which is it?”

“You have quite the knack for telling tall tales,
don’t you?”

I still couldn’t see either of them, sitting behind
me on their safe hoverbikes with the nearflow howling around us and
the Churn belching below, threatening to eat me at any second.

“I don’t have time to argue with a couple of
primies
about how tall my tales are,” I said.

We call humans ‘
primies
’ because they’re
extra the-worst.

“He’s an uppity one,” the first biker said. “Maybe
we should just leave him here.”

“I’ll take my chances, if you’re gonna be like
that,” I said.

“Have it your way,” the other one muttered. He
revved his hoverbike like he was getting ready to leave.

“Whatever cave you antiques crawled out of, I doubt
it’s any safer than this,” I said, trying to sound as condescending
as possible.

“Living down here isn’t difficult as long as you’ve
got the tech.”

I scoffed. “Tech? Please. You primies wouldn’t know
tech if the Churn spit it onto your dinner plates.”

“We’ve got plenty of tech. It’s just not glued to
our bodies like yours is. We found your bluewave beacon thanks to
our tech. And by the way, some good your tech’s doing you right
now, blueblood.”

“Hey. Up until yesterday I had a real slick kit.
Some miner thugs pinched me and stole it all.”

“Now why would mine workers do a thing like
that?”

“‘Cause they’re lowlifes, is why,” I said. “Now how
about giving me a hand here?”

I’ve seen the Churn knock a streamboat out of the
sky and swallow it whole. Trust me when I say I was at risk of
being swallowed very, very whole.

“I’m sure you were just minding your own business
when they decided to come along and mug you.”

“They had pulsers. You tell me.” I shrugged. My
shrug gave the gravel a chance to crowd in and press harder against
my lungs. All part of the master plan.

“Poor fella,” said the first guy. “And how did you
respond when these cruel security guards had their way with
you?”

“I ate them.”

As if in reply, the Churn ate me.

The ground opened and I fell fifty feet straight
down until the bikers stopped laughing and decided to reactivate
their energy field. I snapped to a halt, dangling from my wire like
a rag doll. They hadn’t stopped laughing, actually. I could still
hear their whiny guffaws echoing down. I’d heard dying streambirds
make nicer sounds.

The bikes began to rise. They dragged me with them,
bumping and scraping against the sides of the pit as it collapsed
in around me. I felt the gravel sucking at my legs just as I shot
up above the surface. Good thing I wasn’t wearing boots. The
flecker shield and my bluewave comm were gone, devoured by the
Churn.