Sing Down the Stars

by Nerine Dorman

  The girders of the incomplete structure nearby were maddeningly close. She could do it, right? The landing where she stood wasn’t long, perhaps about four metres. She’d have to shove off hard from the door to have enough momentum to cross the void.

  Ancestors. Her stomach plummeted to her feet. If she borked this now … Well, it wouldn’t matter after she went splat, right? And it was a damned sight better than winding up with a laser bolt through the head or heart.

  Right.

  She’d performed far crazier feats in the past. Stuff that should have seen her get killed over and over again. That gap was, what … four or five metres? She wasn’t certain. Scum it; it looked like eight. Or maybe not.

  Running out of time.

  The longest running jump she’d completed had been just over six metres. The longest standing jump had been just over three. There wasn’t much running she was going to do here.

  Dead or maybe dead. Those were her choices.

  Nuri shoved herself off the wall, hard. One. Two. This was it. She gave it everything as she pushed off from the edge of the railing, felt it buckle beneath her as she launched herself into emptiness.

  Just her.

  The rush of air.

  And then she then instinctively propelled herself using her psi, reaching deep within her resources to give her forward motion that extra oomph.

  Almost too much.

  The girder connected with her midriff and drove all the air from Nuri’s lungs, so that all she could do was cling to the rusted frame, her legs kicking as she swung suspended over the drop. Air. She couldn’t bleeding inhale. Her lungs wouldn’t –

  A small gasp, and then she was greedily sucking in breath as the pain dissipated.

  COME TO ME.

  The call was urgent, and tears of frustration sprang in the corners of Nuri’s eyes.

  I’m ancestors-damned well trying!

  Only after the third attempt was she able to swing her legs over the girder.

  Zzzzzt! Zzaaaat! Laser bolts struck the metal half a metre to her right, scattering sparks.

  Nuri scurried to her left, not daring to look back.

  Her only consolation was that there wasn’t enough manoeuvring room for the pod to come down to this level between the buildings, so she’d bought herself time while the pack reconfigured itself to Nuri’s current location.

  Clang! Clang! Clang! went Nuri’s footfalls as she padded along the horizontal girders until she reached the naked shell of the apartment building. This floor was dead, soot blackened inside, and she vaguely recalled stories of a terrible fire here many, many years ago. Hundreds died. According to legend the place was haunted, so nobody came here. Or, rather, those who did weren’t up to any good.

  A sharp, stabbing pain started in her left side, and she pressed her fingers deep into the soft part of her abdomen while she ran. This helped a little. She inhaled deeply as fast as possible to help push down her diaphragm. Her education was useful in that respect. So long as she didn’t gag from the latrine stench that hit her at the landings. Folks used this place as a bog, and she didn’t want to think too hard about what muck she was stepping in.

  Downstairs she bolted, her eyes adjusting to the darkness. Not much to be seen at all, but she anticipated each step, and didn’t stumble much. If her pursuers had torches, she’d see them coming long before they saw her. Small consolation, but she had to keep descending.

  Two floors down, and she estimated she was nearing the ground floor, Nuri picked up on the clattering of footsteps heading upwards. At least three, so far as she could tell, and not making much attempt at stealth.

  “Up here!” someone called.

  They were trying to get her to panic. Ugh.

  She held on to the railing and peered down in time to see the eerie green of a torch wobbling as they pelted up the stairs. A sudden spike of terror shot through her, the sense of being trapped.

  “Stoppit,” she whispered to herself. “You know what to do, idiot.”

  And she did. Her hunters were so intent on the stairs ahead of them that they didn’t look up.

  Nuri waited until they were on the curve of the stairs near her level and then she leapt across the railings, diagonally down to the level below. No time for thinking, but her ankle shrieked agony as she landed, half missing a step so that her left foot slipped down one.

  “There!” someone yelled.

  She’d bought herself but a few seconds’ respite while they re-orientated themselves. Cursing her wobbly joint, Nuri limped-ran down the last few flights, burst into the entrance hall and then out the front past a laager of burnt-out trams that had been pulled here by a long-defunct community.

  The rail depot on the other side of the electric fence beckoned, and Nuri made for that with her hunters hard on her heels. In a risky move, she ramped up an old dumpster that was lying on its side, the corroded metal giving even as she found purchase. At the top, she pivoted with her left wrist and vaulted over the electric fence, landed and rolled into a crouching position on the other side.

  Her ankle screamed blood and death at her, but she sucked in the agony and grinned at G’Ren, Tali and one she didn’t know, who’d arrived, out of breath, at the fence.

  They lacked the nerve to pull the stunt Nuri’d just managed.

  “Sorry I can’t hang around,” she said, forcing a grin. “I’ve got plans.”

  “Pandor-sucker!” G’Ren shouted after her.

  Nuri made dust, wincing at every step of her hurt ankle.

  Pain was something she could work through, could suppress if she knew what to expect. Sickening fire crawled up her leg, and when she thought about the distance she still had to cross through the fens, her heart lurched. Ahead of her, the railway yard was ribbed with carriages being loaded or shunted; it was always busy here. Bots hurried about like bugs, and Nuri would have to step lightly if she was going to remain undetected.

  Her size played to her advantage now as she slipped between the gargantuan containers that creaked and hummed as they inched into motion. The noise was deafening, with the metallic grindings of pistons and connectors hissing onto the anti-grav tracks. Every once in a while the signals overhead would shift from ruby to emerald, and one of the monstrous trains would groan into motion.

  To Nuri it sounded like a beast that was slowly waking, a low electric buzz that built into a full-throated whine as the carriages gathered momentum. Less than a minute later, there’d be a loud boom as one of the trains reached full speed. This was a sound Nuri’d gotten used to as a child, but here in the yard it was so much louder, and the first few times she’d jerked in fright.

  She was about halfway across the tracks when a shape flitted above her. Nuri flattened against a carriage, cussing under her breath. They’d called in the pod. Of course they had. And she’d been heading more or less in a direct line where she’d climbed over the electric fence. It wouldn’t take an AI to figure out her probable route. Yet cutting across the yard was also the quickest way to the fens.

  If she doubled back, she’d add hours to her journey, and she wasn’t even certain her ankle would hold up that long.

  “Damn it.” Nuri continued, dividing her attention between finding a safe route between the lines while keeping an eye out for a possible pursuit.

  The shadow passed overhead, slowed, hovered.

  The impulse to run was strong, but if she did, she’d break cover and make a moving target of herself.

  Zzzzzt! Zzzzzat!

  The second laser bolt scored the skin on the back of her neck with a blinding stripe of pure pain.

  Nuri swallowed her scream and pushed herself between two carriages. As the pod hovered above, she stumbled in long grass and fell to the ground. There was no way of telling who was flying the thing as it slowly descended. They had her in their sights – even if she was able to drag herself to her feet, she was absolutely royally screwed.

  Her breath seared her lungs as she tried to calm the hell down. N
uri watched as the pod eased up on its anti-grav and began its landing.

  They had blasters and she was unarmed …

  Unless …

  The absolute injustice of her situation coiled in her guts like an angry worm. She wouldn’t go quietly. And they forgot she had other abilities at her command than mere guns and lasers.

  How many times since the incident with Stasja had it been drilled into her that she must never harm, must never intentionally use her powers against those who were not skilled to defend. Her slip earlier in the Den against Vadith had been a deplorable lack of control that she’d managed to harness to her benefit. That she hadn’t killed anyone yet was a miracle in and of itself.

  Now …

  The pod settled with a thump, displacing the weeds and grasses that grew between the rails, and the door on the passenger side sliced open. G’Ren, of course, and Shiv, and a runty human male she’d not seen before. Not all the same ones from earlier. Where were the others then? She glanced from side to side before fixing her attention on the three coming at her.

  G’Ren stalked forward while the others hung back. All three were armed with blasters.

  “You don’t know when to give up, do you?” G’Ren said.

  Nuri coughed, hating how her lungs wheezed from the effort. “Last time I checked, I don’t think I had those words in my vocabulary.” An off-hand remark, the kind of thing someone who was utterly cornered would say.

  But that little ember of anger smouldered in her heart, along with a plan so cunning she didn’t know if she could pull it off. Nuri sat up, doing her best to ignore the sudden defensive postures her would-be captors had struck.

  All along, the star-jumper’s siren song hadn’t diminished, was still present as a low, angry buzz at the edges of her senses. How the star-jumper got under her skin like that, she couldn’t tell, but it was an impulse that triggered her deeply.

  Could she perhaps learn from that? Could she twist and direct repulsion at G’Ren and the others? They had the best of her physically, but they weren’t mentally prepared for what she could do.

  The first time she pushed, outward, nothing happened.

  G’Ren and the others approached, their postures relaxed as Shiv and the human took hold of Nuri under her arms. Her legs wouldn’t obey, so they began to half-drag her back to the pod.

  The bleak helplessness threatened to swamp her again, so Nuri reached deeper inward.

  Help me!

  The siren song hitched for an instant, and Nuri’s vision and hearing blanked out momentarily. A stutter in reality – the only way to describe it.

  When she came to, she was on her hands and knees, her palms stinging from the gravel that had abraded them, and G’Ren and his cohorts were backing away from her, unutterable fear etched on their features.

  “Go!” Nuri yelled she lunged to her feet, and with all her might pushed at them, dug deep into every awful fear that lodged in her darkest dreams. Of claws that snatched, and teeth that nipped at heels. Of tumbling through an empty void.

  As one, they turned and ran, right past the pod, and vanished between the carriages. All Nuri could do was watch with a twisted smile. Then she staggered fully upright and gritted her teeth at the awful agony of her damaged ankle.

  They’d left her the pod.

  Ancestors, yes. Something had gone right for a change.

  22

  At first the damned pod wouldn’t respond to Nuri’s touch. Ancestors-damned retinal ID, and Nuri had no way to override the rudimentary AI because she didn’t have a connection to the Net anymore. She had to do it the old-fashioned way by taking a crowbar to the central steering unit. Thankfully she’d help jack enough of these pods in the past that she had the knack to flip the manual override. Her fingers were especially clumsy, though, and all the while the siren call shivered through her. Nuri could only liken it to being covered in a fine mesh that was slowly being tightened, until it felt as if her bones would soon burst through her flesh.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming, be patient,” Nuri said through gritted teeth.

  The connectors sparked, and she dropped the chip she needed to slip into another slot. She wasted precious seconds fumbling in the steering unit until she was able to grasp the offending part.

  “Warning! Warning! Obstruction on rail. Train RZ505 approaching,” blared a mechanised voice.

  A wash of fresh nausea nearly made Nuri lose the chip a second time.

  The tracks. They’d landed the pod on the tracks. And now a train was coming. She’d seen the front of those monsters far too many times. Bullet-shaped and constructed from the hardest alloys known to science. And equipped with industrial-grade blasters, because sometimes things went wrong, and the trains never did have the luxury of time to stop …

  “Crap, crap, crap!” Nuri’s fingers trembled and the chip wouldn’t go into the bloody slot.

  Any moment now that train would –

  Click!

  The chip went in and the displays lit up like a festival. Nuri slid into the pilot seat and strapped herself in, nearly blinded by the approaching headlight. Even through the insulated pod cladding she could hear the growing shriek of anti-grav as the massive hulk came nearer and nearer.

  Nuri depressed the starter button and the engines shuddered, gave a little whine, but didn’t otherwise engage.

  “Come on, damn it!” She pressed the button again, calculating the odds if she tried to drop and roll out of the hatch or whether she could try one last time …

  The pod shot up so fast Nuri’s neck nearly snapped. Below her, the train went ricocheting past, faster and faster until the carriages became a blur.

  Nuri’s heart threatened to collapse as she heaved a sigh of relief. That had been too darned close, but now … Now she had wings. Well, kinda. With a grin, Nuri checked the fuel levels, the power distribution, toggled a few more switches and then allowed the siren call to draw her. Ancestors above, she didn’t even need the GPS to function – the faster she moved in the direction of the call, the less she had to clench her jaw.

  “I’m on my way,” Nuri said, but the only sense she had in return was one of confusion, struggle. Of being trapped. Of being too large in too constricting a space. She had to remind herself to breathe, that there wasn’t a giant foot smashing down on her ribs, making it impossible for her to draw air.

  The emergence, she realised, and wiped the beads of sweat off her brow. No wonder her skin had felt too tight. She was mirroring what the nymph was experiencing. Which meant Nuri now had to fly as if both their lives depended on her reaching the facility on time.

  The craft responded to her touch and she gave a small whoop as she skimmed over the tops of the trains. She’d completed training in the simulators back at the facility, but this … This felt great. The controls weren’t in all the places she’d expected them to be, and of course she couldn’t access the virtual functions, so she was flying like a drunk gada-rat minus its sonar, but that wasn’t going to stop her.

  Faster and faster, until the lights below her became a bright river, until all of a sudden, only the blankness of the fens.

  Nearly there.

  Nuri’s hands were slipping on the controls, and she had to wipe them dry on her pants, which only made her realise how her clothing was torn to hell and gone from her adventure. Hells, she could smell herself too, and that wasn’t good in the confined space.

  Not that that would matter by the time she reached the facility.

  Almost, almost …

  She decelerated as the facility’s red perimeter lights hove into view. The pod’s internal proximity warnings flashed on, accompanied by a screeching alarm.

  “Override,” Nuri said, then cursed as she realised she’d tried to send the command via her non-existent link.

  Nothing for it. She hefted that spanner and whacked the alarm light. It gave a satisfying crunch and the screaming stopped –

  Whump!

  The pod slewed to the left and dipped a
larmingly.

  The stench of burning circuitry hit Nuri’s nose, making her eyes water. A bright flash blinded her momentarily, followed up with another bone-jarring whump.

  This time, she lost control of the pod. Things were happening too fast for her to understand, except that the craft struck a solid object, the crash shields engaged, and they rolled like a dropped apple, crashing through trees, crunching against rocks and bouncing off obstacles until they came to a jarring halt. From the smell of the muddy liquid seeping in from what used to be the ceiling, they’d come to rest in the reed bed and Nuri was dangling from the safety harness.

  Her ears rang from the sudden impact and it took her a few heartbeats to figure out that although she was winded, nothing was broken or dislocated. No time to wait.

  The pod must’ve encountered the facility’s defence system. Which meant …

  Stars. Security bots.

  Nuri unclipped herself, dropped into the slowly swirling muck, and shoved until the security plating gave way on the one side. Reeds and more muck engulfed her as she collapsed into the cold, wet morass, but the urgency to keep moving had her thrashing against being swallowed up by the water.

  Thankful for the dark, Nuri put as much distance between herself and the downed pod as she could as she fought through the thick vegetation. Where possible, she kept the weight off her left foot, though every other step jarred the joint and she had to bite back from hissing. Outside the temperature-controlled pod, she keenly felt the cold – she’d been sitting still for too long.

  At one point she stepped into a mire that sucked her down to her belly button. The water was so icy it robbed her of breath, and with feeble hands she clutched at the nearest stems to pull herself out. The mud sucked at her feet, and for a breath-taking moment of panic she feared she’d keep sinking.

  Keep calm, keep calm, was her mantra.

  It wasn’t working.

  Hot tears singed down her cheeks and she dragged herself out on the third try, the muck making a horrible schlopping behind her as she crawled onto marginally more solid ground. Her hands stung from myriad tiny cuts from where she’d held on to the serrating reeds, and for a good few heartbeats, all she could do was lie there, gasping.