Patreon or PayPal Me keeps this site and its author alive. Thank you. |
Stories from the Verse
A Dozen Verses
Chapter 8: Slade 253
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Kondor 258
Slade’s Chombito bodyguard/driver/guide opened the door to the flying car on the roof of the apartment building in the swamp. Ystrang had been Derek’s driver/guide/bodyguard, and Slade had a Parakeet driver. But Ystrang had gone above and beyond, and the Parakeet driver had done the bare minimum, so when Slade got the chance, he had taken on Ystrang instead. Light rain sprinkled over them both. Hopping in, he heard his driver speak.
“Not the Missus today?”
“You’re getting the slang down. No, just me. I’m going to go to the sponsorship meet and greet. Unless I get some big red flags on meeting them, I’m going to join in.”
“All right, then. Well as Batman would say, ‘Up, up, and away!’”
The air car launched, and Slade chuckled.
“That’s Superman. Batman says ‘I’m Batman’.”
“That doesn’t make sense. You said bats can fly. And Superman is the strongest so identifying himself would make his enemies want to surrender.”
The two had been spending some relaxed time trading trivia from their backgrounds. Slade learned about many of the weird wrinkles of life on a planet with two hundred billion people and plenty of space. The Chombito learned about car culture and fictional superheroes and medieval lordship.
Suddenly, the diamond paned opaque mostly flying air car shot directly upward with its engines audibly straining. Slade was shoved down into the back seat by enough pressure to knock the first gasp of wind from his lungs as if he had been tackled. Taking a deep breath, he began to shout. His driver interrupted him.
“Two point five gravities upward, sir. The controls are not responding. Emergency. Declaring emergency. No good, sir. The commlinks are dead as well.”
By the end of that, Slade realized he was the target of an assassination attempt. He had hoped the Syndicate was done with him after he had killed Ettagiz and company, but evidently not. He tried his own links, and got nothing.
“I assume we’re being jammed?”
The Chombito checked a few things, and then growled back.
“Yes, sir.”
“Sorry about involving you in this,” Slade said.
“Not the first time some lowlife has tried to kill me, Slade,” the driver said from the front seat.
The engine’s whine reached new ear-piercing levels, and the felt gravity increased to four gs. It was like having a nine hundred pound man sitting on Slade’s chest, but both he and the Chombito were heavily muscled.
“What’s the end game here?” Slade asked. “Are they simply going to let us go up until we pass out, and keep on going until we die?”
“Probably not,” the driver replied. “One of two possibilities. We run into something large like a balloon city or a high altitude light dispenser. Or we reach two thousand miles up.”
“What happens then?”
“Imperial high altitude robot artillery shoots us down, and then incinerates the ashes.”
Slade remembered the Imperial Edict. No one was allowed to go beyond two thousand miles above the surface. It was one of many odd things about a planet the size of Jupiter but with the gravity of Earth. You had atmosphere, breathable, up to two thousand miles up. And no one ever saw stars.
“No warning, no questions asked?”
“It's an Imperial Edict, one with history as a previous Emperor laid it down,” the Chombito driver explained with a tone that despite the g’s remained scandalized. The clear implication was that one did not disobey, or even seriously question, an Imperial Edict. ‘The Emperor said so’ was a perfectly valid argument in this world.
Slade began to think. He was in a car. Granted, it flew, and the power system was gravity control, but he, Slade, was a car mechanic. Plus, he was not just going to sit here and force air into his lungs as his life went flashing by and the Syndicate gloated.
“Um, Slade, Good news, bad news.” That was another slang bit Slade had taught.
“What?”
“We’re not going to have to worry about being shot down.”
Slade pursed his lips.
“How long until we hit something?”
“Two minutes, eleven seconds until we hit the underside of a balloon city.”
There is a behind-the-writings look at the thoughts, influences, and ideas of this chapter, along with eleven other sequential chapters of this novel, in mark Joseph "young" web log entry #524: Twisting Worlds. Given a moment, this link should take you directly to the section relevant to this chapter. It may contain spoilers of upcoming chapters.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
