43
The man in the hyperskimmer brought his arms down in a wide arc, slashing toward Cole with his invisible blade. Inside the cockpit, Cole flinched away from the blow, but as soon as the figure completed the motion, he realized it hadn’t been meant for him. His skimmer lurched to the side as the other craft pulled away, both docking arms neatly parted in one perfect swipe.
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~