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Driftmetal

  Segment One

  J.C. Staudt

  Driftmetal is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 J.C. Staudt

  All rights reserved.

  Edition 1.0

  To the Legendary Heroes of Cataclysmic Fire, for always adventuring.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

   

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Afterword

  1

  I opened my leg and dug around inside, trying to figure out what was wrong with the blasted thing. If I didn’t get a reflex response soon, the battered old hovercell in which I was imprisoned was going to carry me down to the Churn and get shredded like a tin can in a blender. Gilfoyle’s thugs had roughed me up pretty good, ripping out my insides like they wanted to sell me for spare parts, and what was left of me was not cooperating.

  I should start by telling you that centuries ago, this world shattered, leaving its core raw and exposed. I don’t know why it happened, or how, but chunks of land have been floating through the skies on veins of driftmetal ever since. One of those chunks, a drift-town called Bannock, was getting away from me. I could still see the big floater gliding along in the skyward realm like a storm cloud, its rocky black edges haloed in the yellowy shimmer of street lamps. I wanted to be up there again, enjoying myself at the tavern, floating away with the biggest haul of my life. That haul would’ve brought in enough chips to make my mom blush and my dad question why he’d ever doubted me.

  Mining platforms whipped by outside the hovercell window, their border beacons strobing like runway lights on an airfield. I wedged my heel in at the base of the door and poked around in my thigh with my makeshift tools—a pair of tweezers and a chicken bone I’d sharpened to a point with the edge of my boot. Not my proudest moment.

  When the hovercell hit the nearflow, the whole thing started to shake. Dust and particles and tiny floaters began to pummel the hull like popcorn kernels in a vacuum cleaner while the hovercell’s quartet of displacer engines struggled to keep her steady. The thing was shaking so bad I could hear my boot rattling on the bench across the room—so bad I snapped off the tip of the chicken bone inside my leg. I tossed the rest of the bone aside and cursed the thugs for having put me in this situation. No sense of humor, those guys. Never mind that I’d brought it upon myself.

  Yes, my life of crime had finally caught up with me, but I had to hand it to Gilfoyle’s henchpersons all the same; they were no law-lovers. Instead of calling up the Civs to come drag me off to prison, they’d taken matters into their own hands. The Churn was active tonight, and staging my death as an accident was a clever way to get rid of me. It was too bad they’d made a classic mistake; they should’ve finished the job themselves. Rookies.

  The hovercell rumbled louder. I cursed out loud and pounded my knee, using my hand like a mallet. I stuck a finger inside, cursed again when I got it pinched in the machinery. There was a pop and a spark, and my tweezers pinged away and bounced across the floor. A second later the solenoid shot from my heel and slammed the latch, chipping the door open enough for me to shoulder it the rest of the way.

  A surge of momentary pride swelled in my chest. These hovercells looked solid, but they had weaknesses, and I knew every one. Before I went out into the surface storm, I glanced back at the chicken bone, the tweezers, and my boot. I’ll get another boot, I decided.

  I slid out of my trapezoidal box and let myself dangle by the arms, feeling very much like a limp noodle hanging from the fold-out panel of a take-out carton. The hovercell was dropping fast and my stomach was doing somersaults, but I’d gotten out of these things before and I knew just where to place my hands and feet. Like a kid on the monkey bars, I swung forward and hooked my leg onto the coolant pipe running along the underside of the hovercell. When I felt the crook of my knee come to rest, I let go with my hands. I’m no gymnast, but upside down is a strange place to be with displacer engines pushing a thousand tons of gravel-choked air a second past your face.

  Yeah, I pretty much had the hovercell right where I wanted it.

  I crunched up, because back then my abs weren’t so much to scoff at, and took hold of a fuel line. I had about a minute and a half—maybe less—before the hovercell reached the Churn. I pulled myself up until my face was inches from the control panel, then triggered my eyelight and was pleased to find that it still worked like a charm. The focused beam of light followed my darting pupil as I scanned the panel for the component in question: the Lift Processor.

  Reversing the thrust wasn’t the hard part. The hard part was not getting shot into the Churn like a billiard ball when the engines multiplied power. That meant that before I altered the Lift Processor, I needed a way back inside the hovercell. I pounded the heel of my palm into the access hatch until I could see the silver metallic gleam of telerium through the skin of my hand. The hatch was dented, but I wasn’t through yet. It left me wishing I had something to blast it open with. I would’ve, if the thugs hadn’t ripped out all my sweet tech.

  It took another thirty seconds of bashing before I sent the access hatch sailing up into the hovercell and clattering to the floor within. When I squinted at the control panel, the green beam that shot out of my eye severed one connection and joined another. I felt the engine noise start to build as I clambered beneath the pipes, hoisting myself back inside. Through the open hatch I could see the Churn boiling below me, a seismic sea of liquefied stone and grit and gas and sand and metal, the leftovers of a planet that hadn’t seen a year without thousands of quakes like this since centuries before I was born.

  The hovercell’s descent slowed gradually, like a rubber band reaching its limit. It hovered in place for a lingering moment that dragged on so long I thought I’d cut the wrong connection. Then it began to slog upward. The side door was still hanging open, bumping the floor every few seconds like the wing of a wounded bird, refusing to catch on the latch I’d obliterated with my solenoid heel. I reclaimed my lost boot and made a silent exclamation. Won’t need another pair of boots after all. I picked up the tweezers and stuffed them into a pocket. Can’t hurt to keep these, I thought. Unibrow ain’t gonna pluck itself.

  We were rising faster now, me and my erstwhile deathtrap. I waited until I saw the first mining platform go by, then the second. We rose up out of the nearflow into clearer skies. When I saw the third platform, I sprang the door and jumped for it, hitting the deck and rolling through the landing. I looked up and watched the hovercell continue rising overhead. It smacked into the next mining platform, careened sideways, and crashed into a skid along the topside. Even from thirty feet below, the metal-on-metal scraping was loud enough to make me cover my ears. When the hovercell reached the far edge of the platform, it tipped off the side and dropped like a stone.

  “That’s gonna be bad,” I said, pleased with myself.

  It was bad. The engines were running full-bore all the way to the Churn. I hadn’t left the stabilizers active, because… well, I guess I hadn’t thought about it. Why did I care what happened to the ride after I got off? A hot orange flower bloomed below me. There came a dull roar that peaked above the rumble of the Churn. The night was black-and-blue again, except for the yellow pools of light from the drift-towns passing above. I found Bannock, which had floated p
ast my left shoulder and was fading into the distance. What was the name of that tavern again?

  “Mulrainy Jikes.”

  A dark-skinned visitor in a long purple duster and a wide-brimmed hat stood before me on the platform. My name is Mulroney Jakes, but this guy’s weird accent made it sound… weird. The solenoid was jammed, still sticking a foot out from my heel, so I stood there like an improperly-built scarecrow and shrugged.

  “That was a valiant effort,” said the dark-skinned man, “but I’m afraid I can’t let you get away that easily.”

  “You’d better make it harder than the last guys did,” I said.

  I’d never seen this guy before, but I knew by his smug demeanor that he was some kind of law-loving bounty hunter, one of the Civvies’ freelance agents. The thugs had gotten the best of me, but that was only because there’d been half a dozen of them. By contrast, there were as many of me as there were of this guy; pretty decent odds, in my book.

  The velcro flap over my thigh was still hanging open. I slapped it shut and rubbed the seal to make sure it was tight. The dark-skinned man must’ve been getting a good look at my inner workings before I noticed. The less he knew about those, especially in the condition I was in, the better.

  There was a line of hovertrucks parked at the far side of the platform, mining vehicles made for hauling heavy loads. Don’t be so pretentious as to think this was my idea of a luxury ride. Any vehicle that could get