Ancillary Justice (Imperial Radch #1) - Ann Leckie Page 0,71

tubes were just a few centimeters narrower than my outstretched arms, and were themselves very deep.

“Breq?” Seivarden’s voice was breathy and strained. “Can you do something?” Not, at least, You have to do something.

“Do you trust me?” I asked.

Her eyes widened further, her gasps became a bit more ragged. She didn’t trust me, I knew. She was only still with me because she thought I was official, hence inescapable, and she was important enough for the Radch to send someone after her—underestimating her own importance was never one of Seivarden’s failings—and perhaps because she was tired of running, from the world, from herself. Ready to give up. But I still didn’t understand why I was with her. Of all the officers I’ve served with, she was never one of my favorites.

“I trust you,” she lied.

“When I grab you, raise your armor and put your arms around me.” Fresh alarm flashed across her face, but there was no more time. I extended my armor under my clothes and stepped off the bridge.

The instant my hands touched her shoulders, the red glass shattered, sharp-edged fragments flying out and away, glittering briefly. Seivarden closed her eyes, ducked her head, face into my neck, held me tight enough that if I hadn’t been armored my breathing would have been impeded. Because of the armor I couldn’t feel her panicked breath on my skin, couldn’t feel the air rushing past, though I could hear it. But she didn’t extend her own armor.

If I had been more than just myself, if I had had the numbers I needed, I could have calculated our terminal velocity, and just how long it would take to reach it. Gravity was easy, but the drag of my pack and our heavy coats, whipping up around us, affecting our speed, was beyond me. It would have been much easier to calculate in a vacuum, but we weren’t falling in a vacuum.

But the difference between fifty meters a second and 150 was, at that moment, only large in the abstract. I couldn’t see the bottom yet, the target I was hoping to hit was small, and I didn’t know how much time we’d have to adjust our attitude, if we even could. For the next twenty to forty seconds we had nothing to do but wait, and fall.

“Armor!” I shouted into Seivarden’s ear.

“Sold it,” she answered. Her voice shook slightly, straining against the rushing air. Her face was still pressed hard against my neck.

Suddenly gray. Moisture formed on exposed portions of my armor and blew streaming upward. One point three five seconds later I saw the ground, dark circles packed tight. Bigger, and therefore closer, than I liked. A surge of adrenaline surprised me; I must have gotten too used to falling. I turned my head, trying to look straight down past Seivarden’s shoulder to what lay directly below us.

My armor was made to spread out the force of a bullet’s impact, bleed some of it away as heat. It was theoretically impenetrable, but I could still be injured or even killed with the application of sufficient force. I’d suffered broken bones, lost bodies under an unrelenting hail of bullets. I wasn’t sure what the friction of decelerating would do to my armor, or to me; I had some skeletal and muscular augmentation, but whether it would be sufficient for this, I had no idea. I was unable to calculate just exactly how fast we were going, just exactly how much energy needed to be bled away to slow to a survivable speed, how hot it would get inside and outside my armor. And unarmored, Seivarden wouldn’t be able to assist.

Of course, if I had still been what I once was, it wouldn’t matter. This wouldn’t have been my only body. I couldn’t help thinking I should have let Seivarden fall. Shouldn’t have jumped. Falling, I still didn’t know why I had done it. But at the moment of choice I had found I couldn’t walk away.

By then I knew our distance in centimeters. “Five seconds,” I said, shouted, above the wind. By then it was four. If we were very, very lucky we’d fall straight into the tube below us and I’d push my hands and feet against the walls. If we were very, very lucky the heat from the friction wouldn’t burn unarmored Seivarden too badly. If I was even luckier I’d only break my wrists and ankles. All of it struck me as unlikely, but the omens would fall