CHAPTER 7 KORI #2
Charon was modified to withstand the Daylands’ extreme heat by absorbing as much cooler air as possible.
In the Shadowlands, that means my ship eagerly offers itself to the lashing, icy winds.
Already, ice forms around the dome in jagged lines like wintery webbing.
I grip the control stick so tightly that my bone-white knuckles ache.
“TEMPERATURE FLUCTUATION DETECTED,” the ship says brightly, before adding less hopefully, “AT ALTITUDE 2,500 FEET.”
“I know—I know,” I stammer, uselessly hitting the air jets as a reflexive response to low visibility. It does nothing to clear the rapidly forming mosaic of ice along the window.
Aspect unleashes a string of four-letter words that they undoubtedly learned from me.
I shush them, face burning, and lean closer to the main window, desperate to maintain some view of what lies ahead.
I can’t fly like this, but switching back to autopilot will launch us out of the Shadowlands, back into the Passage from which we came.
“No. No.” I blink hard to clear tears, which nearly freeze as they roll down my cheeks. “We’ve come too far to turn back now.”
“Kori.”
“Not now, Aspect.”
The mech waves their arms wildly. “Kori.” When I ignore them, again, they screech, “KORI!”
“What?” I snap through my chattering teeth.
“Aspect—is”—their voice rattles from the cold, but it’s a convincing facsimile of human terror—“afraid.”
There’s no time for comforting words, not that I have any to offer. The entire ship whirls sideways, weighted down by gathering ice on the right wing that I can barely see through the iced-over passenger side of the dome.
“Shit.” Now I’m the one cursing (terrible robot parenting, but also entirely reasonable given the circumstances).
I tug the control stick with both hands, as hard as I possibly can, but the ship doesn’t budge.
Instead, it pivots into an uncontrolled spin.
My harness holds me fast to the pilot’s chair, as does Aspect’s, but the sudden jerk knocks all the air from my lungs—or maybe that’s the scream I can’t restrain.
Panic-stricken, suddenly more concerned with survival than success, I smash the autopilot button that should be above my head and is now, I think, dangling below it.
My center is gone, everything careening off its proper axis.
It’s a blessing my tiny table and associated bench have always been secured to Charon’s floor, because they might have caved in my skull by now otherwise.
“ALTITUDE 2,400 FEET,” the ship chimes. “SIGNAL NOT AVAILABLE.”
“Yes it is,” I gasp, punching the button again. “Yes the hell it is, come on, come on …”
SYSTEMS EXPERIENCING TEMPERATURE FLUCTUATION. This message is written, not spoken, and it shimmers, cracking apart just like the ice on the windows before vanishing altogether. SYSTEMS MUST REB—OOT—REB—OOTI—NG—
Charon continues spinning, careening through the air like a discarded toy.
“Dizzy!” Aspect shrieks. “Aspect—is—dizzy!”
We can’t keep hurtling like this, completely out of control.
With a final choked scream, I let go of the stick altogether.
Instead, teeth gritted, I put both hands on the emergency brake pulleys, yanking them toward my chest with all the strength I can muster, trying to hard stop Charon’s forward momentum.
Three things happen in rapid succession.
One: Some two thousand or so feet above the planet’s surface, Charon does, in fact, stop spinning. We’re still upside down, and my neck stings something fierce from the whiplash, but we’re stationary again, the ship hovering silently in the sky’s black expanse.
Two: Like a cruel joke, every light in the cockpit blinks out.
Three: Before I can even exhale, before Aspect can release a poorly timed victory shriek, before Charon can possibly complete a system reboot, it falls like a dislodged star.
A distant, eerie blue light—the strange fire? the asteroid?—is just enough to illuminate the rocky ground as it lurches to meet us. I’m screaming, Aspect is screaming, and the alarms would be, too, if Charon had any power.
If we don’t eject now, this crash will almost certainly kill me.
And if I eject without my anti-radiation gear, which I never don until landing, Pagomènos itself will poison me the moment its atmosphere makes contact with my skin.
I’ll lose my mind, maybe even my body, most definitely everything that makes me human and not merely a mutant monstrosity.
And if somehow, against all odds, I survive both this crash and the Shadowlands’ unrestricted radiation, I won’t really be me anymore. And there will be no going back.
An awful groan of metal on stone. Charon bounces off a nearby mountain spire, one I can only hope is close to our destination. In my disorientation from all the spinning, what I thought was the ground just ahead was, in fact, the side of a peak.
High, sharp cracking noises fill my ears. The dome above (below?) us looks to be a light breeze away from shattering entirely, then spitting us out into the Shadowlands raw.
I choke on a gasp. “Aspect, my gear—”
Since first activating their too-curious eyes, Aspect has caused me no small share of trouble: Inedible birthday cakes.
Existential crises. Commentary on my sleeping habits.
But this time, the universe takes pity on me.
Aspect’s optical processors blink, their head bobs, and I know that somehow, they understand how dire our situation is.
Retracting their harness, Aspect launches themself across the cockpit, by which I mean they fall out of their upside-down chair and then lunge desperately sideways, crashing into one of Charon’s walls with a heavy thud.
Seizing hold of the appropriate storage closet, they proceed to toss sections of armor my way as fast as they can.
Whether by sheer adrenaline or the terrifying closeness of death, I have a peculiar bodily awareness as we plummet from the sky.
Following Aspect’s lead, I drop from the inverted pilot’s seat and armor myself faster than I ever have, even when wildly excited to enter the Morpheus Market.
Each armor piece snaps into place and expands to meet the others in rapid succession—the helmet blooms across my neck, the chest panel across the rest of my torso, gauntlets linking into my gloves, leg armor latching into my boots.
Charon isn’t big enough to have come equipped with an escape pod.
In outer space, the likely intended environment for this ship’s design, a parachute wouldn’t have stopped suffocation, so we don’t have those either.
Dayfolk armor has small propulsors at the back—not enough to qualify as a jetpack, but activated by a sudden fall, designed to prevent severe injuries from surface-world work accidents.
Aspect’s feet have similar standard-issue mini-rockets. But will either be enough?
In a breath, I’m equipped to meet the planet’s uncompromising atmosphere.
I just have to avoid being crushed to death when Charon hits the ground.
Terror tears at my stomach. I could survive the impact just to break a dozen bones, just to lie writhing and gasping in the gathering dark, wishing someone, anyone, even the damned Coalition, knew where I’d been left to die.
I could survive the impact just to look to my left and find Aspect an empty shell, unseeing optical processors forever staring up, up, up into the night.
“Aspect.” I meet their gaze, clinging to the nearest useless control lever for balance. “The dome is already compromised. I’m going to kick as hard as I can, right here. I’m going to jump. And I need you to follow me.”
“The probability—of surviving—such an—endeavor—is approximately—”
“We’re losing altitude. This is our only chance. On the count of three.”
“Koriiiii—”
“One.”
I brace the heels of my boots against the side of the dome.
“Two.”
I suck in as much air as possible and hold it, insurance against another building scream.
“Three.”
Swinging back, pushing all the strength of my body into the kick, I shatter the last barrier between us and the darkness.
The dome splinters in every direction, a glittering shower of destruction lit by the Shadowlands’ faintly blue glow. Jagged shards rattle and bounce off my armor; otherwise, I’d be tearing pieces from my arms, legs, maybe even my face, for countless sleep cycles to come.
Aspect follows an instant later, lurching through the carnage, arms spread in a defiant T pose as they, too, begin to fall.
It’s a dreamlike descent, the ground so far below and so poorly illuminated as to be invisible.
We’re spinning and spinning, dislodged from standard perceptions of up and down.
I’m plummeting forever, nothing to catch my fall but a pair of thrusters meant to reduce the impact of slipping from a scaffold or tripping on a dune.
The thrusters at my back activate automatically. I barely hear them burst to life over the cacophony of the ship’s crash. Charon’s core form, somehow mostly intact, sails beyond me and Aspect entirely. I’m so disoriented that the ship almost appears to be falling upward.
If I hit the ground wrong, I may never wake up.
My directional perception is only reoriented because just above me, Charon collides headlong with another rocky spire.
Smoke and fire surge, the reinforced X of Charon’s core frame screeching and warping; the smoke makes me cough even through my mask’s filtration, but the flames’ violent glow reorients my body.
Hunks of plating rain down around us. One nearly knocks into my skull, no doubt heavy enough to knock me out cold, but I roll aside, just barely, its uneven edge scraping my armor as it veers past. The jets at my back barely feel like they’re slowing my fall.
Aspect whips in and out of my peripheral vision, the speed of their own descent similarly impossible to track.