Faster Than Falling: The Skylighter Adventures

by Nathan Van Coops

  Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

  Scuff, scurry, splash.

  Scurry scurry scurry!

  Leap.

  The scarab whipped past in the darkness. A flash of shiny armored shell, then it was gone. A brave soldier making a grab for the dark end of the tail.

  “Keep the lights on them!” Atlas shouted. He hung one of the lanterns on a harpoon and propped it up to illuminate the tail.

  Kipling looked down at his hands and found them glowing. Not as bright as they usually did, but enough. He hoped it was enough.

  He brandished the warhook and waited for the scarabs to come closer.

  They didn’t. But the snakes did.

  The lighting snake flashed from the darkness, generating its own light as it moved. The perfect adaptation. Venomous to its prey, poisonous to its predators. It landed on the right lateral fin of the ship and lashed out toward the cockpit. In one instinctual movement, Kipling caught the snake mid strike with the warhook, separating its head from its body and sending both parts tumbling into the river below. The snake was still glowing as it hit the water, but flickered and dimmed as it sank.

  “Careful of the fins. We’re going to need those,” Atlas said.

  Kipling looked and saw that his swing had nicked the fabric on the trailing seam of the fin. A thin slice exposed the glossy wood beneath.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “Look out!” Atlas shouted. His pupils were wide pools in the lantern light.

  Two snakes tumbled from the rocks overhead. Kipling knocked the first overboard in mid-air, but the second landed on the windscreen, lashing out and nicking his arm before he could hurl it away. Kipling hissed in pain and studied the scratch from the creature’s fangs. It hadn’t been a proper bite, but it had punctured his skin nonetheless.

  “You okay?” Atlas said.

  “Yeah,” Kipling responded. “I think so.” He wiped his arm on his pants and tried to shake off the numbness in his skin.

  Atlas steered down the center of the cavern for what must have been another mile before they faced their next obstacle. The river forked.

  The air was thick here. Thick enough that Kipling ought to be floating out of the ship with every breath. But the pressure was too great. His head ached with it. Each breath he took left him smothered. All air and no lift. His hands had dimmed to a faint luminescence. He could brighten when he concentrated, but not nearly enough to light the way ahead. When he tried it, it only made his vision blur and set his head swimming.

  The scratch on his arm was beginning to burn.

  “I think we go right,” Atlas said. The boy was studying his map again but not seeming to find answers. “It’s wider there. At least I think it is.”

  Kipling couldn’t tell. Both passages were a blur to him. Something bumped his leg and he shouted. He scrambled to the side of the cockpit, raising his warhook. But when he looked down, it was only the cliff fox, staring up at him with its brown orb-shaped eyes.

  “Fledge,” Kipling gasped.

  “Hey, are you okay?” Atlas asked.

  He grunted in response and turned his eyes back to the blackness ahead. The monsters were all out there. Waiting. He shivered involuntarily and his skin prickled.

  The ship moved on. The rudder fin flapped and the air motors churned. How far? Miles? Somewhere in the darkness behind them, the scarabs fought their way over the rocks. Scratch, scratch, splash.

  Kipling found himself muttering the old rhyme. The one Samra would chant to scare Rufus and send him scrambling for the safety of home. It always made her laugh.

  “Beware the clatter of claws at night,

  What clicks and screeches outside the light.”

  “What did you say?” Atlas peered at him over the panel of his instruments.

  The rhyme continued to slip from his lips.

  “Pincers that clench, mouths that bite,

  Don’t stir, don’t whisper, or set them to flight.”

  Kipling found himself leaning over the edge of the cockpit. The darkness was porous down there. So many holes. So many eyes.

  Where was the river taking them? Where had the river gone? The sound of the water was far away now—lost, down some hole or pitfall. Had it been swallowed up again?

  Ahead it was just blackness. They weren’t going the right way. He should tell someone. He should tell that boy. What’s-his-name. The one he knew from outside. Kipling turned to find him. He had to tell him to turn around. His skin burned.

  “Pincers that clench, mouths that bite,” he whispered.

  The boy was there. He was speaking but his face was blurry. The lanterns were turning him orange. Their flames seemed smaller now. Dimmer. Almost extinguished, like he was.

  “Don’t stir . . .”

  The air motors were spinning faster. Louder. The boy had his hands clenched on the controls.

  “Don’t whisper,” Kipling whispered. “Don’t . . .” He couldn’t remember the end. How did the rhyme end? There was another verse yet, wasn’t there? Samra would know.

  He turned to the blurry boy in the back seat. “Don’t set them to . . .” It was too late. The tunnel behind them was full of noise. Not scratching. Not splashing. Wings beating and legs kicking. Eyes watching and claws pinching. A swarm of them. A wave. “ . . . to flight,” he said.

  The boy in the back seat wrenched the control wheel toward himself and climbed. Up through the ceiling. He steered the ship through tunnels and spiraled up through caverns. The wings of the horde beat around them. The cockpit shuddered. A big shiny face with pincers was staring at Kipling from the front windscreen. The claws were poised to strike. Kipling swung the warhook at the scarab’s eyes and cut one of them off. He screamed at it and glowed.

  The light poured out of him and flooded the cavern. Winged things took to flight again. Scarabs and snakes and a cliff fox, darting in all directions. The boy with the airship raced on. On through the caverns. Straight through the mountain. Kipling brandished his warhook again and caught another of the scarabs in midair, sending it tumbling into the darkness without its legs.

  And then there was a crash. The sickening crunch of wings against stone. The feverish whirl of the motors now spun down into oblivion. An arm was holding him up, dragging him across water, across rocks. The warhook trailed behind him on the ground, tethered to his wrist but no longer in his hands. He’d chipped out one of the shark’s teeth along the spine of the blade. Would Bronks be upset?

  He flickered. The tunnel was tiny now. Too tiny to fly through. That must be why the boy was walking. The blurry boy with the lanterns. He was down to two.

  “I saw some light up ahead,” the boy was saying. “But it’s high up. I need to climb to see where it’s coming from and I can’t carry you.”

  “Rustleberry leaves,” Kipling whispered. The blurry boy’s face leaned closer, so he spoke again. “Good for poison.”

  Then the boy was piling rocks around the entrance to the cavern. “I’ll be right back. Back before your lantern burns out.”

  It was good the boy was leaving. He wouldn’t like it here. It was dark and cold, and the air was heavy.

  “I’ll be back. I’ll find help and I’ll be back.” The boy had some rope coiled around him and was holding a harpoon. He looked a bit like a guardian. One day when Kipling was a guardian, maybe he would invite this boy to be one too.

  But then he was gone.

  Kipling blinked at the lantern. It was propped up in the hole. The hole that the boy had left in the wall for him. Big enough for a lantern. Not big enough for a monster. Well, maybe a little one.

  It went black for a while.

  He opened his eyes again when the hairy bat thing tried to shove the dead lizard into his mouth. The ponderous brown eyes were waiting, expectant. The bat fox was kind. Thoughtful fox. But Kipling didn’t like lizards.

  It went dark again. When he opened his eyes the second time, the flame on the lantern had turned blue. It was tiny now. A blue pixie dancing
in a glass jar. Samra would have liked to see it dance. He watched through watery eyes till the pixie was done. It curled up into a pinprick and vanished. Then all that was left was the darkness, and the faintest scent of smoke.

  28

  THE ROPE FALL

  “This is Ranginui,” Borgram said, grinning. “He’ll be my champion.”

  Ranginui was a huge man, broad chested and decorated all over with elaborate tattoos. The most intimidating symbols adorned both sides of his face. Ranginui stared at Samra down the length of his broad nose, then opened his mouth and let his tongue hang out. He grunted at her and she took a step backward.

  A hand braced her back.

  “Don’t go falling off just yet, young man.” The games master with the top hat eased her away from the edge of the deck. “You won’t want to go without this.” An assistant passed the games master a pair of goggles and a wooden hook and he in turn handed them to Samra. “And here is your streamer bag. Don’t lose it.” She accepted the armful of items clumsily. He smiled at her and patted her shoulder, then moved on to the next jumper.

  Ranginui scowled at her another moment, then snorted and moved away with Borgram, who seemed intent on giving him extra advice. The men glanced back at her once as they spoke, then moved out of earshot.

  Samra perched the goggles atop her head, then grasped the hook and studied the design of it. It was primarily a pole with a curved rigid hoop at one end. One side of the hoop opened with light pressure from the outside, a feature used to hook the rope, but it was kept closed by means of a spring. The handle of the hook had a stack of shock-reducing springs that divided the hook end from the handgrip. A cord ran through these springs and out the bottom. The apparatus ended in a tether loop big enough to wrap around her body.

  Samra opened the canvas bag next and peeked inside. A wad of colorful fabric was bundled into a dense ball.

  “So you don’t rip your arms from their sockets when you latch on,” a man on the platform near her said. “Throw out the ribbon as you fall. Creates drag and absorbs a lot of your momentum. You’ll regret it if you don’t.” He was watching her from a few feet away, holding his own hook. He had his hook’s tether tied to a harness that was affixed to various parts of his body and he was testing the springs. The young man was lean and sinewy with dark skin and shaggy hair. His clothes were extra baggy and he had them tied with cords around his wrists and ankles.

  “Has that happened to you?” Samra asked.

  “Me? No. But I knew a man once who got his hook caught on a rock on the way down before he’d deployed his streamer. Only had the hook tied to his wrist, so it pulled his arm clean off.”

  Samra screwed up her face in disgust, then looked away. “Well, I’ll be okay,” she said. She fingered the key under her sleeve and loosened the cords to make sure she could palm it easily. The sinewy man nodded and moved toward the ladder.

  The game master hadn’t wasted any time getting them in line. There was one team ahead of them and another already lining up behind. It seemed there was no shortage of desperate competitors today.

  The crew of the Restless Fury was a deck below her, huddled at a table near the bar. Sunburn and Landy had their heads leaned close to one another, whispering and casting occasional glances her way. Cogs was making quick progress on a flagon of beer, while the captain had opted for something smaller but presumably more potent. She fidgeted with the glass in her hand and was looking outside with a far-off stare. Samra wondered if she could see the Fury from her seat. Was she regretting this decision already?

  The signal bell for the jump team ahead of her sounded and the group leapt off the upper deck and plunged past. Samra leaned over the rail and watched them plummet through the open sky, each angling for positions near the rope before vanishing into the hole at the bottom of the sandfall. Two jumpers deployed their streamers prior to entering the hole and floated in gently, while the other two vanished beneath the surface at full speed.

  The sinewy man with the baggy clothing was next to her again, also peering downward.

  “How deep does it go?” Samra asked.

  The man scratched at the stubble on his chin. “Well, we’re nearly at the top of the mountain. The river is all the way down near the bottom of the mountain, so I guess you could say we have an entire mountain worth of fall.”

  Samra nodded. She’d plummeted off the Globe Mother for as long as she could remember, but jumping from the top of the patch to the bottom was still only a few hundred feet. This fall was many times that. Thousands upon thousands of feet. It was going to be a long drop.

  “I’ll give you some free advice,” the man said. “That rope?” He pointed to the giant spool hanging above them. “Doesn’t always reach the bottom of the pit. It stretches pretty low, especially when you’ve got a few guys hanging onto it, but it usually comes up a bit short. If you plan on grabbing on and not pancaking into the river, I’d grab hold earlier than you think you need to. Otherwise you might miss your chance altogether.”

  Samra nodded again, trying to absorb the information.

  The crowd cheered as the rope began to stretch and twitch.

  “And another bit of advice. Stay away from that one.” The man pointed to Ranginui. “Cutthroat as they come. Wherever he is on the fall down, you want to be someplace else.”

  “What’s your name?” Samra asked.

  “Robinson.” The man stuck out a hand. “Jake Robinson.”

  “I’m Samra. Er, Sam,” she replied. The games master was gesturing for them to move toward the ladder. Jake directed her ahead of him. She watched Ranginui scale the rungs, then turned back to Jake. “Have you done this a lot?”

  “Enough to know it’s a bad idea. But not enough that I don’t still need the money.”

  “What do you need it for?”

  Jake glanced down to the crowd. Samra caught sight of a young woman in the corner watching the crowd nervously. Her hand was resting on her slightly swollen belly.

  “I’m trying to make a few things right,” Jake said.

  “You have to jump to do that?”

  “There were probably better chances I missed along the way. This is just the latest in a long line of bad decisions. But if I do this, maybe I’ll have an opportunity to make some good ones.”

  The woman’s eyes had found his. She raised two fingers to her lips, then held them out toward him.

  Jake smiled and held his fingers to his lips in return.

  Samra turned her attention to the ladder.

  Carrying all the jump gear was cumbersome. Samra seemed to have one fewer hands than she needed to manage it all and had to stop at the base of the ladder to shift the streamer bag to her back. The other jumpers all wore theirs by the straps and hung them somewhere near their hips for easy access. Samra followed their example and swung the bag over her head before hoisting the hook in her free hand and climbing the ladder with the other.

  Never in her whole life had she felt so heavy. The chain around her waist had been manageable. It provided a constant but not unbearable downward pressure on her that made it unlikely she’d float away, and gave the impression of Grounder walking. Now she was positively suffering under this additional burden. The fabric of the streamer seemed to be made of a lightweight silk, but there was a lot of it, and wrapped into a ball it weighed plenty. Considering her usual buoyancy, she now felt as nimble as a stone. How would she plummet with all of this? She found herself looking forward to being out of sight below ground. She’d shed the chain, shed the bulky gear, and just do like she always did—drop as far as she wanted, and float back up.

  The crowd hollered as the winch began to turn. Somewhere in her climb up the ladder, Samra must have missed the countdown. The long length of colored rope was reeled back in. White, yellow, green, blue, orange, red, and finally, black. Samra spotted the top few spheres in the black section. No one had bothered to remove them since the rope was headed back down again and that section didn’t need to be wound int
o the winch. The winner of the jump had once again been chosen from the red section, and the closest competitors had never made it past blue.

  Samra searched for the black #8 sphere she would have to reach to win the money for the Fury. It was so far down she could barely make it out. To make matters worse, the last sections of rope had progressively smaller spheres to get a hook around and use to arrest the fall. She hadn’t counted on that. She glanced down at the lower deck and found Captain Savage looking back. Once again, her expression was unreadable.

  Samra averted her eyes first this time and concentrated on the rope. She would do it. She had to. She’d save the Fury, become a pilot, and then she could go home with proof. Proof that she was good for more than just being a lousy colonist. Proof she wasn’t just another faller. She’d be coming home victorious from a dangerous adventure. That would show them. Nobody had to save her. Not even the guardians. She’d see if Bronks would dare try to kick her off the prohibited globes then . . .

  “Places, gentlemen, and lady.”

  Samra started, and turned to look at the games master. But he wasn’t talking about her. The fourth competitor in their jump challenge had climbed to the platform. She was middle-aged and even skinnier than Jake. Her threadbare clothes and undernourished frame gave her away as yet another of Borgram’s desperate foreclosed-upon customers. Her expression was grim.

  Samra lined up at the edge of the platform next to Ranginui, but when Jake shook his head, she stepped aside and let the other woman take that spot. Ranginui tied his long black hair behind his head and flexed his thick neck. Samra noted that his streamer bag was much larger than the others, no doubt to make up for his oversized proportions.

  The crew of the jump ship completed the rope extension and the men with the winch motor shut it down. The games master reset the clock and the crowd grew silent in anticipation. Samra noticed Borgram and Admiral Orloff were both staring intently at her. Borgram was smirking.