Driftmetal

by J. C. Staudt

  Driftmetal

  Segment One

  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

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Afterword

  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 m
y 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.

  I should probably mention that I came up working as a mechanic in my dad’s shop. That was before I learned how to make a dishonest living. Dear old dad, I thought, without missing him one bit.

  I heard the undercarriage clank as the dark-skinned man’s grappler bit through the truck bed. The hovertruck faltered and the man was floating up, up on his line, holding onto his hat while his purple duster slapped at his knees. I lost sight of him under me, cursing the hovertruck for its lack of see-through flooring. I’m a good driver, and I can fight, but fighting and driving at the same time is a feat best left to stuntmen and cityfolk.

  I shuffled through the glove box, searching the cockpit for something heavy. I could hear the soft metallic clinks of hands and feet along the chassis. A shame I hadn’t gotten the dark-skinned man’s name, since I liked being able to brag about who I’d killed. I took off a boot and kissed it. When the man’s arm came through the open window, I grabbed his wrist and punched the grappler through the sole of my boot, triggering the prongs. Then I kicked the door open and cut the engine.

  I bailed, using the boot as a step and holding onto the wire like a rappelling line. The dark-skinned man writhed against the door frame, my weight holding his arm through the window. The winch inside his forearm began to smoke as it tried to reverse the direction. Which it did, after a couple seconds. Shucks. That did not go like I wanted it to. Next I knew, I was being hauled up toward the truck. Now the engine was off, and the truck was coming down.

  I let go of the wire and fell. I hit the platform from two stories up, an awkward landing that made my teeth rattle like pebbles in a landslide. The hovertruck was listing sideways and falling past the platform, fast. I could see the dark-skinned man, caught against the underside with nowhere to go, my boot gliding up toward him on the wire. There was a rush of wind as the truck tumbled past, and then he was gone.

  When the hovertruck hit the Churn, the fireball wasn’t as big or impressive as the hovercell’s had been. Just an uninspired puff of flame and a brief column of gray smoke that blew away in the wind below the first platform. The dark-skinned man’s hat drifted down and swayed to rest in front of me. It had been a shame to ruin a good pair of boots, but at least I’d gotten an ugly hat out of the deal. A fitting end to the life of another law-lover, I thought.

  The next hovertruck in line was just as cumbersome to drive as the first, but it had the benefit of being lighter by one law-lover. I tailed Bannock for a while, following in the drift-town’s wake until I could land without causing a scene. The guys in the crow’s nest could suck on my solenoid if they wanted to clear me first. I knew they were just doing their jobs, but I didn’t care about their jobs. I’d been avoiding the life of an honest working man for years. And I’d been away too long to fool with procedure; I had to get back to her.

  The town was a clockwork mass of sprawling gothic architecture and spooky manor houses as old as the patch of ground Bannock had been ripped away from. In the ages since, the inhabitants had built all the way out to the edges in some places. For the less faint of heart, there were side-bolted apartments overlooking the Churn.

  I was a wanted man, but I made my way through the cobbled streets as though I wasn’t. The stream was whipping my hair around my face as I came around to the edge of the floater, and there she was.

  Ostelle, my rusty clunker of a streamboat. Gorgeous as the day she was born, if a little worse for the wear. I came aboard and entered the captain’s quarters to find it rank with a sour-smelling crowd. My crew. Everything went quiet when I entered the room.

  “Why are there so many people in here?” I wanted to know.

  “Cause we’re havin’ a meeting. Where you been all day, ya lackwit? And what’s with the stupid hat?”

  My dear old dad, always the
charmer.

  I flipped the old man an obscene gesture. “I’ve been getting pinched and almost beaten to dust in the Churn. The hat’s a souvenir. Where’ve you been?”

  “Well shoot, son, I been right here, runnin’ things while you were out playing dress-up. Why didn’t you bluewave us?”

  “Couldn’t, on account of they stole all my tech. I could’ve been rotting away in a Civvy prison, for all you knew. I’ve been gone a whole night and day and you couldn’t send one guy after me?”

  “I thought you done took off with one of them tavern wenches and left us,” dad said, nonchalant.

  “You know I’d never leave my boat on purpose, dad.”

  “Your boat? Who keeps this bucket of driftmetal together, is it you? Cause last time I checked—”

  “Alright, shut up. Our boat.”

  “Cap’n Jakes?”

  “Yeah,” my dad and I both said at the same time. We glared at each other, then at the man who’d spoken.

  Mr. Leigam Irkenbrand hesitated, his beetled eyes darting back and forth between us. He was the boat’s bluewave radioman; our mouth in the stream. He had been frail and thin, even back then, with a prominent cleft chin, a small nose and a thick head of gray locks pulled back into a tight ponytail. “Marshals are on the comm. Chatter about a couple of hovertrucks reported missing.”

  Dad looked at me. Every crewmember in the room looked at me.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, it was me.”

  I’d expected the place to erupt with cheers and smiles, but the news only brought silence.

  “Sounds like you’re in a bit of trouble, son,” Dad said. “Didn’t run off with no tavern wench after all. What’d you haul in?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Except for this hat. I was close to bringing in something really big this time.”

  Expectant silence became murmured disappointment.

  “The marshals are asking if we have any information on the thefts,” said Leigam.