with diagnostics running. When I completed the circle, he gave a thumbs-up, then settled his pack on his shoulder and started hiking off. He had to get back to Igneous to return the sealing equipment.
I couldn’t quite persuade myself to land. After all this time, I wanted to fly a little longer with M-Bot. So I grabbed the altitude lever. The control sphere could make the ship bob up and down, powering the acclivity ring for the finer points of dodging. But if you wanted a quick ascent, this was the way.
I eased it toward me.
We shot upward into the sky.
I hadn’t expected it to work this well. We rocketed upward, and I felt g-forces slam into me, forcing me down. I cringed, noting how fast we were going, and eased off the lever. That kind of g-force would . . .
. . . crush me?
I felt the acceleration, but not nearly as much as I should have. I couldn’t be pulling more than three Gs, though I felt like it should have been much more.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Can you be more specific? I have over a hundred and seventy semiautonomous subroutines that—”
“The g-forces,” I said, looking out the window, watching the ground retreat at an alarming pace. “I should be blacking out about now.”
“Oh, yes. That. My gravitational capacitors are capable of belaying sixty percent of g-forces, with a maximum threshold of well over a hundred Earth standard. I did warn you that your ships had primitive systems for handling pilot stress.”
I let off on the altitude lever, and the ship stopped accelerating.
“Would you like to engage rotational g-force management for further help withstanding the forces?” M-Bot asked.
“Like where my seat turns around?” I asked, remembering what Rig had explained about M-Bot. Humans didn’t do well with g-forces in the wrong directions—it was much harder for us to take downward forces, for example, because they pushed all the blood in our bodies into our feet. M-Bot could compensate for that by rotating the seat, so that I took the forces backward—in a way easier for my body to handle.
“Not for now,” I said. “Let me first get used to how you fly.”
“Very well,” M-Bot said.
We quickly reached 100,000 feet, which was around the highest that we flew DDF ships in regular situations. I reached to decelerate, but hesitated. Why not go a little higher? I’d always wanted to. Now, nobody was there to stop me.
I kept us going, soaring upward until the altitude indicator hit 500,000 feet. There, finally, I slowed us, admiring the view. I’d never been so high. The mountain peaks below looked like nothing more than crumpled-up paper. I could actually see the planet curving—and not merely some faint arc either. I felt as if I could stretch onto my toes and see the whole planet.
I was still barely halfway to the rubble belt, which I’d been told was in low orbit starting at around a million feet. However, from this height, I could see it far better. What I saw from the surface as only vague patterns now manifested as enormous swaths of metal upon metal, vaguely lit by some sources I couldn’t make out.
Looking at it, realizing it was still well over a hundred kilometers away, the grand scale of it finally started to strike me. Those little specks that looked like individual dots . . . those had to be as large as the piece of debris that had crashed down during that fight a week back.
It was all so enormous. My jaw dropped as I gazed at it, taking in the many sections, all rotating and churning in esoteric orbits. Mostly just shadows, moving, swirling, layers upon layers.
“Would you like to get closer?” M-Bot said.
“I don’t dare. They said that some of the junk would shoot at me.”
“Well, those are obvious remnants of a semiautonomous defense grid,” he said. “With the shadows of outer habitat platforms behind, I’d say—all interspersed with broken shipyards and matter reclamation drones.”
I watched it shifting, moving, and tried to imagine a time when this had been functional. Used. Lived in. A world above the world.
“Yes, some of those defense platforms are clearly operational,” M-Bot said. “Even I would have difficulty slipping past them. Note those asteroids I’m highlighting on your canopy; slag formations on the surface indicate their ancient purpose. Some strategies for suppressing a planet include towing interplanetary bodies into position and dropping them. This can accomplish anything from the removal of a specific