The Broken Third (Digitesque Book 4)

by Guerric Haché

  “How far away can you put this levitation… magic spell?”

  She squinted at the blue-swathed green world they were quickly approaching. The sunsoaked crescent of Chang’e was slowly slipping away as they closed in on the dark side. “I don’t know, but even if I could plant it from here the code might break along the way as we move. But - oh, by the way, the sigils are going to explode if I don’t contain or direct the power anywhere.”

  The three colonials turned and gaped at her. “You put bombs on the hull?”

  She tilted her head. “ All code could potentially explode. We’ll be in trouble if those start gathering power and it has nowhere to do. I’ll take care of it.”

  It was a shame there was no way to divert power without a direct code connection. Her body sitting with eyes closed and gripping the bulkhead, she covered the spaces between the power absorption sigils on the bottom of the ship with a dense net of tiny power storage symbols. Hopefully that would be enough. In case it wasn’t, though, she would need to vent the power somewhere - and if they were trying to be invisible from the planet, she had a good idea of what direction that venting might need to go.

  Crawling the wraith back up to the top of the ship, she started tracing light sigils all over it, connecting them with a knot that zagged down towards the power reservoirs - but didn’t quite connect with them. If they got too hot she’d turn on the back lights, and the only people who’d see would be anyone already following them in from space.

  As time returned to normal, she took a deep breath, and looked out at the moon ahead of them.

  “So what’s the plan, Ada?”

  She looked to Baoji. “Well, you want to use as little engine power as you can, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So get us into a vertical drop. Can you do that?”

  He laughed. “You mean, what, like a rock? No power.”

  She nodded. “Yes. Get us dropping like a rock, in a straight line. When we’re about to land, I’ll turn on the levitation sigil and we’ll stop falling.”

  He stopped laughing. “By which you mean we’ll be flattened like a pancake.”

  She frowned. “What? I’m sure we’ll be fine.”

  “No, you can’t just stop a ship when it’s moving without that energy going somewhere. We can handle a gradual deceleration, sure, but even if the ship stayed intact, if it suddenly stopped moving? We wouldn’t. We’d splatter against the floor.”

  That was a very unappealing thought. She considered it, played the scene out in her mind, and it made a certain kind of sense. Not worth risking. “Okay, I’ll power up the levitation gradually then. Be ready to use the thrusters if you think I’m going to get us all killed.”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not sure I trust this whole magic thing anyway.”

  Turou patted her on the shoulder. “It’s fascinating. I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

  She frowned and closed her eyes again, trying to focus. She didn’t need that kind of encouragement - she was Ada Liu, and she could do whatever the hell she set her mind to. Almost. Most of the time. In any case, she didn’t want sympathy. “We’re coming in pretty fast. Want me to slow us down a little?”

  “Not yet. I’m maneuvering onto the right trajectory. I’ll let you know when we’re locked in, but keep your freaky wraith thing on top of the ship or it’ll probably get burned away.”

  “It’s not freaky.”

  “It is absolutely freaky.”

  Elsa spoke over them both. “Cut it. Incoming.”

  Baoji put on something to cover his ears. “You deal with it, I’m trying to get us into drop-like-a-rock position. If we survive this, I’m going to have a hell of a story to tell the bartender at Sangrila’s.”

  Turou smirked. “Still, after all these years?”

  Baoji didn’t respond, effectively deaf. Ada opened her eyes to peek at the screens up above Elsa, but she couldn’t make sense of it. “What’s coming for us?”

  “Two frigates.” Elsa pointed at the screen display. “Same size as the Tellura , the ship you came in on - way bigger than Hermes-class. Big enough they can’t actually land. If they want to laser out our engines then scoop us up, I don’t know what we can do about it.”

  “How far are they?”

  “About a hundred kilometers.”

  “Kilometers? Like klicks?”

  Elsa raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, that’s what the military calls them.”

  She increased her brow. Building code spindles into coherent shapes at short range was one thing, when time was almost still - but it was never completely still, and at great distances time’s effects could cause the code structures to sway or collapse. “I’ve never done anything so damn far away; the code could easily fall apart.”

  “Baoji, any laser countermeasures or - he’s not listening. Nevermind.”

  The ship started shaking a little, and Ada looked out through the wraith’s eyes, seeing the moon growing massive in front of them. In the distance, silhouetted against the grey-streaked white of the gas planet, she saw two boxy shapes approaching. “Any ideas?”

  “You’re the sorceress. If you can’t zap them, can you at least shield us from the lasers?”

  “Well, what are lasers?”

  Elsa paused for just a moment. “Um, light. Intense, coherent light in a really small and focused beam.”

  “Light. Why couldn’t I just absorb it?”

  “I don’t know, why couldn’t you? But Ada, this isn’t some flashlight. It’s enough energy to turn metal straight into gas.”

  “I know, they lasered my last wraith apart.” The problem with light, ironically, was that it was invisible until it had already arrived. She’d need to be thorough in shielding the ship. “Are they talking to us?”

  “I’m not getting anything.” Elsa hummed. “At the speed we’re going, I don’t think they’ll make physical intercept unless they pop our engines in the next few minutes. Even then, it’ll be close.”

  “So protect the engines.”

  Elsa nodded, looking at her with a quiet plea. “If you do that, we can probably make planetside.”

  She projected herself back into the wraith, scurrying over to the side of the ship facing the incoming patrol, and gave it its instructions. She filled it with urgency to shield the engines with absorption sigils, and it set to work on its own. She watched as it did, stretching out tendrils of code into space, still attached to the ship, and spreading sigils all along the right side.

  “I’ve got the wraith doing something , but I don’t really know how much it’ll take.”

  Baoji spoke up. “We’re about to enter atmosphere.” The ship starting to tremble. “Ada, be ready to do your thing as soon as I say magic.”

  Ada looked through the wraith’s eyes and saw the incoming ships. “Should I be looking out for -”

  A patch of sigils burst into light and ephemera.

  “Shit, they just fired!”

  Turou slid to the bulkhead in a fetal position, hooking his hands into the ladder’s rungs. “Atmospheric landings are bumpy. You should hold on.”

  She sat down and grabbed onto handholds, returning her attention to the wraith on the outside. It was busy recreating those sigils as they burst, protecting the ship. Good. Beyond the edge of the ship’s roof, space was growing less dark, and the far horizons of Chang’e were visible on all sides.

  “We’re starting to heat up. Ada, let’s not explode.”

  She sent the wraith to the centre of the ship, keeping it away from any flames, and had it carefully reach around to the bottom, adding more storage sigils wherever they would fit, connecting them with the absorption sigils on the bottom. This might get messy. She had the wraith create its own storage in its body as well, connecting to the rest, slowly growing and glowing.

  The ship was shaking violently now as they fell. Elsa shouted across the din. “Atmo should be thick enough to diffuse long-range vacuum lasers now. We’re clear!”

  Baoji pul
led off his ear covers, and Turou shouted. “Baoji, where are we landing?”

  “Engines cut! We’ll land a few hours’ hike from Tianzhou. Got contacts there who can get us an unmarked skimmer to Guwenhua. Watch it, gravity’s picking up fast.”

  The world was indeed feeling different. Turou and Ada both rose up, catching themselves against the ladder, almost pushed upward. The ship rattled and shook, and Ada projected her mind out into the wraith, seeing it move and flatten itself against the roof of the ship, building more and more power storage sigils that were glowing brighter and brighter. Bright was bad. Power storage shouldn’t glow too much.

  “How much longer till we’ve got a straight shot to the ground?” Ada yelled. “We can’t keep absorbing this much heat!”

  “We’re going to break cloud cover soon!” Elsa shouted. “How much longer can we hold without retro burn?”

  Ada’s eyes widened. “I don’t know but I need to vent now! If I vent when we’re under the clouds the whole damn sky will light up behind us!”

  “Do it!”

  She reached out to the wraith, and had it redirect power from the storage units to all the light sigils on the ship’s roof. The storage sigils hummed and shook; any longer and they could explode. Then the roof of the ship flashed a single beat of the heart of the sun, and Ada couldn’t see anything anymore.

  “I’m blind!”

  “Cloud cover in twenty seconds.”

  She pulled her attention back to her body, not wanting to feel disembodied and lost again. The wraith knew itself. She told it to build more power storage sigils, as many as it could, and she knew that with time slowed it would do better than she expected. It would have to be enough.

  “Ten seconds!”

  “We’re dropping, this is it.” Baoji shouted as one of the ship’s main background noises cut out. “RCS off! Ada, as soon as we get through that cloud cover -”

  “Five seconds.”

  “Are we still hot?”

  “No, I flashed it off.”

  She peered out the window, but couldn’t see anything at all. Then a proper sky rose into view, and Baoji shouted. “We’re through. Ada, magic! ”

  She slowed time, allowing herself time to think this through. She reached into the wraith, saw through its eyes, directed it forward. It was a bloated, floating mass of power storage sigils, an absurd explosion waiting to happen, but it was intact. She turned and reached around to the bottom of the ship, reaching past it, extending seeing eyes and tendrils of code spindles down into the night. Straight down.

  Baoji was right, and he was good - they were falling more or less straight down, and there was barely any wind. They had maybe a klick or two of room before they slammed into the moon, and they were falling fast, but time yielded to Ada and the code, and the vast stores of energy that wraith had accumulated ground it to a halt. Black wirework snaked down through the air, further and further, weaving repeating geometric patterns that minimized the odds of it breaking under severe wind or disturbance, and that would fold up behind the ship in a stable frame as it descended through the structure. It was long and repetitive, but she had to bring them in quietly.

  She wasn’t sure how many real seconds had passed, but after what felt like almost an hour to her, she had extended the code down to the surface of the planet. Turning a seeing eye around to look back up, the ship was barely visible in the night sky. This was getting tiring; even in time dilation and with those energy supplies, she could only do so much. She needed to hurry.

  She started etching the levitation sigil into the air just above the surface of the clearing Baoji had thrown them at, working fast. Then she needed to connect it to the power storage sigils, but not all at once. That was tricky, considering how closely she’d bound them all together. She decided to start with the ones on the bottom of the ship, reaching from the wraith itself down to those and connecting that power with the code that fed down to the surface, to the levitation sigil. Done. Okay, that seemed reasonable enough - but was it? She would have to check.

  She let time move back to its regular pace, and suddenly the entire ship jolted like it had been slammed into. It started drifting sideways, and Baoji shouted, “What just happened?! We’re rolling!”

  She slowed time again. Rolling. Sideways. Shit. If the ship slipped out of the sigil’s beam they might all get killed, even if Baoji did turn the engines on to try and save things. How was the ship rotating? Her mind divided between two tasks, Ada sent out some seeing eyes to look at the ship based on the horizon. It was rolling down on the left side. Okay, easy to fix. She reached out and conjured a force sigil right under the wing, bumping it in the other direction slightly.

  The wing started moving up, slowly in time dilation, but visibly. Oh, shit, it was going to overshoot the horizon and roll the other way.

  She still needed to get that levitation sigil more power. She got the wraith to focus on connecting it to the other power storage sigils along the ship, while she reached out and conjured another, smaller force sigil above the stubby wing, hoping to slow its spin. Boom. The ship’s roll slowed, but it wasn’t quite stopped.

  She looked down with a seeing eye and saw that the ground was a lot closer than it had been before. She could see individual trees on the ground. Fuck. They were running out of time. She reached across the ship’s wingspan and popped a force sigil underneath the other wing, trying to stabilize the roll.

  This was getting tiring.

  Wraith. She got the wraith to start feeding its own stored energy to the levitation sigil, weaving the structures itself. All the power they had accumulated, added in one sigil at a time, slowly increasing the levitation sigil’s power. The ship was still rolling; she popped more force sigils, but she could never seem to get the right balance.

  The ship was a lot closer to the ground now. She could make out plants in the field. They were almost there. She slipped out of time dilation, just for a second, just to get a sense of how fast they were still falling.

  It didn’t feel that bad, actually. The other three in the cockpit were screaming their lungs out, though, so she slipped back into time dilation and looked down. They were almost steady, but the power storage sigils had all been used up. It had clearly slowed their fall, but by how much? Would it be enough?

  There were other options.

  Quickly, she dragged the wraith’s code across the ship’s underside, carving a grand reinforcement sigil into the hull, hoping that might help keep things intact. Would she be able to make one final push against the ship to slow it? That levitation sigil was only a dozen meters below them now at this point. Even in time dilation, they were visibly slipping down - it would be too fast to code a sigil into the air directly beneath the ship.

  She reached down and messed with it, adding power generation nodules and crisscrossing the code indiscriminately. After a split second of real time the code crashed, lighting up the field underneath the falling ship with a bright white light. The force of the impact temporarily stopped the ship in mid-air, just a few meters above the ground.

  This was exhausting.

  She let time slip back to its normal speed and, in the midst of all the screaming, the ship smashed into the fields of Chang’e.

  It took Ada a moment to realise they had all survived. She glanced over to Turou, his eyes pressed shut and his hands covering his head. He was fine. She turned around to look at Elsa and Baoji, in the proper seats, both of them breathing deeply. The bottom of the ship was the ground again. Panels were sparking in the cockpit, and the ship sounded dead, but they were all alive. She smiled.

  Elsa turned around, looking at Ada and Turou. “Everyone all right?”

  Ada nodded, rolling her shoulders as she stood. She reached up to wipe the sweat from her brow and staggered - it was not as easy to code like this when she wasn’t harvesting the energy from a bright daytime sun to power everything. Turou opened his eyes, gasped a little, and started gingerly hauling himself up. Baoji spun around on
his chair and started hissing in laughter.

  “Ada, you crazy, crazy woman!” He pointed at her. “That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever done! We came in completely cold!”

  “We should be dead.” Elsa was grinning, but she was also looking up to the sky. “Hopefully the ships on our tails will think that’s what happened.”

  Ada pointed at the ship, some of the bulkheads looking a little bent or cracked. “You know, we could blow this thing up when we leave. Make it look like we actually did die.”

  Baoji nodded. “Way ahead of you. I’m going to rig the hydrogen cells. It’ll be a nice big boom, so we’d better pack and get the hell out of here. I figure at this point that’s the only way I’ll have a hope under heaven of filing any insurance claims - you can bet your ass there’s some clause that says there’s no payout if magic or crime were involved.”

  Elsa raised her eyebrows at him disapprovingly, but said nothing. They rushed through the ship, gathering what belongings they had, and Ada reached out to the wraith and let it dissipate, disappearing into an ashy dust that trickled down the sides of the ship.

  They stacked the rest of the pizzas in a large backpack, Baoji gathered up his personal belongings, and they left out the airlock. Ada landed on Chang’e with both feet, bouncing a little. She did actually feel lighter here than on Earth or Freyja. She hopped on the spot, going a little higher than usual, and grinned.

  They were in a forest clearing, animal sounds rustling through the trees beyond, calls and cries and buzzes slowly picking up in volume. The animals had probably fallen silent at a starship thundering into their home. The trees themselves were absurdly tall, reaching as high as they could through weaker gravity, and their distant canopies seemed alive with wind and movement.

  “One more thing while I finish rigging the fuel cells.” Baoji pointed. “Head to the back of the ship and pull out the cargo. We’ll need it.”

  Turou frowned. “Cargo? What cargo?”

  “I’m on a job, you know. A paying job. It should help convince my contact to get us a skimmer to the campus. Don’t open the box.”