Aidan Redding Against the Universes

Forever Falls-6

Takamoto’s round face, bright red, eyes broad in panic, filled the hatch for a moment. Then the hatch slapped shut.

The latch rasped.

9My brain quit.

My left hand was cut through like someone had plunged a power saw into the edge halfway between the base of the pinky and my wrist, and whacked through to the very edge of my index finger. Blood pulsed from the gap, drenching everything. The pain disappeared against the absolute horror of the wound, a violation exposing things never meant to see light.

I’m pretty sure I screamed. A lot.

Then Cedar grabbed me, shouting “Redding! Aidan!”

Pain started returning like the early hints of an onrushing tide. I knew Cedar was there, but somehow she wasn’t important. Only my hand mattered, holding it still, protecting it so I could scream.

Then Cedar grabbed my wrist.

I thrashed, knowing that nobody should touch that intimate maiming.

Cedar sat on my chest, trapping my arm between her thighs.

I bucked ineffectively.

She wrenched at my hand.

I shrieked.

The pain evaporated, ending as cleanly as turning off the lights.

Cut free from that white-hot cold agony, I passed out.

10Consciousness oozed back a moment or two later. I had curled protectively around my maimed hand, but not so desperately.

A thick white cotton patch covered my wound, curving around the blade edge of my hand. It looked like a sponge, somehow taping me together despite the fresh sticky blood sheeting my hand and arm.

Cedar. The first-aid kit.

She’d kept her head, grabbed the trauma patches, and glued me together. The drugs would keep my hand desensitized for a few more hours, encourage healing, and help me stave off infection. We didn’t have nanobot meds on Freefall, but if we could get back to Medical soon I might not even lose that half of my hand—I’d made it to twenty-six without needing anything regrown, and I had really hoped to keep that streak going to twenty-seven.

MacConnor lay on the wicker deck, his feet next to me and his head up against the front. We barely had enough room for the two of us to sprawl out in the zeppelin’s passenger compartment. Cedar had ripped off his shirt. She’d already slapped a trauma patch, one of the smaller ones, on his gut, and was sizing a paper-wrapped patch against the bloody gash in his chest.

The basket lurched.

Overhead, Takamoto swore.

The hatch remained closed.

“Cedar,” I said. My voice rasped in my dry throat. “Next size up. Multiple injuries need extra meds. Avoid shock.”

She glanced back at me. “Right, forgot.” She tossed the patch back in the first aid kit, grabbed one the size of a dinner plate, and tore it open. “Never had to really do this.” She pressed the patch over the wound. “You can’t overdose on trauma patches, can you?”

With my uninjured hand I grabbed the edge of a seat and pulled myself upright. Wicker scratches marred my face, my own blood drenched my arm and chest, MacConnor’s blood smeared my face, and somewhere in this I’d twisted my back.

I lurched like a broken machine.

But I moved.

I rubbed my aching shoulder with my remaining hand. “That’s a good armbar you have there.”

Cedar flashed me a quick grin.

MacConnor groaned.

“That should hold him,” Cedar said. She frowned. “It’s all I’ve got, anyway.” Her voice grew quiet. “He used diffused steel, that stuff cuts you like—” She glanced at me. “Uh, it’s bad.”

I nodded. MacConnor looked like he was breathing a little more easily, and color started edging back into him. He had some impressive pecs, despite all the hair—

Pull it together, Redding. Yes, you’re hurt, you could have been killed, you’re having a nice post-not-dead hormone rush. Enjoy it later. But if you don’t take charge of this zeppelin, if you don’t get a handle on Takamoto, this can go even worse.

I clambered to my feet. I’d wrenched my hip, too. My head whirled for a second, then my balance steadied. “Let me get past.” I sucked in another breath. “Ladder.”

Cedar glanced up. “You’re in no shape to climb.”

The zeppelin lurched again. Bamboo creaked.

She was right. I’d lost blood—it covered me, the floor, a seat cushion, and Cedar. I kept sucking air to try to make up the lack. My body struggled to keep me upright. The drugs shut off the pain, but the shock of the trauma still made my grip weak and my vision shaky. I needed to lie down.

“And Takamoto clearly doesn’t know how to fly this thing,” I said. “Someone’s got to talk him down before he gets us all killed. Have you been through hostile negotiations training?”

Cedar gritted her teeth and shifted herself so I could squeeze past.

Hostile negotiations training? Yeah, that’s what they call it when another student pretends to be a bomber and you talk her down. Or the AI-driven gunman in virtual. It’s not when you’re locked inside a giant picnic basket dangling over infinity and hanging from a balloon driven by a desperate, irrational mathematician trying to s***h his way out of his problems.

Keeping my maimed hand over my heart, I climbed the ladder one-handed. The basket lurched and swayed, but we still weren’t back at full weight and I clutched my way to the top. Once my head brushed the closed access hatch I shouted “Doctor Takamoto!”

The basket lurched again. I heard Takamoto cry out. What was he doing up there? It’s not like there were speed bumps out here. You aimed at the cliff and waited.

“Listen to me, Takamoto!” What was his first name again? “Haider! It’s not too late. We can work this out! Whatever’s going on, whatever you’ve done, we can talk about it.”

The whole zeppelin creaked.

I thought of trying the “there’s no place to go” gambit, but Takamoto wasn’t thinking well. I didn’t want him puncturing the air bag as a final, futile gesture.

“I’m okay,” I shouted. “MacConnor will be too, if we get back soon. You’ve done nothing permanent here! Just let us up so we can talk this out!”

Bamboo creaked.

Then snapped.

The basket’s rear end sagged, turning my nice vertical ladder into a set of rungs across an angled ceiling. My hand clamped weakly on a rung, but my feet instantly slipped free. I shouted wordlessly and, for the second time in ten minutes, fell backwards to the floor and slid to the back wall.

Cedar screamed, this time with full unchecked terror, clutching her seat.

MacConnor slid down the short aisle, his feet crashing into me, his body crumpling after them.

More bamboo creaked.

I tried to shove MacConnor aside. Again.

Takamoto shouted “Lucy!”

The knife. The diffused steel knife that had cut through my hand.

How long would it take that knife to cut through structural bamboo?

“Haider!” Cedar screamed. “Stop this!”

“I would have,” Takamoto said. “I would have done anything for you.”

Wood snapped and groaned.

Then the Tahiti Sunset’s passenger basket plummeted into infinity.

11Falling.

Everything in the passenger basket became weightless. Doctor Cedar came off her chair, red hair rising into an electric halo, highlighting her high-pitched shriek of absolute terror. Last night’s boxed dinner bounced off the back of a seat and careened towards the ceiling. The creaking of bamboo was replaced by wind whistling through the warp and weft of the weave. I thrashed, and MacConnor’s limp form rose into the air.

Clamshell.

The basket was going to split in half, spilling us into empty air.

MacConnor still wore his chute box, but an unconscious person can’t pull a trigger. I pawed at his leg, but the fingers of my left hand wouldn’t even try to close. Desperately I snatched his belt with my working right hand. When the basket split open, I’d have to get us both free, trigger his chute, and then trigger my own.

How long would the clamshell take to open?

Cedar grabbed a seat to anchor herself.

The basket twitched and started rolling.

The wind rushed faster, whistling through the weave, suspending us inside the basket.

Come on, open! I wanted to beat at the wall, but the bandage on my free hand stopped me.

“Too long,” Cedar shouted. “It’s taking too long!”

The passenger compartment should clamshell open. It’s automatic, a mechanism—

—but where was that mechanism?

Probably up in all that machinery and struts and entanglements surrounding the pilot’s perch.

The passenger compartment wasn’t going to open.

We had to get out ourselves.

I fought to shove the fear aside. My heart surged in my chest.

The pilot’s hatch was the closest exit. I kicked off the wall, dragging MacConnor with me. Get him out. Get myself out. Pull his chute, then mine. And Cedar.

Or I’d spend the rest of my life falling.

And my entire death, too.

Forever.

The basket continued its own slow rotation, but my head had its own countering spin. I’d lost blood.

One working hand. I pried my hands from MacConnor’s belt and fumbled at the door.

Hyperventilating. I forced my breathing slower and deeper. Think, Redding!

We fell at one gravity. Ten meters per second per second.

After falling one minute, we’d be going three hundred meters a second. That had to be above terminal velocity?

The emptiness was swallowing us. My every muscle trembled, but I wrenched at the hatch.

It wouldn’t open.

The wind through the turning wicker rasped my face.

Wait—Takamoto had locked this hatch. I cursed myself for twelve kinds of fool.

MacConnor had drifted towards the floor. I kicked down towards him, only to collide with Cedar as she tried to get to the rear hatch. We bounced off each other into the churning chaos of the tumbling, turning passenger compartment.

Eleven hundred kilometers an hour. Terminal velocity. About three hundred meters a second.

I clutched at something, trying to anchor myself. A chute box, knocked from its place beneath a seat.

A scream bulged up my throat. I clamped down on it.

My foot hit something, but by the time I could turn to look, it was gone. My back bounced off a wall.

The passenger compartment spun faster.

Dread threatened to burst my heart, my ribs, my skull.

Three hundred meters a second. Eighteen kilometers a minute.

How long had it been since we fell?

Zeppelins had a range of forty kilometers.

Either we escaped this tumbling madhouse in two minutes, or we fell forever.

I lashed out my good hand and seized a wicker chair back as it spun past. It wrenched itself out of my hand, leaving torn skin and welling fresh blood.

I tumbled away.

The heel of a shoe rushed towards my face.

The flailing foot crashed into my temple.

Blackness.

12I came back resting against a wall.

The passenger cabin had stopped its mad tumble. What had been a wall was a ceiling, with a half-meter porthole hanging open exposing the red sky. Cedar huddled next to me, while MacConnor lay akimbo on my other side.

We were still falling.

The wind through the gaps in the wicker screeched and whistled, buffeting my short hair into a cloud at the top and sides of my vision.

I was weightless, held to the floor only by Cedar’s light touch.

Complete freefall.

The terror had collapsed, leaving me strangely numb. We were falling. We would fall forever. Our last meal would be whatever we could scrounge from this empty wicker basket.

I raised my head. Cedar had tears in her eyes, but the wind shredded them before they could trail down her cheeks.

How long had it been? I raised my aching arm to glance at my watch, remembered when we’d left, and did the math.

Takamoto had cut us free about ten minutes ago.

A hundred and eighty kilometers above.

I would die, here, with Cedar and MacConnor. My new best friends.