Current drift, p.13
Current Drift, page 13
Hilda might be the ace, but surely Damian could handle the misbehaving Current for a minute or two.
“Not to rain on either of your plans,” Ivy said, “but Damian’s gone.”
Sloane wrenched her gaze away from Gareth. Behind him, the lab table was empty.
Gareth was already moving toward the door, and Sloane followed, heart in her throat. This wasn’t supposed to be a conversation about sending the even sicker guy to work the Current. It was supposed to be about finding another solution altogether.
If she wasn’t so damned exhausted, she’d have noticed. Surely, she’d have noticed.
They made it to the cargo hold in time to catch Damian sauntering into the airlock, an atmo suit slung over his shoulder. Like he was walking into a club, rather than heading out to face certain doom. The bots watched, unfazed. Unless they were asleep, which seemed equally possible.
Sloane called Damian’s name, but the airlock doors huffed shut, locking him into the airlock. He calmly zipped himself into the suit, his back to them, as Sloane pounded on the door.
Gareth was slower to descend, and she could hear him approaching from behind. She was blocking his path to the airlock, still pounding, but she also wanted to wrench Damian out of it.
“You don’t have to do this,” Sloane said.
Damian turned and looked over her shoulder, presumably at Gareth. “I never was much for family, Commander. But I do appreciate the offer.” He caught Sloane’s eye, then winked. “Name your first kid after me, will you?”
The door cycled shut, locking them out, and Damian turned to face the black. The outer door blinked green, and he gave one last wave. And then, with his arms spread wide, he leapt out into the Current.
CHAPTER 22
Gareth’s breath caught as Damian flung himself into the Current. No tether, no lifeline, and just the thin layer of his atmo suit to protect him from the raging storm. One moment he was there, silhouetted in the airlock door, and then he was gone, the blue-green waves swallowing him like a fleck of sand in the ocean.
“What was he thinking?” Gareth breathed.
Sloane narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re not one to talk, since you were contemplating the same exact move.”
Well. He’d have used a tether, at least.
“Can the bots go after him?” Gareth asked. It felt like someone had shoved a wad of cotton into his mouth, and the words sounded far away. If he listened closely—it hurt to listen closely—he thought he could hear the disruption in the song, the addition of Damian’s thread to the cacophony.
“We are not Current worthy,” the closest bot replied. It was rocking back and forth on its treads, as if Damian’s leap troubled it as much as it did Gareth. “Humans are not Current worthy, either.”
“We dove into the Current before, and we were fine,” Sloane said.
But it wasn’t about whether the Current would rip Damian apart; it was about whether the Current would poison him while he was trying to save their lives. And the lives of everyone on Darrow.
Sloane was already moving, grabbing for her atmo suit and gesturing for Gareth to take one, too. He grabbed his light armor. “Hilda,” she said as she pulled her legs into the suit, “land the ship back on Darrow please.”
There was a pause. “I’m sorry, did you say land the ship on the moon?” Hilda demanded. “As in, the one we just escaped from? While we’re in the Current?”
“That’s what I said,” Sloane confirmed.
“It’s difficult enough just to stay with it!”
Sloane shoved her arms into the sleeves of the suit. “Are you an ace pilot or not?”
Even an ace pilot would have trouble with this assignment, Gareth knew. His own piloting wasn’t nearly as good as Hilda’s, by a long shot, but he knew enough to be fully aware of how near-impossible the request was.
But this was Hilda. This was Moneymaker, and this was Sloane. This crew thrived on the impossible.
Through the comms, Hilda sighed. “Not a good day to push me, Sloane.”
Sloane rolled her eyes. “When is it ever? Land the ship, Hilda. We’re not letting Damian’s sacrifice go to waste.”
Maybe it wouldn’t have to be a sacrifice. Maybe it would turn out that Damian’s Current-connected cells would let him ride through it unhindered. Maybe he would emerge victorious, healed even, with exaggerated tales of his own greatness that would no doubt show up in one of those comics of his.
Or maybe Gareth was fooling himself. He glanced out of the airlock again, searching for his friend, but there was no sign of him. The window was small, though, the view a minuscule sliver of watery light. Damian could be right there, and Gareth would never know.
His head was still throbbing, the music more jarring than ever. He suspected that if they didn’t get out of the Current soon, it wouldn’t matter that he’d stayed on the ship; he’d be losing consciousness again, anyway. And maybe worse.
He wasn’t about to tell Sloane that, though.
“I’m sorry,” Hilda said, “Did you say Damian’s sacrifice?”
Sloane popped her helmet on over her head, closing the visor with a snap. “Land the ship, Hilda. We’ll explain later.”
“Fine. But it’s not going to be gentle.”
The ship lurched, as if to prove that Hilda meant what she said, and Gareth stumbled, barely managing to catch himself against the wall. The bots tumbled across the tilting cargo hold, some flailing for purchase on rails, walls, and each other, while the rest merely allowed themselves to slide.
Moneymaker slammed into the hard surface of the moon with a grinding moan, the walls shuddering violently, several of the bots shrieking in alarm. Through the comms, Brighton yelled something that Gareth couldn’t make out—though he assumed it was along the lines of ‘stop breaking the ship.’
Sloane was already opening the cargo bay doors. “Problem,” she said as the ramp clanked to the ground. “We don’t have a big enough ship to run an evacuation.”
She was right. With the cargo hold full of non-Current-worthy bots, they had precious little space for taking in evacuees. Gareth glanced around the port, hoping to catch sight of a shuttle. There must be one docked around here somewhere; there would be regular jaunts to and from Elter’s surface, and probably the other moons as well.
But there were no other ships in the port. If Darrow had shuttles, they were in another port. Gareth couldn’t imagine they’d be Current worthy in any case, though he found himself wondering how quickly Brighton might be able to modify one so it could withstand the pressure briefly. Until Moneymaker could tow it to safety.
A strong wind kicked up alongside the ship, and Gareth looked up in time to see GRO diving through the port tunnel, arms extended like a superhero’s. It landed on its belly beside Moneymaker, then opened its side to reveal a spacious interior. It looked like a Fleet shuttle, only bigger—much bigger. Had GRO rearranged itself somehow? Expanded its capacity so it could take on passengers?
It seemed that way. But with the Current pounding relentlessly at his mind, he wasn’t sure he could trust his own memory.
“I can hold the evacuees,” GRO said in its chime-like voice. “I am strong enough to sail the Current.”
Sloane lifted a hand, like she wanted to brush her hair out of her face but couldn’t reach it with her helmet screwed on tight. “Cool,” she said. “We’ve got a ship. Let’s go.”
How the woman managed not to look even a little surprised by developments like this one, Gareth would never know.
Sloane ran out of the cargo hold, and the bots rolled after her, rumbling down the ramp in her wake like they were her personal army, waiting on their next command.
Which Sloane didn’t hesitate to give. She sent the bots rolling around the perimeter and through the middle of the campus, instructing them to beam audio, visual, and text messages alerting everyone in the vicinity to evacuate to the docks. “Try not to look too intimidating, GRO,” she said as they passed the bot. “We’ll be back.”
Gareth followed, wishing he had Pitorski and a platoon of Fleet soldiers to help evacuate the moon. Though he supposed the bots would do a fair job, provided they didn’t accidentally terrify everyone into fleeing in the wrong direction. Behind him, Alex and Ivy came dashing down the ramp, followed by Hilda and Brighton, the entire crew running to help usher people onto the docks. Even Vin, looking pale and freshly bandaged, limped out to join them.
Gareth stepped out onto the campus and stumbled as the world tilted beneath his feet. He reached for purchase and found none, vertigo dragging him toward the surface with sudden and ruthless efficiency.
It was Vin, of all people, who caught his arm and kept him from falling. “All right, Commander?” he asked.
No one else was stumbling. They were running, shouting, gesturing, their words muddled together behind a new note, a long, tuneless chord. Like the sustained whistle of a flute, somehow pulling the jarring clash of the Current’s song into a new focus. As if the harmony had merely been missing a crucial element. What was Damian doing out there?
“The song,” Gareth gasped. “It changed.”
Vin was still gripping his arm, and despite his apparent change of heart, Gareth half expected the man to whip around and stab a hole in his armor. “Go,” Gareth said. “Help the others. I’ll be fine.”
Vin gave him a long look, then nodded and took off toward the grass, where people had emerged from the classrooms and libraries to stare with horror at the spider-webbing cracks that were quickly expanding through the domes. Gareth thought uneasily of the poison lines in Damian’s skin. Perhaps they weren’t poison at all, but cracks.
Or perhaps he was losing his mind.
People looked around in confusion as the bots came rolling toward them, swerving to avoid the fallen branches, garbage, and other debris that had collected on the paths and the grass when the gravity had returned. Some of them started toward the docks at a run, while others pointed in the opposite direction.
Which, after a moment, Gareth understood.
The bell tower at the far end of the path—the one Sloane had ascended to free Elter—had begun to tremble. Someone shouted, and it was all the warning he had before the tower collapsed with a deafening roar, the stones crumbling under some unseen weight. The constant barrage of debris, perhaps, or the changing pressure, or the constantly shifting gravity.
Dust billowed into the air, which was still damp from the rain, and people screamed as they ran. The bots were dodging the fallen stones, a few of them taking to the air to avoid getting trapped or crushed.
Gareth realized he was running toward the fallen tower, waving people back toward the port.
And then, a woman’s voice spoke into his ear, cutting through the noise with crisp clarity.
“…get you out of here,” the voice said, sounding breathlessly afraid. “Don’t worry.”
It was Alex. He recognized the efficient clip of the words, even through the waver of fear that accompanied them. Gareth touched his comm, but he already knew the words hadn’t come through it. He’d heard them in his mind, somehow. As if they’d been carried through the Current’s song.
And still, he was able to follow her voice. It shouldn’t have been possible when it was inside his mind, any more than it was possible when someone spoke through the comms. But he followed anyway, with the same certainty as he’d followed the Current’s hunger to the stasis field sample when he and Sloane had infiltrated that dragon ship.
Gareth stepped over the rubble, trying to pair efficiency with care. Rushing would end in an injury, and it wouldn’t save anyone. And yet, the cracks in the dome thickened every time he looked up.
They were running out of time.
Finally he stopped, grateful for the filter in his helmet to keep him from choking on dust. He knew, without a doubt, that he was standing right on top of Alex. He couldn’t say how he knew. It wasn’t so much that her voice had grown louder, only that she was… more present, somehow.
Gareth knelt, carefully shifting a stone out from under his feet. And there she was, staring up at him with her mouth open in shock. The bell tower must have had a basement—a wine cellar, judging from the bottles lined along the walls—and Alex was trapped inside of it, surrounded by a bunch of little kids. They cowered against her, crying and hiding their faces. Someone must have tucked them away here for safety during the fight.
And now they were trapped. None of them had atmo suits on, and Alex had removed her own helmet, no doubt so she could comfort the kids.
“How did you find us?” she asked. “My comm’s malfunctioning.”
He shook his head. He didn’t think he could answer that to her satisfaction. One of the kids whimpered, burying their head into Alex’s side, and Gareth’s heart squeezed painfully in his chest. They needed to get these kids out of here.
Sloane's voice broke through the noise, this time definitely emanating from his comm. “Everyone’s on the ship,” she said. “On GRO. Who happens to be a ship at the moment. Anyway, we need to go. Where are you?”
Gareth looked down at the group of kids, their faces dusty and shadowed. “Not everyone,” he said, reaching for the nearest stone and heaving it aside, making a tiny dent in the pile of rubble. It wouldn’t be enough. It wouldn’t be nearly enough. “Send the bots to the other side of the tower. We’re going to need some help.”
CHAPTER 23
It really wasn’t ever simple. Ever.
Sloane had already made it back to the port, ready to gather her crew and take off before those domes split open like crystalline eggshells.
Now she turned, calling for the bots to join her as she raced back toward the fallen tower, even though every instinct in her body was screaming at her to get out of this place.
Gareth knelt on top of the ruined tower’s rubble, bending to extract a stone and toss it over his shoulder. Sloane approached from the side, joining him in his digging and trying not to think too hard about the fact that she’d been standing at the top of this tower not long ago. The bell had landed halfway across the quad, a huge dent punched in its side.
When the bots started up the slope to help, their tracks allowing them to crunch across the pile of stone, Gareth waved them back. “You need to fly,” he said. “There are kids down there. And Alex. We can’t risk a collapse.”
The bots shuffled back, a few of them taking to the air, where they hovered, seemingly unsure of what to do. They were meant for hunting, for attacking. Not digging. Not rescuing.
Sloane grabbed another stone, pushing down the panic that was insisting, in no uncertain terms, that they had minutes before that dome exploded. At best.
“Form a line,” she said to the bots. “One extracts the stones and hands them back down the line.”
The closest bot edged forward at a hover, digging its limbs gamely into the rubble. The first stone slipped out of its claws, but it managed to balance it at the last second, passing it to the next bot in line before digging in again.
“Our claws are not meant for this,” it said. The words sounded like an apology, and Sloane would have patted it on its bot-shoulder, had her hands not been full. It wasn’t the bots’ fault that they were asking it to do something that exceeded their physical limitations. Those claws weren’t meant to close around bricks.
Bones, sure. Bricks, not so much.
“It’s not enough,” Gareth said, hands buried in stone. “It’s not nearly enough.”
It wasn’t. She could see that it wasn’t. Several of the kids had begun to cry, but she’d be damned if she was going to leave them here.
Hefting another brick up and over her shoulder, Sloane looked around. The once-pristine grass was now littered with fallen stones, uprooted trees, and other garbage. The library’s dome had shattered, leaving behind a ragged half-cone of glass. Judging by the books and shelves that lay scattered across the steps, quite a few of the library’s materials had ended up outside.
It hardly looked like the same place they’d landed just a few hours ago.
There’d be time to consider her penchant for destroying stuff, later. Now, her eyes landed on the one aspect of the campus that still seemed to be in working order: the lines of delivery drones that skirted across the center of the quad, oblivious to the wreckage.
Delivery drones could carry things. Delivery drones were made to carry things.
Trying not to think about the time an army of those things had attacked her and Vin on a campus much like this one, Sloane opened a comm to Ivy. “Can you access the delivery drones?” she asked.
In response, the drones swirled into an organized circle. And then they swarmed, diving toward the wreckage like they were on a mission. Sloane barely had time to hurry aside as they came rocketing toward her face. She grabbed Gareth, wrenching him out of the way—he brought one last stone with him, of course—and then the drones were descending, hauling the pile away brick by brick, zooming back and forth with the kind of determination she most associated with bees. And A-plus students.
In less than a minute, the cellar was clear.
“Call them off,” Sloane said, stumbling back up the pile to offer a hand to the first kid as the drones took off again, buzzing close enough to stir her hair. She pulled the girl up and set her on the back of the nearest bot, which zoomed off toward the port. Gareth did the same, and in another minute, she was hauling Alex up out of the cellar. Cheeks covered in dust, Alex nodded in thanks before taking off at a run, apparently uninterested in riding a bot back to the port.
Sloane would have advised against that, given that she was pretty sure her helmet was now picking up cracking sounds from the dome. But Alex did have a helmet, even if she wasn’t wearing it at present. She’d be all right.
Gareth was still peering into the cellar, the rubble shifting under his weight, as if to check for the last time that they hadn’t missed anyone.
“We got them,” Sloane said, grabbing his arm and pulling him back toward the closest waiting bot. “We’re good. Let’s get out of here.”
