14.

 

Winston’s hands shook so bad he couldn’t re-fire the grav fans. He stopped, clenched his fists, gave a shaking roar and pounded the arm rests several times. Lightning webs pushed the growing Black Void even closer, filling the sky from the canopy. It seemed to pulse as if it was breathing, always expanding.

That was when he noticed… something.

The Black Void’s lighting flashed out farther than it’s intended radius, leaving growing smoke where it spread. Just like the Q Staff did. Was LaBlanc right? Could it be that a Black Void was an out of control nano-disassembler cloud?

That disassociated analysis made Winston’s world swim. His mind drifted away in enthralled astonishment, seduced by that incredible suspicion. The lead weights of blaring alarms and flashing lights lashed on to his thoughts and dragged him back into the moment. Winston shook himself and regained his focus. He had no time to fixate on that.

“Bubby, get me positive buoy on those containers. Max power to the couplers. We are out of here!” He barked, forcing himself to focus.

With a quick tug, Winston’s crash frame slammed down, and he strapped in. A few shaky taps on the controls and the grav fans fired up. He gripped the yoke and watched the buoyancy creep down to zero.

“Come on… come on…” he begged the readout.

“Zero buoy! Punch it!” Billy Joe yelled.

Power poured into the Sierra Madre’s fans generating enough brute force to pull her train of containers into the sky. Blaugarten’s gravity well made the inertia drag tough to overcome at first. They jerked and yanked the empty containers skyward. Coupler buffers slammed against each other as the strain nearly overwhelmed them. They snapped back jolting Winston and Billy Joe, but the buffer generators, like pairs of magnets, kept the string of containers from crushing themselves into accordions as they broke from the moon’s field.

Winston was gently pushed deeper into his seat as acceleration began to outpace the tug’s compensators. A bubble of worry grew in his mind that they would fail. Images of being crushed flat cavorted through his mind.

“This is going to be so close,” Winston grunted, putting his caboose toward the Black Void’s hungry reach.

As they broke local atmosphere the first grasping tendrils struck Blaugarten, carving it up and then crumbling it like a rock crusher into smoke and dust.

“We’re hypersonic,” Billy Joe yelled.

“Yip,” Winston agreed through clenched teeth. The sensation of acceleration lessened as the Sierra Madre raced to her maximum speed, a ripping thunderclap chased her wake.

“No implosion yet,” Billy Joe said, his eyes locked on the rear cameras.

“There won’t be until the Void’s done eating,” Winston said. “Distance from Blaugarten?”

“Not far enough. Lightning tendrils are still gaining,” Billy Joe’s voice climbed an octave in fear.

Winston pushed the engines to the max, feeling the shudder through the floor as the Sierra Madre reached max speed. The hull gave brief flashes of fire off her nose as the thicker air and clouds burned from their passing through.

“We’re pulling away!” Billy Joe gave a hearty sigh of relief.

A contrail of smoke highlighted their escape. Their heat shields were glowing red and slowly turning yellow with the acceleration. Using the weather map, Winston aimed for gusts of lighter atmospheric viscosity. With careful maneuvering, the Sierra Madre ducked between clouds and thick pockets of atmosphere. Behind them clouds and asteroids turned into smoke and ash.

“How big is this thing going to get?” Billy Joe asked.

“Mighty big.” Winston’s voice strained. His eyes flicked sporadic glances between the controls and the void in the rear cameras. Ahead lay a collection of small populated skylands. They were too close. He could see the specks of people fleeing in their personal fliers and every airship they could get off the ground.

“Full size! Full size! She stopped growing!” Billy Joe shouted.

Winston held his breath, the Sierra Madre’s rattling flight was the only sound.

“It’s collapsing,” Billy Joe said. Winston looked at the camera. The Black Void boiled in place for a moment on the scanners, then it started to fall in on itself, drawn back by inexorable cosmic force.

Winston wanted to throw up. “Valerie...” he whispered.

There was a bright purple flash that washed out the sky. The canopy auto-polarized to black and the energy wave washed over them. Alarms wailed and a few touchscreens went blank. Their circuit breakers snapping open from the EMP wave washing them.

“We’ve ruptured a seal and backup coupler on containers number one and four! Telemetry link is cut after can number five! Computer is working to reestablish. All primary couplers still show green,” Billy Joe said, relieved.

“Get those back up and fix that seal, Bubby, or we’ll lose the whole string. We’re still way too close!” Winston ordered. He watched the implosion wave chasing them, moving at megasonic speeds as air rushed to fill the hard vacuum left behind. Billy Joe flew from the engineering console, closed the inner cab door and slid to the container access hatch. He split his arms in twain and mounted tool orbs from the maintenance locker onto his two new pseudopods. He lashed himself on to the Sierra Madre’s safety line and went out the exterior hatch.

Winston flipped through the exterior cameras to keep an eye on Billy Joe. The sound of the hypersonic air roared as the minute safety eddy was still terrifyingly strong. Little zephyrs bit chunks out of Billy Joe’s arms like piranhas.

The second backup coupler on the container was flashing red warning lights on its control panel. Some debris must have hit it in the cavitation between the faring, or the flash might have caused an electrical surge. Billy Joe moved in slow motion, his utility skirt’s strained to keep hold of the rails and lifelines that were taut to the point of breaking. Any biological life would have been torn apart instantly.

Slowly he stretched over and toggled the manual reset for the coupler. A larger crosswind tore nanites free from his utility arms almost losing one of his tool orbs to the Dream. Winston could see his partner being sandblasted away by bits of smoke and vapor that snuck into faring eddy. A few more adjustments to the controls and Billy Joe resealed the panel. Green across the board.

“Looks like a software glitch,” he commed back.

Winston looked back at the camera from the rear container and swallowed hard.

“Then get back in here, the implosion wave is coming fast,” Winston warned. The hazy edge of the wave, though slowing down would still reach them too soon.

With one final check, Billy Joe tested the container hatch lock and it slid open.

“Hoss! Container One’s open! Latch’s busted, internal gravity is offline.” Billy Joe could see scraps of dunnage and dirt whirling like dervishes with the wind in the zero gee environment of the container.

“I don’t give a behng! You have maybe 15 seconds and then anything not inside is gonna get sucked right off this ship! In or out Bubby!” Winston shouted.

Steeling himself, Billy Joe reached across and gave a 5 second spot weld to the container door then dragged himself back inside the Sierra Madre and closed the access hatch.

The implosion wave hit just as the hatch locked. It felt as if the ship’s grav fans reversed flow in an emergency brake. Winston was thrown against his cushioned crash frame, hard. Without it, he would have slammed through the carbon scored nose of the canopy. Billy Joe had to grab onto the floor with every nanite in his skirt, turning it into a huge suction cup to keep him from doing the same.

Off to their eight o’clock the skylands began to slide past them, some breaking up from the pull, others colliding in horrifying explosions of rock.

Winston couldn’t take his eyes off the rear monitor. The horrifying void mesmerized him for the second time in his life. The space was absolutely clear of everything that had existed mere minutes before. Everything in the implosion’s radius was falling into its center.

The Sierra Madre shook as the winds grew and grew. Man and mech were slammed about by the turbulence despite inertial buffers. Winston lost track of time as he fought to maintain control. The skylands accelerated past them on their way to a new position in the Dream. It was possible that a new moon of compressed matter might be the result, some isolated amused part of his brain thought. A new Blaugarten was being created by the matter drawn into the growing gravity well of collecting mass.

A bright shimmering blob was approaching them with froth and spray.

“You have got to be cheising me!” Winston blurted out. “A waterberg?”

Winston turned to avoid the raging mountain-sized mass of free-floating water. As he turned hard to avoid a direct hit on the liquid mass, the hypersonic winds grabbed the Sierra Madre and began to try to tear the train apart. Coupler alarms screamed as they skimmed its surface, blasting through the foaming spray rising from its surface.

“Keep turning, Hoss!” Billy Joe shouted. “Use the wind’s draw to slingshot us out!”

Winston ran with the Bubby’s suggestion. “Just like a heavy moon, use its force...” he muttered, praying that the water shooting through the fans wouldn’t burn them out. “... and achieve escape velocity.”

The Sierra Madre burst out of the water, using the winds help to make for much smoother flying. Now instead of fighting full force against the Dream’s atmosphere rushing to fill the void he was now at an angle to it, spiralling away. The route was longer but his power drain dropped by half. Winston wove up and down  to avoid slow moving debris pulled in to where Blaugarten and a fair chunk of the Dream existed.

Winston sighed. “Good suggestion, Bubby. Really good. Looks like we’ll make it after all.”

“I guess we got a tug wash out of the bargain, too.” Billy Joe said.

Winston laughed at the mundane side effect of their near disaster. Like an emergency relief valve engaged just before the boiler exploded. The high shrill hysterics left him with a hitch in his side and tears down his cheeks as the hysterics finally subsided.

Billy Joe stared at him blankly head cocked ever so slightly like a puppy. Winston felt light. He could see that his partner couldn’t understand but now wasn’t the time to explain either.

Now he was able to focus on more mundane needs of the Sierra Madre. With a few deft taps, he cleared out the list of comm warnings and standard mass casualty and disaster alerts. It looked like for the most part those who weren’t digested by the Void escaped without too much trouble, and those left probably couldn’t be helped.

Just as Winston started pulling up the charts to plot a lane back to Consolidated Freight with the containers the “All Comm” channel indicator lit up. Someone in this disaster was broadcasting in the clear for everyone to hear. Usually it was just some entertainment Dataoid who was tone deaf to tragedy or a news network reporting. Hard to believe they’d be here so quick though. Curious, Winston flipped the comms open to give a listen.

“Mayday, mayday, mayday,” came the ancient cry for help. “This is Bonavitae Pharma Clinic calling for any vessel in the vicinity to evacuate our facility. A Black Void has imploded nearby and our skyland is falling into the collapse. There are four hundred patients and attendant staff. We need immediate evac. ETA to impact with the debris core is two hours. All our vehicles were destroyed by the event. Mayday, mayday, mayday! We need immediate evac to any and all vessels in the area.” The voice broke off for a moment. “Please help us...” they whispered before breaking into hopeless sobbing and the transmitter went dark.