Cole cursed and grabbed the control stick. He gave the accelerator a shove and looked to the side. The man with the buckblade grinned through the rain as he slumped back in his seat, the canopy closing around him.
Without thinking it through too clearly, Cole thumbed his own canopy open. He ground his teeth together, consumed with the primal rage any pilot feels after their craft has been dealt a blow. The glass came back, and the horizontal rain pelted him as it invaded the interior of his craft. Cole didn’t care. Pulling his feet up under himself, he steered with the control stick and raced over toward the other skimmer as it tried to peel away.
Cole grimaced through the stinging rain. He watched the bemused smugness fade from the passenger’s face as he approached at ramming speed. The look was transformed into one of shock as the two skimmers collided, sending Cole through the air and onto the deck just forward of their canopy.
Were it not for the nonskid on the deck, Cole probably would’ve bounced and slid right across the craft and off the other side. Instead, he managed to spread himself out and hold on. He waited for the skimmer to begin swerving in an attempt to buck him off, but it never happened. Instead, the canopy started peeling back once more, and the passenger leaned forward, that dangerous cylinder reappearing in his hands.
Cole scrambled toward the front of the skimmer, away from the cockpit. The two saboteurs yelled back and forth inside the craft. The driver jabbed a finger toward Cole, then pointed to himself. The passenger waved him off and crawled out of the cockpit and onto the flat deck. They seemed to be arguing over who got the privilege of killing him.
The wounded skimmer got back up to speed just as Cole began to run out of room at the pointed end of the triangular craft. As they accelerated, solid walls of spray rose up to either side of him from the forward foil. Cole scooted back until he could glance down at the watery land racing by under the nose of the ship. He returned his focus to the man with the buckblade, who was inching ever closer, one hand on the deck to steady himself, the other one probing the air ahead with the invisible sword.
Cole crept back even further to stay away from the deadly blade. As he ran out of decking, he reached out and grasped one of the stabilizing arms bracing the hydrofoil, his grip on the tubular metal slick with spitting water.
His quarry moved closer, waving his monofilament weapon back and forth as if trying to gauge the distance, hoping to kill or chase off Cole without putting himself at risk. Cole thought about jumping, about throwing himself through the wall of water to the side and bracing for a rough landing. Someone from HQ would find him as surely as they had through several feet of snow. But then, the skimmer would make it to the Luddite camp with detailed knowledge of the upcoming raid. His raid. And Cole couldn’t allow that.
The sword swished through the air closer and closer with each swipe, near enough now to hear it over the pounding rain. It made a wisping noise, almost as if slicing the airborne drops of water in two. Cole looked past the waving arm and saw the mad, determined sneer below the man’s goggles. He gripped the hydrofoil even tighter and leaned back, out over the nose of the ship, his head just inches from the wall of shooting spray. And suddenly—he felt the metal in his hand giving way like a squeezed sponge.
His hand!
Glancing back at his furious grip on the foil’s support strut, Cole saw he’d dented and warped the metal where he’d been grasping it. His hand looked so real, it was easy to forget what it could do. The magnetic blade once again swiped through the air close enough to hear. Death’s nearness steeled Cole’s resolve. He tightened his grip on the strut and released his arm’s full fury.
There was a groan, and then a harsh, ringing crack as solid steel bent and parted. The starboard strut snapped off, and the forward foil lurched sideways, folding back on the remaining strut and digging into the watery surface. As soon as it did, the flat, smooth ride turned into an airborne disaster. The nose of the skimmer dove into the water, caught on something below the surface, and the entire craft kicked up, bucking like an injured beast. In a mere instant, Cole and his attacker were launched into the air, tumbling high over the glimmering, wet land. The skimmer summersaulted below them, the pilot trapped as it smacked and crumbled and skipped across the endless brown lake below.
Cole had but a few glimpses of the destruction, and just a single, stretched-out moment of soaring through the sky. He flew the same direction as the sideways rain, so all of it hung in space around him, seemingly motionless. The bizarre illusion of suspended droplets ex-tended that solitary second into an eternity of gliding and falling. But the never-ending plummet was an illusion, one that was about to be shattered by the placid wall of solid water rushing up to greet him.
Just before he hit, Cole thought to secure his goggles. He clamped his real hand over his eyes and threw up his new one to absorb the impact. He hit at such a high speed, it felt more like solid land than forgiving fluid. Cole bounced across the surface, his other arm and both legs flying out in a tangle of cartwheeling, plowing limbs. The rolling and spinning seemed to go on even longer than the flight through the air, and as Cole’s head was repeatedly dunked, he worried as much about running out of breath as sustaining any injury.
Finally, though, he slowed to a halt—his body sore but intact. His legs sank below the surface. He started treading water with his arms, when his boots and knees felt solid ground beneath him. Solid, but trembling, almost as if moving. Cole swam with his hands to regain his balance and stood up, finding the water to be a little more than a meter deep. He peered around for the wreckage of the skimmer and the man with the sword.
Both were less than a dozen meters away, and both were in pieces. Cole waded toward the ruined hyperskimmer as several chunks of human remains floated his direction amid a slick of red. A severed leg drifted past, powered along by an arterial jet. Cole thought about what must’ve happened: the active buckblade tangling up in the man’s body as he careened across the water’s surface. An arm approached, detached at the collarbone. The hand remained clenched in a fist, the water sizzling around an invisible thread of humming power. Cole stepped to the side, careful of the sharp nothingness, and grabbed the arm by the wrist, as wary as if seizing a cobra. He twisted the fist to the side, keeping the buckblade pointed away from himself, and slowly worked the stiff fingers off the handle. It wasn’t until he powered the blade down that he felt able to breathe easily around the device. Penny and Arthur had warned him how dangerous they were, but being in the presence of one felt like standing on a ticking bomb. Cole held the cylinder away from himself and dropped the arm in disgust. He turned to survey the twisted wreckage of the hyperskimmer.
It was hard to believe how lucky he’d been. One twist of the skimmer’s hydrofoil, and he’d chunked the swordsman and crushed the driver. All for a tweaked knee and a sore back. He made his way toward the heap of metal, figuring it was the only dry place to await rescue while he slightly embellished his story.
Then—his story started embellishing itself. Out of the canopy burst a fist, the metal around it peeling back as if from an unnatural blow. Cole stopped in his tracks. Beneath his boots, he could feel the surface of hyperspace trembling with movement, rippling now and then as something slid below the surface like a thing alive.
The hand ripped a large section of plasteel off as if it were made of paper, and out of the gnarled mass of machinery, the thin driver emerged, his face contorted into a mask of fury. Cole took a step back and fumbled with the buckblade, trying to remember which way was up with the thing. He held it away from his body with his new hand—just in case—and powered it on. When he looked up, he saw the man peeling more metal out of his way, his thighs kicking through the twisted decking as if it were no more viscous than water.
Cole looked at his hand, then back to the unnatural figure thrashing his way toward him.
He realized at once that he had his foe outmanned.
And that it wasn’t necessarily a good thing.
Part XVI - Decisions
“Temptation, a magnet, nears the moral compass.”
~The Bern Seer~
44
For the second time in two days, Parsona made an early morning approach to Bekkie, flying low and under the barest cover of dawn. As the morning sun peeked over the horizon, it cast long shadows over the dry land, dramatically illuminating the sad and severe differences between that previous flight and the current one. Gone were the long, horizontal dust plumes of busy traffic, like ephemeral, fuzzy snakes slithering up into the sky. They had been replaced with vertical clouds of a darker hue—rising columns of smoke that marked the death and destruction that had rained down from the sky the day before.
The distant plumes weren’t the only residue from the one-sided battle: the tragic remains of the Navy fleet could be seen long before they reached town. Molly banked around the odd wreckages dotting the landscape, the twisted remnants of military hardware still smoldering from its impact. Around each wreck, the dry Lokian grass formed black circles of expanding char ringed with thin, orange halos of fire. Each growing circle of blackened grass reminded Molly of Glemot, of the way that singular bomb had circumnavigated the planet, swallowing it up and adding it to the void of space.
Beyond the dotted plains, Bekkie bore its own unique signs of rained-down hellfire. Red lights pulsed throughout the sleepless city, illuminating the dusk-shadowed faces of buildings with the color of emergency and worry. Some of the structures formed unnatural, jagged shapes, like teeth and broken bone shoved up from the ground, all visible scars of a town penalized for its importance. No other part of Lok had been hit so hard; the shattered hulls were densest around the town. It had been logical for the fleet to arrive above the planet’s capital. What was unusual was the manner in which they were brought straight down out of orbit, ignoring the normal parabola of reentry. It was as if the town’s importance, its gravity, had been temporarily suspended.
Molly kept Parsona low, just above the waving grasses. As she flew past the corpse of another ship hundreds of times more powerful than her own, the terror of sudden reprisal from the fleet above crept up in her throat and remained lodged there.
“I’m starting to feel like this was a bad idea,” she said aloud.
With only her mom and the Wadi in the cockpit with her, it fell on the former to answer, though the Wadi seemed to respond by curling up tighter against her neck.
“I don’t think good ideas any longer have place in this universe,” Parsona said. “I’m beginning to think you were right about hyperspace.”
Molly checked the cargo cam to make sure Walter didn’t sneak in on them talking. “In what way?” she asked.
“That we’d be just as well off to jump there with no way of coming back.”
Molly laughed, more out of nervousness and empathy than mirth. “I’m glad I never rigged you up to control the hyperdrive, then.”
“Me too.”
Another wrecked ship smoked off to port, visible mostly by the eerie glow of things burning within. Ahead, on the outskirts of town, Molly saw flashlights darting about with anxious twitches, like morning bugs caught in a jar. Whatever it was they were looking for, they were desperate to find it.
“If Scottie comes through with the fusion fuel, it’s gonna be hard to wait until we get back to the clearing to jump away,” Molly said.
“I’ve already thought the same thing. But the survivors from that carrier need the supplies. It’s the least we can do for them. Right, Cat?”
Molly turned and saw the Callite had joined them in the cockpit. The Wadi flicked its tongue in her direction, winning a pat on her head for the effort. Molly smiled up at her and got a hair-tousling in return.
“Bekkie looks worse for the wear,” Cat said, peering out at the approaching town. “And you’re being light on the throttle, aren’t ya?”
“I was just telling mom that I feel like coming here might be a mistake. Maybe I’m just putting it off.”
Cat crawled into the nav seat. “Can’t cower in a wooded clearing the rest of your days. ’Sides, all you gotta do is run by the Navy offices and let them know where their people are, maybe secure a place for them to stay. Walter and I will handle rounding up supplies for your friends in black.”
“And Scottie will round up the fuel?” Molly asked.
“He says he will, and I believe in him. So stop fretting. We’ll be in and out in no ti—”
“Don’t say it,” Molly said, waving her off. “I hate hearing how easy stuff is gonna be. It never is.” She pulled up, gaining a little altitude as they reached the outskirts of the city. She soon spotted her old slip in Pete’s now half-empty stables. The sight of her open space made her rub the tender pads of her fingers together as she remembered she had not yet paid.
“Can’t we go ssomewhere closser?” a voice hissed by her side.
Molly turned and saw Walter standing behind the flight seats. The Wadi’s tongue vibrated in his direction like a bit of red yarn in a stiff breeze.
“Turbulent waters aren’t for testing,” Cat said.
“What’ss that mean?” Walter asked.
“It means you don’t try something new in the middle of a storm,” Molly explained. “It’s an old Navy saying.”
“Goes back to when they used to sail ships on the ocean,” Cat said.
Molly and Cat exchanged a look. Once again, she realized how little she knew about the Callite. Walter turned from one to the other, his face scrunched up in a confused sneer.
“Listen, this is just one of those times when you have to trust m—”
The radio crackled, cutting her off: “Parsona, Pete’s Hideaway, come in.”
