The Gravity of the Situation Read online

wondered what they were thinking. Skiffs had minimal cover at best.

  “Pura, man the guns.” Syrah pointed to a shotgun mounted on a rack connected to the dash of the hovercraft. It was black and spiked for no reason Syrah could fathom. Pura approached it with trepidation.

  “Hang on,” Syrah warned, and then flew directly towards one of the guards. The guard she advanced on desperately tried to reverse gears. The hovercraft caromed into the delicate skiff wing, crumpling it like discarded paper. The guard spiraled to the ground, his skiff trailing smoke. Another guard had a clear shot, and opened fire. Laser blasts rained down from above. Pura grabbed the gun and leveled it at the skiff. She pulled the trigger, releasing a long laser blast. The guard jerked when the beam hit and the skiff spiraled out of control.

  "Nice shot!" Syrah hoped it was skill, and feared it was luck.

  "Center mass!" Pura repeated her earlier lesson.

  The ground craft still paced them. Syrah saw a copse of trees ahead and she angled toward it, watching the vehicles maneuver to keep up. Occasionally a gun would appear through a skylight or side window, but she had enough distance on them to make it a show of frustration rather than a threat.

  Her hands started to tremble, the same as they had earlier. Syrah bit down on a curse. “Pura. Come here.”

  "What's going on?" Pura watched Syrah's face, looking for a clue.

  Syrah pointed to the controls. “This is a stick. You use it to drive.”

  “Drive?” The girl turned to her, horrified.

  Syrah held up her hand, which shook violently. “I’ll talk you through it.”

  Pura radiated reluctance but stepped up to the stick and took it over. The hovercraft lurched as she jerked her hand left. Overcorrecting, she jerked the stick to the right. The hovercraft’s engines whined, and the girl looked horrified. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry!”

  Still shaking, Syrah grabbed Pura's hand and righted the stick. Her grip on the girl seemed to mitigate the tremors. “This is what it feels like. You want to keep it about here.”

  The panic receded from Pura’s eyes. Syrah knew berating her would only serve to make her useless, and she couldn’t afford useless. Right now the girl was the only guarantee that Syrah made it through without crashing the hovercraft. “Now, I’m going to take my hand off of yours. See if you can keep it steady.”

  Pura's eyes were wide, but Syrah let her go. She sat heavily and wrapped her arms around herself, waiting for the tremors to subside.

  “Where are we going?” Pura asked. She was trying to keep an eye on Syrah, but her attention was forced to the task at hand.

  “The starport.” Syrah tried to look up at the console, but couldn't read the screens.

  “I know that.” Pura frowned. "What I mean is, are you leaving me at the starport?"

  Gunfire killed the conversation. There were two new problems in the sky. Hoverbikes. Chrome and black, they flew in at high speed. The guns on the craft were high end slug-throwers, designed to destroy machine and man. Pura groaned and Syrah forced herself up. Slugs pounded into the shiny paint designed to reflect laser fire.

  The hovercraft tilted as Pura tried to watch everything in the sky at once. Syrah put her hand over Pura's, and pointed to the gun. Her tremors had lessened, enough that Syrah would still make a better pilot than the girl. "Center mass!"

  The hoverbikes followed like a pair of vultures waiting for their meal to stop kicking. Syrah knew what waited for her back on the compound was worse than death. She wasn't about to let the bikes take her out. She looked for a way to ditch them.

  Pura took aim and fired. The best part of a hoverbike was they weren't enclosed like a hovercraft. A hail of bullets perforated the air and the arm of the driver. His hoverbike lost altitude.

  “Good girl!” Syrah banked towards the ground, trying to shake the remaining hoverbike. The hoverbike fired back on them. The familiar sound of metal penetrating metal told her what she didn't want to know about his ammunition. She hoped that the damage was minimal.

  The hoverbike closed in. Pura swung the turret around, trying to line the sights with their pursuer. She took aim and fired. She missed the driver and shot through the console. Sparks flew and the driver threw his arms up reflexively, protecting his face. The hoverbike wobbled uncertainly in mid-air, and fell behind as Syrah opened the throttle.

  “Nice shooting!” Grabbing the controls, Syrah coaxed more speed towards the spaceport. She felt almost normal again.

  "Center mass." She grinned when she said it. Syrah smiled back, warming to her.

  The console alarms whined, warning them that the hovercraft was targeted again. It was Ari's ground craft. She wondered why they had bothered; the starport had most certainly been alerted to their course. Two escaped slaves stealing a hovercraft and trying to make a break for the star port to leave the world would certainly sound plausible from the mouth of Lord Ari Kozlov.

  “Pura, I need you to crawl in there.” She pointed at the equipment locker.

  “What about you?” Pura asked. To her credit, she started moving to the locker even as she asked.

  “I’m too big, and someone has to drive. Just do it, and get into the netting. Curl up as small as you can.” She watched as the nervous girl opened the equipment locker.

  Pura stepped over a canteen, a knapsack, and a magazine. Then she snuggled down into the secure netting. She looked up with trusting eyes, and watched as Syrah closed the locker door.

  Looking up towards the security network set up around the building, Syrah whistled long and low. They were drones, silver balls about the size of a man’s head, floating with a red eye staring balefully at the world. A voice over the PA system spoke at full volume. "Warning. Please be advised you are approaching at dangerous speeds. Countermeasures will be taken."

  Like a bad dream, more tremors shot up her arms. Her whole body started to shake as the starport loomed large in the front viewscreen. The hovercraft was too small of a vessel to support gravity shields, so it had no protection as the front foil connected with the synthetic diamond windows. Syrah was barely aware of the sound of crystal being struck by metal at high speed. Her eyes rolled up in her head as the hovercraft crashed into the building.

  The hovercraft looked like it would shred to pieces against such an impressively hard surface when the synthetic diamond cracked and burst inward, showering both the terror-stricken and the enterprising. The remains of the hovercraft were an afterthought as the security robots worked to stop the crowds from running off with the diamond dust.

  "Syrah! Wake up Syrah!" Pura sounded terrified. Syrah felt herself shaken awake, and looked around to see Pura unhurt. Syrah looked at herself, and noticed that she had only scrapes and bruises. She wanted to know what had happened, but there wasn't time. Their skin glittered from diamond dust. Syrah reached out and took Pura's hand. "Run!"

  The starport was enormous, and now had a gaping hole where a Kozlov hovercraft had burst through the security network and the synthetic diamond windows. Some people scattered, their sense of self-preservation suggesting that elsewhere was the place to be. There were many others willing to take their place, as they helped themselves to a little mana from heaven. No one seemed inclined to ask the two passengers what had happened.

  No one, save a security robot that headed towards them. It was an enormous machine, seven feet tall, with a round head with one LED 'eye'. Its shoulders were four feet across. It was built as a square, with only the vaguest nod to the human shape. Four arms that ended in clamps pointed in their direction. "Halt and desist!"

  Pura ran. The robot's attention didn't deviate. Syrah noticed out of the corner of her eye that a robot busy arresting a small, brightly colored alien with six fingers on each hand let go of its catch and begin chasing Pura. The security robot facing Syrah had locked onto its target and advanced on her. Syrah tried to pull herself together and stand, but the floor was slick with diamond dust and she couldn't gain her footing.

  It pulled her up off the floor. She tried to jerk against the robot. It stopped for a moment, before pulling her along. Syrah wondered if she had imagined it. She wished for a moment she could have gotten her eyes on some of the tests Ari had run on her. Another robot appeared as backup. It flanked the bot that pulled her forward. It beeped a report to the security robot that had her, and then went over to help disperse the people who were staring at the destroyed hovercraft.

  Syrah allowed herself to be maneuvered away from the group. Some of the onlookers stared and pointed at her, leaning together to conjecture how she had managed to survive such a crazy act. She waited until she was around a corner, to try to pull the security bot to a stop again. It paused. "Cease and desist." The dispassionate voice warned. She did so, but a plan started to form in her mind.

  The processing office rested in an unlikely spider web of iron girders. The walkway connecting the floor to the door was a ramp barely wide enough for the robots to traverse. Syrah barely realized where she was. She hadn't bothered to pay attention to where she was going, because this wasn't her destination. She was going to have to play a hunch, and hope, if she was to make it out of here.

  The being behind the desk in the center of the spider web made Syrah stop in her tracks. It was corpulent and noxious, its skin pasty pale and moist. It filled the room behind the desk, leaving