Providence - Max Barry Page 0,79

how much trouble he was in, or didn’t care.

“I disagree,” said the NCO.

“Well, let me tell you something about my brothers,” Anders said, and leaned across the table. “They taught me that when you get hurt, the only way to make it stop is to go find whoever gave it to you and give it back.”

She stared at him in dismay. His words were a knife in her heart. Just like that, she knew. She was going back out. And she was taking Paul Anders with her.

11

[Anders]

THE SURFACE

He coughed. Around him, the jetpod was battered and deformed and on fire. Someone had him by the shoulders. He jerked and twisted but it was only the harness.

Beanfield lolled beside him, half-naked and caked with soot. She looked dead. He turned away. Flames crackled. His sense of direction was wrong. He was looking into the nose of the jet, which was filling with thick curls of winding black smoke, but it felt like up, not forward. Down was behind and a metric fuckton of gravity was trying to usher him in that direction. They had ditched, then. He hoped he hadn’t killed Beanfield. He looked at her. “Beanfield,” he said. She didn’t respond.

He wrestled free of his harness to look for Jackson. Below was a blanket of smoke and crackling fire. Beneath that was a sound: gloop, gloop. He didn’t know what that meant. But it wasn’t good. He considered moving Beanfield, but it was probably safest to stay above the smoke. That was a strange thing about the smoke: It wasn’t rising. It was low smoke. He eyed it. Jackson had gone to the rear, to that exact area. He hadn’t seen her since they’d sideswiped a hive and tumbled through atmosphere. That had opened up a lot of holes in the jet. There was a good chance Jackson had exited mid-descent.

He felt Beanfield’s neck for a pulse. He squeezed her chin and shook her head back and forth until she groaned. Her eyelids fluttered. So she wasn’t dead. That was good.

The smoke was closer. It was rising, eating away at the room he had. The back end of the jet was badly breached, he figured; possibly the whole fucking thing was gone altogether. They were holed and sinking. That was the gloop, gloop sound: liquid coming in.

He felt for the lightning gun but couldn’t find it. He didn’t know why he might need a gun, but he wanted it badly and groped around near where he’d stowed it. When his fingers closed on its grip, everything immediately felt better. He hauled it out and slung its strap over his shoulder. He began to extract Beanfield from the harness, but she weighed a ton and he struggled for leverage. Smoke blurred his eyes. The gun on his back clunked against something: his survival core. He’d long lived in fear of that fucking thing deploying with no warning, springing wet plastic around him, trapping his face, but he would need it now, if he was going to jump into that mess of flame and liquid and survive. Then he looked at Beanfield. She didn’t have a survival core. He’d left hers in Medical, on the ship.

“Beanfield?” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”

He was unstrapping his own core when the smoke below heaved and something came out of it. It was Jackson, her head bulbous, her body glistening. She was encased in a thin suit with a boxy little helmet: Her core had deployed.

She pulled herself toward him one rung at a time, fighting the gravity. “What are you doing?” she said. “Put your core back on.”

“Where did you come from?”

She yanked open a locker and pulled an EV suit from it. Anders had forgotten that the jet contained stuff. Jackson had been scavenging: She already had a matter converter strapped to her back and supply belts at her waist. When she reached him, she flopped the EV suit onto a harness. “We’re sinking fast. Can you take Beanfield?”

He nodded.

“I’ll be right behind you. But the liquid’s dense. If we get separated, find each other on ping.”

He began to feed Beanfield into the EV suit, dressing