“Three jaunts from Hull,” Adan said, glancing down at the status screen. A jaunt was about how far a Wayman could travel in one day.
“You’re twisting my gears,” Nox said in disbelief. “How long have I been out?”
“More than half a day.”
Nox glanced towards the horizon. “Well, I guess we’re clipping along at a pretty good rate, then.” He reached into his garrick and pulled out a few pieces of kern. “That would explain why I’m so gut-quivered,” he said, taking a bite out of one of the tough strips.
“So, why were you at Nolan’s camp?” Adan asked, eyeing the kern and feeling his own gut quivering.
“Ah, the shim caught me in a raid,” Nox said, scowling and spitting on the deck as if the kern had left a bad taste in his mouth. “He’s been swelling his ranks like mad ever since the attack on that fake Tasada place you and your friend drug us to.”
Adan shifted uncomfortably at the mention of Tasada, the name some Waymen used to refer to Oasis. Dark memories flitted through his thoughts. He would never be able to forget that the man in front of him had killed his friend there.
Nox chattered on. “After I made it back to Thral Gyre, my tyranny as the new Reeve lasted all of three days before I was captured,” he said, shaking his head. Then he burst out laughing. “Killed an awful lot of us, but they captured even more—that was what they were after—warm bodies; fit as many of us as they could onto those floating crates of theirs.”
“So you’re saying Nolan forced you to serve him?” Adan studied the Wayman, trying to gauge what was really going on inside his head. Nox’s thoughts proved impossible to unravel. He seemed to be both afraid and seething with anger at the same time. The impressions were too vague, too unreliable, as if Nox himself had no idea what he was thinking either.
Nox shrugged. “It’s part of the Wayman life—you get captured and pressed into a new thral from time to time. Nolan was different, though. He tried to force that gear tech on us. It blew by me like the desert wind, though. I’m too empty up top to learn that gimcrack stuff. So they put me on latrine cleanup instead.” He spit on the ground again. “Bah! That’s Welkin work, not something for a well-built Wayman like myself.”
“Well, at least you’re free of him now,” Adan said.
Nox shook his fists at the air as if the invisible Nolan were standing in front of him. “Ha! We sure showed those hollow skulls back there how it’s done, eh? A little nap-trap is worth more than those death relics when it comes right down to it, I say.” He gave Adan a hearty slap on the shoulder, causing his hand to slip on the steering lever and forcing the transport to dip to the left. Adan jerked it back to center before the vehicle could descend too far and collide with the dunes.
“So where are you taking us in this desert loper? Not through those rocks, I hope?” Nox asked, gesturing at the landscape ahead.
“Yes, through those rocks,” Adan replied. “I lost a friend a few days ago on the other side of them and I have to find him.” Adan knew from his bioseine exactly where he and Gavin had been separated. The auto-map screen of the sovos indicated that it wouldn’t be long before they arrived back there.
Nox let out a loud cough and cleared his throat. “Now just set your heels in the sand a moment, gear-head. I was the one who dragged you out of the pit. I’m the one that says where you’re running this wreck to.”
Adan had wondered how long it would be before Nox unveiled his true intentions. Even though he no longer had his weapons, the Wayman was still a threat. Adan had little doubt Nox would turn on him if he wanted to, the same way he had on Will.
“Well, where is it you need to go?” Adan asked tentatively, looking away as if he were focused on piloting the duster, and scrutinizing the auto-map even though he already knew their exact position. “Perhaps we’re headed in the same direction.”
Adan’s remark caught Nox off guard. He scratched his beard and sputtered out mono-syllables as if he had suddenly lost the ability to speak.
“Go-off-um, oh, uh-er…” he sputtered. “Yes, that’s a very good question. Where am I going?”
“I’ll make an agreement with you,” Adan said quickly, taking advantage of Nox’s confusion. “If you’ll let me look for my friend, after I find him I’ll take you to wherever you want to go—or I can even drop you off on my way if you like,” he added hastily, hoping the latter would be the case.
“Well…” Nox continued mumbling to himself, making odd faces as if the kern wasn’t sitting all that well in his stomach. “I suppose that suits me fine enough. My thral is gutted. I just wanted to put as much distance between me and Hull as possible. I hadn’t really spiced my kern enough to think about where I was headed once I got out.”
Without warning he backhanded Adan in the face, sending him stumbling.
“What was that for?” Adan shot back as he hurried to grab hold of the steering column again, his cheek stinging like mad.
“That’s how we make agreements in the thrals,” Nox said. “Now you slap me back and we’ll call it a deal.”
As tempting as Nox’s offer was, Adan shook his head. “No, that’s all right,” he said, massaging his throbbing cheek. “I don’t need to hit you back. I’ll keep my word. You can count on that.”
“Fine, suit yourself,” Nox said, wagging his head from side to side and grinning so that his ragged teeth poked out from behind his lips. As always, the Wayman’s smile gave Adan an unsettling feeling.
Adan was not entirely sure he had made the right decision in agreeing to stay with Nox, but opposing the Wayman didn’t seem like a very wise choice either. He only hoped his decision would not come back to haunt him. In the meantime, he kept an eye on the Wayman, wary of any sign that Nox might change his disposition.
And so, uneasily, their journey continued, sending them into the rock fields. The formations were mostly low enough for the duster to fly over. If not, Adan simply swerved around them. He didn’t bother using the lentes during the day to conserve their charge, but towards nightfall they were still in the rocks and the shadows began to lengthen so he slipped them back on to better navigate the treacherous terrain. Nox, who did not have the benefit of such vision became increasingly anxious whenever they passed close to the dark shapes looming up at them. After a time, his fitful exclamations became so distracting Adan used his bioseine to turn down his hearing so that all he could hear was a low murmur in the background.
Focused as he was on piloting the duster, he gave a startled shout when Nox grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. Nox glared at Adan as if he had done something terribly wrong. Adan felt certain the Wayman was about to lash out at him, whether verbally or physically. He re-engaged his normal level of hearing in hopes that it would be the first of the two.
“What is it, Nox?” Adan asked.
“It’s pitch dark!” Nox shouted. “We’re going to crash if you don’t stop this ship. And if you don’t, I’m going to throw you off and then jump myself. I can’t take any more of this!” Though the temperature in the Vast never changed much, even at night, Nox’s kaff was soaked clean through with sweat.
“We’re almost there,” Adan assured him, but Nox refused to calm down, screaming as they passed beneath the shadow of an enormous rock.
“You’re trying to punish me for what happened in Tasada, aren’t you?” Nox cried, grabbing Adan’s arm and wringing it with both hands, like he was desperate to get them clean.
Adan winced and tried to pull away, but Nox held him fast. “No, Nox. Forget about that. Just hold on a little longer. These glasses let me see as if it were midday—better actually. I wouldn’t continue if it wasn’t safe.”
Nox let go of his arm and kicked the side of the ship. “A curse on all relics. If it were up to me, we’d drop all this gear into a vat of taline and be done with it.”
Nox quieted down after that, but not much, continuing to bellow and curse until they arrived at the crash site. He jumped out of the duster the moment
it stopped and threw himself face first into the nearest dune, blubbering about how unfair life was for ignorant “shafts” like himself and how men were never meant to fly. Eventually his ravings petered out and his grumbling turned to snores, echoing across the desert like a distant avalanche.
But Adan couldn’t sleep. He could not rest until he found Gavin. Every moment he delayed, his friend might be closer to death or further away if he’d been captured. He doubted Gavin would still be at the crash site after so much time had passed, but it was the only information he had to go on. If he wasn’t near the wreck of the lev, Adan hoped to at least find some indication as to where he might have gone after the crash.
He was nearing exhaustion, but if he had to, he could use his bioseine to keep going without sleep. He intended to go on looking until his system shut him down. The only thing that mattered was finding Gavin.
Adan found the remains of the lev with little difficulty. Even though the crash and his ensuing capture had been chaotic moments where he’d been running for his life, his bioseine led him to the exact spot.
Most of the scrap from their ship was covered in sand now. He pulled away the smaller sections, but the larger ones were far too heavy. If Gavin was trapped underneath any of them, Adan doubted he would still be alive, but he decided to check there first. He looked around for a long bar or something similar to wedge under the panels and perhaps lift them using leverage. He wandered around for some time, but found nothing.
Then he remembered the cutter. Running over to the spot where he’d been captured by the Waymen, it only took a moment to find it. He shoved it onto his arm and headed back to the crash site. His feet were dragging now; he wasn’t sure how much longer he could hold out. When he arrived back, he started slicing up the larger pieces of the lev with the yellow blade, but found no sign of Gavin.
His searching was not entirely in vain, though, for he managed to salvage two important pieces of equipment from the wreckage.
The first item was the shifter. It was battered and scuffed, but amazingly, still powered on when he turned the dials. With it, he could at last make something to eat.
The other item gave Adan mixed feelings; it was the chronotrace. It had actually been lying out in the open, all by itself, but he didn’t notice it until his work with the cutter was finished. It, too, was badly dented, but still in working order. The bismine array had separated from the rest of the device and some of the chips were missing, but after a long search, he found all of them and reattached the array and restored power to it.
But the fact that Gavin’s precious invention was left lying out in the middle of the desert only confirmed what Adan feared most: Gavin was no longer there. His friend would never have abandoned the chronotrace on his own; he must have been captured. And if that was so, the chances of finding him were bleaker than ever.
Ten
A New Trace
Two forces had been present when the lev crashed. Adan was certain the Waymen hadn’t taken Gavin since Nolan sent his own men to find him; that left only the somatarchs. As far as Adan knew, most of them had been killed in the fight with the Waymen, but Adan had not seen everything. If some of them had survived, they could have easily captured Gavin and carried him off under cover of the storm.
Adan was tempted to despair at this thought until a realization flashed through his mind: he had the chronotrace. That could tell him Gavin’s fate.
He set to work at once, powering on the device and instructing it to begin its initial scan of the area. Since the crash had happened several days ago, he would have to let it run for some time, but once it had gone back far enough, he could run a backtrace to find out where Gavin had been taken, following him in the same way they had followed the stranger who had taken the extractor.
Adan left the softly glowing device to run its course and picked up the cutter. He slid it onto his arm. There was plenty of abandoned machinery nearby so it wasn’t long before he had a few dozen plugs for the shifter. His eyes drooping and his limbs heavy, he slid the plugs into the black box and watched as first the ingredients for mosh and then the those for atol dropped out into a pair of containers he found in the wreckage of the lev. He quickly mixed them together, then gobbled down half of what he’d made and sealed up the rest for later.
After placing the cutter and shifter in the storage compartment on the ship, he found a clean stretch of sand and collapsed. Giving the snoring Nox one last wary glance, he let sleep overtake him at last, instructing his bioseine to wake him if it perceived a threat or when the chronotrace finished, whichever came first.
By the time Adan stirred, Nox was already up, staring at the pulsating chronotrace, grinding his decayed teeth so loudly it sounded like they were made of metal. He looked both mesmerized and apprehensive at the same time, and barely gave Adan a glance.
The glowing ring around the base of the chronotrace dimmed until it was barely visible in the pale light of the morning. The spinning half-sphere slowly wound down as the trace completed.
“When can we leave this place?” Nox asked. “These relics give me the shivers.”
“Soon. I just have to find out what path my friend took.”
“Who is this friend of yours, anyway?” Nox asked. “Is he a gear-head, too?”
“Yes. He was the man Will rescued in Oasis—the city your people thought was Tasada.”
“Ah, of course. The one who threatened to kill me and my men.” Nox gave Adan a sinister look. “I do hope you find him.”
Adan turned away and tried to forget the dark look on Nox’s face. He hoped Nox would be long gone by the time he found Gavin.
“You can probably go ahead and wait for me on the ship,” Adan told him. “I just have to check to see that there weren’t any problems with the trace. It will only take a moment.”
Nox perked up at Adan’s words and shuffled off towards the duster.
Adan closed his eyes and connected his mind with the chronotrace. He instructed it to begin playback at the crash scene four days ago.
The trace began to play just before the lev flipped. Adan saw his body flying through the air in slow motion. He winced involuntarily as he watched himself slam into a sandbank. Seeing how far he’d been thrown, Adan marveled that he had not received any major injuries.
Gavin had been thrown in a direction perpendicular to where Adan landed, but he had not been thrown nearly as far. From the trace, Adan could tell that Gavin’s zoetic pulse was still active and that the crash had not killed him, though his garrick had been torn in several places and he lay face down in the sand.
Adan sped the trace forward one microslice until Gavin stirred. Gavin rose to his feet and walked towards the remains of the lev. Adan began to hope that perhaps his friend had walked away on his own power, but Gavin noticed something beyond the edge of the trace and began to run. He only got a short distance before a white-robed somatarch on skimmers swooped down and picked him up under its arm. Adan froze the trace. The creature looked as soulless and inhuman inside the projection as it did in real-life. It was bleeding in several places, but nothing severe enough to hinder it since somatarchs felt no pain.
There was no point in watching the rest of the trace play out. It would use up unnecessary amounts of power and, more importantly, it would take precious time. Adan could always pull it up later if he needed to. With every passing moment, Gavin got further and further away; Adan had to start after him at once.
He disconnected his mind from the chronotrace and headed towards the duster, picking up the precious device as he went. Nox was sitting in the doorway of the ship, his pudgy legs dangling over the side. When he saw Adan heading towards him he jumped to his feet and clapped his hands.
“Finally!” he blurted out, his eyes aglow.
“I’ve locked onto Gavin’s trail,” Adan said as he stepped onto the ship. He set the chronotrace down beside the steering column and engaged the duster’s power. In a few moments they had risen once again above the g
rayish sand of the Vast. “We should find him soon.”
That moment could not come soon enough for Adan. Shoving the velocity lever forward, the ship surged into motion, sending them hurtling out across the field of ruined machines.
The duster zipped across the desert, careening above the sand like the shuttle of a loom, leaving behind a thread of displaced dust and debris in its wake. Nox, for all his anxiousness to resume their journey, soon dropped off into a dead sleep. He lay at the back of the sovos, propped up against the outer wall, snoring away. He could not have been all that tired, having slept the better part of the last two days, but whatever the cause of his drowsiness, Adan was glad to have the ship to himself.
As the duster sped along Gavin’s trail, Adan checked the chronotrace from time to time to get a snapshot of how the trace was progressing. He saw that the somatarch was using skimmers to cross the desert, carrying Gavin on its shoulders. The sovos was about twice as fast as the air skates so Adan was steadily gaining ground. Even so, because he had started a few days behind, he knew he would not be overtaking Gavin anytime soon. One thing he did know, though: the somatarch was headed in the direction of Oasis.
While Adan had little desire to return to that city, there was nothing he could do about it; he had to follow the trace. He kept the velocity lever in full forward position, using the lentes to travel through the night, knowing that any delay might mean the difference between finding Gavin dead or alive.
On their second day of travel, Nox, in one of his rare waking moments, seemed at last to realize where they were headed.
“You’re taking us back to that machine city, aren’t you?” he said.
“Yes, that looks like where my friend went.”
Adan expected some sort of protest from the Wayman, knowing how much he seemed to fear technology, but Nox was strangely silent and a short time later the sound of his snoring could be heard once again above the wind. Adan wondered why the Wayman chose to stay with him. Even if his own thral had been destroyed, there had to be others he could join somewhere in these lands. But perhaps Nox didn’t want to go back. Perhaps he preferred the freedom of striking out on his own. Adan didn’t know enough about him, or about Waymen in general, to understand what his motives might be. Whatever his intentions, he hoped they would not involve traveling with him much longer. Adan would never feel completely safe in Nox’s presence. Even in sleep, the Wayman’s face often formed itself into unsettling expressions, as if he were intending some malice even in his dreams.
The Chronotrace Sequence- The Complete Box Set Page 44
