Heavy Shower

With Gavin’s foot on the pedal, their Spade half-flew along the canyon floor. Every time a tire hit a patch of vitrified earth under the sand, Zoey was thrown back in her seat as the pickup lurched like a boat cresting a wave. She felt the jolt in her teeth, but scarcely dared un-clench her jaw for fear of biting her own tongue off.
“Aias! Aias Dispatch, come in!” she managed to hiss into the CB tethered to the dashboard, “Aias, this is the Chancer crew! We’re coming back, and we have survivors from the crash! Keep the door open for us, over!”
A dreadful silence followed her releasing the speaker button before Foreman Banks’ voice filtered through. “We read you, Chancer crew, but we can’t wait much longer. The meteorite swarm’s already broken atmosphere, they’ll start hitting any second. If one hits us with the blast doors open, we’ll lose the garage, worse if it’s a big one.”
All our lives aren’t worth a garage to you, huh? Zoey wanted to scream, but she knew it wasn’t his fault. Aias Prospect survived on a razor’s edge. With Troy’s low-orbit moons shifting gravity unpredictably and pulling down swarms of meteorites, getting any captains saner than Gavin to just make deliveries cost dearly. Any who did risked smashing into the glass spires and canyon walls surrounding Aias Prospect like the Foduck had.
Banks never would’ve posted a reward for salvaging the downed freighter, especially one worth racing across the glasslands ahead of a meteor shower for, if the mining drills’ loss didn’t put the settlement’s contracts at risk. If the miners lost their jobs, the whole place would be abandoned. Without the drills, they might recover, but not without the excavators in their motor pool.
It wasn’t his fault they were late, either. That was the Jiralhanae mercs’ doing. The ones who’d waited for Gavin and Simon to load up the crates they’d found, then swooped in with a Spectre to steal their bounty at the point of a plasma turret. Simon was still only half-conscious after that encounter. And in searching the Foduck’s wreck for emergency meds, they’d found survivors of the unfortunate ship.
“Just keep it open!” Zoey growled, hanging up before Banks could make another excuse.
That moment, the clouds above the canyon’s rim lit up with a flash like lightning. But lightning, so far as Zoey had seen, was blue. This was the yellow-white of a sun.
Unnatural daylight began chasing shadows down one side of the canyon, like a time-lapsed day playing out all around. Then for an instant, a mote of blinding light passed over the ravine: an iron core glowing like a star from the heat of reentry.
It disappeared over the canyon’s other rim, leaving a trail of vapor. For a long moment, the Spade’s growling engine felt like relative calm. Then a sonic boom slammed through the canyon and broke over their eardrums.
Zoey closed her eyes and slapped her hands over her ears as the overpressure wave made long cracks in the Spade’s windshield. Muffled tones through the ringing of her ears told her Gavin was cursing in the driver’s seat.
Then her left ear popped like water had drained from it, and Zoey could hear the engine’s whine again. Panic gripped her bowels, making her want to struggle free of her seatbelt. The meteorite had come down with all the force of a MAC slug, and here she sat in an open-frame buggy! Not that she’d survive an impact like that in a Scorpion tank. She felt their pickup was racing across the surface of a dartboard while the moons took drunken shots at it with a handgun, waiting to see if the next turn would bring death down on them for twenty points.
Another flash lit the heavens as more space debris hit the atmosphere. “Faster, Gavin!” she yelled, frantically slapping the dashboard. The obstacles of boulders and scree fallen in their path from the canyon walls were the least of their worries now.
The next meteorite must’ve fallen far off, as its flash faded without so much as a tremor. But before the clouds had dimmed completely, another turned them bright again.
In the harsh shadows the new perpetual sunlight cast, Zoey spotted a sleek purple shape—turned over and dusted at the foot of a mountain of debris which hadn’t been there when they first rode out. She pointed it out in silence, willing Gavin to understand. It could’ve been them, just as the crash that killed the Foduck could’ve been the Chancer V.
Gavin only spared a second’s glance and a bitten lip. “Nothing we can do for ‘em now, even if we wanted to!”
The skies lit up again, brighter than ever. Zoey dared to look up, but couldn’t see the source—until the falling star blazed down dead ahead of them. Its glare stung Zoey’s eyes only a moment, leaving its path burned on her retinas from peripheral vision to where it buried itself in the canyon wall. A thunderhead of sand and glass chunks blasted free of the cliffside.
Zoey had just enough time to track the falling debris and realize it was on course to intercept the Spade when Gavin shouted, “Keep your heads down!”
Then the first pebble-size stones began to rain across the hood with sharp, metallic thuds as a curtain of dust descended.
Category:The Weekly