Driftmetal

by J. C. Staudt

  “One’s parked outside town,” I said. “The other… they ain’t gonna find the other.”

  Dad was irked. “Get below, son. Mr. Sarmiel, make ready to lift off. Stations!”

  I made my way belowdecks, hungry as a dog and still aching, my bloody hand in need of patching and my left leg due for a tune-up. Merton Richter and Dorth Littage were stationed at the coal furnace, doing more sitting than shoveling. As soon as they saw me, they started pretending otherwise.

  “Slackers,” I said as I passed. “Liftoff soon. I’ll kick your teeth in if we fall behind because of you jackwagons.”

  “Aye, cap,” they said.

  Merton thumbed over his shoulder and gave me a knowing look. “Cook’s in the galley.”

  I frowned at him and trudged off in that direction.

  “There’s my sweet little boy,” said the cook when I sat down. “What’s with that dreadful hat?”

  “Hey, Ma.”

  She leaned in, pinched my chin between two wet, floury fingers, and puckered up. I obliged her, then nodded out of her grasp. My mother, as beautiful and terrifying a woman as ever sailed the stream.

  “You must be hungry,” she said, returning to her work. “You missed dinner last night, and you didn’t come home for breakfast or lunch today. Or dinner, either, come to think of it. This town isn’t that big, Mull.”

  The guilt-trips never stopped. When am I gonna get away from these people? “You’ll notice by the hole in my hand that I kinda got into some trouble,” I pointed out.

  She glanced over her shoulder, frowned, clucked her tongue. “What’d you bring in?”

  I slumped my shoulders. “Not a blasted thing.”

  “You should be with the Doc, not down here,” she said, hiding her disappointment with nagging.

  “Dad mutinied again. Took command of the ship and told me to hide below until we shove off.”

  Ma huffed. “I’ll call Doctor Ditmarus. Your father, I swear… we’re supposed to be retired. Doesn’t that man know how to take a moment’s rest?”

  I resisted the urge to point out what a hypocritical statement that was, coming from my mile-a-minute mom. Instead I said, “Sometimes I think Dad would like it if I got pinched. For good.”

  A moment’s hesitation. “Don’t be silly,” Mom said, shoving a long whisk handle into her wrist port and whipping the bowl of batter like it deserved the punishment. “He loves you.”

  “Don’t feed me that crap,” I said. “You’re a better cook than that.”

  She called Doctor Ditmarus on the intercom and set the bowl aside. “Someone’s a little grumpy tonight,” she said. “Go lie down and wait for him.”

  The whisk shed drops of batter as she waved me away.

  I crossed into the crew cabin and set my ugly new hat down on a barrel. Then I pulled off my lone remaining boot and flung myself onto a spare bunk. My mind drifted to the medallion. My medallion. Life would be different if I ever got my hands on it.

  I felt the turbines rumble down my spine. My stomach heaved as the boat pitched off and caught the stream. Building a good boat isn’t just a matter of throwing a few scraps of driftmetal together. It has to be balanced. It has to have the right ingots in the right places, size and mass and purity, all in equal proportions. My Ostelle, she was a good boat. Just because Dad had built most of her for me didn’t make her any less mine. I’d financed the endeavor, after all.

  Speak of the devil, Dad’s voice came over the intercom. “They’re stopping us. The Civs want to search the boat. Mull, if you’re somewhere where you can hear me, make yourself scarce.”

  The marshals caught us? I thought. Not a chance. Ostelle can run and gun against anything the Civs could ever throw at her. Why wouldn’t Dad just haul it out of here and leave them in the dust? Unless… he’s making it easy for them to get to me.

  I was the only one in the crew cabin. There was something eerie about being alone. Maybe it was that I felt alone. Abandoned. But he just told me to hide. Doesn’t that mean he wants to keep me safe?

  Metal planks on the deck above shrieked under the weight of footsteps. I shouldered a set of webgear and darted into the galley, where Ma was laboring away at dinner as if there weren’t half a dozen Civvy marshals coming aboard to take her only son into custody. When she turned to look at me, there was something strange in her eyes. Sorrow? No, that wasn’t it.

  “Better get out of sight,” she said. “Where do you think you’ll hide?”

  Looking at my mother then, I realized it wasn’t sorrow I saw in her eyes. It was betrayal. I went numb. I backed away. How could you? I almost said. How much did they have to pay you to turn me in? I could hear the footsteps spreading fore and aft, crossing decks and clunking down stairs.

  The flecker was in my hand before I reached the furnace room. Two marshals were questioning Merton and Dorth as the crewmen leaned on their shovels, enjoying the break. I burst into the room and fired an erratic barrage, adrenaline pounding in my chest. All four men held up their hands to shield themselves. The flecker particles melted over them, searing away synthetic flesh like a hair dryer over butter.

  With their skin out of the way, I could see that both marshals were heavily augmented, but that was no surprise. I kept shooting until I saw a clear path, then bolted past them. I heard them stumbling after me like a gaggle of anodized skeletons, screaming. I flew up the stairs and across the deck, but stopped short at the railing.

  There were four Civvy sloops and a cruiser docked to my Ostelle. More than a score of them had come aboard, decked out in the red-and-tans of the Civil Regency Corps. I couldn’t help but feel honored by the show of force.

  “Drop it and come forward, nice and easy,” said their commanding officer, a dark-haired mustachioed man I knew as Captain Ludolf Kupfer, the biggest law-lover of them all.

  I didn’t budge. “Ah, Kupfer. Isn’t this an unexpected surprise? How nice of you to drop in and say hello.”

  Don’t judge me. Sometimes you have to match a law-lover’s smugness with a little smugness of your own. Well… you don’t have to. But it’s more fun that way.

  Kupfer gave me a pained grimace, as if my greeting had been cliché enough to hurt him physically. “We’ve collected evidence that leads us to believe you’re responsible for the deaths of as many as eleven missing persons, including three security personnel employed by a Mr. Alastair Gilfoyle as part of his Churn-mining operation. I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”

  Thirteen, I would’ve said. I’m responsible for the deaths of thirteen missing persons. I wanted to thank Kupfer for underestimating my murder tally, but I couldn’t have opened my mouth without correcting him. Plus, I knew better than to put myself at odds with the two dozen rifles his marshals were pointing in my direction.

  In my defense, the Churn was what did the killing, I could’ve said, but didn’t. I thought of the dark-skinned man, his funny accent and the equally funny look of terror he’d had on his face while he was falling. And Gilfoyle, that balding, cane-wielding, gold-ring-wearing rotten apple of a mining tycoon who still had my medallion. His medallion. My… medallion.

  I looked around at my crew, standing off at the fringes of the conflict, cowering behind the marshals like children behind their mothers’ skirts. I was pretty sure I knew then what Dad’s little meeting had been about; why everyone had gone silent when I’d walked into the captain’s quarters. They’d decided it was time to vote me off the boat. My crew was no longer mine.

  ‘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.

&n
bsp; 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?”