Driftmetal Read Online Free

my crew. We just think this is the
best thing for you right now. Tough love, as they say.”
    By about the second sentence in, his words had
started to blend together into a meaningless porridge of
patronizing gibberish. I bit my lip, shaking my head. “Dad, you and
Ma should’ve stayed home. You never had it in you to sit by while
your son took the reins of a ship you built yourself. I always got
the feeling you regretted giving her to me. Someday soon, you’ll
regret taking her back.”
    I bent my will toward getting a reflex response,
hoping the solenoid in my heel wouldn’t make a fool of me again. A
moment of awkward silence and two heartbeats later, it shot out
like a dream and launched me off the deck. I soared over the bow
and into a backward dive as the guns rang out, sending laser bolts
and charged particles and hot shrapnel thrumming past my ears. I
got hit twice, but I wouldn’t realize it until later. In that
moment, I was too busy falling.

2
    Gilfoyle’s thugs had ripped a lot out of me, and not
in a figurative sense. There were empty compartments all over my
body where they’d eviscerated awesome, expensive tech I’d bought,
begged, or stolen for. They’d reduced me to a shell of my former
self by the time they tossed me into that hovercell. Now I was
plummeting toward the Churn, its desolation spreading out below me
in every direction, and I was still that same shell.
    We’d been between drift-towns when the Civs stopped
us, sort of a no-man’s land where there were no platforms or large
floaters. Now I found with startling certainty that there wasn’t a
single sign of life around, even as far as my telescopic eye could
see. The nearflow was far below me yet, heavy gusts of wind
carrying a field of airborne rubble over the surface.
    You should know that driftmetal possesses a quality
called cumulative anti-gravitational mass ; that is to say,
the bigger it is, the higher it floats. So the longer I fell
without hitting anything, the lower my chances of hitting something
big.
    I clamped my eyes shut while I fumbled around in the
pockets of the webgear I’d grabbed from the crew’s quarters. I was
playing the ‘ how-well-do-you-know-your-tech ’ game show where
the grand prize was not dying. I recognized each mod as my fingers
felt their way along: flecker shield, tripwire, proxy remote,
bluewave comm, scrambler, cochlear translator, muscle booster. No,
no, and no.
    Wait a minute. The first one.
    With the sound of terminal velocity screaming in my
ears, I ripped open the velcro fastener. I got a white-knuckled
grip on the flecker shield and drew it from its pouch, opened the
panel in my forearm, and shoved the mod inside. I tucked my body
into a cannonball and flipped over so I was falling feet-first. I
was plummeting at a frightening rate. When I opened my eyes, the
nearflow wasn’t so far away anymore.
    A big floater caught me on the elbow and I cursed to
myself. I would’ve cursed out loud, if the sheer terror of falling
hadn’t made my voice seize up like a clogged chimney. Soon I was
pinballing off floaters the size of coffee tables and ironing
boards, trying to grab hold of whatever I could, but failing. You’re going to make it , I reassured myself, failing to
reassure myself.
    I waited until the floaters had decreased to the
size of house cats before I bent my wrist back and activated the
flecker shield. It wasn’t a shield I needed, of course. What I
needed was a parachute.
    A metal rod shot two feet from my wrist and unfurled
like a circular fan, a pleated metal ring designed to shrug off
flecker particles. I raised it overhead like an umbrella. As I fell
toward the nearflow, debris started to accumulate in the shield’s
underside. I felt myself begin to slow down.
    The floaters were coming at me sideways now; the
nearflow felt like being in front of a gigantic fan while someone
was dumping out a bag of gravel. I managed to open one eye for a
second and found myself closer to the