Патрик Томлинсон - Children of the Divide

[CONNECTION FAILURE. INSUFFICIENT SIGNAL STRENGTH.]

“Shit…” Jian took a deep breath. There was more power to cut, of course, but then the question was how many more attempts the laser could take before it threw in the towel?

One way to find out. Jian went back to the fuse box and shut down the cryo tank fans, the thruster banks, Navigation lights, put the main computer itself into standby, then killed main cabin life support. It would take the flight deck a couple of hours to cool off to the point he’d have to worry about hypothermia, and with only him breathing the air, he’d freeze long before he ran out of O 2 anyway. Worse came to worst, he could always crawl back into his long-endurance suit.

[CONNECTION FAILURE. INSUFFICIENT SIGNAL STRENGTH.]

“Damnit!” Jian punched the console in white hot anger and immediately regretted it. Something in his hand gave way with a POP . The metacarpal behind his right pinky finger looked like someone had tried to pitch a tent.

Jian inhaled sharply and cursed his stupidity. The break was clean, and he’d managed not to make a compound fracture out of it, but in a few minutes, it would hurt like hell, and he didn’t look forward to setting his own bone.

There was one more thing to try, he knew. But it would mean physically rewiring a few components, a task that would be all the more difficult with only his off hand to work with.

The Buran didn’t have internal power generation. No miniaturized fusion plant recharged its batteries, nor did it sport a passive solar array. In atmo, her oxygen-breathing turbine and ramjet engines bled off some of their output to power the electrical systems. But out here in space, all of her electrical came from fuel cells which tapped into the same internal reserves of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen reserves that fed her rockets.

These fuel cells used a chemical reaction between the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen to create electricity, extracting power from the fuel in a somewhat slower, more subdued way than when the two elements met in a combustion chamber. Either way, the end result was consumable energy and pure water. Still, available stores of hydrogen and O 2 put a hard cap on the amount of electricity the shuttle could produce and still have enough fuel left in the tanks to go anywhere useful.

Jian intended to use all of that spare fuel to charge up the shuttle’s bank of quick-discharge capacitors for a single, high energy burst transmission that would last until the laser burned itself out.

It took almost ninety minutes to make the necessary modifications to the Buran ’s electric grid, and another twenty-five for the fuel-cells to convert three full days of fuel into electricity and pack it into the capacitor bank. Then another twelve minutes to convince the shuttle’s safety systems to accept the whole insane, jerry-rigged system without complaint.

With sweat pouring from his forehead in spite of the growing chill of the flight deck, and his right hand throbbing with pain, Jian pressed the icon to power up the whisker laser once more and held his breath.

[CONNECTION ESTABLISHED.]

Thirty

Benson’s quadcopter passed low over a warzone.

“Ho. Lee. Shit,” Korolev whispered.

“Cuut be merciful,” Kexx said solemnly.

“I’ll need one of those rifles,” Sakiko added with all sincerity.

The scene below them was appropriately apocalyptic. The Native Quarter was quiet, eerily hollow. But it only took a glance to understand why. The Atlantians had emptied their ghetto and moved on the rest of the city in force. A wave of native youths crashed against Shambhala’s defenders and scattered them like leaves in a strong autumn wind. The Glades were already lost. Benson spotted his home of the last eighteen years as they flew by. It had not been spared.

The muscles in Benson’s jaw clenched involuntarily. “I just trimmed those topiaries,” he said, trying to force some levity onto the grim situation, but it didn’t take. Smoke columns billowed up into the sky from a dozen or more structural fires, which was no mean trick. Humanity had spent the last two centuries and change living onboard a starship. Fire consumed irreplaceable resources, burned through precious oxygen, poisoned the air, and clogged the environmental filters. In space, it was the greatest threat they faced outside of catastrophic meteor collisions. Out of necessity, they’d gotten very good at fire-resistant materials and fire-suppression systems. You really needed to want a building to burn to get it to stay lit.

Public transit was already offline after someone had torn up a length of track, electrocuting themselves in the process. Benson had ordered Korolev to divert the quadcopter from the airfield and land it right on the roof of the station house.

They’d had to dodge a thunderstorm on the way back from the mine that ate up almost fifteen minutes of flight time. Their drone’s batteries were being drawn down to the dregs. A shutdown warning sounded through the cabin, alerting everyone that the quadcopter would perform a forced landing in fifteen seconds.

“We’re not going to make the station,” Korolev said.

“Override the shutdown,” Benson said.

“Are you serious?”

“They build spare capacity into everything. We’ll make it.”

“And if we’re short?”

“We’ll autorotate down.”

Korolev blew out a long breath and worked the controls. The alarm chime and countdown disappeared. “No offense, coach, but I’m going to take her a little lower. Just in case.”

“Oh, no, please do. I insist.”

Korolev set the copter’s altitude to ten meters, which was still a hell of a long way to fall if it came to that. The two- and three-story rooftops of Shambhala’s residential district swept by underneath them at disturbingly close proximity. The nest of com antennas perched on the station house’s roof came into view. Another two hundred meters. They were going to make it.

Right up until the propellers stopped spinning.

The quadcopter died around them, first the even whine of the electric flight motors, then the augmented reality overlay and heads up display in the canopy. Benson’s stomach lurched as the quad abruptly lost airspeed and altitude.

“Brace! Brace! Brace!” Korolev shouted frantically just as the bottom of their fuselage clipped the first rooftop and compressed the spines of everyone aboard into their fight chairs. Everyone except maybe Kexx, who didn’t technically have a spine, but–

The forward arms of the quadcopter crashed headlong into the second story of a café. The motors snapped off at the roots among the clinking of a thousand shards of shattered window glass. The copter held there for a long moment, until gravity won out and dragged the back of it towards Gaia’s embrace as it slid down the building’s faux-brick exterior, ripping off chunks of veneer as it fell.

The rear motors hit the sidewalk first, shattering the propellers and fraying the carbon composite of the structural members that held them. What remained of the quad fell backwards and came to rest upside down next to a gelato cart abandoned by its owner.

Korolev hung from his seat’s five-point harness. “Spare capacity, huh, coach?”

“Shut up, Pavel.” Benson craned his head back to the rest of the passenger compartment. “Everyone OK back there?”

“I am intact,” Kexx said.

“Still need that rifle,” Sakiko answered.