Driftmetal (7 page)

“You’ve got to take her higher,” Chaz managed to
shout above the din. “The exterior skin can only take so much
punishment.”

“I’ll get us there,” I yelled back. “Keep your
crotch in your chair and let me fly.”

I flicked my pedals and took us hard to port,
letting the nearflow push us instead of trying to fight against it.
I could’ve made a nice tight turn in a streamboat like my
Ostelle
, but the best I could do in this tub was wobble in a
lazy arc as the stone-laden wind buffeted us. The windows sounded
like they were about to burst, the constant
tap-tap-tap
of
smaller rocks interrupted every now and then by the
whack
of
a stone the size of a melon. I thought I was going to stomp the
port-side turning pedal through the floorboards by the time we
finally straightened out so the nearflow could wash us along in its
tide. I turned the elevator wheel, watching the dials on my
instruments quiver and spin.

“Watch your ballast gauges. We’re flying too heavy,”
Chaz sputtered.

“Would you like to take over, or are you gonna shut
up and let me drive?” I lifted my feet off the pedals and raised my
arms into the air, like I was hanging from a set of stirrups.

“Drive,” they all shouted.

I got back down on the controls, shaking my head and
swearing to myself as the airship shuddered.
Buncha sissies
.
I’d get us out of this—but as usual, I was going to do it my way. I
hit the engines full speed and level, pushing us downwind. With the
nearflow at our backs, the engines were getting blasted. I could
hear the metallic clanging of the propeller blades slapping rocks
aside. One sharp stone at just the right angle was all it would
take before we’d find ourselves dealing with irreversible damage.
Soon the ship began to falter and lag behind the speed I needed to
reach to escape the nearflow. The torrent was so strong it was
stunting the propellers’ rotation.

Chaz’s airship came with a few surprises, though.
Surprises I’d had the foresight to ask him about previously. Now
that we had some momentum, I cut the engines to prevent them from
taking further damage. Then I opened the front ballonet valve,
letting air out of the forward-most of the two internal sacs
designed to act as counterweights. We nosed up while the wind
pushed us forward. Soon we could see clear blue above us, and I
twisted the rear ballonet valve open to level us out.

We had almost cleared the nearflow when there was a
loud
snap
. The whole cabin shook and tilted forward.
Anything that wasn’t bolted in slid to the fore and clattered to
rest in the window well. Chaz fell too, lost his seat as the cabin
tilted vertical. He tumbled down head-first, slamming hard onto the
glass. My heart skipped like a stone, boots slipping off the pedals
as my weight shifted forward. Through the windows I could see in
startling detail how high we’d risen. The airship’s entire
undercarriage was dangling from the balloon like a thumb pointing
down from a fist, the nearflow pelting it even as the balloon
itself ascended to cleaner air. Lucky the engines were cut, or they
would’ve been pushing us downward.

“What the blazes do we do now, genius?” Blaylocke
screamed, his ire directed at Chaz. Blaylocke was still in his
chair, scrabbling for purchase and unused to his techsoul footwear.
Vilaris had managed to climb around behind his chair and was
clinging to the back of the seat.

Chaz didn’t respond. Loose junk and a spatter of
blood decorated the window below him. His unbreakable glass was the
only barrier between himself and gravity. The rocks pinging the
bottom of the hull were lessening in force now. The windows were
caked with dust, obscuring the outside world in a dull brown film.
The floor was sloping forward at around sixty degrees, I guessed.
At least the ship was still rising.

I’d seen plenty of airships travel between
drift-towns, but I’d never seen one take off from the surface and
climb all the way through the nearflow and into the stream. There
was one problem inherent in our current situation, which I was now
coming to realize: there’s no way to put eyes on what’s above you
when you’ve got a pudgy balloon in the way. Being the genius was
Chaz’s responsibility, not mine. So naturally, I beseeched him for
advice.

“Chaz, you alright buddy? We need you. Stay with us,
huh?” I called down loud and firm, clinging to my seat.

Chaz blinked. I hadn’t noticed the awkward
positioning of his body before he blinked. I heard him take in a
deep breath.
Okay
, I told myself.
Time to put some of
this fancy new tech to good use
. I spun halfway around and slid
down to him, scraping to a halt on the retractable toe and wrist
spikes he’d designed, leaving deep gouges in the deck.

“Chaz, ol’ buddy,” I said. “It’s about time we found
someplace to land. You with me?”

He looked up, groggy and half-awake. I was reaching
toward him, my upper body anchored by one wrist spike, when the
ship quaked. I heard something rasping along the canvas skin of our
balloon, and I knew we must’ve run into the bottom of a big
floater. The balloon was dragging us up the rocky underside. If it
burst, we had seconds—seconds, before we dropped out of the
sky.

Chaz took my hand. I hoisted him to his feet, my
hydraulics hissing to afford me the strength. When the balloon
cleared the edge of the floater, the undercarriage slammed against
it and began to scrape up the side. The cabin’s port-side wall
disappeared in a storm of wooden splinters. Before I had time to do
anything, another rigging line snapped. We tipped sideways, thrown
toward the gaping hole in the side of our hull. Vilaris lost his
feet and hung by his chair’s armrest; Blaylocke’s body whipped
around, but he managed to keep a one-armed hold and found himself
dangling above the chasm. Chaz slid into the corner window. I
stayed where I was, anchored to my spikes like a fly on the
wall.

We stuck. Some jut of rock snagged the hull
somewhere, and we stuck there with the balloon above and the
undercarriage dangling with us inside it. Through the splintered
hull I could see the floater’s rocky underside sloping away from us
like the prow of a ship. Below us the nearflow blew the stones past
in a dizzying sprint; below that, the Churn. Chaz propped himself
up on his knees, subdued and too calm in light of the situation.
Blood flowed from a wound in his head, dark and copious, matting
his black hair to his scalp. Vilaris and Blaylocke had managed to
gain some traction and were perched on the sides of their seats
like frightened birds.

“Hang on,” I told them, knowing how redundant a
thing it was to say.
Let’s find out how unbreakable this glass
really is
.

It was a strange sensation, climbing a vertical
floor toward the starboard side of the hull. When I got there, I
gave the window pane a series of sharp strikes with my wrist spike.
The blows left scratches; the glass trembled in its frame, but it
held. I flexed my wrist. A steel dart about four inches long
quivered in the wood beside the window. Again. Another dart
sprouted beside the first. I drew one of Chaz’s gravmines from a
pocket in my webgear and rested it between the two darts. It was a
squarish box the size of a child’s building block. No explosive
components, but a marvel of electromagnetic tech if ever there was
one.

“Look sharp, fellas,” I yelled down. I uprooted my
climbing spikes and let myself slide down to Chaz again. “Sit
tight, buddy. I’m gonna get you out. Promise.”

The flecker wasn’t a marksman’s weapon; an
approximation of aim was all I needed. I pointed straight up and
fired. When the flecker particle skimmed over the gravmine, there
was a familiar
clink
, like the sound of a streamboat’s
runners. The window pane blew off its frame and spun away in one
piece.
Unbreakable, but not immovable
. The cabin shifted
again. We were swinging away from the floater, loosed from whatever
had snagged us.

I didn’t waste time climbing. My grappler bit into
the hull and took me upward. When I clambered out of the open
window frame, we were beside the floater and rising.
I can jump
that
, I told myself, doubting it was true. The longer I waited,
the less true it would be.

I crouched and leaned into my jump, grapplewire
trailing behind me through the air, breath caught in my throat at
the sheer amount of open sky between me and the floater. At the
pinnacle of that leap I knew I wasn’t going to make it, so I locked
the winch and jerked downward, knocking the hull sideways. I reeled
myself up the deck, hoping I hadn’t jarred any of my companions
loose. On top of the hull again, I withdrew the grappler from the
hull and took another leap. This time I shot my wire at the floater
from above, latched on, and swung in below it, slamming against the
underside.

The pain lanced through me, but I set the winch to
reeling.
Maybe I should’ve let Chaz build me those
hoverboots
, I thought, as I lifted myself onto solid ground. I
wanted to lie there in the grass and catch my breath, let my body
recover from the shock, but
The Secant’s Clarity
was getting
away. As soon as my grappler punched through the deck I let the
wire slacken and ran across to the far side of the floater. I
planted my feet there and staked myself in with a pair of shiny new
solenoids.

A long, nerve-wracking few minutes later, I had
reeled the
Clarity
to within reach. Vilaris and Blaylocke
came tumbling out through the gash and helped me moor her down. I
ventured inside and set the ballonets to refilling. Presently the
wounded airship settled to rest, and we found ourselves alone in a
sea of clouds, drifting along somewhere between the stream and the
nearflow. I pulled Chaz outside with me and collapsed next to the
two City Watchmen, who were hugging the ground as though they
hadn’t seen a patch of it in months.

“Well that was interesting, huh?” I nudged Chaz with
my foot.

Chaz said nothing. Just smiled at me, a vacant smile
with the corner of his mouth making a little upward twitch.

I sat up. “Chaz,” I said. “You hit your head pretty
hard. I need you to say something to me. Are you okay?”

Nothing. Just the same empty smile.

“Guys, Chaz ain’t doing so well.”

Vilaris lifted himself into a seated position.
“Chester? Chester. Professor Doctor Elijah Chester Wheatley. Do you
hear me?”

“Yes,” said Chaz. “I hear you. Make me a tray on the
seventh form of Kalican Heights with the gorge betwixt a jollity
and his motes of singe-gutter. Can I hasten to gewgaw…” He stopped
in his tracks, mouth hung open and staring. His jaw raised into
another smile, something sinister in it.

Had it been anyone else, I would’ve seen fit to make
a joke. But it was Chaz, sweet innocent Chaz, and for the first
time in longer than I could remember, I felt guilty. I’d frightened
him; tricked him. Shoot, I hadn’t stopped
using
the guy
since the moment I met him. He wouldn’t have come on this little
adventure if I hadn’t insisted. Not that I was blaming myself. I
never blame myself, even when I deserve to. Chaz was a brilliant
man, with more potential in one breath than any dozen copies of
Blaylocke. Yet here we were, stranded, with no way to get him the
help he needed.

I exchanged a look with Vilaris. He was thinking all
the same things I was.

“Blaylocke,” I said, standing. “I want you to circle
the ship and double-check all the mooring lines. The wind’s picking
up, and it’s looking like we’re gonna be here a while.”

“Don’t order me around,” he said. “I’m the one with
the crackler, remember? Why don’t
you
check the lines while
I sit here and have a rest?” He showed it to me, the gray plastic
remote whose activation could turn me into a temporary colleague of
Chaz’s again. He was grinning.

I considered making a lunge for the remote, but
Blaylocke was far enough away to press the button before I got
there. “I was on my way inside to find a bandage for a buddy of
mine who hit his head,” I said. “But yeah, you just sit there and
take a load off. And when
we
get off this floater,
you
can sit there on your keister as long as you want. What
am I, your mom? Get on your feet and take some blasted
responsibility for yourself.”

I stormed inside, through the roughshod hole in the
port side of our vessel. When I emerged with the medical supplies
I’d found, Chaz was lying on his back in the grass. Vilaris and
Blaylocke were crouched at one of the stakes near the ship.

“Come take a look at this,” Vilaris said,
motioning.

I stared at them, frowning in disbelief. “You guys
left Chaz by himself.”

“Because of this, yeah,” said Blaylocke.

I ignored them and rushed to Chaz. He lay with his
eyes wide open, staring up at the sky, midday sunlight painting him
in shades of gold. The floater was no bigger than a skating rink,
with room enough for the airship and a wide grassy border around
it. There weren’t many floaters this large so close to the surface.
It was close enough to the nearflow that I could hear the winds
howling if I listened. That meant the stream was much higher still,
and we’d be lucky if we saw signs of life more than once every few
days.

With his head wrapped in thick white gauze, Chaz
looked like the refugee of some war zone. He had started to mumble
to himself while I dressed his wound, his voice taking on a faint
singsong quality at times. I wrapped the bandages around his head
several more times than I needed to so the blood wouldn’t show
through, and left him to join the others only after I was satisfied
the bleeding had stopped altogether.

“Bout time,” Blaylocke said as I approached.