Something snagged her attention, coming up over the tree line. It was the Better Nation. As she saw it, she heard it, which was incongruous, because the bumblers were not supposed to run their impellers except for emergencies. It was transport that went where the wind blew, making hay while the sun shone, treating nature as a feature, not a bug. The impellers grew louder – an insect-buzz, then a swarm, then a full-throated roar. The Better Nation was supposed to be on its way to Nova Scotia.
There was a breeze out of the woods that left her in goosebumps. The hair on her neck stood. She was rooted to the spot, staring at the zepp straining across the sky, twisting to and fro as it fought the winds. It grew faster, and she realized belatedly that it was descending as well as impelling. Her heart thudded in her ears.
“HELP!” she shouted, without meaning to. “HELP THEM!” She smacked her interface surfaces, turning on her cameras and sensors without consciously deciding to.
The sound of her shouts in her ears unfroze her feet. She ran through camp, toward the zepp. She saw black shapes moving through the sky behind it, invisible except where they blotted out starlight. Inaudible over the impellers’ whine, a shrill tone of machines laboring beyond their safety margin.
Others were around, aiming scopes at the sky. There was shouting. Cursing. A fan of pencil-thin, violet lasers lit the sky, so bright it hurt to look. They converged on a black shape, tracked it jigging and jagging across the sky. She followed them down to their source, saw three of the university crew frantically plugging hydrogen cells into a rig like a miniature antiaircraft gun on a wide metal plate they weighed down with their boots. She ran to them and stood on the plate, freeing two of them to move closer to the batteries.
The drone in the lasers’ path fell. The lasers followed it until it fell below the tree line. Where they briefly touched the trees, the lasers set sizzling fires that smoked but quickly extinguished themselves as nearby shaking branches spilled payloads of raindrops on them.
The lasers retargeted, skewering another drone. As a third one opened fire with small missiles that wove through the sky on cones of flame, they split into two and targeted both drones. In the same eye-blink instant, two of the missiles found the Better Nation, one hitting the bag. The other hit the gondola. That one skated its surface and spun out of the sky like a maple-key, detonating beneath it, shock-wave sending up the gondola’s tail. The whole thing shook like it was caught in the teeth of an enormous dog. The missile on the gasbag blew. There was a sound like a thousand balloons popping as the cells bag ruptured in a cascade that swept back and forth across the bag’s length. The zepp fell, but it didn’t free fall – some of the cells, incredibly, were intact, a tribute to their fail-safes – but it came down fast.
Another drone caught fire and became a meteor. The lasers jumped to the remaining one, but it lifted as the stricken Better Nation smashed into camp, plowing a furrow through the roofs and walls of five hexayurts before its nose made contact with the road and it crumpled, the smoking remains of the gasbag settling over it a moment later. The sound – rending noises ending with a tooth-vibrating crunch – blended with shouts of dismay and terror. Walkaways swarmed the gondola, using their hands to bend back the smashed fiberglass hull to get at the people inside.
Etcetera ran past with a pry bar, but didn’t see her. He was fixed on the Better Nation, the zepp crew he’d befriended. The Mohawk kids were right behind him, with tools of their own, hammers and a wrecking bar. She remembered some of their friends had gone up in the airship. She pushed her fists into her guts, somewhere between punching herself in the stomach and massaging it, trying to drive the grief out.
One of the hexayurts that had been knocked down, right at the start, was the one she’d shared with Gretyl. The zepp had only grazed its roof, but the light, composite panels bent, then snapped, leaving the walls to tilt like ancient tombstones. Moving as if in a dream, Iceweasel walked to the yurt, kneading at her stomach. More people raced past her and there was a chorus of explosive bangs, the remaining gasbag cells overheating. She felt the fire’s heat on the back of her neck and smelled her hair singeing.
Before going to bed, she and Gretyl had taken advantage of the spacious privacy of the hexayurt to unpack their jumbled gear, squeezing the water out of the wet stuff and folding it carefully, coiling their rope and swapping the cells of their devices. It was still all laid out in the precise, Cartesian grid that Gretyl created, barely ruffled by the fragments of roof that tumbled into it. Next to it was the air mattress, trillions of mezoscale bubbles that filled if you laid the bed out and gave it a few brisk shakes, but deflated easily if you rolled it from one corner.
On the bed: Gretyl, on her side, dressed to chase Iceweasel into the night, like she was sleeping. Between her and Iceweasel, the air wavered with a cloud of steam, and she bent over Gretyl, solarized by the flashlight beam that her computer automatically sent arcing from her chest, without Iceweasel noticing. She reached a hand for Gretyl’s shoulder, touching it, then cupping and tugging it, trying to rock Gretyl onto her back. She was dead weight.
There was blood on the bed beneath her head.
Iceweasel tried to breathe three deep breaths. Got to one. Snapped into focus. She bent to Gretyl’s mouth, heard her breathing, slid a hand onto her neck and felt for a pulse, encountering blood but not caring. The pulse was strong. She played light over Gretyl, probing with her fingers, starting at her feet and working up, checking each arm, then her throat again, her chin.
Now, at last, she examined Gretyl’s head, probing carefully, unmindful of the chaos and bangs. There was a shallow cut on the back of her scalp, bleeding profusely, but small. There was no dent, no pulpy depression like the one that she’d half-seen/never-unseen on Billiam’s head. She heard her own breathing, slowed it down, peeled back each eyelid, looking at the contracting pupils, were they the same size? Gretyl blinked, brushing her hands away from her eyelids, leaving behind smears of blood from her fingertips.
Gretyl blinked several times, moved her arms and legs weakly, tried to sit up. Iceweasel held her down. “You’re hurt.” She spoke into her ear, trying to be calm and comforting.
“No shit. Fuck.” She blinked more. There were screams from the crash, and some that sounded nearer. Iceweasel looked into the night, dark and spotted with erratic orange flame-light. While she was distracted, Gretyl sat, shrugging off her restraining hand. She touched her scalp wound, and she stared at the blood on her palm with an affronted scowl. “Fuck this,” she said. Iceweasel folded the bloody hand in her own bloody hands.
“Babe, you have a head wound. You should lie down, in case there’s a spinal injury or a concussion.”
Gretyl stared out, seeming to have not heard, then, “Fine in theory, but I don’t think we get to choose tonight. Let’s go unfuck this. Help me up.” She turned to Iceweasel, stared with an intensity that admitted no debate, shifting her grip to pull her hand. Iceweasel struggled with herself, then pulled. Gretyl staggered, put her free hand to the back of her head, straightened.
“What the fuck is going on?” she said, as she lurched in the direction of the fire.
They were nearly upon it when someone grabbed Iceweasel’s arm and yanked. She swung around, hands in fists, eyes wide, heart pounding, sure she was about to be tazed by a merc sent by the zottas to terrorize them. It was Etcetera, his face smudged, eyes panicked. “Come on!” He yanked again, oblivious to the fact that she’d been about to break his nose.