The Trouble Dog reared back and I realised there was no time for the ship to ease itself into the higher dimensions. If we were to escape the coming detonation, it would have to slam its way through the membrane and hope for the best. Pinned in place, all I could do was clench my jaw. As a kid, I’d seen little insects skate across the surface tension of a pond. They didn’t have the weight to break through. Jump engines gave us the clout to break the “surface” of the universe, but the transition had to be handled carefully. A miscalculation could cause a ship to “rebound” into the physical world, or disintegrate entirely. And what the Trouble Dog was about to do was the equivalent of a mosquito diving at the water from a hundred feet up, accelerating all the way.

I thought of Sedge again.

This was going to be brutal.

Forty-Seven: Ashton Childe

FORTY-SEVEN

ASHTON CHILDE

Alva Clay lit the shuttle’s spotlights as we sank into the shadows between the slab-like sides of the canyon.

“There,” she said, pointing between her booted feet. Through the shuttle’s transparent nose, I caught movement on the canyon floor.

“Looks like a couple of flyers, maybe a dozen people.” I was standing behind the main seats in the cockpit. The exoskeleton made it impossible to wedge myself into a chair, so I had to settle for locking the legs in place and holding on as best I could.

“Rescue party?” Preston asked.

Clay shook her head. “See those things there, like millipedes?”

“Yeah.”

“They’re crawlers. Combat recon drones. And those people down there look to be armed, and—whoah!” She threw the little craft into reverse. Hail rattled against the hull.

Preston’s eyes went wide. “Are they shooting at us?”

“They’re not blowing kisses.”

I grabbed hold of the back of Clay’s couch as she whirled the shuttle around in its own length and powered away. We heard a few more pings, and then we were up and over the lip of the canyon. We arced upwards, and then fell back into a second canyon running parallel with the first, separated from the gunmen by impregnable white crystal walls two kilometres high.

As we lowered into the gloom of this new fissure, Clay ran diagnostics on the shuttle’s systems and swore under her breath.

“Problem?” I asked.

“Depends.” She punched a few controls and her scowl deepened.

“Depends on what?”

“On whether you’re particularly partial to breathing.” She flipped a couple of switches and brought us in to land on the canyon floor. The wheels touched stone and the engines whined into silence.

“What’s the damage?”

“A couple of high-velocity rounds through the main oxygen tank.”

“Can it be fixed?”

Clay shrugged. “Sure, but there wouldn’t be any point. All the air will have already leaked out.”

“Don’t you have any emergency patches?”