41
Cole whipped his head forward, snapping the welding mask in place and causing the world around him to fall black as blindness. He pulled the torch’s trigger and a blast of plasma illuminated his workspace in an eerie, greenish glow. Popping a few dollops of steel at a time, he worked along the joint and tacked the sheet of metal into place. Once it held, he ran back the length of the seam with a steady burn of the flame, concentrating on making a good, strong connection. Behind the torch’s passing, he left a long bead of beautiful, red, puddling steel.
The weld complete, he shut down the torch, lifted his visor, and watched the molten alloy cool—the rivulets of lava turning gray and then a dull silver. Cole stood up. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and surveyed the nearly completed box. On the opposite side of the cage, two other workers finished the wiring as they secured the last connection between the grav panels and the three separate power supplies. Cole nodded to one of the men who kept glancing up to survey his work, then moved to the next joint that needed welding. He was just about to flip his visor back down when a voice like dripping honey interrupted him:
“I hear you came up with this.”
Cole turned. Penny stood behind him, her hair as bright as liquid steel.
“Yeah,” Cole said, beaming. “Ryke said I get lifetime clever points for this.”
Penny pouted. “If it works.” She appraised the box skeptically, one hand perched on her hip, the other reaching out to touch a vertical strut. “You actually think anyone’s gonna risk their lives in one of these things?”
“Are you kidding?” Cole smiled at her. “It’s flawless. C’mere, step inside.” He ducked under one strut and stepped over another, entering the cage of steel. Penny followed. She even accepted Cole’s proffered hand and allowed him to steady her as she crawled through. When they stood up, they found themselves in a box just two meters on a side, divided in half by two solid walls of steel, pressed up together. Cole’s head had just enough clearance to stand upright.
“A little tight to jump inside of,” Penny said.
“We’ll be balled up, hugging our legs. Besides, we shouldn’t have more than one person in them at a time. Here’s how it works.” He slapped the solid walls standing vertically in the center of the box. “You’ve got two steel plates facing each other, right? At the moment, they’re just tacked in place with a few spot welds. There’s grav panels in each one, just like the panels in a ship’s decking.”
He reached up and traced the wires coming off the panels. “Every-thing’s wired in parallel and with three separate power sources, just in case the box jumps in the middle of something. But even if they do, a single cell from any of the battery banks should still have enough juice to drive the plates away from each other.”
“What if the grav plates jump in the middle of something?”
“It won’t matter,” Cole said. “That’s how they’re built in a ship’s decking, anyway.” He slapped the steel wall. “Besides, that’s the whole point of the design. We can’t jump inside a ship, because there might be something in the way. However, if these puppies become one with something else, they’ll drag all that material apart once the grav panels fire. It’ll create an empty box, no matter what it hits. And that’s what we’ll be jumping inside of a few seconds later.”
“I’m with you so far. The box jumps in, the grav panels engage, the plates fly apart and drag open a cube of empty space. You jump in a second later . . . so now you’re inside a box of solid steel. What next?”
Cole put his hands together and swished a perfect third angle attack. “We pop our swords, cut our way out, and take care of the crew.”
Penny ran her fingers back through her hair and surveyed the struc-ture thoughtfully. She turned and looked Cole up and down. “You thought of this?”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” he said, grinning. “Though, I do think I had some help.”
“Yeah? Ryke, right? This is totally his sort of thing.”
“No, I think it was from the training.” Cole grabbed his imaginary sword and slashed at her with an angle-two. “Repulsion,” he said, smiling.
“More like attraction,” said Penny, stepping close. She reached around Cole, her face approaching his.
“I, uh—”
“This is wired wrong,” Penny whispered. She pursed her lips, then grinned at him coyly before stepping away.
Cole turned, blushing. He looked down at the wiring harness behind him. The leads from the grav panels were reversed, the polarity completely backward. The panels wouldn’t have flown apart—they would’ve been permanently locked together! He looked around for a screwdriver to loosen the terminals, then decided to bend down and check one of the other two battery feeds.
Same thing.
Cole glanced around the workshop to see if anyone was watching. As he contemplated the chances of wiring two panels backward, he felt a chill run up his spine, the hairs on the back of his neck tingling with danger. He turned to tell Penny, but the workshop’s double doors were already swaying back and forth from her departure. He looked around for Ryke, who had just been supervising another welder, when he saw the two workers in the neighboring cage peering up at him.
Cole looked away, then he realized what they were working on: another wiring harness.
“Hey—” Cole said, standing up.
The duo reacted as if shots had been fired. They took off, running toward the double doors leading out of the workshop. Cole crawled out of the cage and gave chase. One of the workers shoved open the doors as the other man turned, his arm a blur. Something glinted in the fluorescent lights, twinkling as it spun through the air. Cole felt the impact on his chin before any of it fully registered. A loud crack reverberated through his skull. He fell to the ground, dazed, as an adjustable power wrench clanged to the floor beside him.
Cole tasted blood in his mouth, could feel the laceration along the inside of his lip like a swollen ridge of tenderness. He shook his head clear, grabbed the wrench, and scampered to his feet. Stumbling forward a few steps—his legs still resistant to keeping the rest of him upright—he shouldered open the workshop doors, one of which slammed into someone on the other side.
“What in the hell?”
Doctor Ryke came into view as the door snapped shut. His annoyed expression moved from the men running down the hallway to settle on Cole.
“You boys need to—”
“Stop them!” Cole yelled to the handful of aliens milling through the hallway. He brushed past Ryke and gave chase as the two Humans disappeared around a corner. Cole ran as fast as his wobbly legs could take him. He skidded around the corner, caroming off a spinning Mortimor, who looked even more annoyed than Ryke.
“Watch where you’re—”
“Sabotage!” Cole yelled, pointing. He tried to think of the word for the people committing the act, but his head was even less clear than his legs were sturdy. He pushed away from Mortimor and continued to run awkwardly, his arms windmilling, his grasp furious on the power wrench. Two aliens came out of a doorway, and Cole nearly plowed them over; he brushed against the hallway wall and took the next corner too fast, bouncing off an open door. He pounded his feet as fast as he could as the men ahead slowed to round another corner.
“Stop them!” he yelled once more, but the motley group ahead just turned from one curiosity to the other, everyone frozen by the spectacle of the footrace. Cole weaved through them, pushing aliens twice his size out of his way as he turned the next corner.
There was no sign of the men in the next hallway, but a smattering of gawkers turned from a closing door to look at him. Cole traced their bemused glares back to the door. He ran to it, pushed through, and found himself in a stairwell, could hear the rapid slap of descending feet below. He hurried down after, swallowing more blood as he slipped and slid down the steps.
He was a flight down when he heard a door slam shut, leaving the stairwell ringing with just his footfalls. The next landing was the last. Cole jumped past the last few steps and shoved his way through the door, suddenly remembering having come that way the day before. When he staggered into the skimmer garage, he wasn’t surprised. His trip to the Seer had begun and ended there. Nor was he surprised to see the hatch pulling shut on one of the vehicles, its engine whining as it slid down the ramp and toward the door, which led to the open, wet world beyond.
Cole hurled his wrench as hard as he could, a seemingly futile expression of his anger. It flew like a missile, his very hand making a whirring sound as it parted the air before him in a blur of augmented elbow. The momentum of his own limb threw him off balance, causing him to stagger forward as the wrench exploded through the rear of the hyperskimmer. The impact made a deafening crack, and the skimmer swerved to the side, crunching against the wall of the ramp as it conti-nued to trundle along.
Cole stumbled ahead, regaining his balance as he ran past the other parked skimmers. He prepared himself to race down the ramp after the fleeing saboteurs—that’s what they were called—to chase them down and jump on the canopy if he had to. He was nearly to the top of the ramp when an alarm rang out and red lights began to flash, almost as if warning him of how bad an idea he’d just had. With a panicked stutter, Cole remembered what the alarms signified and cursed himself.
He looked around quickly for a locker or a storage bin as the alarm continued to blare, signaling the garage door was about to open. He squeezed between two of the parked skimmers, then caught a glimpse of a pair of goggles resting on the dash of the nearest skimmer, inside the closed canopy.
With a loud groan, the garage door at the bottom of the ramp began to open. Its chain ratcheted up with a staccato noise, letting in a harsh stream of unrelenting, blinding, photons.
Cole grimaced in pain at the brief exposure. He shut his eyes and folded the crook of his arm over his face. He’d only caught a glimpse of the light, but it was enough to spot the darkness behind his lids. Reaching to the side, he groped for the fender of the nearby skimmer and found it, then patted along the hull until he reached the canopy. Cole fumbled for the release. He felt it and pulled the lever as the departing skimmer whined high and roared out into hyperspace.
Picturing the location of the goggles behind his shut eyelids, Cole leaned far over the edge of the open canopy and brushed his hand across the dash, feeling for them. He hit them with the side of his hand and knocked them off and onto the floorboard. Cursing again, Cole stretched out and fumbled for them across the skimmer’s floor. Suddenly, his feet slipped off the deck and he went head-first into the passenger seat, landing awkwardly.
Cole kept his eyes squeezed tight as he untangled himself. He reached down by his feet and patted for the goggles. Finally, he found them. He brought the cups to his eyes as he righted himself in the skimmer’s seat. Working the rubber strap into place, Cole peered ahead for his quarry, but the other skimmer was gone. He looked to the door, wondering why someone wasn’t coming along to help, to give chase. Then he saw the pale glow of a red light flashing above the door. A door that would remain locked for safety reasons until the garage was shut tight against the photons.
“Damnit!” Cole looked to the skimmer dash, trying to recall which switch opened and closed the garage door. He traced his finger over the canopy release, remembered which one had operated the docking claws at the Seer’s cabin, saw the wiper knob, then came to the ignition switch.
Cole’s brain spun with more bad ideas, his poor judgment clicking along in defiance of the alarms and flashing lights. He thought about the time it would take to close and open the garage door, how long to explain what was going on, how much longer to organize pursuit. The idiotic plan hadn’t even made a full circuit through his boyish glands before his finger depressed the ignition switch, powering the grav cells in the rear of the skimmer. Cole keyed the canopy shut and adjusted himself in the seat, familiarizing himself with the control stick and taking the time to finally locate the garage door controls.
As soon as the canopy clicked into place, Cole pushed forward on the stick, jolting the sleek vehicle toward the ramp. The sudden burst of speed nearly made the back end of the skimmer whip around. Rather than let up and correct, he gave it even more juice and rocketed forward, the craft briefly leaving the deck as it raced over the edge of the ramp and down. Cole yelped. He dug one hand into the dash as he piloted with the other. He only barely remembered to hit the garage door controls as he raced out into the wet world and driving rain.
Sliding across the film of water outside, Cole’s skimmer kicked up low walls of spray as he scanned the horizon for his prey. Behind him, the metal door to the lumbering headquarters slammed shut, sealing out the light. Inside, alarms would be falling silent, the light above the door ceasing its steady flashes. Cole could imagine the stairwell door bursting open, an annoyed and confused group of freedom fighters stumbling through and wondering what in hyperspace was going on.
He tried not to think of that. It was too late to go back. He peered ahead at the spray from the other skimmer, standing out on the feature-less landscape. It rose in a watery bloom and shivered against the ash-white sky, easy to pick out. Cole pushed forward on the control stick and raced off after it, two walls of water forming on either side of him as he gained speed.
As his craft moved up to the surface of the muddy water, the back end of his skimmer swayed side to side. Cole fought to keep it under control. The steering was much more sensitive to overcorrection than a Firehawk’s. The vehicle’s foils seemed to carve through the water like skis: biting, sliding, and weaving. Each movement begged for a countering one, and it took several moments before he figured out the timing, how to go with the flow rather than fight it. He found large, smooth motions worked better than the fast-twitch variety suited for spacecraft. As he gained some semblance of control, Cole looked up and saw he’d fallen off course. He veered to the side, lining up with the speeding skimmer in the distance. With the accelerator pinned, he chased off after it, steadily gaining.
As he got closer, he saw why he was able to catch up: trailing off the fleeing craft was a tight plume of gray smoke, his furious wrench toss obviously having hit something important. Cole activated the windshield wipers. Even though he traveled the same direction as the rain, his skimmer was going much faster, so the sideways droplets smacked the canopy as surely as if they were falling straight down.
Cole hardly breathed as he powered down the smooth wake created by the other skimmer. He pulled within a dozen meters, and still the wounded craft ahead maintained its unwavering course. Cole glanced over his shoulder at his own limited visibility. A wall of kicked-up water loomed to either side and a haze of spray occluded what little glass lay behind him. The vehicles were fast, but driven in near blindness. Only a narrow chute of visibility lay ahead, and even that was filled with nonstop rain.
Cole looked to the dash. An array of sensors, chart plotters, and readouts reminded him of the hyperskimmer’s primary function: to find body heat and pull people out of the snow. For all he knew, the things drove like a dream on the ice-covered portions of hyperspace for which they’d been designed. He matched the speed of the craft ahead and scanned the dash once more, wondering if there was anything he could use to stop them—perhaps a radio to alert HQ—but none of the controls were labeled, and he’d only seen a few used during his trip to see the Seer.
The Seer!
Cole looked over the switches again, finding the one he recognized. He focused on the tail of the other skimmer and powered his own craft forward, deep into the plume of gray smoke and the shower of watery spray. Piloting with one hand, Cole kept his other one poised on the switch while he visualized the maneuver. He took a few deep breaths before pulling to within a mere meter of the racing craft, the world outside disappearing in a wall of kicked-up and solid white foam. He had a brief moment of terror that the pilot ahead might suddenly slow down, but shook such thoughts aside.
Cole whipped out of the craft’s wake, moving into clear air and uncut water. He gave the skimmer everything it had, his shoulders pressing back into his chair as he jolted forward. Pulling up beside the other craft, Cole looked to the side, but saw nothing through the wall of water kicked up from the forward foil. He swerved that direction anyway, his finger on the switch tense with anticipation. As soon as he heard the crunch of metal-on-metal, he hit the button, sending the docking arms out through the wall of water. He heard another crunch as the grippers found something solid to bite into.
Cole pulled back on his throttle, powering his own skimmer down and hoping to bring the other craft to a halt. The locked ships veered to one side as the other craft, clearly wounded, tried to keep running. Cole corrected for the drag as the neighboring engine whined loudly in complaint. He could practically feel the vibrations as the other pilot attempted to flee, but the weight and power of his craft were far too much for it.
As their speed fell, the two ships sank deeper into the water, and the wall of spray between them fell like a dropped sheet. Cole peered through his canopy, expecting to see a shocked expression on the passenger’s face—a look of resigned defeat.
What he found instead, as the hydrofoils ceased kicking up so much spray, was an open canopy next to his own. One of the saboteurs knelt in his seat, leaning out over the side of his skimmer toward Cole. He had his hands up, as if holding something, but they looked perfectly empty.
It wasn’t until the man swung his arms down in a perfect angle two that Cole realized what he was holding.