CHAPTER TEN
Lem
Across the city Lem squeezed tighter behind the engine turbine of the bus as it lumbered through the air just above Revelon’s clearing streets. The spindly white spaceport, Lem’s target, loomed just ahead. The hot wind died as the ship slowed.…
Not a moment too soon. Her fingers burned, still gripping the underside of the bus’s wing with her static cling. Hurry up. Her elbows shook. Blood rushed to her head, pulsing in her face. Hurry up and land, you slow ass civvy pilot. It wasn’t electromagnetic skill at this point, just a straight-up test of muscle failure. Lem breathed, trying to speak patience into the churning rush in her belly—
Except—uh-oh.
Lem expected the bus to turn up toward one of the spaceport’s landing platforms—to the “branches” of the metal “tree” reaching over the city.
But the bus didn’t turn at all. It was heading straight for the spaceport’s stem. The stalk. The trunk. Like, collision-course.
“Oh shyte, Njande, it’s a polymerwall,” Lem grumbled. She was getting tired of not being able to get into places.
Lem eased her cling to scuttle across the wing, over the top of it, scanning for somewhere else, anywhere else, to climb. The ship began to penetrate the wall—
There was nowhere to climb. The spaceport wall ahead was perfectly smooth, above and below—and oof, a long way down to the tiny city streets and that huge ventilation port in the ground, fan blades spinning spinning spinning behind that giant grate.
Uh … well, Lem could probably hold on to the trunk with her static cling, but actually reaching the nearest platform stories and stories above would take hours she didn’t have—and what happened if her muscles gave out or her powers flickered?
The wall had swallowed half the ship now. Its edge slurped across the helm in slow motion toward Lem.
“Do I just cut a hole in the tower, Njande?” No, she still needed to stay incognito to keep troops away from here and focused on Jei—
But she needed to shut this place down now to keep the Growen from summoning new ships.
Oh shyte. The wall oozed across the bus’s dorsal wing; Lem was standing on the edge of the back tail now—need to decide, need to decide—
A crashing crackle sounded across the city. Over her shoulder, Lem could see the blue explosions lighting up the dark edge of the jungle under a zipping rainbow of oxidizer cartridges. She couldn’t make out Jei’s distant figure on top of the water tower, but she knew she was now late.
“Filk it.” Lem whipped out her mace and smashed the polymerwall, surfing the back of the bus into the spaceport through a cloud of rubble.
Time to bring the chaos.
An alarm screamed. The huge hollow white tube stretched for stories above and below Lem. She had seconds to take stock of the vehicles buzzing around—a few other squat-winged buses, a handful of moving elevator platforms—and moments to stop the whirring alarm. Where was it? Lem’s balance shifted as the bus under her boots turned upward—where—where—shyte, the bus was almost vertical now. Lem crouched and stuck a hand on the bus tail, rubbing it up and down to ensure static stick. The proximity alarm?
“Filk it.” Lem fired an arc of electricity from her finger back to the wall. The bolt danced across the tube, bouncing back and forth along the crumbling hole Lem had entered, illuminating the whole huge panel of damaged material. The shock took out the panel’s sensors; the alarm silenced.
Not that it made much difference—after that alert Lem now had less than two minutes to stop all outgoing transmissions and seal off the landing platforms.
But—oof—her torso slammed against the back of the bus as it climbed stories; she hung vertical now, her entire body-weight dangling on static cling from just one palm. Well. She did need air control at the top of the tower. She’d just planned on taking an elevator, not flapping around like a leech on a sabertoothed cat. There was a hand-crank-powered rescue lift that didn’t require DNA access—for emergencies and power outages—parked on the lowest spaceport platform, where she and Jei had thought buses landed. That’s what she was supposed to be riding right now. There was another crank-lift lying somewhere on the tower floor far, far below her now, but that meant less than nothing …
Ooh, but there was another elevator on its way up now: an automated white service platform carrying four Growen blitzers in gray cloth uniforms. Lem hurled herself forward, ran up the back of the bus, and leapt for the platform in a ball of sparks.
The blitzers panicked—apparently not used to girls hurtling at them through the air—two of them raised weapons to fire, two yelled about damaging the tower, one fired anyway, the cartridge swerved around Lem’s electrical field, and Lem slammed against the side-rails of the elevator gut-first. She grunted as the air burst out of her, almost unaware of the pain as she flipped herself up and over the railing to hit two blitzers in the face with her boots.
“No armor today, guys?” she asked. Her voice sounded like a cough: wow, that bar took more out of her than she expected. She ripped the gun off one of their belts, yanked back the slide while her finger clicked it to stun, and bzip, bzip, bzip-bzip—
All four blitzers hit the deck unconscious. “Shyte, I shoulda used the thing I brought with me,” Lem remembered: she still had the gun on her belt with the inky sleep capsules.
Thirty seconds. Thirty seconds to seal off the landing platforms and stop all outgoing calls. Lem snapped her mace back onto her belt and ripped a small black button transmitter off the jacket of the guy closest to her.
“Attention, this is an emergency transmission,” she spat into the button as the elevator flew toward the ceiling. “There is a biological weapon incoming. Seal off all landing pads immediately.”
“Message received, this is the tower—who is this?”
“General Johnson, Control Number 3-215,” Lem recited her dead former Growen identity code from memory, with a pompous voice to match: “And dammit, you imbecile, this is an emergency! Did you not hear the alarm?”
“Well, I’m going to need to verify that, sir or ma’am, we have a situation at the end of town and we’re in the middle of calling in reinforcem—”
“Oh, shut up,” Lem growled. Fifteen seconds and the elevator still wasn’t near the traffic control center yet. Lem looked around for options, eyes narrowed against the rushing air blasting down from above—but there wasn’t a faster ride than this one. With most of the civilians in curfew, and most of the Growen forces dealing with Jei, the buses had all parked, and except for a few elevators this place was mostly empty. And it wasn’t like she could scale the tower on her own. So then what?
“Show me something please, Njande,” Lem growled.
A large water pipe ran up the side of the tower.
Press in case of fire, said a pale silver button on the elevator control panel.
“All right, I guess we have a fire.” Lem said. If she remembered right, the spaceport also drew water from the western water tower they’d polluted. She yanked her atmosphere hood from her left cargo pocket and slipped on some gloves. Skin covered, she punched the button.
Massive sprinklers burst throughout the tower. Lem heard cursing through the transmitter—and then silence.
No one would be calling in reinforcements in their sleep.
“All right then.” The contaminated water struck Lem’s masked hood with a heavy pitter-patter that reminded her of huddling under giant leaves with Cinta, hunting for mud-grubs. Shyte, this whole planet made her miss him. Hopefully his mission was going well on Forge—
Uh-oh. The elevator platform didn’t seem to plan on stopping as it neared the ceiling. “Ceiling’s a filking polymerwall, too, Njande,” Lem grumbled. The guards could phase through to the room above with their DNA as keys, but Lem was about to be squashed like a mud grub in Mali’s protein flour. She whipped out her mace again and thrust the glowing bulb above herself—
Too slow, bad angle, not enough room to swing! The ceiling resisted with such force Lem’s shoulder was yanked out of joint. Pain shrieked down her arm as she slipped with a curse—
But her mace wedged at an angle, spikes in the ceiling and handle on the lift floor, temporarily stopping the elevator. She was un-squashed for now.
Not for long, though. The elevator’s boosters whined; the surface under Lem’s boots jittered as the lift’s gears ground and rockets struggled against her mace. Railings whirred and folded beside her, trying to prep for docking. The ceiling cracked, and oozed, super-heated by her weapon’s spikes; a horrid chemical smell stung Lem’s nostrils as the staff began to melt through the elevator floor, too.
Shyte, the floor was breaking faster than the ceiling. “Yo, Njande, I need to stand on this!” Lem cried out.
She almost thought she could feel him chuckle.
He wouldn’t.
Would he?
You’re going to get him killed.
Oh man, not now.
He’s going to die because you’re too slow.
The hissing threat pulsed through Lem’s brain in time with the stabbing throb of her dislocated shoulder. Lem felt cold fingers reaching through her back, into her chest, as if squeezing her lungs—
It’s just the Accuser. He’s a nobody, she forced herself to breathe—
But her body panicked and with a strangled roar Lem gripped the mace in her other hand and shoved her way through the ceiling. The elevator slammed in place beneath her; inertia sent her tumbling forward into the center of the tower control room.
Finally.
Lem was surrounded by three hundred and sixty degrees of computers and windows. Sleeping bodies lay on the floor in puddles of azure liquid, glowing in the soft shadows cast by the monitors and the setting sun.
Lem had to close those platforms and prevent reinforcements. She scrambled forward for the emergency lock, a huge red lever jutting out between two huge computing towers—she dropped her mace, gripped with her good hand, and yanked.
A pre-recorded emergency message blared over the speakers and flashed on every computer screen, warning nearby ships to stay away. This emergency message would override any other outgoing transmissions on all frequencies within a 10-kilometer radius. Outside, a clear dome closed over every platform, sealing off every branch of the metal tree. Quarantine procedures: no one in or out of the port.
Lem breathed a sigh of relief. Okay. No reinforcements. Everyone in the spaceport showing even the slightest skin now lay unconscious—all the armored units guarded the landing platforms outside, so anyone still in full spacesuit was now locked in one of the sealed domes.
“We’re almost done. We did it. Kind of,” Lem said, half to Njande, as she allowed herself a weary stretch of her back. “Just gotta tie up the sleeping beauties in here.” She bent to pick up her mace …
Oof, something burned. Lem looked down.
Shyte, a melted bit of floor had seared a hole in the shin of her pants leg. Her gloved hand shot out instinctively to wipe the hot gunk off her leg—
Oh, shyte, now she had blue liquid on her skin.
“Filking fantastic,” she groaned. Shyte! She wasn’t done yet! She didn’t have time to get paralyzed or fall unconscious or whatever happened first—
Things not going well?
Lem looked up, and saw her nightmare.