by J. C. Staudt
Sable smiled. “I think he knows you noticed him on the palace lawn. So how bad is the damage? Are we stuck down here?”
“Hopefully not for long. The City Watch knows we’re coming. If we’re anywhere close to Pyras, they’ll find us pretty soon. Probably they can tow us from here. We should get Nerimund to the infirmary. Do you need help carrying him?”
“He’ll be alright. He’s already coming back.”
“If he gets any worse, call the doc. I should head up top in case anyone shows up.”
She nodded.
A pair of city watchmen on hoverbikes found us within the hour. They attached cables to the hull and dragged us through Pyras’s cloaking field sometime after nightfall. As people crowded the streets to witness the drama of a scuttled streamboat full of techsouls and trailing smoke, my Ostelle settled on the rooftop platform Chaz had commissioned.
Malwyn and DeGaffe had prepared temporary apartments for my crew, family, and friends in the building beneath that rooftop. The entrances and exits were guarded night and day, just as they’d guarded me while I was in Pyras the first time. A few of my crew raised complaints. I silenced them with a reminder of how short a distance it was to the Churn.
From the next morning until our final day in Pyras, I spent most of my time with Chaz, designing and building what we hoped was the ultimate weapon. The weapon that would bring down Maclin and give us the opening we needed to take back the Regent’s throne. Every spare crewman contributed to the Head Gadgeteer’s largest and most ambitious invention ever, either in Pyras’s gravstone mines or in the Department of Innovation.
Sable liked spending time in my Ostelle’s navigation room, even while the boat was being repaired. I think it reminded her of Mr. Scofield. One day, she called me inside to show me something. “Muller, I was checking out these navigational charts and I noticed a rarity in the forecast. Based on estimated position and wind speed, there’s a chance Maclin and Roathea could be very close to one another in a few weeks’ time. Of course, Maclin will be much lower. But if we can hurry and finish this thing, there’s a chance we’ll be able to make a coordinated strike—knock out the island of Maclin and neutralize the Galvos army on the same day.”
I sat down to double-check her calculations, then looked up at her. “I knew there was a reason I liked you. We’ll have to pick up the pace if we want to meet that deadline, but I think it’s more than achievable.”
10
The trial of Lafe Yingler, formerly known as Clinton Vilaris, took place in the Pyras city square. Councilors Malwyn and DeGaffe sat on a low stage while Yingler stood on a higher platform, flanked by city watchmen. Hecklers shouted curses at the man who’d betrayed their city; the techsoul who had attempted to expose their way of life and put them at the Regency’s mercy.
From my vantage point on the deck of my Ostelle, perched atop the techsoul tenement building at one edge of the square, I watched the proceedings with amusement and curiosity. There were no prisons in Pyras—or so the councilors had told me. The ultimate penalty for crimes against the city was banishment to the Churn.
Pyras had sunken over the past few weeks, pulled closer to the planet by virtue of the exponential acceleration in its gravstone mining. Thankfully, Chaz had devised a delivery system efficient enough to cripple the island of Maclin without requiring a critical mass of Pyras’s remaining supply. Our mission was set to begin later that day, after Yingler met whatever fate the people of Pyras determined for him.
“We all know of Lafe Yingler, the man who stands before us,” Councilor Malwyn said through the amplification system. “He has acted as trade liaison between our fair city and the stream for several years, and served as third councilor in the Pyras City Council for almost as long. This man is an agent of the Regency; a spy, sent here to unravel the carefully preserved history of our people. In light of his betrayal and misconduct, Lafe Yingler is hereby banished from our city for the rest of his days and all time beyond. His fate now rests in your hands. You may show him mercy, allowing him safe passage to the stream. Or you may show him vengeance, in which case he will be delivered to the Churn and left to accept whatever consequence befalls him there. So I ask you, citizens: what is your judgment? Mercy, or vengeance?”
The noise was deafening, yet the people’s choice was clear.
After a few moments, the crowd quieted enough to let Malwyn speak again. “Lafe Yingler, the people have spoken. They have chosen to give you… vengeance.”
The crowd rejoiced.
“The City Watch will deposit you on the Churn to face your destiny,” Malwyn said. “Take him away.”
The two city watchmen mounted hoverbikes and loaded Yingler into a hovercell attached by cables. One of the watchmen lowered his hood and tied his hair back. Gareth Blaylocke hadn’t come to see me since we’d returned to Pyras. Everything’s back to normal, just like you wanted, I thought, studying him from afar.
Sable came over to lean on the railing beside me. Nerimund got up on his tiptoes and peered around her leg at the crowds below. “So they’re really doing it, huh?” Sable said.
“That slimebag deserves what he gets,” I said.
“Does he, though?”
I looked at her. “You don’t think he’s guilty?”
“I know he’s guilty,” she said. “But wasn’t he the one who stood up for you when Captain Kupfer tried to block your plan to rescue us from the Regent’s palace? Didn’t he advocate for you to lead the mission? And wasn’t he the one who pulled you out of the Churn and saved your life the day they brought you here?”
“He also tricked me into thinking he was some commonplace primie watchman while I was leading him across the stream after Gilfoyle. He used you to try and make me turn myself in, he stole millions from Pyras, and he basically said himself that primitives don’t deserve to live. The guy’s despicable.”
“You’re not going to like hearing this,” Sable said, “but how are you any better? What makes you any less deserving of justice than Yingler?”
I felt my face grow hot. I knew she was making sense and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be reminded of what I’d done. Her words came across not as candor from a friend, but as resentment from a spurned lover. She was bitter because I’d started having second thoughts about us, and she was taking it out on me. At least that’s what the pure, unadulterated medallion-ness shooting through my chest was telling me. It was rage, clean and sudden, that made me say what I said next.
“Screw you, Sable. I’m sure you’d love to see me in that hovercell with him, wouldn’t you? When we lift off later today, I’ll drop you and Nerimund and Ezra off on the closest rock and you can find your own way back to that cave he lives in. Take Thorley and Eliza with you while you’re at it. Hell, take Thomas and Rindhi, for all I care. The sooner you all get out of my face and quit criticizing me for everything I do, the better.”
Sable said nothing, even when I hammered the railing with a fist, turned to leave, and stumbled over my own boots on my way across the deck. That made me even angrier. I descended the gangplank and stood on the roof below, watching Blaylocke and the other watchman start their hoverbikes and pull Yingler’s hovercell into the air behind them.
She’s right. That was all I could think as the two hoverbikes soared over my head and headed for the cloaking field. Sable is right. I cursed aloud, then to myself, then aloud again. Another thirty thousand chips down the drain.
When I returned to the deck and mounted one of the cheap rented hoverbikes I still hadn’t returned, Sable and Nerimund were gone. I cranked the ignition and blasted off after Yingler’s death caravan, hoping to catch them before they reached the barrier. It didn’t look likely at first, but they were moving so slow with the bulky hovercell that I gained on them quickly.
I didn’t know whether anyone in the city square was still paying attention, but I didn’t care. I came in low and fast, then leapt from bike to hovercell with cat-like grace. More rhinoceros-like, actually. I
crash-landed onto the hovercell just as the cracklefield flashed up around it. My unprotected hoverbike struck Pyras’s cloaking field, shorted out, and fell like a brick worth thirty thousand chips.
Yingler’s eyes went wide when he saw my face mashed against the hovercell window. Blaylocke and his pal, deafened by their helmets and the cracklefields surrounding them, passed through the barrier without knowing I was there.
I began to contemplate the rashness of my decision. It was a long way down. Granted, any distance is the wrong distance when it’s the Churn you’re falling into. The hovercell’s spherical cracklefield was glowing just a foot or two above my head. It was hard to remember what, exactly, I had intended to do once I got up here. Then I remembered I hadn’t thought that far ahead. As usual, my lack of a plan was going to require a lot of pretending like I had one.
The hoverbikes angled downward as they flew out over the open Churn. The hovercell was in decent condition, so I doubted they were going to waste it on Yingler. More likely they’d open the hatch and make him walk out, then take the cell back with them.
Most hovercells are built specifically for traversing the nearflow, with window glass as tough as the hull itself. I could try hitting the glass with my plasma gun, but from this close up I had as much chance of searing my face off as breaking a window. There was nowhere to rest my heel and break the door latch, so the solenoid was out too.
Then I had an idea. I clambered over the top of the hovercell and slid down the other side, landing on the exterior step where the two metal cables ran between the hovercell and the bikes. With my left arm, I readied the plasma gun. With my right, I triggered the tiny wrist-mounted buzzsaw Chaz had installed there.
I severed the right-hand cable and shot plasma at the left. Both cables broke free, one after the other. The cracklefield around the hovercell winked out. The hoverbikes stuttered at the sudden change in drag, their own cracklefields alive and well. Neither Blaylocke nor his friend noticed for a sparse few seconds, which gave me exactly that length of time to do my worst.
With the cracklefield gone, a dust-laden gale slashed at my skin. The hovercell glided to a standstill. I grabbed a hand-hold and leaned back before I blasted the latch with plasma. Face-searing averted. When the door came open, I slipped inside and held it shut behind me.
“What are you doing?” Yingler asked.
“Hold this door for me,” I said. “We’re getting out of here.”
I shot out the four corners of a floor tile, then knelt and slung it away to uncover the lift processor. Yingler was bewildered, but he did as he was told. When I glanced out the window, both bikers were circling around and coming back toward us.
Many hovercells had built-in remote guidance systems. This one did, so I ripped out its bluewave antenna to prevent that nonsense. There were manual switches on the control board for the four displacer engines, but I couldn’t touch them without getting a fun electrical shock every time.
All I had to do now was switch all four to high-power mode.
We rocketed skyward like a missile.
“Move,” I shouted.
Yingler moved. “Are you trying to save me, or what?” he asked.
“Shut up. Daddy’s working.” I cracked open the door and shot throbwebs at the hoverbikes as they followed us up toward the nearflow. The darts shorted out the cracklefields pretty quickly, but I kept missing when I tried to hit the bikes themselves. Finally, I stuck a dart to the front fender of the second watchman’s bike. His displacers flickered out for a second or two, then restarted.
“How do we stop going up?” Yingler screamed.
“Do you want to live?”
“Of course.”
“Then we don’t. They won’t follow us into the nearflow without cracklefields to protect them.”
Yingler pointed out the window. “It sure looks like they’re following us.”
The air outside thickened with particulate matter as we entered the nearflow’s lowest layer. Blaylocke was coming in hot, cranking the lever on his instrument panel to turn on the bike’s cracklefield. It wouldn’t. The throbweb had blown it for good and all, but Blaylocke was undeterred.
“What’s that idiot doing? He’s gonna get himself killed.” If my actions ended up killing Blaylocke instead of Yingler, I’d have to throw Yingler out the door to bring balance to the universe.
The hovercell ran into something big and tilted sideways. Its hull scraped up the rocky underside of a large floater, coming free just in time to get showered with skull-sized rocks. I checked all four windows for signs of Blaylocke, but we’d lost him. He was either very dead or very much underneath us and still in pursuit.
After a few more bone-shaking knocks, we came clear of the nearflow. I slowed the displacers and kept my eyes peeled for a good spot to land. A grassy floater the size of a baseball diamond came into view on our left.
“We’re landing there,” I said, pointing. “I’ll steer. You look out the window and tell me which way to go.”
“Okay. Go forward. Slow down.”
“One thing at a time.”
“Slow down first. Okay. Now, forward. Wait, no. No. Too high, too high. Hold on. It’s moving to the right.”
“Your right or mine?”
“Yours. Mine, I mean. Mine. That’s it. There you go. We’re almost over it. Okay, we’re over it now. Set us down. Easy does it.”
I cut power to the engines and we crashed down hard.
“I think I chipped a tooth,” Yingler said.
“I hope you choke on it,” I said.
“What’s this all about, Muller? Did you come out here just for the pleasure of killing me yourself?”
“I’m rescuing you, numb-nuts.”
Yingler stared. “What for, exactly?”
“Gods I hate you so much. The more you keep yapping, the less I remember why. It had something to do with… pity, or… forgiveness. I don’t know. Sable made it sound better.”
“You finally started listening to that girlfriend of yours, huh?”
“Yeah, and I don’t need a reminder. Sable has something I’ve never had. Sympathy; compassion; whatever you call it. She sees things from other people’s perspectives. This is so un-villain-like it makes me want to blow chunks. You’re the worst, Vilaris. I have a real problem with you and everything you stand for. Not to mention the idea of letting you live. So I’m letting you go, but only on one condition. You have to leave Pyras alone from now on. No investigations. No searches. No changing your name. And for the record… if you do get out of this, I hope you grow a diarrhea-causing brain tumor and live to be two hundred.”
Before he could answer, both hoverbikes roared up and parked on our floater.
“Now look what you did. You wasted our precious time and let them catch up with us.” I kicked open the damaged door and went out to greet our visitors. The nearflow was so close it was hard to hear anything. We had to shout at each other to be heard.
“Hand him over, Muller,” said Blaylocke, removing his helmet.
“Blaylocke… I’m warning you. Don’t get in my way. You know what I do to people who get in my way. You have zero chance of taking me in a fight, so stand aside.”
The other man removed his helmet. “Mull… Lafe Yingler has been sentenced to death.”
“Oh, come on, Chaz,” I said. “Why? You’re not a city watchman. Why are you getting involved in this?”
“The Councilors thought it would be fitting that Gareth and I see him to his fate,” Chaz said. “Given the torment he put us through.”
“Well look who it is,” said Yingler, emerging from the hovercell. “The four friends, back together again.”
“Except we never really were friends, were we?” I said.
“You three seem to have formed something of a camaraderie,” said Yingler.
“I used to think so. Blaylocke hasn’t spoken a word to me since he got home.”
Blaylocke set his jaw, but said nothing.
�
�Mull, we need to carry out the Council’s orders,” said Chaz. “You know I’m not one for dark, grisly stuff like this, but Lafe has caused our city and our people a lot of trouble. He hasn’t been sentenced to death. Just banishment to the Churn.”
“Is that how you rationalize it? They’re the same thing, Chaz. I can’t believe I’m the one trying to convince you of this and not the other way around.”
“You can step in and interfere with the Regency’s justice all you want,” Blaylocke shouted. “Pyras isn’t yours to screw up.”
“None of us are leaving this floater unless we all do,” I said.
Blaylocke came toward Yingler. I stood in the way, hand outstretched. Chaz drew a weapon and fired. I tried to dodge the shot, but the throbweb caught me low on the flank and lit me up. I went stiff and fell prone with waves of continuous pain coursing through me. I could only watch as Blaylocke and Yingler collided.
Blaylocke closed his fingers around Yingler’s throat. Yingler punched him in the face, then kicked out and caught him in the groin. When Blaylocke let go, Yingler stepped behind him and wrapped a muscular arm around his throat.
“Primie scum,” Yingler said, choking Blaylocke as he dragged him toward the edge. “Drop the gun, Chester, or he goes over.”
Chaz hesitated.
I convulsed.
“Drop the gun, Chester,” Lafe repeated.
Chaz dropped it.
“Good. Now, step away from the bike.”
Chaz did as instructed.
Yingler sidestepped him, still holding a suffocating Blaylocke only a few feet from the floater’s edge. “You know, you two think I gave you trouble, but you never mentioned all the trouble you gave me. The lengths I had to go to to keep you in line. Keep you from spilling the beans to Muller, here. Primitives. You’re not worth the space you take up. None of you. Never have been, never will be. Even without the Regency’s sanctions, you’ll be extinct before my grandchildren are my age.”
“I dropped the gun and gave you the bike,” Chaz said. “Now let him go.”
Yingler glanced at his hostage. “Who, him? You want me to let you go, Gareth? Is that what you want?”