Rising, Patrick Sean Lee [top books of all time txt] 📗

at me in awe. Several stop in turn when they reach me. They ask more questions, but all I answer is, “Get to the forest. Hide!”

Fifty or sixty feet back, Sant has hold of Faerborn’s left hand, urging him forward. It’s like watching a Skirter rolling along with three round wheels and one square one. If our situation weren’t so grave I’d laugh. I push myself toward them, notice, now, the stinging on my forehead. The droplets of blood coursing down over my eyebrow. Sant sees it, too.

“Alana, you’re bleeding!” He stops when I reach him, and Faerborn’s clumsy momentum nearly causes him to fall on top of Sant and me.

“I’m okay. Sant, get Faerborn across the open space and into the forest. Go as far inside as you can.”

“What about you?” he says.

“I have to go back. Help as many get out as I can. I’ll meet you in the forest. Just go, please! Don’t worry about me.”

Sant doesn’t move for a long second or two. Finally he turns to gentle Faerborn. “Faerborn, you go ahead. Do as Alana says. We’ll find you later.”

“No! You know trees. He’s injured, Sant. Go, and take Faerborn with you. He needs you. I’ll be fine.”

Sant bites his lower lip as he considers what I’ve just said. As if time means nothing, he throws his arms around me, and then kisses me.

“If you don’t make it, I swear I’ll kill you.”

“You won’t have to," I laugh. "Go!”

I return the way I came, but I’m afraid this is useless. The ghetto is fifteen blocks wide, and twice as many deep. Banging on every door on every street will take me hours. Even getting to every wandering street will take an eternity. As I pass the intersection at the main road, I catch sight of something far down the way that lifts my spirits, but rattles my brain. I stop. It’s Gerstam. It has to be, and he is limping up the ramp of the Helicere. He is alive, but he has to know what is about to happen, and the futility of hiding himself inside the ship. Against every impulse inside me I abandon my mission and run to help him. Seconds before I reach the ramp, it starts to lift upward. I don’t know how he figured out which of the twenty or thirty keys on the console activates it, but…

I jump and roll sideways onto the ramp. An instant later I am tumbling down into the hold. I am on my feet just as the engines fire to life…what? How? In the cockpit I see him seated, the earphones strung over his head, his fingers tapping one key after another.

“This is Darra. Give me a minute or two. Almost ready to lift off, guys. I have her.” He is trying to speak in a deeper voice, but it is comical. ‘Guys’? Even in view of the fact that his voice is several octaves higher than dead Darra’s, that one word has to expose the ruse. Whatever he is up to, it’s simply idiotic!

“Gerstam! You’re alive! How? And what in the name of all that’s holy do you think you’re doing? You can’t possibly think…” I say.

He turns his head in surprise, and then grins at me. “Sit down and buckle up. We’re going for a ride.” Gerstam taps two more keys, grabs hold of the T-shaft thing on the hump between the seats, and pulls back on it slowly. I’m pretty certain we’re going to move…but which way? I leap over the second seat and plop into the cushiony surface.

“I…this is madness!”

We lift off, straight up for a second or two, and suddenly we’re tipping sideways. Back to equilibrium, over in the other direction, and then equilibrium once more. I can see the ground slipping away as he works the T-thing and taps another one or two keys with his other hand.

Oh gods almighty, he thinks he can fly this thing!

“Now, where’s the control for the guns? Your side! Yes, I remember.” He releases his hold on the T-thing and points to one in front of me with a red button on top of it.

He remembers? When was he even inside a Helicere before this second?

We are climbing slowly, the nose of the ship leaning down slightly. Already I can see the neighborhood on the far backside of Black’s dump, the bend in the perimeter road.

“Push the button. Quick, before we get out of the dump,” he instructs me. “We need to see exactly how to control it. Try moving the handle left and right when you press the button.”

Suddenly we are moving faster. This is insane!

 

 

 

EIGHT

 Gerstam banks left while I sit here in shock.

"Quick, fire!" he says,

Why not? We’re going to die anyway. He’ll either crash, or a ton of enemy ships will descend on us and blow us off the face of the earth. I depress the button with my thumb. Hear the hummmm from the gun below us, but I see nothing.

“Pull back on it. That raises the trajectory,” he says in an excited voice. The nose of the ship is still pointing downward. We are rapidly approaching the east wall and the beginning of the no-man’s land outside Black. I yank the handle toward me with both hands and press again. The greenish-white ray of light hits the wall in a blink, almost as violently as my blast on the other side of Black did to the west wall! I see parts of it explode outward toward the swamp, a thousand other shattered pieces rocketing in tiny bits left and right. I pull the handle left, hit the button again, and then pull it right and toward the console. Push.

The first shot obliterates another section of the wall fifty feet away from the first. The other shot makes the reeds in the marsh lift; the spongy, wet soil jump toward the sky. If only we had time we could piece-by-piece, section-by- section, bring the entire wall down!

One head, then two, then half a dozen more pop out of doorways. They look as though they’re puppets, with some ten-handed giant jerking their strings! Good, they’re awake at last on this side of town, but as quickly as they appear, they disappear back into their houses. I have an idea.

“Gerstam, swing back and come in at the same angle, closer to the north wall. I’m going to make more holes.”

I don’t know if he hasn’t quite gotten the full mechanics of how to drive this thing, but we suddenly rip nearly straight up, and then we’re upside down, entering the clouds. I have my seat strap on, but not my harness. I hang by my waist for a second or two, and the next thing I know, I am being pushed into the back of my seat as he finishes his turn and drops out of the clouds. I see the clutter and debris of the first two hits hundreds of feet off to the right, and without thinking I grab the gun stick again and hold the button down as I ease it back between my legs, jerking left and right.

It-is-fantastic! The narrow beam demolishes part of a roof, the entire rickety porch, widens and tears up the road beyond as it moves along…and then fifty feet of wall erupt in a million shards of stone!

“Loudspeaker, loudspeaker,” I scream at Gerstam. “I know this ship has one; I heard it back on Folly. Find the key!”

He runs his fingers over several keys, then depresses one near the end of the console. “Got it.”

“Now, slow down and fly us up and down the streets.” I reach for his headset, yank it off, and whisk the contraption onto my head.

“People of Black, run for the marsh. Polit will attack any minute. Run!”

I scream the warning over and over as we cruise slowly back and forth…not more than fifteen feet above the rooftops. At first I see no activity. The sight of the gunship, the explosions have frightened the residents out of their wits, but finally one, two, six, ten bodies bolt from scattered dwellings, and then like a human tidal wave, hundreds begin pouring into the ragged holes I made.

“We did it! They’re leaving! Gerstam, move, move, move! Get us over to the forest as fast as you can.”

“Huh? I want to get us into Polit. With this ship…we’re just getting started!”

“No! Just put it down outside the forest. We’d never make it even a mile into the city. If it isn’t already, it’s going to be a hornet’s nest before you know it. Go! The forest!”

He is disappointed. But then he hasn’t committed suicide yet, thanks to me. Gerstam circles wide, farther, even, than the southernmost boundary of Black, with a sour look plastered on his face, and then suddenly pushes the stick hard forward. I hear the engines roar to maximum power, and I am slammed into the seatback behind me. He is grinning, thinking, I suppose, that somehow he has punished me for saving his life.

“I just want to see how fast one of these things will go,” he giggles.

Very fast. We are accelerating at a phenomenal rate, and to make things worse, he drops back down to a height where I can nearly see each pebble on the ground. Or could if they weren’t racing by in such a blur. In a heartbeat, the mass of Blacks scurrying, stumbling, crawling in a few cases, come into view, and then they’re gone. Before I have time to blink we are at the north wall, traveling so fast that my eyes want to bleed. Gersham begins to sing a song at the top of his lungs. He is crazy!

“Enough! Slow down. Pull up. Oh gods, you’re going to hit something! We’re going to die! Get us back to the forest, please!”

He glances over at me. I know I am white as a sheet of paper. A whimsical I’m-almost-sorry look is what I see, and so he points us up, but pulls the stick halfway back. We decelerate as we leave the blackness of the smoke and hit the greyness of the clouds. Then more. Worse. He taps two of the keys with his thumb and little finger. We stop! The ship doesn’t begin to fall, but I sense we are no longer moving. It is hard to tell for sure in this soup. But no. We are hovering like a bird a hundred feet in the air getting ready to dive on its prey.

Oh no, what is coming next? Does he see something, somehow, down on the ground that he intends to dive down and pounce on?

Tap. A screen of some sort appears where the front window used to be, spreading until it fills the cabin; as though the place we sit has vanished, and we're outside.

“There it is,” he says triumphantly, like he’s just solved a complex riddle. What I see makes my heart drop to my toes. Dark gray background. Dots of iridescent red beginning…there is no beginning. They’re intermixed with larger, more recognizable forms, mixed further with very recognizable images in a three-dimensional round that appear to be extremely close, and moving slowly toward us from all directions. Heliceres. Hundreds of them.

“Get