by Jeff Somers
Mara and the Poet I had no doubt about. They’d make it without breaking a sweat.
“All right.” I twisted my head until I got a satisfying crack from my neck. “I go first. If I eat it, go for the duffel. You’ll need it.”
I let them ponder that for a moment, and then stood up. I felt immediately exposed and had to resist the urge to rush, to get out of sight. The wind blew the rain into my face, a gentle mist that kept me blinking, as I stood for a moment judging the load on my back and shifting the straps of the rifle and the bag slightly. The Poet and Mara just stared at me. I put my eyes on the spot I wanted, about five floors down, and fixed the black rectangle of empty space in my head. Then I took one step backward, found the edge of the wall with my heel, rocked back, took one bounding step forward, and threw myself off the wall, feet first.
Slapping my arms down at my sides, I tried to be aerodynamic. My HUD lit up again, a tiny number popping up on a transparent overlay announcing how many feet from the ground I’d just become. For one second it was serene, the happiest moment of my recent life, and I thought, This is what suicide is like. The happiest you’ve felt in fucking years.
The gap screamed up at me and just before I hit it, I knew I was going to make it; the opening was pretty wide and I sailed through without hitting my head and decapitating myself, which would have been my vote for most likely end to this little experiment. When my HUD counter was just about to turn zero, I balled myself up, knees in my chest, and hit the concrete floor hard enough to bounce, then managed a decent roll, ass over tits, until I smacked into the far wall.
I lay for a moment and felt myself vibrating. A few seconds later I sat up as the Poet sailed through the opening, landing bad and scraping himself, squawking, along the rough floor for several feet before the friction of his own body managed to stop him. He flipped around and sat up and we stared at each other.
I heard Mara a moment before we saw her, her words unintelligible as she came flying toward us. She misjudged it and smacked into the floor at about waist height, immediately dropping out of sight.
The Poet and I looked back at each other.
“If she falls, we die,” he said in a flat voice, a slight lisp his gift from Hong Kong. “Beginning to think, Why not? A moment of peace.”
I grunted, hauling myself up. “If she’s going to crap out and take us with her, I’m going to at least enjoy the fucking moment and kill her myself.” My leg sent a sharp lance of pain up my side as I limped over to the edge. I leaned out and looked down; Mara was dangling from a piece of rebar that jutted from the concrete just a few feet below us. She glared up at me and we said nothing.
I turned and walked back toward the Poet. “You reel her in. I’m going to see if there’s any hope of getting that hover up. I’m tired of running from lines of fire.”
“Much better to crash,” he said as he got to his feet, looking steady despite the ugly landing. “I have always maintained this. The best way to die.”
The hover was an amazing sight: With just a few feet of clearance, it sat in the rough center of the empty slab of floor and looked to be in pretty good shape, at least on the outside. Whoever had piloted it into this space had been a master, and getting it out was going to be impossible. But I wasn’t going to make it to the Shannara if I had to run the whole way, and if we could avoid for about thirty seconds the antiair munitions Pucker the Pig had mentioned, we’d be home free.
It was a military-issue craft; I recognized the sleek silver design and the SFNA logo—a globe surrounded by arrowheads—was painted up near the front. It was shaped like a cigar and looked to seat about five people at most, maybe six if you didn’t need to actually sit down in flight. The hatch was up, a yawning rectangular wound in the hover’s silver skin. Swinging the duffel off my back, I dropped it on the floor and drew my Roon, keeping my finger off the trigger as I stepped up to the hatch and leaned in.
It smelled like damp and dust, but the interior of the hover was empty, just a wad of safety netting and nothing else. I hopped in, feeling the whole thing rock and settle under me, and took two steps to the cockpit hatch. Gently pushing it open, I found the controls abandoned as well. Stuffing the gun back into my pocket, I limped to the pilot’s seat and sat down, instantly feeling tired.
I studied the controls. I was no expert; in the past, I’d always had someone to do the flying, but I knew the basics, and at a glance I could see that the military had just adjusted the standard old SSF hover designs for its own use. The control panel was almost identical to the ones I’d seen in plenty of SSF hovs, and I had a list of standard gestures that usually worked to get things unlocked. I raised my hand and then hesitated, thinking that it might be trapped, rigged to blow.
Did I care? I wasn’t sure. As I sat there, I noticed my HUD had a new icon just above the blinking exclamation mark my mind’s eye still shied away from. It was a tiny representation of a hover; my military augments recognizing I was in a military vehicle. I wondered if that was good or bad.
Closing my eyes, I tried a gesture. Nothing happened.
I ran through the ones I could remember, ones that had worked at one time or another for waking up hovers. None of them worked. With a sigh, I stood up and retrieved the duffel from outside, dropping it in the belly of the hover as the Poet and Mara, both looking scratched up and bruised, joined me.
“This is fuckin’ unbelievable,” Mara said, touching the silvery skin of the vessel with one bloodied hand. “I need to find this pilot and hire ’im.” She looked at me as I reached into the duffel and extracted one of the gifts Hense had given me back in Brussels. It was a large black disc, its surface rough and nonreflective, swallowing all the light and looking like a piece of the night sky in my hands. It vibrated slightly, a barely there ripple from inside it, and it was hot and heavy.
“Why, Avery,” she said, “you’ve bin keepin’ secrets. What t’fuck is that?”
I stood up by increments, holding the disc carefully in my hands. “This is how we’re getting this tub in the air, and this is how we’re getting into the hotel to pay Londholm a visit,” I said, turning slowly toward the cockpit. “This is a multiuse, SSF-property uranium hydride portable reactor, capable of generating sustained two hundred and fifty megawatts over the air.”
“I confess I’m slow,” the Poet said. “Too old for the latest tech, but what does that mean?”
I could picture Mara grinning behind me—I knew her, somehow. “Old friend,” she said, “it means, don’t fucking drop it.”
XXXI
THE PERFECT PLAN, A CLOSED CIRCUIT WITH THE CADENCE BEING DEATH
“You know how to pilot one o’ these bastards, right? ” Mara said from where she’d perched on the copilot’s seat, sitting with her legs splayed, leaning forward.
“I’ve crashed several times,” I said. “And once jumped out of one that wasn’t crashing.”
Behind us, the Poet, hanging from his beefy arms in the hatchway, barked a short, compact laugh. After a few hours of dodging bullets, we were all enjoying that weird euphoria that came during lulls. I’d seen it get folks killed, but it was hard to resist.
I’d set the disc on the floor of the cockpit and gestured it online; it had started to hum loudly, and the temperature in the cabin had risen immediately, making me sweat. In my head, I ran over everything Hense had told me back in Brussels, trying to remember every detail.
“It all depends on whether the hover was locked down,” I said, reaching out and pulling the console’s plastic cover off; it came easy, popping off like it was supposed to and revealing a mass of thin, threadlike wires. “If the pilot encrypted it before leaving the cabin, there’s no way I can do anything without a Tech Associate.” I looked at Mara while leaning forward and reaching into the mass of wires up to my shoulder. “You got any Techies in your pocket? ”
She shook her head, looking for a moment just like a real seventeen-year-old girl. “I never had any way with tech,” she said. “I’m old-school. Anything mo
re complex than a gun is too much for me.”
“Me too,” I grunted, finding the diamond-shaped short-term battery the hover used when main power was off-line. It was cold, which told me the craft had been completely without power for some time. “Okay,” I said, retrieving my arm, “let’s put some juice into her and see what happens.”
I gestured at the disc, and the humming revved up, pulsing through my chest. I glanced up at the Poet, who raised his thick eyebrows at me.
“You’re sure we are safe? ” he said. “It’s like I’m drawing power. Hairs on arm stand up.”
I shrugged. “Does it look like I read the fucking manual? You’ve got wires in your brain. I wouldn’t worry about this shit. The battery’s dead, so the hover won’t have any history in its databanks. Without a history, it will assume a crash or other emergency situation. When we power this up, we should be dropped into an emergency shell, which will accept a small number of generic commands. It won’t be fancy and weapons will be off-line, but it’ll get us into the air. Any last words?”
No one said anything. I glanced back at the exploded console and gestured at the disc again.
Immediately, the cabin’s lights flickered on, and various readout screens mounted on the interior windshield burped into life and started throwing numbers my way. The hover’s climate control kicked into whining overdrive, and a Klaxon, the loudest sound I’d ever heard in my life, immediately began to wail. I had no idea what it meant, but if I were forced to come up with a sound that meant imminent explosion, it would be pretty close.
“Fucking hell! Shut that noise off!”
I shook my head. “I know exactly fifteen standard HOV protocol gestures! Shutting off the alarm ain’t one of them!”
“Then get this fucking brick off the fucking ground!”
I gestured at the console and with a squeal of sudden metal fatigue the hover jerked upward, smashing into the concrete above us. Several ceiling panels fell from above and something sparked inside the console, sending a thin acrid plume of smoke into the crank air. Outside, several large chunks of concrete fell to the floor around us.
The Klaxon continued to wail, now joined by another, subtly different alarm.
“Cates!” Mara screeched. I wanted to reach over and clamp her mouth shut. I gestured at the console again and the hover began to inch forward, slowly, scraping along the ceiling, the dry, high-pitched squeal of metal on rock adding to the noise. I found myself making fists and grinding my teeth as we slowly drifted toward the gap in the wall.
“There is no clearance!” The Poet was suddenly in my ear, his body crouched down between Mara and me, almost on top of the humming disc. “You must adjust vertical! The lip, Mr. Cates!”
The view screen showed the approach interior wall; there was a stone and rebar lip that came down from the ceiling about a foot. From the floor, a taller railing rose up, three or four feet high, leaving just enough room between them for the hover to squeak through. I shook my head.
“I don’t have a fine touch here! It’s either scrape the top or scrape the bottom! Top’s shallower!”
“Well give it some fucking speed then, or we’re go—”
I reached over and clamped my thumb and forefinger onto Mara’s lips. They felt real enough: warm and damp, elastic. The avatar business had gone luxe. I looked across the Poet’s body and met Mara’s eyes, then winked and let go.
“Hang on!”
I gestured again, and the hover shot forward, the scraping from above becoming a keening, shuddering noise that even drowned out the alarms. The whole hover began to shake as we tore through the empty space, the gap approaching so fast I didn’t even have time to shut my eyes before we hit the lip.
There was a noise just like an explosion, a bomb going off above us, and we rocketed out of the building on an angle, the hover fishtailing spastically and immediately dropping fifteen feet before recovering some of its vertical thrust. It continued to waggle crazily, yawing this way and that as I frantically gestured at it, running through every command I knew and trying to shake it back into something I could control.
Instantly, a third alarm began squawking, and on the heels of that, a fourth one, this one heralded by the cabin lights turning a light red, bathing us in urgency.
Mara leaned as far over toward me as she could from her chair. “What! The! Fuck! Is! That!”
I smiled. “Defensive scan! We’ve been targeted by the city’s antiaircraft weaponry!” I pointed at one of the smaller Vidscreens. “I don’t know what kind of system those assholes have in place, but we’re gonna find out real soon!”
We only needed thirty seconds in the air. Thirty seconds at good speed would put us right over the hotel, and then we could land the brick and the last human cops in the world could blow the hover to pieces for all I cared. I kept repeating the same gesture to turn on the small stabilizing thrusts on the sides of the tail, and the hover kept ignoring me as we spun in a crazy circle.
“You think about it!” the Poet shouted directly in my ear. “There is a metaphor here!” He yelled something else I didn’t catch, and when I looked at him, he was grinning. I grinned back. I was pretty sure I knew what metaphor meant, and he was so fucking right that I almost gave up on the spot and let us crash into the fucking ground, maybe the best idea I’d had in a long time. Just seeing the look of horror on Mara’s face would have made it worth it.
If we stayed hanging in the air, we were going to die.
I closed my eyes and imagined the sphere of glass I’d used to hold the voices at bay while they persisted. I hadn’t heard much from them in recent months, but I still had the knack with the imaginary wall, and put it in place without much effort. Inside, it was quiet and serene.
I combined a couple of gestures and the hover dropped another ten feet in one sudden lurch before stabilizing back into its crazy swinging in place.
I started to think maybe letting the fucking thing crash was our best bet. If it dropped to the ground, the city’s antiaircraft system might shut down, and since we were only a few dozen feet up, we’d survive. Unless I was wrong and the AA system pounded the crash site anyway, which would take us right on back to being dead anyway. It looked like the perfect plan, a closed circuit with the cadence being death.
“Cates!” Mara shouted, jabbing a long finger at the bank of screens. “One of the displacers is crapped out! Shut it down!”
I followed her finger and nodded—she was right. I gestured my way through the clunky generic commands and managed to kill it, and the hover immediately steadied. The Klaxons kept ringing away, though, jamming into our ears mercilessly. We were slow and wouldn’t be able to manage much altitude, but I suddenly had some coherent control of the brick. Carefully, I pushed us forward. The Shannara, a thin needle of a building, stood out on the view screen clearly enough, and I steered toward it, the hover swinging around like we were filled with fucking gas and floating our way over on the wind.
“Hell, at least we’re not in a fucking rush!” Mara shouted. “I’m gonna take a goddamn nap while you drift over there!”
I ran through my slim repertoire of commands but couldn’t find any way of coaxing more power out of the hover. The generator was rated high enough to power a fucking building for an hour—I knew that well enough—but the hover maybe wasn’t pulling enough juice from it, or the displacer was damaged, or the emergency status kept it in a crippled state—whatever the reason, we were drifting at a speed only slightly faster than me running across the empty pavement of Hong Kong below us. Which was better than doing the actual running, but I decided not to argue the point with Mara. A hot red light bloomed on the console, and suddenly all of the alarms cut off, leaving us in relative silence, the only sound the familiar, though muted, roar of the displacers.
“Well, fucking finally,” Mara snarled.
“Yeah, fucking hurrah for us,” I said back. “We’ve been targeted. Better get back into the bay and wrap up in the netting, ’cause I can’t
make this thing fast via sheer will-power, so we’re going down in about twenty seconds.”
She stared at me. “Well, this has turned out to be a huge fuckin’ success for you, eh? ”
I ignored her and tried my best to push the hover as fast as it would go, which remained a stodgy and stubborn twenty miles per hour, putting along. Hong Kong was the biggest collection of huge I’d ever seen—the buildings were packed in tight, of all sizes and shapes, glittering empty tombs in the dim rainy twilight. Steering down the canyons created by them at our gentle speed was easy, and I urged the brick on as the collision detection started to beep. On the view screen, the rear field showed a tiny black dot in the sky behind us.
The alarms cut in again. They made me want to crash the fucking brick just to shut them down.
“Okay!” I yelled. “We’re hooked.”
“Ditch it!” Mara shouted.
I shook my head. “Ten more seconds!” Every moment we were in the air gained us ground we wouldn’t have to run a gauntlet through.
She slapped me lightly on the side of the head. I twisted around in the pilot’s seat to look at her; she held up the tiny black remote. “Ditch it!”
I forced a smile to my face and put my hands up. “All right!” I shouted. I turned back to the controls and gestured the flaps down so nothing would slow us, and with a curt movement of my hand the hover went dead, coasting on inertia for a second. The sudden silence popped into place as if it had always been there, like air. “I hope we don’t get blown to hell on the ground!”
“You’re always inspirin’, Cates!” Mara bellowed, strapping herself into the copilot’s chair. “That’s what I like about—”
XXXII
I’M MAKING A BET HERE
Someone was laughing.
Behind it there was another noise, a damp hissing sound that was puzzling for a moment.
I opened my eyes. The ceiling of the hover was sliding away behind a thin haze of smoke. It was rippled and bent but gliding along like a river glimpsed from high altitude. At first I thought my HUD was smoke in my eyes and I blinked furiously trying to dislodge it.