Driftmetal
Authors: J.C. Staudt
Tags: #steampunk, #pirates, #robots, #androids, #cyberpunk, #airships, #heist, #antihero, #blimps, #dirigibles
Driftmetal
J.C. Staudt
Driftmetal
is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
organizations, places, events, and incidents either are products of
the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely
coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 J.C. Staudt
All rights reserved.
Edition 1.0
To the
Legendary Heroes of Cataclysmic Fire, for always
adventuring.
Contents
1
I opened my leg and dug around inside, trying to
figure out what was wrong with the blasted thing. If I didn’t get a
reflex response soon, the battered old hovercell in which I was
imprisoned was going to carry me down to the Churn and get shredded
like a tin can in a blender. Gilfoyle’s thugs had roughed me up
pretty good, ripping out my insides like they wanted to sell me for
spare parts, and what was left of me was not cooperating.
I should start by telling you that centuries ago,
this world shattered, leaving its core raw and exposed. I don’t
know why it happened, or how, but chunks of land have been floating
through the skies on veins of driftmetal ever since. One of those
chunks, a drift-town called Bannock, was getting away from me. I
could still see the big floater gliding along in the skyward realm
like a storm cloud, its rocky black edges haloed in the yellowy
shimmer of street lamps. I wanted to be up there again, enjoying
myself at the tavern, floating away with the biggest haul of my
life. That haul would’ve brought in enough chips to make my mom
blush and my dad question why he’d ever doubted me.
Mining platforms whipped by outside the hovercell
window, their border beacons strobing like runway lights on an
airfield. I wedged my heel in at the base of the door and poked
around in my thigh with my makeshift tools—a pair of tweezers and a
chicken bone I’d sharpened to a point with the edge of my boot. Not
my proudest moment.
When the hovercell hit the nearflow, the whole thing
started to shake. Dust and particles and tiny floaters began to
pummel the hull like popcorn kernels in a vacuum cleaner while the
hovercell’s quartet of displacer engines struggled to keep her
steady. The thing was shaking so bad I could hear my boot rattling
on the bench across the room—so bad I snapped off the tip of the
chicken bone inside my leg. I tossed the rest of the bone aside and
cursed the thugs for having put me in this situation. No sense of
humor, those guys. Never mind that I’d brought it upon myself.
Yes, my life of crime had finally caught up with me,
but I had to hand it to Gilfoyle’s henchpersons all the same; they
were no law-lovers. Instead of calling up the Civs to come drag me
off to prison, they’d taken matters into their own hands. The Churn
was active tonight, and staging my death as an accident was a
clever way to get rid of me. It was too bad they’d made a classic
mistake; they should’ve finished the job themselves. Rookies.
The hovercell rumbled louder. I cursed out loud and
pounded my knee, using my hand like a mallet. I stuck a finger
inside, cursed again when I got it pinched in the machinery. There
was a pop and a spark, and my tweezers pinged away and bounced
across the floor. A second later the solenoid shot from my heel and
slammed the latch, chipping the door open enough for me to shoulder
it the rest of the way.
A surge of momentary pride swelled in my chest.
These hovercells looked solid, but they had weaknesses, and I knew
every one. Before I went out into the surface storm, I glanced back
at the chicken bone, the tweezers, and my boot.
I’ll get another
boot
, I decided.
I slid out of my trapezoidal box and let myself
dangle by the arms, feeling very much like a limp noodle hanging
from the fold-out panel of a take-out carton. The hovercell was
dropping fast and my stomach was doing somersaults, but I’d gotten
out of these things before and I knew just where to place my hands
and feet. Like a kid on the monkey bars, I swung forward and hooked
my leg onto the coolant pipe running along the underside of the
hovercell. When I felt the crook of my knee come to rest, I let go
with my hands. I’m no gymnast, but upside down is a strange place
to be with displacer engines pushing a thousand tons of
gravel-choked air a second past your face.
Yeah, I pretty much had the hovercell right where I
wanted it.
I crunched up, because back then my abs weren’t so
much to scoff at, and took hold of a fuel line. I had about a
minute and a half—maybe less—before the hovercell reached the
Churn. I pulled myself up until my face was inches from the control
panel, then triggered my eyelight and was pleased to find that it
still worked like a charm. The focused beam of light followed my
darting pupil as I scanned the panel for the component in question:
the Lift Processor.
Reversing the thrust wasn’t the hard part. The hard
part was not getting shot into the Churn like a billiard ball when
the engines multiplied power. That meant that before I altered the
Lift Processor, I needed a way back inside the hovercell. I pounded
the heel of my palm into the access hatch until I could see the
silver metallic gleam of telerium through the skin of my hand. The
hatch was dented, but I wasn’t through yet. It left me wishing I
had something to blast it open with. I would’ve, if the thugs
hadn’t ripped out all my sweet tech.
It took another thirty seconds of bashing before I
sent the access hatch sailing up into the hovercell and clattering
to the floor within. When I squinted at the control panel, the
green beam that shot out of my eye severed one connection and
joined another. I felt the engine noise start to build as I
clambered beneath the pipes, hoisting myself back inside. Through
the open hatch I could see the Churn boiling below me, a seismic
sea of liquefied stone and grit and gas and sand and metal, the
leftovers of a planet that hadn’t seen a year without thousands of
quakes like this since centuries before I was born.
The hovercell’s descent slowed gradually, like a
rubber band reaching its limit. It hovered in place for a lingering
moment that dragged on so long I thought I’d cut the wrong
connection. Then it began to slog upward. The side door was still
hanging open, bumping the floor every few seconds like the wing of
a wounded bird, refusing to catch on the latch I’d obliterated with
my solenoid heel. I reclaimed my lost boot and made a silent
exclamation.
Won’t need another pair of boots after all
. I
picked up the tweezers and stuffed them into a pocket.
Can’t
hurt to keep these
, I thought.
Unibrow ain’t gonna pluck
itself
.
We were rising faster now, me and my erstwhile
deathtrap. I waited until I saw the first mining platform go by,
then the second. We rose up out of the nearflow into clearer skies.
When I saw the third platform, I sprang the door and jumped for it,
hitting the deck and rolling through the landing. I looked up and
watched the hovercell continue rising overhead. It smacked into the
next mining platform, careened sideways, and crashed into a skid
along the topside. Even from thirty feet below, the metal-on-metal
scraping was loud enough to make me cover my ears. When the
hovercell reached the far edge of the platform, it tipped off the
side and dropped like a stone.
“That’s gonna be bad,” I said, pleased with
myself.
It was bad. The engines were running full-bore all
the way to the Churn. I hadn’t left the stabilizers active,
because… well, I guess I hadn’t thought about it. Why did I care
what happened to the ride after I got off? A hot orange flower
bloomed below me. There came a dull roar that peaked above the
rumble of the Churn. The night was black-and-blue again, except for
the yellow pools of light from the drift-towns passing above. I
found Bannock, which had floated past my left shoulder and was
fading into the distance. What was the name of that tavern
again?
“Mulrainy Jikes.”
A dark-skinned visitor in a long purple duster and a
wide-brimmed hat stood before me on the platform. My name is
Mulroney Jakes
, but this guy’s weird accent made it sound…
weird. The solenoid was jammed, still sticking a foot out from my
heel, so I stood there like an improperly-built scarecrow and
shrugged.
“That was a valiant effort,” said the dark-skinned
man, “but I’m afraid I can’t let you get away that easily.”
“You’d better make it harder than the last guys
did,” I said.
I’d never seen this guy before, but I knew by his
smug demeanor that he was some kind of law-loving bounty hunter,
one of the Civvies’ freelance agents. The thugs had gotten the best
of me, but that was only because there’d been half a dozen of them.
By contrast, there were as many of me as there were of this guy;
pretty decent odds, in my book.
The velcro flap over my thigh was still hanging
open. I slapped it shut and rubbed the seal to make sure it was
tight. The dark-skinned man must’ve been getting a good look at my
inner workings before I noticed. The less he knew about those,
especially in the condition I was in, the better.
There was a line of hovertrucks parked at the far
side of the platform, mining vehicles made for hauling heavy loads.
Don’t be so pretentious as to think this was my idea of a luxury
ride. Any vehicle that could get me up to Bannock and back to my
streamboat was fair game, at this particular juncture. I had to get
across that platform. But first, there was the small matter of this
melodramatic do-gooder in my way.
“You’ve terrorized these miners for the last time,
Jikes
,” said the dark-skinned man, proving that he was
indeed a melodramatic do-gooder.
“Everybody wants to be a hero,” I said, rolling my
eyes. I stomped down hard to shove the solenoid back where it
belonged. The metal clangor resounded along the platform, and the
landing lights around the border gave a flicker.
The dark-skinned man didn’t have time for small
talk. I felt his grapplewire wrap around my legs before I realized
he’d shot the thing. He yanked hard on the line, pulling my feet
out from under me. I hit the deck and started sliding toward him.
He extended a boot, doing me the courtesy of providing a brake for
my momentum. I shoved off sideways with my hands and forced myself
into a slanted roll, twisting counter-clockwise to unwrap my legs.
I tried to grab the wire, but when I came around on the last twist
it ripped free of my calf and took a nice chunk of flesh and pants
with it.
I rolled to a stop in an almost-seated position. The
man shot his wire again, but I raised a hand to shield myself. The
grappler pierced my palm and came to rest within an inch of my eye.
When he yanked on the line, the spring-loaded prongs flicked out
and bit into the back of my hand.
He began to reel me in, so I turned down my heels
and let him lift me onto my feet like a water-skier. I went
airborne just before I reached him, straightening out like a wooden
plank and plunging my feet into that law-loving face of his. He
would’ve gotten a solenoid through the skull too, if I’d been able
to trigger the blasted thing on cue. I followed through the kick,
intending to land on my feet and send him sprawling. Problem was, I
was practically holding the guy’s hand, so we tumbled across the
deck together like a pair of broken chairs.
I managed to end up underneath him somehow. The
grappler was still tugging my palm toward his wrist, its motor
chugging like a stuck wind-up toy. Lucky for me, his brain was
still knocking around in his skull. All he could do was give me a
woozy stare as I shoved him off me and worked my hand free of the
grappler.
I took off toward the hovertrucks, my hand a mess of
bloodstained metal, sliced veins flopping out like thin plastic
tubing. With the same hand, I punched through the driver’s side
window and climbed into the first hovertruck, wiping glass shards
off the seat.
After a moment of fiddling, the engines growled to
life, and the hovertruck lurched and rose. More
staggered
than rose, really. With the dark-skinned man getting to his feet on
the platform below, it felt like I was driving through a vat of
maple syrup.
Come on come on come on come on.
These things
were easy to hotwire, but they moved slower than cold boogers.