Driftmetal Read online

bent my will toward getting a reflex response, hoping the solenoid in my heel wouldn’t make a fool of me again. A moment of awkward silence and two heartbeats later, it shot out like a dream and launched me off the deck. I soared over the bow and into a backward dive as the guns rang out, sending laser bolts and charged particles and hot shrapnel thrumming past my ears. I got hit twice, but I wouldn’t realize it until later. In that moment, I was too busy falling.

  2

  Gilfoyle’s thugs had ripped a lot out of me, and not in a figurative sense. There were empty compartments all over my body where they’d eviscerated awesome, expensive tech I’d bought, begged, or stolen for. They’d reduced me to a shell of my former self by the time they tossed me into that hovercell. Now I was plummeting toward the Churn, its desolation spreading out below me in every direction, and I was still that same shell.

  We’d been between drift-towns when the Civs stopped us, sort of a no-man’s land where there were no platforms or large floaters. Now I found with startling certainty that there wasn’t a single sign of life around, even as far as my telescopic eye could see. The nearflow was far below me yet, heavy gusts of wind carrying a field of airborne rubble over the surface.

  You should know that driftmetal possesses a quality called cumulative anti-gravitational mass; that is to say, the bigger it is, the higher it floats. So the longer I fell without hitting anything, the lower my chances of hitting something big.

  I clamped my eyes shut while I fumbled around in the pockets of the webgear I’d grabbed from the crew’s quarters. I was playing the ‘how-well-do-you-know-your-tech’ game show where the grand prize was not dying. I recognized each mod as my fingers felt their way along: flecker shield, tripwire, proxy remote, bluewave comm, scrambler, cochlear translator, muscle booster. No, no, and no.

  Wait a minute. The first one.

  With the sound of terminal velocity screaming in my ears, I ripped open the velcro fastener. I got a white-knuckled grip on the flecker shield and drew it from its pouch, opened the panel in my forearm, and shoved the mod inside. I tucked my body into a cannonball and flipped over so I was falling feet-first. I was plummeting at a frightening rate. When I opened my eyes, the nearflow wasn’t so far away anymore.

  A big floater caught me on the elbow and I cursed to myself. I would’ve cursed out loud, if the sheer terror of falling hadn’t made my voice seize up like a clogged chimney. Soon I was pinballing off floaters the size of coffee tables and ironing boards, trying to grab hold of whatever I could, but failing. You’re going to make it, I reassured myself, failing to reassure myself.

  I waited until the floaters had decreased to the size of house cats before I bent my wrist back and activated the flecker shield. It wasn’t a shield I needed, of course. What I needed was a parachute.

  A metal rod shot two feet from my wrist and unfurled like a circular fan, a pleated metal ring designed to shrug off flecker particles. I raised it overhead like an umbrella. As I fell toward the nearflow, debris started to accumulate in the shield’s underside. I felt myself begin to slow down.

  The floaters were coming at me sideways now; the nearflow felt like being in front of a gigantic fan while someone was dumping out a bag of gravel. I managed to open one eye for a second and found myself closer to the ground than I’d imagined. The shield was helping, but it wasn’t going to be enough to make the landing comfortable or painless.

  I braced myself and hit hard, a bone-jarring impact I couldn’t roll away from. I sank down to my armpits in loose Churn, my bare feet plunging through four feet of grit and gravel.

  Yeah, it hurt like the dickens. Whatever the dickens are.

  I ejected the shield and tossed it onto the surface beside me. All the bits of driftmetal and gravstone it had gathered began to float away. I yanked the bluewave comm from my webgear and flicked on the beacon, then tossed it onto the shield. The beacon would alert the Civs and bring them right to me, but I was starting to like the idea of prison better than the idea of suffocating in a sea of powdered stone.

  The morning sun was just beginning to rise, but the air was so thick with dust and rubble down here that it was as dark as late afternoon. I felt a rumbling beneath me. Everything started to shake. My augmented eye went haywire, and my solenoid triggered.

  A dozen yards away, the ground spewed a cloud of pink dust. I sank a little further. A rush of water choked up to my right and flowed down the side of a shallow hill before soaking into the ground again. I heard the rush of air as a pocket opened up behind me. There was a smell like eggs and rotting meat. Earth fell in and filled the pocket, and I slid a few feet backward.

  I flailed my arms above me, trying to wiggle my way up a little and ease some of the pressure on my chest. This was a less active part of the Churn than the territory encompassed by Gilfoyle’s mining operation. The land was coughing up dust and brown water and foul-smelling gases instead of quicksand and firespouts and boulders, so it could’ve been worse.

  I felt another rumble, this time from somewhere in the distance. A pair of hoverbikes slipped over the hill where the dirty water had flowed up, moving fast through the dust haze. Their riders were hooded and masked, jacketed in long dark trenchers.

  The first instinct I had was to fight. Anyone who made a habit of hanging out down here was, by default, savage, uncouth, and not to be trusted. Of course, when you can’t trust your own parents, who can you trust?

  I snapped the grapplewire mod into my forearm and tried to wiggle out far enough to snap off a clean shot. I didn’t lead the hoverbike enough, and the wire flew wide of its target. The rider cranked something, and a tent of blue electrical arcs erupted around him, sucking the errant grappler toward itself like a magnet.

  I tried to retract my wire, but the energy field had a better grip than my winch had pulling power. The biker hit another switch. Blue arcs bolted down the wire and zapped me rigid. My eyelight strobed, and my solenoid triggered three or four times.

  When the shock ended, I went limp. I sank down to my neck. The gravel was pressing against my chest anew, the sour smell of electrical smoke in my nostrils and the taste of raw ozone on my tongue. My arms were poking up like broken antennae, and every movement I tried to make sent up new clouds of dust for me to breathe.

  The bikers circled around behind me, and I heard them approach. Their hoverbikes were low to the ground, displacer engines thrashing the surface like leaf blowers over uncooked rice.

  “What’s a techsoul doing down here?” one said, yelling over the noise.

  It became apparent to me then that these weren’t just people. They were human people. Bona fide hundred-percenters, the kind without a scrap of synth in their bodies. As in, one step above Neanderthals.

  I wasn’t sure whether the guy was talking to me or to his friend, but in no uncertain terms, I told them both to mind their own business.

  “That’s an awfully rude thing to say, for a tool who’s gotten himself into a bind like you have,” said the other guy.

  Humans call us ‘tools’ to make themselves feel better about being the worst.

  Since insulting them hadn’t worked, I resorted to taunting them instead. “You guys seem to think you’re pretty tough, picking on a defenseless techsoul when you know I could pound you into meat squares if this was a fair fight.”

  “Who said anything about fighting? You’re the one who tried to start a fight with that grapplewire of yours,” said the first one.

  “Don’t you try to bamboozle me with your technicalities. You should’ve seen yourselves, the way you looked from down here, zipping toward me a like a couple of fiery devils with hell’s own fury farting out your tailpipes. Either you came over here to help me, or I’m going to keep thinking you came to pick a fight. Now which is it?”

  “You have quite the knack for telling tall tales, don’t you?”

  I still couldn’t see either of them, sitting behind me on their safe hoverbikes with the nearflow howling around us and the Churn belching below,
threatening to eat me at any second.

  “I don’t have time to argue with a couple of primies about how tall my tales are,” I said.

  We call humans ‘primies’ because they’re extra the-worst.

  “He’s an uppity one,” the first biker said. “Maybe we should just leave him here.”

  “I’ll take my chances, if you’re gonna be like that,” I said.

  “Have it your way,” the other one muttered. He revved his hoverbike like he was getting ready to leave.

  “Whatever cave you antiques crawled out of, I doubt it’s any safer than this,” I said, trying to sound as condescending as possible.

  “Living down here isn’t difficult as long as you’ve got the tech.”

  I scoffed. “Tech? Please. You primies wouldn’t know tech if the Churn spit it onto your dinner plates.”

  “We’ve got plenty of tech. It’s just not glued to our bodies like yours is. We found your bluewave beacon thanks to our tech. And by the way, some good your tech’s doing you right now, blueblood.”

  “Hey. Up until yesterday I had a real slick kit. Some miner thugs pinched me and stole it all.”

  “Now why would mine workers do a thing like that?”

  “‘Cause they’re lowlifes, is why,” I said. “Now how about giving me a hand here?”

  I’ve seen the Churn knock a streamboat out of the sky and swallow it whole. Trust me when I say I