“Damage report!” Rei bellowed from his pilot’s harness. “Report, all stations!”
A brother limped to his console, every mechabacus chittering and clacking, the stuttering percussion of a hundred tiny drums. Kin looked about him, saw Kensai being helped to his feet by two Lotusmen, blood leaking from his skin’s buckled collar.
One side of the Earthcrusher’s head had caved in, the left viewport shattered, consoles toppled and spewing sparks. A ventilation duct had been torn from the wall, a bucktoothed grille hanging from broken screws. Kin grit his teeth against the pain of his wounded thigh, gathered himself for a spring.
“By the First Bloom!” Kensai swore. “Commander, what are you doing?”
“Forgiveness, Shateigashira, there were too many!”
“It was an ironclad, man! A hundred feet long! How did you miss it?”
“Due respect, Shateigashira, but I did hit it. Its momentum carried its—”
“Get out of that chair!”
Kin crawled closer to the ruptured vent, wreathed in smoke and steam as the Commander raised his voice in protest.
“Shateigashira—”
“Out!” Kensai bellowed, slapping aside the hands of his concerned lackeys. “The Earthcrusher is my creation! This plan of my design! No one will jeopardize it! Not you, not the Inquisition, not the First Bloom, no one!”
We’ll see, bastard …
And with a gasp of pain, Kin rose to his feet and dove into the ruptured vent.
*
His landing turned out to be a little softer than he’d expected.
Bouncing down the greasy air vent, his cursing rose over the engines’ roar. He fell near forty feet, head over heels, finally crashing to rest at the bottom of the duct. Even though he’d been stripped of his skin, the impact wasn’t quite bone-jarring, but he still cracked his head on the metal, breath leaving his lungs with a sprayed curse. An agonized minute passed as he tried to inhale, finally realized the floor was groaning underneath him.
“Off,” it pleaded. “Get off me.”
Kin blinked, barely recognizing the voice without the suit-distortion.
“Shinji-san?”
“Kin-san? What the hells? Did you fall down the vent shaft?”
“Fall would imply … it was accidental…”
“I think you broke my godsdamned ribs…”
“I think I broke my godsdamned everything,” Kin groaned.
Rolling off the other boy, Kin was astonished to see Shinji had removed his skin, the boy clad only in the skintight membrane every Guildsman wore beneath his outer shell. His skin was pale, hair cropped short, chin sharp and pointed.
“Why are you naked?”
“Look who’s talking, skinny boy.” Shinji was feeling at his rib cage, wincing. “Nice ankles.”
“Shinji, what the hells are you doing in here?”
The boy shrugged. “Maseo managed to warn me as they grabbed him. I figured the vent system was a good place to hide, but my skin was too big to crawl around quietly. So I stripped. Kept my tool belt and mechabacus, but that’s it.” Shinji glanced overhead. “What the hells happened up there?”
“Kitsune suicide attack. Their fleet rammed the Earthcrusher.”
Iron creaked, the vent echoing with the engines’ guttural song. Kin felt the ground shift beneath them as the DOOMDOOMDOOMDOOM of the behemoth’s tread began again.
“Not hard enough,” Shinji said.
“Apparently not.”
“So what the hells do we do now?”
“We can’t proceed with the plan,” Kin sighed. “They had me bugged. A transmitter in my mechabacus. They know we intended to overheat the Earthcrusher. They’d have removed the explosives from the coolant clusters by now.”
Shinji scratched his head, looking a little rueful.
“And what about the heat diffuser arrays?”
Kin glanced at the boy. “You didn’t mention any—”
“I confess, I was feeling a little guilty about it too. But I feel better now.”
“Shinji, what the—”
“We didn’t tell you about our redundancies,” Shinji shrugged. “Bo didn’t trust you enough. But we planted secondary charges. Not in the coolant cluster. In the heat diffusers. If Kensai only knows what you knew, the explosives might still be there.”
“Surely they would have checked everywhere?”
“They’re well hidden. Besides, the crew probably have bigger problems, what with Kitsune ironclads dropping from the sky. But even if the charges are still in place, we can’t blow the cooling system. Earthcrusher is inside Yama walls. We’d level the entire city.”
Kin nodded, wiping at his split brow. The pair sat in the dark, bleeding and bruised, listening to the behemoth’s footsteps, the roar of its motors, the song of its gears.
Kin blinked in the dark, sudden light gleaming in his eyes. “Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“Our chance to take out the Tora army is gone,” Kin said, a slow smile blooming at his lips. “But we can still stop Earthcrusher.”
“How?”