The clear steel gave way first.
Stress fractures splintered outward and shattered along weakened spider webs, slicing his skin and flight suit. The magnetese reacted to the sudden increase in atmospheric content, sucking his blood inward, against his titanium-alloy skeleton.
His hands closed over a triangular chunk of plate.
The x-class aimed her shatter-pistol past him, through the opened cockpit at Cressida.
He stabbed the sharp plate at the x-class’s throat.
She jerked back and released him, losing her angle on Cressida. The glass grazed her skin. He sliced at the shatter-pistol with enough force to sever a human wrist.
But she wasn’t human.
She whipped away the gun and angled up to shoot him in the arm.
He deflected her with the glass, ricocheting the full one-two-three-four-five-six rapid-fire blasts between their faces. The plate super-heated. He shoved the melting metal onto her barrel. It forced her finger off the trigger long enough for the plate to re-solidify, creating a seal. The pistol was effectively jammed.
She stepped back.
Normally, he would step forward and kick her. But his human ligaments wouldn’t take the force required to render damage.
He ticked through the possibilities in a microscopic instant and came up with a no-win unless she made a critical error, the odds of which he calculated as he turned and leaped over the cockpit, landing on the metal hull of the shuttle. The x-class landed behind him with a hard metallic clang.
The crate bulleted for the outer atmosphere, an elevator straight into the stars. The engines shuddered, indicating a critical failure of an ill-maintained thruster valve. In a calculable time, it would become a problem when the engines seized like his knees.
The shuttle didn’t offer him many options, and he ran through them as he bolted across the corrugated metal surface. Nothing to grab on to, nothing to rip off, nothing to fling. If he leapt onto one of the receding skyscrapers, even if he convinced the other x-class to follow, it would be impossible to return to the shuttle. Cressida would fly out of control into atmosphere heavily controlled by defensive lasers; miraculously surviving that, she would be ejected into space.
If the engines did fail, as the shuddering suggested they soon would, she had no way of surviving the crash. So his leaving wasn’t an option.
Maybe he could find something hanging off the sides—
The other x-class slammed her foot into his spine.
Bone would shatter. His titanium alloy didn’t even dent, but the human ligaments gave him no warning as they simply failed and slammed him into a kneeling position on the crate. The impact reverberated up his body and snapped his teeth together.
External noise hid her movements behind him. He started to roll to his left. Her kick caught him in the jaw. Sheer physics arrested his roll while his rotators fought to dampen the kick torque. He flashed out his fist at her midsection.
She caught the punch in her hands.
And wrenched him upright.
He leaped with the motion, striving to roll out of the lock without disengaging his joints—they were bitches to realign properly—and she let him, easily catching his second fist so that she held both hands. Her foot swung up faster than sight, and force exploded against his chest. Her grip released at the same moment. He flew across the crate and skidded on his back to the very edge.
New strategy.
“What the hell?” he shouted, striving for indignant. “Are you trying to kill me?”
She stalked forward. “As a start.”
Clearly, she was not a type four.
He recalculated the odds of his various options—no win—and scrambled to his feet, away from the edge, crouched. She marched down on him.
Get away, get away, get away.
He bolted to the left.
She dropped to one knee, hooked his ankle mid-sprint, and threw him down. He rolled to break her hold. She stepped into his roll. His other leg moved to his chest to kick down and smash her. She levered her body against his force and heaved.
He flew.
She swung him in a wide circle, arms flapping off the edge of the container and back onto it again, expertly kept aloft. It seemed to be a holding pattern while she evaluated her options. Time he did not want to give her. He jackknifed for her wrist.
She swung him up to the sky and slammed him into the shipping container.
The metal reverberated with another hard clang.
The force momentarily activated his emergency force-trauma response. He overrode the system suggestions clouding his vision and scrambled to his feet.
The other x-class shoved him down twice more, and finally kicked him onto his back. She immobilized his arms, accurately interpreting that his legs were no threat, and gripped his jaw. Her fingers dug in. “Open.”
He resisted.
The pressure increased. Her dark eyes glinted with the internal lights, constantly analyzing. His resistance interested her. His jaw started to bend in the wrong direction. He was going to have an ugly smile and one hell of a problem with TMJ.
Then, as though recalled to her assignment, her interest light extinguished. His jaw stopped bending. She leaned close, opened her mouth, and a series of tones emerged from her lips.
His body danced like he was being electrocuted. The tones finished and his body sagged, forcefully relaxed from forehead to sphincter. She opened his mouth with her index finger, tilted her head, and kissed him.
Her tongue adhered to the back of his mouth. His brain summoned the gag reflex. Connection. He felt the electronic pulse of a file transfer. File transfer complete.
The other x-class withdrew and leaned back, studying their surroundings, considering her next moves. She didn’t bother to look at him anymore, assuming whatever was supposed to be done with him had been accomplished. Now, on to Cressida.
But rather than executing the files in his brain, the packets shunted straight to the trash.
He blinked. Ah, a return to his own power. He remained still, using all of the extra time to clear his force-trauma warnings and evaluate his situation. He could not beat this x-class. He had bested her only when she was dividing her attention between both himself and Cressida, but he could not beat her when she was focused. She had different training and default operations.
She stood and looked down on him. The sunset reflected against her, blinding. “Is your transmitter malfunctioning?”
He risked an answer. “I don’t know.”
“Are you not receiving?”
“No.”
She studied him for a long, charged moment. Her fingers flexed for the jammed gun, discarded after their earlier fight.
The engines coughed again, shuddering through the shipping container.
She turned and walked toward the cockpit. “Come.”
He stood and walked after her.
Strategies raced through his brain, odds calculated and discarded. He “stumbled” and noted her reaction; a subtle tilt to her body that indicated absolute readiness to handle any threat.
Shit.
His strategies took on a more desperate character with higher and higher failure odds. The other x-class reached the edge of the container.
The engines coughed and died.
The immediate consequence was the abrupt decrease of upward velocity. The shipping container dropped away from them, slowing faster than their small bodies. The other x-class was just hopping down onto the nose. She shifted in the air mid-hop, weightless and off-balance.
He ran forward, the balls of his feet and then just his toes gripping the retreating surface, and punched her spine.
She flew outward, twisting around to grab him.
He scrambled for the shuttle, jerking in his legs to keep himself out of her grappling distance.
Crosswind buffeted her farther away.
Her expression flattened. She closed her arms to reduce wind drag and dropped below the shuttle.
&n
bsp; He swam for the edge, pinched the inch-wide metal with reinforced fingertips, and heaved himself up onto the container.
Could the other x-class have been swept away completely? Either way, they were falling toward the ground out of control, with a slight tilt and anticlockwise spin. He pushed himself to his feet, crouched against wind shear, and ran for the cockpit.
Cressida’s white face greeted him with relief mixed with horror. “I’m sorry.”
He pulled himself in and landed beside her, one foot on either side of the escape pod exit holes now blasting air upward at buffering speed, hemming her safely away from the open flooring. Her restraint tape had fallen through the holes and stiffened.
He caressed her unhurt cheek. He needed a physical reassurance that no stray bullet had hit her, that she was still alive.
Her eyes un-wrinkled as she leaned into his touch. Knowing that she turned to him for comfort eased a hard spot of tension he’d felt ever since their argument by the lagoon. He felt able to review their situation more clearly.
They were falling to their deaths.
He turned to the shuttle control panel and flipped through the restart sequence. No good; the chip was fried. He excavated their emergency options.
“I couldn’t touch anything,” she said, distress commensurate with the growing size of the skyscrapers outside the tilting plate glass. “I didn’t mean to break it.”
“It wasn’t you,” he promised, reviewing the specs for this class of shuttle. Lifeboats? Life rafts? Individual pods? All had been combined in the pilot and copilot escape pods. So, he either had to regain positive altitude, or they had to get off this thing, and fast.
“It wasn’t?” Cressida’s eyes closed. She leaned into him as the shuttle slowly rotated in the air. “Thank goodness.”
He half carried her to the rear cargo bay. The backside began to swing open with a shriek. Air roared into the shuttle, causing the whole crate to shudder and forcing him to shift his weight and hold Cressida’s. If he could get enough air moving, perhaps the shuttle could glide—
The hair on the back of his neck stood up.
Without doubting for an instant, he grabbed Cressida around the waist and leaped for the satellite.
From the gaping pilot’s hole, a hand gripped the magnetic tape. The other x-class’s head cleared the floor.
Cressida shrieked.
If he had learned one thing today, wherever they found the other x-class was a place they needed to not be. He threw off the magnetic tape securing the satellite and keyed in its launch sequence. It started the count for bringing its systems online. So long? He calculated the minute or so he had until the shuttle cratered the cityscape versus the seconds until the other x-class caught them, hefted Cressida over his shoulder, and carried the satellite to the roaring door.
Her breath stopped in her throat.
“Hold on,” he said as they cleared the spinning cargo bay and flung out into the atmosphere.
She clung.
Behind him, the other x-class stood at the edge of the cargo bay. She had missed them by micrometers.
They flew through the crushing air, Cressida’s legs wrapped around his torso and her arms crushing his windpipe. He angled the satellite, trying to use its wind shear for their benefit. One system and then another came online while the ground and the skyscrapers loomed. They passed the top floors, rocketing downward. Cressida’s breath took on a ragged edge.
“Close your eyes,” he said.
“They are closed!” she shouted back.
Floors zoomed past. People walked to their jobs, conducted their business, chatted with their friends, ate lunch. Shoppers strolled across landscaped skywalks. Children scampered up recreational sky-structures wearing gecko-climbers and inflatable safety bands. Some of them craned their necks to watch the screaming fall.
He rotated the satellite so it was under them. The times finished counting, and a systems integration check initiated.
Their angle of descent was bad. A skyscraper loomed nearer and nearer.
He turned the satellite so that it would hit first, then him, and his body would shelter Cressida’s from a catastrophic arrest. It wouldn’t sever her head from her body or any other limbs from her torso, not if he was enclosing her like a giant metal cage. Just every organ in her body cavity would strain to the ripping point.
Just that.
They skimmed the edge of the skyscraper so close that the pressure rippled the window plate.
Then they eased past the corner.
He breathed out.
Shit—another smaller scraper, hidden from the first. They barreled right for it.
The systems check finished, and the satellite came online. Yes! Fuck yes! Warning lights flashed. It sensed its position and trajectory. Emergency systems kicked in, including the buffers that slowed its fall, preventing any real damage from an impact. The buffers kicked in just as he remembered a pertinent fact: He had found this satellite on the beach in a crater, suggesting a problem in the buffering system.
Shit.
Three buffers kicked on while the fourth emitted a high-pitched whine.
Nothing goddamned worked on this planet; everything was half a fucking maintenance session away from falling completely apart. Stupid, idiotic, non-robotic, human-run, pieces of—
They slammed into the skyscraper, denting the satellite and the girder, bounced off the floor of an office, and ricocheted through screams.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cressida held on to Xan while the world descended into chaos.
She couldn’t tell what was up or down. Everything was just noise and color. There wasn’t even time to be frightened or sick, two feelings that had overwhelmed her from the moment they had landed in the pit of sentries twenty minutes before. They were sliding across a building floor. There was shrieking—of people, of metal—and a sense of being tumbled. Xan’s voice, swearing. They broke into some sort of shaft, and she fell downward again. Then, everything went still, as if she had been smothered over with cloth.
She just wanted to rest and breathe.
Xan pulled her upright and half-dragged her past the growing crowds. His palm clamped like a familiar comfort over the crown of her head. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”
She heard him, but she couldn’t respond. Everything was still jumbled. Her legs moved in fast walking strides, but her ankles kept turning into him, unable to support her weight. They crossed a skybridge—planetshine—and descended into throngs of citizens. Cafeterias buzzed with mandatory socialization hour, a hold-over from the colony ships. They descended lower. She peered at unrecognizable signs. Her ears hurt, but the noise was still very far away.
He grabbed the horned metal helmet off a Valkyrie statue, jammed it on her head, looked surprised and pleased, and pulled her into an arcade.
Miner patches, shuttle insignias, and engineer wings adorned the breasts of patrons in the sprawling place. Her disorientation and their destroyed uniforms didn’t seem particularly out of place. The floor, ceiling, and walls pulsed with lights, and her skin glowed red, green, and yellow.
He half carried her to a bank of temporary plastic tables around a single-use reprocessor that looked a lot more permanent and used. He released her gently into a creaking chair. “Do you have any money?”
She blinked up at him.
His expression changed. He stroked her cheek with the back of his finger, and then looked up, around. Analyzing their safety. “Stay right here. Okay?”
She didn’t have the energy to nod.
He left.
The heavy helmet made the cords of her neck ache. And the place smelled dingy and oxygenized, a slow leak in a cleaning cable. It tickled the back of her throat.
She rested her head on the table.
A servo wheel appeared in front of her. She hadn’t really heard it, and she couldn’t remember what she’d said, but a small cup appeared in her hand. Her throat was dry. She sipped the liquid. Cool, sweet, and pleasa
ntly numbing. By the time she finished it, the gears of her brain were turning again.
They had fallen from the sky, she and Xan, and somehow he had sheltered her when they’d impacted a building. She had screamed uselessly, and he had actually done something to save her life.
Just like all of the other times she had relied on someone else to save her.
Would she ever grow up and save herself?
Xan returned to check on her. As always, he seemed surprisingly unfazed by the battle. Even his flight suit was no more scorched, and the chest filling it stretched wide and whole. Relief filled her like a drug, lifting her to her wobbly feet.
He glanced at her drink. “Feeling better?”
“Yes, thank you.” She stepped to him, needing to be closer. The servo, which had been waiting patiently beside her, turned to follow. “Oh. I didn’t pay.”
He produced a handful of small gold balls.
The servo displayed a total, which Xan dripped into the pay chamber, and then turned to her as if waiting for another order.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I think it wants the cup,” Xan said.
Oh, wow. She handed it the small bit of plastic. It buzzed, expectant.
“I’m not supposed to give it back the liquid,” she said uncertainly.
“She’s done,” he told the bot.
It wheeled in front of the two of them, blocking their path. She stepped closer to Xan. He put a protective arm around her, drawing her into his side. The helmet shifted on her head. “I’m fine. Thank you.”
He shooed it, and the servo finally rolled away.
“Persistent,” she noted.
“They’re worse if you don’t order.” He stepped onto the wildly carpeted floor. Lights zinged through the fabric and shot up the walls, exploding on the ceiling and sprinkling down on the bouncing, blaring, jangling machines. Advertisements about exchanging credits for balls flashed on every surface. She felt dizzy again and rested against Xan.
He stopped in front of a machine that balanced blocks on a holographic platform. A couple inserted balls and grasped the crane controls. The platform jerked back and forth as though psychically avoiding their dropped boxes. They lost immediately, laughed about their lack of skill, and moved on. He watched six more people lose and tugged her forward.
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