The Lead Cloak (The Lattice Trilogy Book 1) (29 page)

“Trial?” Tranq scoffed. “You think they’ll let us go to trial? They’ll blow this ship out of—”

“Enough! There’s still time.” Wulf cut in. He’d been staring at the spheres, where Shaw’s message was fading away. Over his shoulder, he called, “Annalise! We’ve got less than a minute to get out from under the Orbitel’s shield. We’re checking out.”

Wulf left the sphere room behind him and hurried down the hall with the rest in tow, including Shaw.

“But we don’t know where we’re going!” Annalise said, running next to him. “We haven’t planned any descents, and it would take at least eighteen hours to reach another shield big enough for the
Walden
hide to under. In that amount of time—”

“I know. We’re almost certainly going to encounter some piece of old satellite that we can’t adjust for. But if we stay, we’ll be caught.”

“Anything larger than a marble … that’s all it will take to pierce the hull,” Annalise said.

They reached a door unfamiliar to Shaw and Wulf put his hand on it.

Tranq grabbed Shaw’s forearm. “This one’s not for you,” he said.

“It’s not like he can do anything worse in here,” Wulf said, not even looking back at Shaw. “We clearly locked him out of the wrong room.”

Shaw shook off Tranq and followed the rest through the door.

The control room of the Walden had another immense window, just like the great room. Through it, he could see the arc of their protective shield and the bulbs of the orbiting hotel.

But the space was filled with display panels and instrument holograms showing the layout of the ship, and the clutter meant that this space lacked the beauty of the empty room directly above. Annalise was already at one of the screens, manipulating information at a speed Shaw could barely follow. Wulf slid into a chair and slid a belt over his waist.

“Better do the same,” he said to the room. “This is going to happen fast.”

Shaw looked for another chair, but they were already taken. He stepped backward into the back wall, hoping that the stickiness would keep him in place. Once secured, he studied the hotel again. In any second, their view of the shield should start being flashed by blue laser pulses. Shaw kept his eyes on the surfaces, but nothing changed. Had no one gotten the message?

The angle of the view suddenly tilted, and it was as if the Walden were falling back away from the Orbitel, the window rolling up to take in the full and immense scope of the shield. Shaw felt his body press more firmly against the back wall.

“Move her to port,” Wulf told Annalise. “We can’t be anywhere between the Earth and the shield.”

They kept moving, and Shaw kept his eyes fixed on the white expanse that was now moving slowly out of his field of view. Was the Walden clear yet? Could this still work?

There was a flickering—yes! “There!” Shaw exclaimed, pointing. Two small blue lights suddenly dotted the shield surface. They disappeared and reappeared, dancing across the surface of the shield.

Then there were a handful. More and more tiny pinpricks of light. Then a whole field of them all over the shield.

He’d gotten through.

But it was too late … He could see the entirety of the shield dancing with blue dots. And if he could see it, they weren’t in front of it.

“And in that bottom left corner, there would have been a big round white hole where no lasers penetrated,” Taveena said to herself.

Had the
Walden
stayed even a few seconds more, it was clear that they would have been revealed. Even Shaw was impressed with the density of laser points. When Wulf called, his men on the ground answered …

Now what?
Shaw wondered as the
Walden
continued to move away and to the left. They were distant enough now that the shield and hotel were a quarter of their size, stark white against the void of space behind them. And with that distance, his one gambit to reveal the ship had been snatched away.

Once the
Walden
was out of harm’s way, what would they do with him? Like an attempt on the Lattice, an attack against the raiders that wasn’t successful meant certain death. Now that it had failed, what hope did he have? If they didn’t choose to execute him on the spot, there was no way he was going to survive the vote.

Shaw was ready to turn away from the view and face his fate, when something changed. A few of the dancing lights on the hotel had changed. Not blue, but—

But red.

Someone whispered, “No.”

No one would go that far, would they? Just because of a message from a sphere?

And then he saw his answer.

There was blinding flash of light as the white bulbs of the hotel exploded, some into space, many back against the shield where they ricocheted off and cascaded away. The shield stayed intact, but was now protecting the void of space from the hotel’s debris.

Shaw gaped at the new meteor shower, a cascade of metal and plastic and glass, but also … of guests and staff. Of men and women. He felt a new weight on him as he watched the Roman candle of burning debris. And he had unknowingly lit the fuse.

“I …” Shaw stuttered, but he couldn’t think what to say after that.

As if he had broken a spell in the silent room, Tranq leaned forward in his chair. “Annalise, get us out of here! Now!”

She must have already been thinking the same thing, because before Tranq had even finished, Shaw felt his weight shift as the
Walden
picked up speed, trying to put more distance between itself and the remains of the Orbitel.

Annalise, her voice thick, said, “Where am I going? All of that debris is going to be in this orbital path for at least a day. Maybe a week.”

“Either we descend into the atmosphere or we find a higher orbit,” Tranq said.

“The moon.” Wulf sounded certain. “It’s our only option.”

“I didn’t design the
Walden
for that!” Annalise said.

“I know. But we have to. We’ll do a single orbit and get our bearings while the debris clears. But we can’t risk—”

With an immense rumble, the
Walden
shuddered, cutting off Wulf. He didn’t need to finish his sentence. Everyone froze.

The
Walden
shuddered again, and paused again. And then she bolted upward, like a dog who had just broken its leash, spiraling maniacally and almost joyfully out of the strict confines of autopilot and Lattice-generated telemetry. She had no fear, no cause to do anything but run and flip and chase her tail. No matter how the crew inside was tossed about.

Somehow Shaw had been rocked free of the sticky wall. He was spinning, floating, hurtling through the air, trying to keep himself from slamming into the walls—or letting the walls slam into him, really—as the ship plummeted and raced and bucked around him.

During some low pass against the floor, he felt something catch on his ankle. A tight grasp, but not tight enough, he felt himself pulled away at the next back flip of the ship. As the incredible forces whipped him around the room, he tried to keep his orientation. Where was the floor? Whose hand was that?

He was lucky he hadn’t collided with anyone else yet—was he the only one who had lost contact with the
Walden
?

There! A hand outstretched. This time he was facing the right way. He grabbed at it, his hands clutching for the wrist before he sailed passed it again. The ship tried to keep him moving, but the grip was strong enough, and he stayed.

Pulling him in, the strong arm helped him down. Tranq.

“Get as much contact against the floor as you can!”

Shaw put his forearm out, and slowly slid off of Tranq’s chest and tried to get as much of his legs and torso as he could against the sticky gray floor. He could feel the
Walden
continue to pitch around him, the horrible creaking noises continuing. He remembered the noises he’d heard when he’d jumped back and watched Caesar crossing the Adriatic Sea in those old creaking wooden boats. How was it that after more than two thousand years, this could sound so much worse?

And why hadn’t it ended yet? Where was Annalise or Wulf?

Shaw tried to roll his head off of the floor, but was having trouble getting the angle right. He felt his stomach churning—never one prone to motion sickness, he was nevertheless having trouble keeping everything down.

Timing his head roll to when he felt his stomach lurch, Shaw was able to get his head up. But he could only see the backs of the deep chairs where Wulf and Annalise had last sat.
Were they still there?

Someone must have been, because all at once, the ship was stable. Flat, calm, and dull, as if it had never had a wild run in its life. Shaw stayed on the floor, his eyes closed, trying to let his breathing return to normal and making sure he wasn’t going to puke.

He felt a boot tap his stomach. He opened his eyes. Tranq again.

“I’m OK,” Shaw answered.

“Then get up and help me clean this mess up.”

Shaw rolled his head up again, and then slowly unstuck the rest of his limbs. Each motion triggered an ache or a pain. He didn’t think anything was broken, but he’d hit too many surfaces to avoid significant bruising.

Getting up, he found the air was filled with tiny pieces of floating material. Bits of cloth, moisture that he guessed was bile or spit or blood, and some larger pieces as well. A shoe, hair, a wrap off of someone’s forearm. He tried to clear the air around his face but without much success.

Tranq was screwing a hose into the wall.

“Thank you for grabbing me,” Shaw said.

“I didn’t want to get kicked in the face while you flew by. Stupid to let yourself get unstuck.”

Shaw ignored it. He looked around for everyone else. Annalise and Wulf were huddled over a display, ignoring the room around them. Taveena was nowhere to be seen.

“Where did Taveena go?”

“She’s checking on everyone else,” Tranq answered. “Grab anything that looks important out of the air. The rest is going in here.”

There was the hum of a pump somewhere and Tranq started trying to clear the debris out of the air. Shaw grabbed for the shoe and the wrap and anything else he could get. He was straining to reach something a few inches out of his grasp when he remembered that he could float free of the floor again.

He rolled his feet off the floor and grabbed at all the floating debris he could before pushing back off the ceiling and aiming through another area thick with debris on his way back to the floor. Crisscrossing the room, he was able to get most of the biggest objects out of the air, grateful the ship hadn’t chosen that particular moment to start bucking wildly again.

As he was finishing, Erling came into the room with a monstrous black eye that was almost swollen shut. He caught Shaw’s glance at it, but looked away with his good eye and went to talk to Annalise and Wulf. Annalise wrapped her arms around him in a big bear hug and inspected his eye.

Shaw wanted to slink off into a corner somewhere.

“What’d you expect, Shaw?” Tranq was standing beside him. “That as soon as you used those spheres, we’d all come around to your point of view?”

“I wasn’t thinking,” Shaw said. And he knew he hadn’t been. He’d almost killed every person on this ship, including himself. And what if he had been successful? Tranq had been right—the rest of them would have died because of their raid on the Lattice. He didn’t want that to happen either. They were raiders, yes. But he didn’t
hate
them like he thought he would have before. He understood them. Mostly. Understood their basic motivations, even if he didn’t get all the nuances they were throwing at him.

But he understood the wider world, too. He understood how much people loved the Lattice, how much they thought it helped their daily lives. Did it have to go this way? Couldn’t they just …
convince
more people not to use it?

Shaw shook himself out of his thoughts. That kind of logic would have gotten him fired from his job before he’d even finished the thought. And yet … it didn’t matter anymore. Something really had changed inside him.

If Wulf looked inside me now, I know he’d give me that ring.

Shaw moved toward Erling, but the young man saw him coming and hurried away. Shaw was left with Wulf and Annalise, who ignored him in favor of the screens they were hovering over.

“—will keep it from getting any worse, sure. But we need a lot more than just sealing the crack. We don’t have enough bots to repair the thrusters in time.”

“Taveena can get
billions
of them out there in just a few hours.”

Annalise shook her head firmly. “It’s too long. We’re keeping her steady thanks to the quantum stabilizers, but they shouldn’t be used as a main engine like this. They’ll burn out before the bots are finished. We can’t change course, we’re just barely keeping her in a straight line … we need the main engine back online as fast as possible. We’ve got to replace its AI.”

“A drone, then? Instead of a lot of little bots, maybe one big one can do it.”

“It won’t go any faster. There’s only one
Walden
, so it doesn’t have the background of other ships to learn from like most repair drones. It’ll be guessing the whole time, and we don’t have time for it. It’s got to be me.”

“Dammit, Annalise, it’s like you’re itching for a reason to go out there! We’re hurling away from Earth and at any moment the stabilizers could give out and we’ll start the roller-coaster again. There’s no way I’m going to let you out there!”

“It’s the only way we’re going to get back into a stable orbit, Wulf.”

Wulf looked back at a screen. Shaw glanced at it too—a triangular piece of metal lodged into the side of the hull, right over what Shaw now understood to be the primary engine.

“Just you and the drone?”

“I would have said Erling, too, but under the circumstances—”

“I can still go with you!” Erling exclaimed, moving back into the conversation, but not entirely drowning out Wulf’s strenuous objections.

“No way! No way! First, you’re too young for me to let you risk your life on the side of a runaway spaceship. And second, you can barely see, Erling! You’re staying put.”