Rising - Patrick Sean Lee (big screen ebook reader txt) 📗

“Yee-ah!” Gerstam’s head is whirling, and with his fingers dancing across the keys he looks like a pianist caught in a rhapsodic frenzy. “Get your harness on!”

Before I grasp the shoulder straps and yank them down, we drop like a rock and begin to spin. Click! I’m in. Feeling nauseous. He jams the control lever forward, and we take off like a bolt of lightning.

In the images all around us I see bright white bursts of destructive light flash by. It’s like we are at the center of a deadly, moving web. Gerstam is gritting his teeth in concentration, trying to out-maneuver the experienced pilots and gunners. I’m thinking we’re sunk for sure this time!

“Start shooting!” he says as a burst clips the nose of our ship, sending miniscule bits of metal rocketing away. I grab the gun stick, hold my thumb on the button, and move it around as fast as I can. There are so many Heliceres out there—I’m bound to hit a few of them. So what?

“Get us away from here!” I shout.

“I am! I am!”

“You idiot, Gerstam! What were you thinking?”

We are spinning madly, rifling up and down at incredible velocity. He doesn’t answer. Finally we rip out of the clouds, somewhere over the forest. He drops to treetop level, and I hear branches smashing against the hull. Oh great, he’s going to impale the ship on a…

He taps a key. A red warning light flashes on the console.

“What’s that!” I bleat.

“Ramp door. Get ready to get out of here when we hit.” Another key, the three-dimensional images disappear. In their place, the windows again. Gerstam is navigating through a tiny break between the thick trunks. We are maybe ten feet off the ground, following a straight, narrow path barely as wide as the ship. A steady bang! Bang! Bang! of sheared branches, and suddenly Gerstam rips the T-handle back.

We drop the few remaining feet and hit, skidding and bouncing out of control.

The dust settles. I am dazed, astounded that we’re still alive. Gerstam does something that at first sight seems so weird. He leaves the engines running, although they don’t sound good, and then bites his lip as he searches the keypad. He presses one, but nothing happens that I can detect. Now he has the headset, pushing it over the firing button between my legs. He pulls downward and then twists the wiry ends until they are locked tight against the lower part of the shaft.

“What?” I ask. A continuous burst. I hear it, but I have no idea where the beams of deadly light are striking.

“Don’t touch the control. Just get up. Time to leave,” he answers. He doesn’t have to tell me twice. I am out of the harness and over the seatback in a breath, my heart pounding, adrenalin racing through every vein in my body.

I reach the hold and see the ramp kind of open. It is down, but the left side is bent badly. The other side of it appears to be normal, though, and I race to it, and down to wonderful mother-earth. I want to fall to my knees and kiss it!

The guns. A dull pap, pap, pap. Straight up. The remains of branches and leaves still flutter down in the beams’ constant wakes. They continue on until I lose sight of them in the bottom of the clouds. What else is this ship capable of that I have no idea of? Astonishingly clever of Polit’s designers, it hits me. All those keys and weapons…how in the name of all the gods, though, does Gerstam know about them?

He is beside me, now, as I watch the display in awe.

“Pretty neat, yes?”

I would never in a million years have thought of something like that. I’d like to plop down and watch the fireworks for hours; how the two guns, one on the roof above the cabin, the other between the twin tails, send the greenish pulses rotating up in arcs. For sure none of the pursuing gunships are straight up there above us, but even though I don’t see them yet, I know they’re in the clouds, and that we’re surrounded. I take Gerstam’s hand.

“We have to leave. I have a few questions for you, but they’ll wait. Come on, let’s go.”

There are loads of bushes beneath the trees. Not deadly like the Traeschos back on Folly, but one kind in particular has huge, thick leaves. If I can hack two off the stem, maybe…

“The knife,” I pant as we dart like two skittery bugs between the tree trunks, “it’s back in front of my house! I need a knife!”

“I’d much prefer a pistol,” he answers, stumbling over a fallen, dead and rotting branch. I let him struggle to his feet alone, run ahead twenty feet to a fat bush that has a thick growth. Taking hold of one of the leaves near the stem, I twist and pull and grunt until it rips free. Toss it aside and do the same with another. We’re ready. These might help; I don’t know for sure.

Gerstam has limped up the space dividing us. “What are these for?” he asks.

“Do this.” I grab hold of the last one I liberated from its mother, at the stem-end, and lift it over my head and back. Probably useless if the ships have the power to see us, but…I don’t know, we could run faster without having to use both hands to keep them in place. I’m hoping against hope that the thickness of the leaves can disguise what is beneath them.

“You seem to know all about the Heliceres—what they can and can’t do. Can they see us? Do you think these thick leaves will help prevent them from being able to?”

“Yes, for sure they can. I don’t know exactly how the things work—they’re some sort of ray, different from the ones in the guns—but I read about them in the manuals. I suppose covering ourselves can’t hurt,” he explains.

So that’s it. In his library of stolen books stashed beneath the floorboards he has operating manuals, evidently, that he must have read a hundred times, backward and forward. Thank you, you little gimpy thief. You hopefully saved a lot of Black lives. And strangely, it was fun having you in the pilot seat.

Polit’s forest floor is anything but flat. Gerstam falls more than he runs—tries to run—and I have to stop and backtrack to help him up one hill, and down the other side time and again. My fleshy leaf keeps slipping off. He has abandoned his altogether. Bad idea to have wasted the time and energy required to lug those things with us.

It feels like we’ve traveled a hundred miles, but out here distance is deceptive. Maybe we’ve gotten a mile away from the crash site. I let Gerstam rest beneath the outcropping of a large boulder in a deep ravine we have entered, and then crawl around the rock to look back in the direction I think we’ve come from. It is raining. There is no sky above the treetops, and if the guns of our wrecked Helicere are still ripping holes in it, I can’t see or hear them any longer. The wonderful thing is, I don’t notice any pusuit ships either. Maybe they gave up the chase and went home. More likely they left us for the moment and concentrated their attack on the hundreds fleeing Black.

Sant and Faerborn. My sisters, Jeren and my parents. I pray they are together and alive somewhere deep inside this forest. How many others made it to the questionable safety of the woods I wonder? Not a pleasant thought. Still, I didn’t see any gunships break through the cloud cover, or notice any shots during our wild flight anywhere south or north of the hole I blasted on this side of Black. Maybe…

Returning to the other side, I join Gerstam. He is huddled beneath the boulder as far back as he can tuck himself. He is shivering. His wound—I crawl to him. The splotch of blood is near his left shoulder, but it hasn’t spread.

“How badly are you hurt?” I ask him.

“My leg hurts. I’m not used to running these days, you know,” he answers.

“You were stabbed right here,” I say, putting my finger on the bloody area of his tunic top. “It must have stopped bleeding. Does it hurt much?”

The jovial little guy snickers. “That isn’t my blood. It’s Darra’s. I was sticking him pretty good when someone smacked me on the head from behind. Next thing I knew, I woke up, and everyone was screaming and running around. I figured Darra and whoever helped him had left me and run back to the Helicere, so I got up and went there myself. Of course it was empty. Gods alive, Alana, I sure love that ship!”

“I noticed. But you didn’t see who hit you, then?”

“How would I see that? I just told you he got me from behind.”

“Yes, yes, so you did. Or she got you from behind,” I add.

“No woman I know of can hit that hard,” he tells me.

“You’ve never met Queen Ugly,” I scoff, the image of her rumbling toward me across the floor of the infirmary room Marcus stuck me in back on Folly springing to life in my head.

“Who?”

“Never mind. She isn’t here on the mainland. You’re lucky.”

“Well anyway, now what?” Gerstam asks. “I want to go back—I mean when it’s safe, of course. I want to go back and get the Helicere up and running again. I sure don’t feel like tromping through this damned forest forever hiding from gunships.”

When it's safe again? He has this insane suicide wish, stupid kid. Even so, he’s half right. I don’t want to spend eternity tramping through the forest, either. What we need to do is stay out of sight for a while, and then search out Sant.

And everyone else.

Go from there.

I have no idea how far from the wall we landed. The terrain we covered fleeing the wreck was unfamiliar, and it shouldn't have been. Over the years, Mondra and I had snuck out of the ghetto many times to explore the deep forest, risking the gods-know-what kind of punishment had Polit cops nabbed us. I do remember the path Gerstam crash landed on, I think it’s the one I know, but how far into this place it cut is anyone’s guess. Father told us it runs from the Black side of the continent a hundred miles or more east and north, roughly following the land’s end. Gerstam and I could easily be ten or twenty miles away from Black. Or half a mile, for all I know. What lies at the end of those miles Father didn’t say, or even if that distance is entirely covered with forest.

I wish I knew which direction was which. Black is at the easternmost end of the continent. The forest begins on the west side. Polit is north. Reason tells me we landed facing the wall, but who knows? Maybe Gerstam. No doubt among his collection of books lies a geography one. Even so, in our wandering with those stupid leaves on our backs, the backtracking to avoid obstructions, the clouds and rain—just the