by Maggie Allen
The ship quaked.
Rela stumbled and would have fallen off the narrow platform if not for a steady hand at her back. She did not have the time to thank the engineer who kept her up. She did not think she could, with her heart thudding so loud that it overtook the noise of the volcano. She was thankful for the support, even more thankful that her fingers did not tremble even as she did inside.
Tongs gripped the piece between the cogs, and she pulled. The piece—a piece of metal Rela did not recognize—came free, and she began the next part of the repairs. She put her tongs away and this time plunged both hands into the thruster, almost as though she meant to crawl inside like it was a large air duct.
It wasn't very large, and she certainly didn't fully fit inside. It felt like it swallowed her up, though, and she gulped with a little bit of nervousness.
Not the time to be afraid, she thought.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Rela gritted her teeth and used her hands to feel her way through the mechanicking.
"Hala!" she cried as she heard the clink and the whirr. "Done!"
It was right on time, because another quake took form, and this time, even the engineers' hands slipped from her back and her waist. It was time to go.
Someone gripped Rela's shoulder, urging her out of the thruster and back onto the hoverbike. She scrambled toward Iring, revving the engine, only to find—with panic now rushing in—that her bike had run out of fuel.
"Mabilis, mabilis!" the engineers screamed. One by one, they hauled themselves up on coils of rope, and like monkeys, started swinging themselves across to make it back onto the deck. Faster and faster they went, until it was just Rela.
In their hurry toward the deck, they had forgotten her. Forgotten the little delivery girl with the pink hoverbike. The pink hoverbike that had stopped working.
Rela did not know how to make it away from the thrusters without Iring, and she refused to leave her hoverbike on the platform. But if she stayed nearby when the airship began its ascent...she gulped. She'd be burnt as crisp as if she'd jumped straight into the mouth of the erupting volcano.
Aim for something great. Her father's words drummed inside her head as her heart continued to beat quickly through her chest. Her palms became sweaty, and her head began to ache. There must be some way to...
She saw the rope that the engineers used to make it onto the deck. Coils and coils of rope that could carry her weight and much more. Rela looked over at the deck and tried to gauge the proper distance between the thrusters and the next landing.
"Far," she muttered. "Much too far."
It would take her several broken cords to do what she needed to do.
Rela revved up Iring one more time in hopes that the hoverbike would give one final thrust. No luck. She bit her lip and loosened the sharp knife in her tool belt.
Still seated on the hoverbike, Rela lifted herself up, hands reaching toward the rope. She began to cut.
A brilliant idea was one thing. Executing it wonderfully was a whole thing in itself.
Rela kept her grip on the rope as she swung her hoverbike—and herself—across. Within moments she was swinging toward the next piece of hanging rope, and after a great deal of concentration—and timing—she'd cut the next line of rope and grabbed the two strands. She tied them around Iring, cut the previous pieces of rope, and swung again.
She did this three times. Then four. Then five.
The sixth time she almost missed, for that was when the thrusters came on, and the ship began to float up, up, up.
Rela gritted her teeth and focused. She cut the next rope, tied it around the hoverbike, cut off the previous rope, swung to the next. Cut, tie, cut, swing. Cut, tie, cut, swing.
It never seemed to end.
Until it finally did, and one final swing brought her—and Iring—crashing down onto the deck, this time with Rela hurtling downward with sheer gracelessness. She smacked onto the surface with a loud thwap as she rolled to the side and finally landed on her back, arms splayed out. She breathed once, twice.
Then she groaned and tried to get up.
The woman—the captain—helped her up, yelling words and phrases she could not quite hear. Rela's ears rang with the noise of the volcano and the thrusters, and she steadied herself before trying to speak. When she finally did open her mouth, it wasn't a line of thanks to the woman or the engineers. It wasn't to ask to be added to the woman's crew.
"My hoverbike," Rela said. Her eyes landed on Iring and she felt her heart explode into a million tiny pieces.
Iring had made it onto the deck as well, pink and brown and altogether very grimy. It had snapped into two pieces.
The hoverbike had broken on the last swing.
There were two things Rela loved most when it came to riding on an airship.
The first was the opportunity for travel. The airship in flight was a beautiful thing, passing through the skies with ease. It had moved north, following the flow of the wind for a time before it doubled back in a southerly direction. The islands below had been specks of brown and black and gray, the water almost luminescent at night, filled with jellyfish that made Rela shudder with dread. It wasn't until they were moving south that she could see the stark difference between the lands in the north and the lands she'd been more familiar with, mostly green and pale, muddy brown, numerous plants and rice paddies growing in the distance.
The captain, Caliso, had been grateful for Rela's help and had promised to take her where she needed to go. After the initial shock over her hoverbike, Rela had asked Caliso again for a place on her crew, though this time around, her heart wasn't really in it.
She'd missed her parents by then. It had taken one more glance at her broken hoverbike and the feel of the letter inside her vest pocket to remind her that she still had a mission to undertake before heading home, and she would need to find a way to get to the villagers who had gone missing. Perhaps they'd moved south. Most villagers tended to move south.
Rela refused to give up, so she'd pored over a map of Southern Pinas. When she'd asked the captain where the villagers would likely go, Caliso had pointed at a place on the map near Cebu City.
"Refugee Hills," Caliso said, wrinkling her nose. "Too close to Cebu City for my taste. But if that's where you want to go, we can take you there."
The captain had stayed silent for a time before she tilted her head, almost like an owl when it's glancing curiously at something in front of it. "Perhaps..."
Rela's ears twitched, and she tried not to blush.
"Perhaps in a few years, when you're ready." Caliso smiled. It wasn't a mocking smile or a malicious smile. It was a normal, natural smile. A comforting smile. "I may be persuaded to accept you on board. We could use another mechanic with us. Maria Makiling knows a lot of things break down in an airship, even one as advanced as mine."
It was a promise, Rela knew. And one day, Rela would eventually seek out that promise. When she stopped being a delivery girl.
But for the moment, while she waited to get to Refugee Hills to find the missing villagers, to deliver her mother's urgent letter, she still had one more thing to do.
Which led to her second favorite thing about riding on that airship: having access to a room full of scrap and volcano-tech.
She had lugged Iring's pieces into the workroom and had asked Caliso for full use of the parts there. The captain readily agreed, and Rela had gone to work.
"Build yourself one then," her mother had said.
Rela's mouth curled into a smile. One day, she would ride Caliso's airship again. One day, she would move on to build one herself. Aim for something great.
But first...
She twirled the wrench in her hand and looked at the parts on the table, already thinking about what pieces should go where, already recalling the times she'd watched repairmen and women mechanicking away in their workshops. She hummed as she did so, eyes focused on the problem at hand.
First, she was
going to rebuild her hoverbike.
Blaze-of-Glory Shoes
by Brandon Crilly
An Ottawa teacher by day, Brandon Crilly has been published in On Spec, Solarpunk Press, Third Flatiron Anthologies and other markets. His short story "Rainclouds" earned a semi-finalist spot in the fourth quarter of Writers of the Future 32. He has also released several SF chapbooks, including Science is for Real, which asks the question, "What would happen if Hollywood blockbusters followed actual science?" Find out more about Brandon's work at brandoncrilly.wordpress.com or by following him on Twitter: @B_Crilly.
Powaw had never seen a pair of shoes like the ones hanging above him.
They were suspended from one of the colony’s power lines, tied together by their laces, unmoving in the windless air. Even through the glare of his radiation suit’s helmet, Powaw could see the patterns of blue and yellow along the sides, and the logo for a company that didn’t exist anymore.
He glanced up and down the street again. The Old Colonies all looked the same these days: gray, abandoned and empty of life. The buildings in Nebula-Eight were squat, metal structures with very little color, and most only one story tall; the power line holding the shoes was strung between the only two-story buildings on the street. Powaw guessed that one was a general store of some sort, because of the sign out front showing a jolly, overweight figure in an apron. The building across from it looked like an office.
There were probably things they could use in the general store. If any supply containers were properly sealed when Nebula-Eight was attacked, the rations or basic materials inside would have been protected from the radiation. That was what the crew of the starship Aldrin looked for when they hopped from one colony to the next. He and his friends needed to finish examining the rest of this tiny side street, like Lieutenant Hayvers instructed, but their attention right now was just on the shoes.
Or at least Kelsi’s was. She was tapping her fingers together as her eyes flicked from the shoes to the power line and back again. Beside her, Tarek was standing perfectly still in his green radiation suit, seemingly staring at the open doorway of the office. It was difficult to tell where his eyes were pointed, thanks to the dark glasses they had found for him back on Nebula-Five.
He asked, “What do they look like?” His voice always sounded a bit tinny over their suits’ com system.
“Blue and yellow,” Powaw said, and he tried to describe the swirling designs in a way that Tarek would understand. His friend had been able to see when he was really young, so Powaw never had to explain what colors looked like, but he wasn’t an artist, and he wasn’t sure if he got the description right.
“They sound awesome,” Tarek said when he was finished. He tilted his head and smiled. “Good condition?”
“I don’t think anybody wore them before they got thrown up there,” Kelsi said. “Why would anybody do that to a perfectly good pair of shoes?”
Powaw shook his head. “Maybe they didn’t need them?”
“Remember that time Yoon tossed your set of styluses into the waste recycler?” Tarek said. “This is probably the same thing.”
“Huh. Yeah, could be.” Powaw tried to imagine kids like them running around Nebula-Eight, pulling pranks on each other, knowing that they could waste something like a pair of shoes because there would be another shipment of supplies on the way. Nobody on the Aldrin wasted anything if they could avoid it; they needed all the supplies they could make or scrounge.
Like a new pair of shoes, he thought, and imagined returning to Lieutenant Hayvers and the rest of the group—including his aunt, who was out collecting plant samples—and showing them that he and his friends could handle scavenging on their own.
“How are we going to get them down, though?” he asked.
“Working on it,” Kelsi murmured as her eyes kept flicking around.
“Is the line close to any windows?” Tarek asked.
Powaw shook his head. “No, I don’t think we’d be able to reach.” When Tarek waved his metal cane, Powaw added, “The lines look like they’re bolted in place. Sorry.”
Some of the adults had laser cutters that could break the power line, but Powaw didn’t want to go back and ask for their help. Lieutenant Hayvers had been against letting them go off alone—“We’re going to trust the kids to spot something useful on their own?” he had said—and even though his aunt and some of the others had defended them, Powaw felt the need to prove that he and his friends could pull their own weight.
He had overheard his aunt and one of the engineers, Luke Reed, talking in the galley a few weeks ago, and he hadn’t been able to get the conversation out of his head. Luke had said, “We’re stretching everything to the limit. The engines, the shields … the Aldrin wasn’t supposed to be out this long without a proper stay at a space dock.”
“We’ll make do,” his aunt had said, calm as always.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Luke had muttered. Powaw had been about to slink back to his cabin when he said, “You ever get tired of this? Jumping from one colony to the next, scrounging what we can, knowing that we’ll just be jumping again in a few days?”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t ever want to maybe relax for a day? Have a little fun?”
His aunt had laughed. “We still have fun sometimes. We just have different priorities. That will change eventually.”
“Here’s hoping…”
It had never dawned on Powaw before how much stress the adults must be under. Not only did they have to maintain the Aldrin, but there were sixteen young people on the ship as well, most of them younger than Powaw and his friends. As he stared at the shoes, he realized that he didn’t want to collect them just because someone would be able to wear them. He wanted to walk back to the others, holding the shoes up in the air and grinning like an idiot, just to see the adults smile—maybe even laugh. That had to be a contribution that was worth it.
“We need a ladder or something,” Kelsi said, breaking his thoughts.
“I haven’t seen one yet.”
“We could stack some boxes. Maybe bring a table out here and put the boxes on top. It’s only … eight meters up, I think.”
Powaw checked the clock on his helmet’s HUD. They only had twenty minutes before they were supposed to report back to Lieutenant Hayvers. “Do we have enough time?”
“Not if we keep standing around!” Kelsi said and dashed off toward the office.
Powaw sighed and turned to the general store, just as Tarek asked, “Okay, where do we go?”
He paused, not sure what to say. This was always the issue when Tarek went along on a mission. Powaw admired his friend’s intelligence and his eagerness to help, but there was only so much that he could really do. He would never suggest that Tarek stay back on the ship, but he had heard Lieutenant Hayvers refer to Tarek as a liability once, and part of him couldn’t help but agree.
But he and Tarek had been friends long before the Old Colonies were attacked, and so he said, “The general store. We might get lucky and find a ladder. Come on.”
They walked side-by-side, Tarek’s metal cane brushing back and forth over the ground. He tapped it against the general store’s front step and then the entrance to guide his way through, and Powaw followed behind him.
“Don’t get eaten!” Kelsi’s voice chimed over the com.
Powaw shook his head. The adults liked to tell stories about monsters that lived in the Old Colonies, describing bizarre creatures mutated by the radiation. The younger children on the Aldrin still got frightened, but Powaw and his friends were old enough to laugh the stories off; there were no such things as monsters. Just whoever had attacked the Old Colonies, and that definitely wasn’t some eight-tentacled octopus thing that spewed fire.
Everything in the general store was coated in dust. There was a long counter at the back; behind it, a sign listed different goods and their prices. Metal containers were arranged in groups around the space to show the colonists what h
ad been delivered; some of it could have been collected for free as part of the colonists’ weekly ration, but the rest would have been bought, usually on credit. Most of this was useless now: food turned to ash, electronics fried and so on. Any basic materials the Aldrin could use would be stored in a warehouse elsewhere for the others to find.
Tarek rapped the side of the containers with his cane and cocked his head. “We won’t be able to drag these outside before we have to report back.”
“How can you tell?”
“I’m getting better at listening to vibrations, even through the suit,” Tarek said with a smile. “A full container rattles differently than an empty one.”
“Huh. Very cool.” Powaw looked around the store but didn’t see a ladder or anything they could move quickly. There was a doorway beside the counter, leading farther into the store, and a staircase at the back. “You want to help me check the back?”
Tarek led the way again. A window to the right caught Powaw’s eye, and he wandered over to examine it. The glass had been blown out long ago, probably during the attack, but something had left a stain around the outside. At first Powaw thought the metal was scorched, but when he ran his gloved hand over it, he thought it felt sticky. Weird.
He was about to ask Kelsi over the com system, since she was better at science than he was, when he heard Tarek’s voice: “Hey, I might have found something.”
The back room was crowded with sealed containers, just like Powaw had hoped. He scanned the labels and saw several marked FOOD, plus a few other materials the Aldrin could use. “Good find! Did you just guess what’s in these?”
“That’s not what I meant,” Tarek said. His friend was in a far corner of the room, facing away. “I was going to wait for you to tell me. What’s in them?”
“Food, other stuff.” Powaw frowned as he approached his friend. “What were you talking about?”
