by Mike Sheriff
Pyros halted and studied the unfolding geometry of the chase. After a few seconds it became clear; the geology aerostat’s angle of descent homed in on a specific location in space.
He eyed the gap between the blade contrails and the heaving sea. Could the aerostat fly beneath the turbines and still avoid the—
The white-capped waves two thousand feet below stopped his heart.
The tailwind.
He grasped Narses’ shoulder. “Recall the aeroshrike!”
Narses flinched at the shout, dropping a handful of grooll. “They’re almost upon them!”
“And they’re almost upon the turbines!” Pyros said. “Look to the sea. This wind is strong enough to drive them into the blades.”
“The aeroshrike has powerful airscrews!”
“It also has an enormous sail area, Narses,” Julinian said. “Did you fail every aerodynamics course at the Librarium? The Jiren is right!”
Narses’ vaunted brow folded. For a hopeful moment, it appeared their appeals had found reason. The moment deflated when he punched the comms tile. “This is the Unum Potentate. Close to one thousand feet and destroy them!”
“One thousand feet, acknowledged,” the crackling voice responded.
Narses lowered his hand. His smile smacked of defiance.
Pyros resisted the urge to drive his fist into the Unum Potentate’s teeth.
DAOREN LUGGED THE sonic hammer along the raised platform running the length of the aerostat’s gas envelope.
Dusty hydrogen cells bracketed the platform, each as big as the grooll mill’s mixing tanks. Arched-glass framework and lateral I-beams crisscrossed the envelope, lending structural support to its tapered cylindrical shape. At the end of the platform, a circular hatch penetrated the hemispherical stern.
He reached the hatch and powered up his sonic hammer. It emitted an angry electric hum. He selected the highest power preset. The hum became angrier.
Heqet settled to a knee beside him, wheezing. Sweat dripped from her forehead. He activated her hammer and selected its power preset. “This setting should punch through their armor, but it’ll give us no more than a minute of power . . . if we’re lucky.” He grasped the hatch’s handle. “Make your shots count.”
“Tarry!” she said. “I’ve never fired a weapon!”
“Just keep firing. Quantity has a quality all its own.”
He spun the handle. The hatch swung open with a groan.
A thousand feet away, the aeroshrike’s shadow-black bow filled the sky. The bridge gondola jutted like a cleft chin below the gas envelope, its tinted windows shielding the crew. Midway down the envelope, throbbing airscrews churned the air on swept port and starboard mountings. Five hundred feet below, mountainous waves flew white banners of spindrift.
Daoren laid the shaft of his sonic hammer onto the hatch coaming, positioning the headstock a foot beyond the opening, and gripped the T-handle. Heqet did the same.
“Ready?” he shouted.
She gritted her teeth and nodded.
They activated the headstocks. The circular bases spun up to five hundred revolutions-per-minute in three seconds.
He placed his thumbs on the pulse generator’s twin buttons. “Now!”
They depressed the buttons in perfect sync. The hiss of the airstream and throb of the airscrews vanished beneath the shrieking chatter of the sonic headstocks.
Twin streams of high-frequency sound bursts stitched the air, wispy contrails tracing their flight path. They intercepted the aeroshrike’s bridge windows in less than a second.
Strobing flashes signaled strikes. Armored glass fractured and flaked away. The shards plunged toward the sea.
Daoren walked his bursts back and forth across the bridge.
Windows shattered, exposing the crew to the withering fire. The aeroshrike veered to starboard. The evasive maneuver revealed the vulnerable port-side longitudinal axis of its gas envelope.
He trained his hammer up the envelope, raking it with sound bursts.
Rows of black panels buckled. Chunks of armor cladding spiraled through the sky.
He set his chin on the hammer’s shaft and lined up the headstock with the port airscrews. The spinning headstock decelerated, losing angular momentum and fouling his aim. The hammer powered off before he could bring his sound bursts to bear. He shook Heqet’s arm and pointed. “The port airscrews!”
She steadied her aim and fired. A stream of sound bursts arced across the gap. Her hammer powered off moments later, but its bursts found their mark.
Two airscrews splintered from the impacts. The unbalanced engines ripped the mounting from the gas envelope in a gushing fountain of sparks. The aeroshrike yawed violently to port.
Daoren reefed the hatch closed. He traded a look of supreme satisfaction with Heqet. “For someone who’s never fired a weapon, you’re a natural!”
“Or lucky!” she said, beaming.
An internal voice-comm pinged among the glass framework. “Daoren! Heqet! We need you in the control gondola immediately!”
Daoren and Heqet scrambled to their feet, impelled by the distress in Laoshi’s voice. They raced down the platform.
Thirty seconds later, they dashed into the control gondola. Laoshi and Cordelia huddled by its forward windows.
“What is it?” Daoren asked, breathless.
Laoshi raised a trembling hand to the windows.
Five hundred feet ahead, turbine blades swirled, ready to carve them to pieces.
Daoren lunged for the navigation console and shoved the control yoke forward. The aerostat nosed over. Heqet, Laoshi, and Cordelia stumbled into the windows.
Beyond them, the Sea of Storms looked close enough to touch.
PYROS STARED THROUGH the forward windows, not believing what he was seeing.
The geology aerostat hugged the sea’s surface, threading the gap between the turbine blades and the heaving waves. The pursuing aeroshrike had been mortally wounded when it closed for the perfect cull shot. It lurched toward the wall of blades, its gas envelope slewed to starboard.
The comms tile mounted above the windows crackled, relaying audio from the wounded vessel’s bridge. Damage to its communications console must have shorted the air-link, locking the channel open, or perhaps a crewman had keyed it in his death throes. Whatever the reason, the tile broadcasted the unfolding horror.
“I said full-speed astern all engines!” a voice bellowed over braying klaxons.
“They are!” another shouted.
“Blow forward ballast! Climb!”
Immediately following the command, streams of sand poured from the aeroshrike’s forward ballast spouts. The lighter nose pitched up at a sixty-degree angle, clawing for altitude.
Pyros shivered. The commander, if he was still alive, must have realized that his one hope was to climb over the turbines before the tailwind forced the aeroshrike into them.
“They’re not going to make it,” Julinian said with languid detachment. Beside her, Narses stayed silent. His grooll-munching had ceased.
Pyros gauged the height of the turbine blades, the height of the aeroshrike, and its angled path. Julinian was right; one hundred-thirty men and women were going to die.
The vessel reached the first turbine, nose high, but two hundred feet too low. A shrill voice leaked from the comms tile, drenched in terror. “Climb! Climb! Cl—”
A turbine blade slammed into the gas envelope, abeam the bridge gondola. The comms tile spewed an ear-splitting crash.
The aeroshrike’s severed head buckled and twisted, shedding instrument consoles and Jireni, and plummeted toward the sea eighteen-hundred feet below.
“Oh my Sha . . .” Narses whispered.
The aeroshrike’s headless body plowed forward. A second blade struck it mid-envelope. Chunks of armor cladding and sections of shattered blade sprayed into the air.
The shrapnel clipped the adjacent turbine blades. They fractured and unleashed a torrent of debris, triggering a c
hain of destruction. Turbine after turbine spun apart, casting off fragmenting blades and toppling into the sea.
A glinting object seized Pyros’ attention.
A tumbling forty-foot blade section arced through the sky, closing on a steady bearing.
Narses and Julinian gaped at the missile, stupefied.
“Hard to port!” Pyros said. “Hard to port!”
The aeroshrike heeled into the turn. The deck canted thirty degrees.
The severed blade brushed down the starboard side, close enough to touch. A split-second later, a rumbling crash resonated through the vessel.
The deck shuddered and rolled another fifteen degrees. Crewmen pitched against their consoles or slid across the deck into bulkheads. Klaxons blared.
“Hydrogen leak!” a crewman said from the damage-control console. “Cells thirteen through nineteen!”
“Number five engine offline!” another crewman said.
“Stop all engines!” Pyros said, gripping a hard-point to stay on his feet. “Take us down to the surface!”
Narses snapped out of his stupor. “I’m in command here!”
“I have no intention of turning this aeroshrike into a Daqin candle!” Pyros said. “We must stop to make repairs!”
The deck leveled. He righted himself and gazed through the window.
Miles away, the geology aerostat exited the far side of the devastated turbine complex. Its nose lifted and the vessel climbed, clear of the danger.
Despite the horror, a tinge of admiration bloomed in Pyros’ chest. The escape ranked as the most daring feat he’d ever witnessed.
Narses showed his appreciation by driving his fist into the window.
9
Awakening Trust
PLASMONIC NAV-DATA flared on the dash panels, the increased luminance triggered by the encroaching gloom. Cang peered through the windshield and guided the levicart along the deserted transway. She needn’t worry about hitting a pedestrian or another vehicle. Evening twilight marked the start of the curfew that had been decreed following the Unum’s cull order this morning. It had reduced a normally bustling habitation complex to a vacant shell.
The complex ranked among Zhongguo Cheng’s largest. Home to nearly forty thousand Asianoids, its sprawl marked the southernmost extremity of the district. Its drab structures lacked the dizzying heights and dazzling spectraglass of those in the central boroughs, but they still outshone the stunted blocks rising a mile to the south in the neighboring district of Yindu Cheng.
Commander Hyro dozed in the passenger seat, seemingly content to bide the excursion in silence . . . or what little silence she could enjoy. Radan occupied the levicart’s jump seat, sitting slightly aft and a few inches higher. During the one-hour transit from the Assembly, his chatterwailing had filled the cabin for all but a few minutes—a product of nervousness. Cang had become accustomed to the affliction over the two years he’d been her aide. She’d even grown to enjoy it; the timbre of his voice had a soothing quality, even when he was anxious.
“You’re certain these dissenters are safe to meet?” he asked after pausing for a breath.
“They’re people,” Cang said. “No different from you or me.”
“But they’ve used violence to achieve their ends.”
Hyro chucklebucked. “As Commander Cang said, they’re no different from us.”
“But the violence we use is sanctioned by the ruling caste.”
“And that makes it right?” Hyro asked.
The question seemed to perturb Radan. He huffed and folded his arms across his chest; his telltale signal of retreat. Unlike most Jireni, his retreats tended to involve contemplative mental exercises.
Cang left him to his rumination and turned right at the next intersection. The meeting was set to take place in the open cloister amid the complex’s ten innermost habitation structures. Technically, it would constitute a violation of the curfew, but in the grand scheme of things it was a minor infraction. If everything went as planned, the dissenters—the denizens, she reminded herself again—would be violating a hundred more edicts in the days ahead, each more dire than the last.
If everything went as planned.
The importance of this initial outreach wasn’t lost on her. Setting it up had kept her unsettled and pacing her district office all day. Identifying the district’s leading dissenter had been easy enough; she had privileged, eyes-only access to every open investigation in Zhongguo Cheng. Convincing Su al Xing that the meeting wasn’t a trap proved easier than expected. The leading dissenters in Daqin Guojin already knew they were on the Cognos Populi’s lidar screen; all of them had spent time in the Rig. Su’s willingness to risk renewed detention to meet with her spoke to a deeper truth. For him, the Rig had long lost its deterrent effect. He had little left for the city-state to take.
Earning his trust would be a vital first step. Commander Hyro would play a crucial role in achieving that goal. At Cang’s behest, she’d made contact with Su to work out the terms and location of the meeting. Hyro was widely renowned as an honest broker, and not just in Riben Cheng and the other eastern districts. Dissenters throughout the city-state knew her reputation for fairness in her dealings with the under-castes, as well as her tolerance for attitudes that ran counter to the will of the Cognos Populi. Tonight, her support would echo and amplify Cang’s promise to give voice to the dissenters’ concerns in return for their help in the coming insurrection.
If everything went as planned.
The levicart reached the transway leading to the complex’s central cloister. Cang cranked the control-yoke to make the westward turn. The vehicle heeled ten degrees before righting itself on the straightaway.
Hyro stirred in her seat. She leaned toward the windshield and pointed. “What happening up there?”
One hundred feet ahead, at least fifty denizens filled the open cloister. They faced four levideck-mounted Jireni.
“Are those Jireni with us?” Radan asked, craning forward.
Cang’s cheeks grew hot. She cursed under her breath. “It must be a random patrol enforcing the curfew.”
The denizens spread out and advanced toward the patrol, displaying the classic signs of double-envelopment. The Jireni inched backward on their hovering craft, maintaining a ten-foot cull zone between them and the threat.
Cang grimaced. The tactic would only work for a few more seconds. Structures to the rear and on the flanks would soon hem in the four Jireni, cutting off their egress routes.
“This looks ill,” Hyro said.
One of the Jireni hoisted a dart gun and leveled it at the oncoming denizens.
“He’s going to cut them down,” Radan said.
Six denizens rushed the Jiren before he could fire. He toppled from his levideck and disappeared beneath a tangle of bodies. A dozen more denizens hauled the other Jireni from their levidecks, laying into them with fists and feet.
Cang slammed the throttle-control forward. The aft varinozzles screamed, spewing compressed air at an appalling rate. The levicart surged, accelerated through sixty miles an hour. Sixty feet ahead, the embattled groups stilled their blows and pivoted to the din.
Cang steered straight for them, hand still on the throttle. Radan gripped her shoulder. “Are you going to stop, sireen?”
“Not yet.”
The battling groups disengaged, creating a narrow pocket. Cang pointed the levicart’s nose directly at it. Radan squeezed her shoulder. “You’re going to hit them, sireen!”
She reefed the throttle backward. Compressed air blasted from the forward grill, its resonant howl amplified tenfold by the surrounding structures. Denizens and Jireni alike covered their ears and scattered for their lives.
The levicart bucked to a stop between them, forming an impromptu barricade. Cang powered off the vehicle and twisted to Hyro and Radan. “No weapons. This meeting mustn’t spiral any further out of control. Understood?”
Hyro and Radan agreed. They followed her out of the levicart.
A chorus of shouts and taunts greeted them. Dissenters of all ages hurled insults from twenty feet away. One man in a simple, brown shenyi lingered in the background. He remained mute.
Cang recognized Su from the quantum images in his file. The Asianoid was fifty-two years old, but could easily have passed for someone in his mid-thirties. The stud pattern on his cropped scalp featured ancient script used by Mother China during its imperial zenith. A few years ago, she’d asked a Librarian to decipher the symbol. It translated into one word.
Awaken.
Su raised a hand. His fellow Asianoids immediately ceased their taunts. Radan took up position beside Cang. Commander Hyro helped up one of the nearby Jireni. “Are you okay to travel?” she asked him.
“Yes, sireen,” the Jiren said, wiping blood from his lips. “Thank Sha you—”
“Get out of here!”
The Jiren flinched at Hyro’s curt command. He clambered aboard his levideck and whisked away with the other battered members of the squad.
Cang gauged the mood of the denizens. Their eyes conveyed well-honed suspicion and contempt. She focused on Su, who still lingered at the back of the throng. His eyes gave away nothing. Nor did his voice. “An ill start to your proposed truce, Commander Cang. I’d expected something less . . . blunt.”
“That wasn’t the start,” Cang said. “This is.”
“Your men wanted to detain us for illegal assembly after curfew,” Su said. “Is that a prelude for what lies ahead if we keep talking to you?”
“Those men weren’t privy to the purpose of this meeting. We’re here in good faith.”
A younger Asianoid broke from the crowd. Fresh scars mottled his scalp. Skeletal wrists jutted from the sleeves of his tunic. They bore raw scabs, like they’d been recently bound and subject to severe tension. “You expect us to believe you?”
Cang raised her hands, showing the boy her palms. The gesture was meant to reassure him that the meeting was about words, not weapons.
The boy reached inside his tunic. His hand reappeared grasping a curved blade. “So those Jireni just happened to find us?”