Driftmetal V

by J. C. Staudt

  Aside from a few casual words exchanged during meals, I’d been too busy to speak to my parents for a while. I was heading toward the workshop to gear up for the heist when my dear old Dad cornered me in a passage belowdecks.

  “What you been up to these days, son?” he asked. “Your mother and I haven’t heard much from you.”

  “Oh, this and that. You know… stuff.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “I sure hope you don’t got nothing wrongful going on. The Ostelle could lose its privateer status with the Regency if they ever found us to be in breach of our agreement.”

  “Look, Dad. Whatever agreement you signed with the CRC has nothing to do with me. There’s nothing going on that you need to be worried about.”

  “Oh no? Then why we been in Seskamode so long? I thought you said we were headed to some primie city or something like that.”

  “We’re just getting things shored up before we go,” I said.

  “What do you want with a bunch of primitives, anyway?”

  “I sort of owe them. They pulled me out of the Churn that day I fell from the Ostelle.”

  “Jumped,” he corrected me. “I gotta be honest, son. I thought you were a goner that day. It was them primies who saved your life, huh? Bottom-dwellers picked you up like toss-away trash and now you’re going back for… what, exactly? To thank them?”

  “Not quite,” I said. “They sabotaged the airship I left in and almost killed me.”

  “So it’s revenge you want.”

  “What I want is to set things right. Chaz and Blaylocke need to get home. Their whole city depends on trade with the stream to survive. One of the men locked up in our brig betrayed them. When I return, I’m going to deliver both him and the money he stole. They’re counting on me for at least that much.”

  Dad gave a thoughtful nod. “Sounds like you’re doing the right thing, son. I ain’t pleased you’ve taken up with primitives, but your mother and I are here to make sure this new obsession of yours doesn’t take an unhealthy turn.”

  I gave a forced smirk. “Thanks, Dad.”

  “Any time, son. And hey—if you ever feel overwhelmed and need a hand running things up top, you just give me a holler.”

  “That’s alright, Dad. You just take it easy. You’re supposed to be living the good life nowadays.”

  “I don’t mind. Really, I don’t.”

  “Dad, you promised you wouldn’t—”

  “I know, I know. I’m sorry. Sometimes I just can’t help myself. I get antsy after too long being left to my own devices. A man needs responsibility in his life or he starts going cuckoo. I guess your old man’s just getting elderly. Forget I said a thing about it.”

  I would’ve loved to forget. But somehow, the look on my dad’s face made me feel like I was depriving him of something he deserved; something which, even though it was mine by rights, I knew he would’ve enjoyed getting back. That was how things had fallen into such a state the last time we’d shared this vessel. I felt guilty for keeping him from the command he loved… until I realized that was because he was trying to make me feel guilty.

  “I appreciate your willingness to help out,” was all I could think to say. “I’m doing fine, though. If I ever need anything at all, I’ll let you know.”

  He forced a closed-mouth smile and nodded. “You bet, son. Enjoy your evening, now.”

  “You too, Dad.”

  Little did either of us know, few folks aboard my Ostelle were going to be enjoying this particular evening. As I slid past him and continued down the corridor, the only thing on my mind was getting into that bank and coming out a few million chips wealthier. Everything was set for the big show. It was time.

  The night sky over the Seskamode Trust was vacant of all but the hulking form of my Ostelle. This was a fact I found rather unfortunate; a little cloud cover wouldn’t have hurt. My big lug of a streamboat wouldn’t come close to fitting on the bank’s roof, so we’d set the clinkers and turned off the engines to maintain some small measure of stealth. I had ordered key crewmembers to remain at their posts so we’d be ready for immediate departure. It was dark enough—and late enough—that I hoped our sitting-duck-like position wouldn’t come into play.

  I stepped over the railing and grabbed hold of one of the four guide ropes mounted to the big square platform holding the plasma cutter. It was a bulky machine, mostly due to its power generator, a big metal box to which the cutter was attached by an extensible hose. The generator was fastened to the platform with bolted-in ratcheting polyweb straps, like a pair of seat belts crisscrossed over the top.

  The platform swayed as my boots came to rest on it, giving me the pleasant feeling of vertigo I’d grown so accustomed to. Fiery red driftmetal ingots gleamed around the edges of the platform, each one paired with a matching shell of hand-cut gravstone. Thorley stepped on after me, followed by Chaz, and finally, Sable. The four of us strapped our waist harnesses into the safety bolts at the corners of the platform.

  Blaylocke wasn’t feeling a hundred percent yet, so he’d be staying on board with Mr. Irkenbrand to give us cues from the deck. I was sure Irkenbrand didn’t like the look of this operation; neither did Mr. Sarmiel, who had only grunted his derision when I’d given him the basic overview. But since the ship’s remaining crew had practically begged me for the chance to stay on, no one else had raised a complaint. My parents were blissfully unaware of the whole thing, for the moment; I’d asked Eliza to distract them by making a huge mess in the galley.

  At my signal, Mr. Sarmiel gave the deckhands the order to begin lowering us. The winch squealed under our combined weight as we made our descent. When we dipped below the streamboat’s hull, the wind slapped us with a force that made our clothes ripple and our platform sway at the end of its line. The longer that line got, the more every little gust and movement sent us rocking and twirling, like a spider on the end of her silken thread.

  “Can you hear me alright?” Chaz whispered, communicating to the ship via his eavesdropper.

  “Crystal-clear,” came Blaylocke’s reply, which we could all hear through our earpieces.

  “Blaylocke likes blindly licking blocky lollipops,” I said. “How’s the signal on my end?”

  A short silence. “Fine.”

  “You’re extra grumpy today,” I said.

  “Don’t screw this up, blueblood.”

  “You do your job, and I’ll irritate you while doing mine. Don’t worry. Everything’s going to go smooth as blocky lollipops.”

  The platform scraped to rest on the bank’s concrete roof. We wasted no time getting to work. Thorley and I fired up the cutting machine while Sable paced the rooftop to measure for our cut-in point. Chaz assumed lookout duty.

  “How’s everything looking up there?” Chaz asked.

  “Clear on all sides,” said Blaylocke.

  Sable took her last step of measurement, bringing her boots together at a spot several feet from where the plasma cutter had landed. “This is it,” she said. “We go in right here.”

  Thorley and I stretched the cutting tool’s long accordion-like hose as we carried it away from the power generator. Sable sketched a square on the roof’s surface with a piece of glow-in-the-dark soapstone. We set the cutter flush with the roof. The power source was on; all we had to do was start cutting.

  I lowered my goggles into place and gave Thorley a readying nod. He fortified his stance and tightened his grip on the upper housing. I flipped the switch.

  There was a bolt of white light. Then the cutter went dead.

  “What happened?” I said. “Why didn’t it work?” I flipped the switch off, then on again.

  Nothing.

  Thorley cursed.

  Chaz said a word that was as close to cursing as I’d ever heard him get. He dropped to his knees and scrambled to find the problem. “No no no no no no no,” he kept saying.

  Under any other circumstance, I would’ve given him a hard time about this. He didn’t need me telling him wh
at a major failure this was about to be if he didn’t fix it quick.

  “Sable, take lookout,” I said.

  She stepped away and pressed a finger to her ear, whispering to the ship.

  “Everything’s still clear,” they said. “Wait… no. You’ve got someone coming up from the southeast. The street along the front of the building. Lone pedestrian, looks like.”

  Chaz was still tinkering with the machine. I wanted to scream at him to hurry up, but I bit my tongue. We all froze, waiting for whoever was walking by.

  “Okay,” Chaz said. “Try it again.”

  I considered waiting until our passerby was out of earshot, but I was too nervous. I hit the switch. A thin arc of blue energy shot from the cutter’s mouth and bit through the concrete, sending up a shower of sparks.

  Together Thorley and I moved the cutter along Sable’s soapstone line. It was heavy and unwieldy, and soon the constant glow of sparks became disorienting. Smoke poured from the incision, thick and acrid. But the worst part was the noise. It was loud. As the high-pitched keening knifed across my eardrums, I wondered how anyone in the whole town could ever sleep through it.

  We sped up, making right-angle turns at each corner. The horrible burning smell was thick in my nostrils now. My head was ringing, and my hands were numb from the machine’s vibrations. I could barely hear Blaylocke when he sent us another warning.

  “Two more people in the street,” he said. “They’re looking up at the building, wondering what’s going on.”

  “We’re almost done,” I said.

  We came around the final corner and sheared away the last stretch of concrete. Our first cut met our last, closing the square. The plug of concrete fell away into the bank’s darkened interior and shattered on the steel floor with a deafening crash. I flicked off the cutter and slid it aside, then tied myself off and plunged through the hole.

  As soon as my boots hit the floor, I turned on my eyelight and moved to let Sable and Chaz come down after me. We were standing in the deeper of the vault’s two rooms, exactly where we’d meant to come in. A closed steel gate led into the front chamber, a larger room whose walls were lined with safety deposit boxes. At the far end of that chamber, the giant round shape of the vault’s exterior door gleamed faintly in the moonlight.

  Thorley gave the three of us the thumbs-up from above and disappeared from view to assume lookout duty. Sable opened a black canvas bag on the floor while Chaz and I dispersed. I went to a stack of chip boxes in the corner and began tossing them to Sable, who started to line the open bag with them. Chaz sat at the desk and began taking bank ledgers off the bookshelves, scanning the pages for records of the Vilaris account.

  “Uh-oh,” said Blaylocke over the line. “Two more people coming out of the building.”

  “What building?” I asked.

  “The one you’re in.”

  “The bank?”

  “That’s the one you’re in, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but who—” I cut myself off. “What do they look like?”

  “From way up here? Like heads on shoulders,” Blaylocke said.

  “Thanks a lot,” I said. “What can you see, Thorley?”

  “Give me a second.” I heard Thorley’s footsteps moving toward the front balustrade.

  At the desk, Chaz leaned back in his chair and swept his long black hair out of his eyes. “Uh, Muller? You’ll want to come take a look at this.”

  “Not really, Chaz. I’m busy.”

  “I insist,” he said.

  With a sigh, I looked at Sable and hiked a thumb at the stack. She nodded and began carrying boxes back and forth. I crossed the room and leaned over the desk, where Chaz was pointing to a spot on the page with a flashlight.

  “What is it?”

  “You’ll never believe this,” Chaz said. “This is the most recent line item I’m seeing for the Clinton Vilaris account. It’s showing a total balance of seven million, four-hundred thirty-two thousand, six hundred eighty nine chips.”

  “Seven m—” I tensed up like a woman in labor. For a moment, I didn’t know whether to drool, crap my pants, or explode. I held my breath to stifle an orgasmic groan. It was a few seconds before I could speak again. “Are you sure?”

  Chaz nodded. “This is the current ledger book.”

  “We’ve got a lot of packing to do,” I said, still in disbelief. “Zero it out. Make a new entry under his account number. We’re taking it all.”

  “If you say so,” Chaz said, scribbling. “You’re not really going to take all of it, are you? Can we even lift that m—”

  The sound that interrupted him was not comforting. A zip, followed by a metallic clink. The sound repeated itself.

  “Thorley? What’s going on up there?”

  I heard footsteps on the roof again—faster this time.

  “Night guards,” Thorley said. “Coming up. Heavy augments.”

  I looked at the bag Sable was now filling by herself. We couldn’t have moved more than half a million chips yet, and that was a generous estimate. I saw Thorley run past the hole in the roof, heard the thudding steps of his pursuers. There was a bright blue flash, followed by a rush of static. My earpiece went haywire. Thorley’s grunt of sheer discomfort was the last sound that came over the line before it cut out.

  They’ve got pulsers, I realized. That was alright, though. We had something better.

  “Show yourselves,” shouted a deep male voice from above.

  I pushed a palm toward Chaz and Sable. We pressed ourselves against the vault walls and waited. I lifted my right arm toward the hole in the ceiling, taking aim. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the eavesdroppers came back online.

  That was when I heard Blaylocke curse through my earpiece. “Muller, we’ve got house guests.”

  I couldn’t speak without giving myself away to the security guards on the roof, so I put a finger on my earpiece and listened. I heard a lot of shouting and running around. I heard weapons firing, objects crashing and breaking. What kind of security team does this bank have? I wondered. Yingler wasn’t kidding when he said they were top-notch.

  “He’s secure,” said a female voice on the rooftop, presumably referring to Thorley. “What’s going on up there?”

  The deep male voice from before said, “Hell if I know,” then shouted down at us again. “Step into the center of the room with your hands up.” I heard him whisper to her. “Go around.”

  Her head came into sight through the square hole, the briefest glimpse. My medallion pulsed with insight. I bent my wrist back. Chaz’s newest invention shot from the dart launcher. Its single shaft split six ways in mid-flight. V-shaped ligatures pulled apart and locked into place between the filaments. Then each of the six strands unfolded to twice its normal length. This all happened in the blink of an eye, of course; I only knew how it worked because Chaz had demonstrated the device to me earlier.

  The projectile landed across the female guard’s face and shoulder, a web of sticky filaments that attached themselves to her skin and clothing. The best feature of Chaz’s throbweb dart was the tiny emitter at its base, which became the center of the web when opened. Upon impact, the emitter sent a pulser burst through the web’s tendrils. It could maintain the burst for close to thirty seconds before losing power, a constant and excruciating wave of pain for any techsoul to endure. It was, as I had eloquently described it, a pulser round times infinity.

  The female night guard cried out in torment and fell with a thud. The male went over and tried to help. He must’ve been an idiot, because I heard him cry out when he touched her and got a nice long pulse as well. This was our window. Too bad we’d only gathered a fraction of the money in the Vilaris account…

  Chaz tossed me a black drawstring pouch from a basket of similar ones beside the desk. “We should get out of here right now.”

  “What’s this?” I asked, shaking the pouch in my hand. Little plastic pieces tinkled around inside.

  “Notes,” he sa
id.

  “You can’t steal notes,” I told him. “That’s the whole point of notes, is that they’re unstealable. They can track them.”

  Chaz frowned at me. “Give me some credit,” he said. “If I can figure out how to read the electronic serial numbers, I can wipe them and create new ones.”

  “That’s a big ‘if’, Chaz. If you can’t, we’re about to steal millions in worthless plastic.”

  “Will you two shut up and help me with this?” said Sable, who had resumed filling the canvas bag with boxes of chips.

  Chaz scooped up an armful of note pouches and dropped them into our duffel bag. Together we sealed the bag and fastened it to the rope. Without Thorley to haul us up, I had to climb. I shimmied up, feeling the strain in my left arm but thankful it was almost back to normal.

  On the roof, the male night guard was recovering from the effects of the throbweb. The woman, on the other hand, was still feeling its effects in full force. I shot the man with another dart, then looked up.

  Above my Ostelle, I could see the pink glow of displacers and the lumbering shape of a mid-sized hoverfrigate. Ropes dangled from its sides onto the deck of my streamboat, from which the shouts and bright flashes of a developing battle radiated into the night. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve thought the hover was a bank security measure. I did know better, though. I recognized the trademark design elements of a Maclin-made ship, and knew with reasonable certainty that this was no bank vessel.

  My reasonable certainty was upgraded to absolute certainty when a black-clad Maclin operative tumbled over the Ostelle’s railing and crashed onto the male night guard. They shared the throbweb’s pulses like some disturbed version of lovers in simultaneous climax. When the female guard’s throbweb expired, I pilfered her keys and unlocked the magcuffs around Thorley’s wrists and ankles.