by Daniel Price
Butterfield gaped at the fleeing aership. “You gotta to be . . .” He waved at his crew. “Everyone back to the shuttles! Now! Now!”
He balked at the expression of his telemetry analyst. “What? What’s the problem?”
“They’re gone, sir. Every last one of them.”
There had been thirty soldiers inside Atropos when Rebel detonated the roof charges. The ones who weren’t crushed by falling debris were quickly cut down by Jinn’s surviving turrets. Rebel would have gladly left the poor fools alone, but he couldn’t have them firing at the Absence. The ship had delicate equipment on the underside, flammable hydraulics. A few well-placed shots could bring it falling back to the ground.
“Son of a bitch!” yelled Butterfield.
He rushed into his command shuttle, the veins on his temples throbbing. As the Absence straightened out to a vertical ascent, he gave his weaponeers full clearance to blow it out of the sky. He didn’t care who was on board—hostages, children, his own damn mother. Someone on that bird just killed thirty of his men. They weren’t getting away. Not in a goddamn restaurant.
—
The Absence ascended at forty-four miles an hour, the maximum lift speed for pure aeric vehicles. The Integrity ships could rise a bit faster, thanks to their electric fan thrusters, but they were saddled with safeguards that the commercial saucers lacked.
At two thousand feet, the gunships and cannon cycles came to an automatic stop. The drivers were forced to pry open their consoles and manually disable their altitude locks before proceeding. The delay set them back a good eighty seconds, but Butterfield didn’t fret. Satellite cameras were already locked on the vessel. There was nowhere in the sky for those people to hide.
At twenty-four hundred feet, an elevator opened inside the Absence. Hannah, Amanda, and the rest of their group stepped out onto the main dining floor and took a bewildered look at their surroundings. The floors and walls were made of black marble. Gray velvet partitions bisected the area at random angles. The bolted steel tables were molded into impractical shapes—starbursts and crescents and irregular heptagons. The whole interior seemed to be designed as a protest against symmetry and good cheer. If it wasn’t for the blue sky and sunlight shining in the windows, the place would be macabre.
David scanned the past and saw a pale-faced hostess in tight black taffeta, welcoming patrons to the void. “What the hell is this place?”
Peter shook his head. “No idea. It’s not like any aerstraunt I’ve ever seen.”
Amanda girded her arms in an uneven coat of tempis. “Why would Rebel do this? What’s his strategy?”
“His strategy is to kill us,” Peter told her. “It’s not so easy to do when some of us can teleport and run a hundred miles an hour. Now we’re all boxed in with nowhere to go.”
“Why can’t you teleport?”
Peter turned to Mia. “Show them what happens.”
She cast an eight-inch portal on the nearest partition. It sank through the floor at forty-four miles an hour.
“Travel doors can only exist in a fixed location,” Peter explained. “As long as we’re moving, we’re stuck here.”
Jonathan looked out the nearest picture window. The horizon had fallen out of sight. There was nothing but sky as far as the eye could see. “So we have to find a way to stop this thing.”
“And get Zack,” Amanda added.
“Yeah. Obviously. I’m just saying we can’t do one without the—”
“Air brakes,” Mia uttered.
The others watched her blankly as she fished four notes from her bookbag.
The air brake’s down on the engine level. Find it before they disable it!
There’s an emergency brake in the flight bridge. You’ll have to hurry if you want to get there.
The next was a pencil sketch of a long metal lever with a rubber grip. The only words on the note were Air Brake.
“It’s either in the cockpit or the engine room,” Mia said. “Maybe both.”
“Or maybe neither,” Amanda warned. “She’s sent you bad notes before.”
“Not about this.”
Even as she said it, though, she wasn’t so sure. Her gaze lingered anxiously around the fourth note, which maddeningly contradicted the other three:
Forget the air brake. Go to the manager’s office and look in the closet. The solution’s right there.
Peter reread her messages, his brow creased in thought. “Your phones all working?”
The others checked their handphones for signals. Amanda eyed Peter worriedly. “We’re splitting up?”
“Afraid so.”
“Are you sure that’s smart?”
“It’s not smart at all, but we have a lot to do in a little time. You and I will look for Zack. David, you find the flight bridge. Should be one floor down on the staff level. Jonathan, go with him but keep your eye out for the manager’s office. See if you can dig up that solution Mia’s talking about.”
He looked to Hannah and Mia. “Go two floors down to the engine level. If there’s an air brake anywhere, it’ll be there. Just . . .”
Peter closed his eyes in a grimace, stammering as he fumbled for words. “Look, I’m not gonna lie about our chances here, and I won’t tell you to be gentle. If you see any of my people coming, you do what you have to. Don’t hesitate for a moment, because they won’t.”
Only Mia had the mind to process Peter’s quandary. He’d been straddling the line between two different tribes, trying to minimize losses on both sides. But they were long past the point of handshakes and “sorry”s. Here on the Absence, it was kill or be killed.
“But don’t get too eager,” Peter added. “If we want any hope of ending this war, we’ll need one of the leaders alive. That means Rebel or Ivy, preferably both.”
He cleared his throat. “The rest are expendable.”
A tense silence filled the dining room. Nobody moved until Amanda looked to Peter. “Come on. Time’s wasting.”
They wished the group luck, then proceeded deeper into the dining room. Hannah and the others continued along the curved inner wall until they found the employee lift to the lower levels.
As the electric door closed and the motor hummed with power, Jonathan stared at the floor and fidgeted with his sleeve. “Eggs.”
Mia turned around. “Huh?”
“What normal people do on Easter,” he said. “They color eggs.”
Hannah wasn’t sure if she’d laugh or cry. Her heart hadn’t stopped pounding since the Absence took off, and the world never felt bleaker. If she had known about the Sinkers, she would have understood their contempt for humanity and its insatiable need for self-affirming bullshit. Hard work pays off. Good things come to those who wait. Cheaters never prosper. All you need is love.
Except Hannah knew of seven billion people whom love hadn’t lifted a finger to help. She knew of seven hapless survivors who, like her, had to constantly fight for the right to keep breathing. It was so unfair that she wanted to scream. And yet . . .
Hannah turned her head and took a close look at Jonathan. The guy had all of her problems and then some, but he never once surrendered to despair. More than that, he’d found the time to tell a muddled ex-actress about his deep, crazy feelings for her.
As the Absence climbed and the elevator sank, Hannah suddenly felt an overwhelming love for the people in her life—the sister, the savior, and the six other tribemates she couldn’t imagine living without. She had more love on this world than she ever had on the old one. But when it came to her fondness for one particular man, she fled for the hills and burned the bridges behind her. Why was she so afraid? What the hell was she running from?
The doors slid open to the staff level. While David and Mia took a cautious peek down the hallway, Hannah gave them a sheepish look. “I’m sorry, you guys.”
&n
bsp; David looked at her confusedly. “What?”
“This will be awkward.”
Hannah cupped the sides of Jonathan’s face and kissed him hard on the lips. Their transceivers crackled with soft reverberation. The blood of their shrapnel cuts dotted each other’s clothes.
Soon she pulled her head back and drank him in with heavy eyes. “Don’t die.”
Jonathan stared at her dazedly. “Okay.”
“I mean it.”
“I wasn’t kidding. I really want to do that again.”
“Me too.” She shook her finger at David. “You play it smart now. No daredevil shit.”
“That’s not entirely up to me.” He took a sullen look at Jonathan. “Come on.”
David and Mia shared a quick, heavy glance before the elevator door closed between them. As the two remaining Silvers continued down to the engine level, Hannah pulled a billy club from her holster and clasped her free hand around Mia’s. She couldn’t tell who was trembling more.
“Why’d you do that?” Mia quietly asked her. “I mean, why now?”
Hannah gazed at the door, the tip of her club tapping frantically against her thigh. “I don’t know. Just felt like the right time.”
Mia scoffed in self-rebuke. She hadn’t even said good luck to David.
The door opened to a long, thin corridor of steam pipes and cables. Hannah sucked in a deep breath, her thoughts overflowing with worries.
“Stay with me,” she said to Mia. “Don’t leave my side.”
They stepped out of the lift together. The doors closed behind them.
The Absence was now nine thousand feet above the ruins of Atropos, and rising.
SIXTEEN
Though aerstraunts were designed to cruise at low altitude, the Douglas Corporation built their Mark VI saucers with the same atmospheric protections as the high-flying ships: triple-paned windows, electrothermal de-icers, a cabin pressurization system to prevent passenger hypoxia. The aerstraunt people would probably never need those things but, hey, anything could happen. The motto at Douglas was “Better safe than sued.”
At ten thousand feet, the Absence’s environmental control system kicked in, blowing reconditioned air into every room and corridor. Zack’s ears popped in the pressure readjustment, and he could once again hear the low, ambient noises of the dining terrace. He glanced up from his prisoner’s chair and saw clouds breaking left and right against the panoramic sun dome.
“Jesus.” Zack looked to Mink, incredulous. “At some point, you people got together and said ‘This is a good idea.’”
The lumic glared at him before continuing his work. Zack didn’t recognize the long, round device he was setting up on a tripod. He thought it was a spyglass until Mink aimed the lens at him.
“A video camera,” Zack guessed. “So that’s the plan, Harpo? You’re going to slit my throat on Pay-Per-View? How very al-Qaeda of you.”
Mink clenched his teeth, fuming. Zack had learned many of his captors’ pet peeves over the last two days, and went out of his way to exploit them. Mink was particularly annoyed by his esoteric cultural references.
A tiny green bulb lit up on the camera. “Is it on?” Zack asked. “Can my friends see me?”
“Not yet,” said a voice from the stairwell.
Mercy returned to the terrace, looking less comfortable than ever in her black fiber armor. Though Zack wouldn’t go so far as to call her a decent woman, she was one of the few Gothams here who actually treated him like a human being.
His eyes lingered on the .22 pistol in her hip holster. “So you’re the one.”
“The one who what?”
“The one who kills me in front of my people.”
Mercy leaned against a wall and gestured at her teammate. “No. That’ll be him.”
Mink smiled vengefully from behind the lumicam. “Wow,” said Zack. “I didn’t think he had it in him.”
“Me neither. Guess you called him ‘shitwad’ one too many times.”
“Guess so.”
Zack closed his eyes, fighting to maintain a semblance of dignity. This was a cruel and humiliating way to die. He didn’t want it to be Amanda’s last memory of him.
“You know this won’t do a thing to stop the end of the world,” he told Mercy. “It’s just sacrificial bullshit. Lambs on the altar. Virgins in the volcano.”
“You telling me you’re a virgin?”
“I’m telling you you’ll be sorry. When the sky comes down four years from now, you’ll hate yourself for wasting all this time. You might even feel bad about the innocent people you killed.”
Mercy crossed her arms and looked away. “Just shut up.”
Guilt was her sore spot. Zack could see it in her eyes, behind all the dark makeup. She hated everything about this mission, but not enough to tell Rebel and Ivy to go screw themselves.
Mercy took a swig from her water bottle, then paced the floor in a circle. “You think we like doing this?”
“I think some of you love it,” Zack said.
“Fuck you. I’m an artist.”
“So am I.”
“Mink’s a poet.”
“Mink’s a shitwad.”
Mink turned around, furious. Zack shrugged at him. “Sorry. I keep forgetting you’re not deaf.”
Two floors down, Ivy glowered at Zack’s live image. “Will someone shut him up already?”
“No,” Rebel said. “Let him be.”
Gemma watched Jonathan and David on a surveillance monitor as they silently parted ways. “They’re right outside our door.”
“Don’t worry,” Rebel said. The kitchen had been sealed with tempic barriers. Should those breachers find their way in, Rebel had his .44 ready to drop the dropper and light up the lumic.
His bigger concern was Peter and Amanda. One knew far too much about his team and their weak points. The other was an extremely dangerous tempic, especially when she was angry.
And Amanda was about to become very, very angry.
Zack looked into the camera. “I know you’re watching, Rebel. You’re standing in the kitchen with Ivy and Bug and that screechy little niece of yours, who I’m pretty sure was Rosemary’s Baby.”
Gemma threw her hands up. “What does that even mean?”
“I don’t have anything left to say to you people—”
“Thank God,” Ivy groaned.
“—except for Peter’s kid.”
Liam looked up at the monitor in surprise. Ivy gripped his shoulder. “Don’t listen to him.”
“He told me a lot about you,” Zack said. “That you love comic books and logic puzzles, and those old-fashioned jet planes you only see at stunt shows. He says you’re smart as hell, but I don’t see it. All I see is an angry brat who’s about to learn the hard way that he backed the wrong team. You should have seen right through Rebel and Ivy. You should have never stopped believing in your dad.”
The boy bowed his head miserably. Ivy switched on her headset. “Mink, shut him up!”
“He isn’t doing this to save the world,” Zack told Liam. “He’s doing it to save you.”
“Mink!”
Furious, Mink crossed into the solic field and wrapped his fingers around Zack’s windpipe. Mercy struggled to hold him back, for all the good it did her. She was only half his weight.
“Stop it!” she yelled. “Mink, stop!”
“That’s enough,” Rebel barked. “Everyone get back to your stations. Now.”
He turned his attention to Monitor 8 as Peter and Amanda finally crossed into view. They’d taken their own sweet time making a clockwise sweep around the dining area. Now, at long last, all the enemies were in position.
Rebel nodded at Ivy. She kneeled in front of Liam and brushed the bangs from his eyes. “Hon, I want you to wait in the pantry, all right? Jus
t for a minute.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s about to be violence, and I promised Mother Olga I wouldn’t expose you to that.”
“But what about my dad?”
“Liam . . .”
“You said you wouldn’t kill him.”
Ivy shook her head emphatically. “We don’t kill our own. We’ll bring him back with us and we’ll make him answer for his crimes. I swear it.”
Rebel looked at Liam, his voice low and severe. “Go.”
Grudgingly, the boy retreated into the pantry. Ivy closed the door behind him, then traded a dark look with Gemma. They had no intention of keeping Peter alive. He was a traitor to his clan, a traitor to the world. The bastard deserved everything that was coming to him.
Rebel studied the swifters on Monitor 10. “All right, you two. You ready?”
Bug and Jinn acknowledged him with a nod. They were crouched in the main stairwell, a quick sprint away from their targets. While Bug held a short-barreled shotgun in his hands, Jinn was armed and ready with her secondary power. Her small fists glimmered with tempis.
“Do it,” Rebel told Gemma.
She twisted a knob on a handheld device, a portable snuffer that had been pilfered from DP-8. All wireless phone signals were now thoroughly jammed. The breachers were cut off from each other.
Rebel squeezed his wife’s hand. “It’s all you, babe.”
Ivy activated the ship’s public address system, then raised the microphone to her lips. “Everyone stop.”
Her voice echoed throughout the aerstraunt, freezing all of Zack’s friends in place. One by one, they looked up at the ceiling cameras.
Ivy smiled as the last of the breachers met her gaze through the monitor. “You folks came a long way to rescue Zack. Frankly, we don’t get it. After two days with him . . .” She closed her eyes in a tortured wince. “He’s annoying. He’s very, very annoying. But you all seem to like him. Least we can do is show him to you.”