Providence - Max Barry Page 0,68
drifting down from the stars like spider eggs in the wind. The jet was screaming. Jackson was fighting it for control. But it wasn’t going to help, Talia saw. They had lost. They had gone deep into VZ and failed to appreciate how the salamanders were expending vast numbers of lives trying to get close to them, or the resolve that that implied, the hunger, the hate. They had been very complacent. She hadn’t really noticed she was in a war, if she was honest.
From the ship, a core of light, clean and brilliant.
A concussive force hit her. She was at the beach, six years old, her father turning away and a wave she never saw coming hitting her from behind, plunging her into a churning watery world of confusion, not knowing where she was or how to escape. Her father had caught her hand and plucked her from the sea and held her in his arms while she coughed and cried.
The screens were filled with debris. A large chunk of the ship’s rear was venting fire. “Go,” Jackson screamed. “Go, go, go.” The jet fled but the ship hung on the screen and Talia could see fire spreading along it like fault lines, rupturing and splitting. The fire looked small compared to the mass of the ship but each tear revealed a deeper conflagration. It was insatiable and it ran in straight lines, following the materials lines, eating the ship in bites, and there went her station, and there the place she had gone with Anders to the hot room, and where she had eaten, and lived, slept, too many places to count, all becoming light and ash.
* * *
—
They ran through space. “Goddamn it,” Anders said. “Goddamn it.” He was cursing a lot. He was wrestling with his controls like a lover; which was to say, roughly. She felt the urge to go up there and tell him he should have been the one left behind, not Gilly. I’m not leaving you, Gilly had said, when he was carrying her down the ladder shaft. But she had left him.
“Give me thrust,” Jackson said.
“I’m fixing the redline.”
“You can do both.”
“Like fuck I can.”
“Calm down,” Jackson said.
She wanted to speak to Jackson, too. This captain schtick of Jackson’s wasn’t cutting it anymore. To the untrained observer, sure, Jackson was a picture of professionalism, strapped up there with her shoulders bunched, her jawline jutting, that would make a really terrific clip, right there, but Talia knew the truth: that Jackson had been chosen for her public profile, and that was why all of them were here—not because they were good soldiers but because they made a good feed. They sold a good war. Even herself, for all she wanted to believe she was keeping this crew together in deft and clever ways; that wasn’t a real skill. That wasn’t what anyone really needed in a war. They were impostors, all of them, and they had gotten Gilly killed. She felt choked with failure.
The jet shuddered. Another impostor. If it was anything like its crew, they were in for a short ride. It jumped about like a skittish cat, avoiding debris, she guessed, which, according to the screens, was all around them, most of it small, some not so much, and plenty banging against them. The only reason they hadn’t been torn to pieces was they were all moving along roughly the same vector, traveling away from where the ship had been. She caught a glimpse of some large part of the wreckage, a great broken chunk like a falling moon, then lost it.
The ship hadn’t said good-bye, she realized. It had said hello, but never good-bye.
“Four of them now,” Anders said. “Fuck!”
“We can lose them. Keep burning.”
“If they don’t box us in, which they fucking will!”
“Bank,” Jackson said. “Bank!”
A force pressed her against the floor. She heard something detach from the jet: clunk. Anders yelped. The pressure increased. She could feel blood falling from her brain. She wasn’t a drinker, but the times she indulged it wound up like this, her feeling the blackout coming and realizing she should have made different choices about half an hour