Driftmetal Read Online Free Page A

ground than I’d imagined. The
shield was helping, but it wasn’t going to be enough to make the
landing comfortable or painless.
    I braced myself and hit hard, a bone-jarring impact
I couldn’t roll away from. I sank down to my armpits in loose
Churn, my bare feet plunging through four feet of grit and
gravel.
    Yeah, it hurt like the dickens. Whatever the dickens
are.
    I ejected the shield and tossed it onto the surface
beside me. All the bits of driftmetal and gravstone it had gathered
began to float away. I yanked the bluewave comm from my webgear and
flicked on the beacon, then tossed it onto the shield. The beacon
would alert the Civs and bring them right to me, but I was starting
to like the idea of prison better than the idea of suffocating in a
sea of powdered stone.
    The morning sun was just beginning to rise, but the
air was so thick with dust and rubble down here that it was as dark
as late afternoon. I felt a rumbling beneath me. Everything started
to shake. My augmented eye went haywire, and my solenoid
triggered.
    A dozen yards away, the ground spewed a cloud of
pink dust. I sank a little further. A rush of water choked up to my
right and flowed down the side of a shallow hill before soaking
into the ground again. I heard the rush of air as a pocket opened
up behind me. There was a smell like eggs and rotting meat. Earth
fell in and filled the pocket, and I slid a few feet backward.
    I flailed my arms above me, trying to wiggle my way
up a little and ease some of the pressure on my chest. This was a
less active part of the Churn than the territory encompassed by
Gilfoyle’s mining operation. The land was coughing up dust and
brown water and foul-smelling gases instead of quicksand and
firespouts and boulders, so it could’ve been worse.
    I felt another rumble, this time from somewhere in
the distance. A pair of hoverbikes slipped over the hill where the
dirty water had flowed up, moving fast through the dust haze. Their
riders were hooded and masked, jacketed in long dark trenchers.
    The first instinct I had was to fight. Anyone who
made a habit of hanging out down here was, by default, savage,
uncouth, and not to be trusted. Of course, when you can’t trust
your own parents, who can you trust?
    I snapped the grapplewire mod into my forearm and
tried to wiggle out far enough to snap off a clean shot. I didn’t
lead the hoverbike enough, and the wire flew wide of its target.
The rider cranked something, and a tent of blue electrical arcs
erupted around him, sucking the errant grappler toward itself like
a magnet.
    I tried to retract my wire, but the energy field had
a better grip than my winch had pulling power. The biker hit
another switch. Blue arcs bolted down the wire and zapped me rigid.
My eyelight strobed, and my solenoid triggered three or four
times.
    When the shock ended, I went limp. I sank down to my
neck. The gravel was pressing against my chest anew, the sour smell
of electrical smoke in my nostrils and the taste of raw ozone on my
tongue. My arms were poking up like broken antennae, and every
movement I tried to make sent up new clouds of dust for me to
breathe.
    The bikers circled around behind me, and I heard
them approach. Their hoverbikes were low to the ground, displacer
engines thrashing the surface like leaf blowers over uncooked
rice.
    “What’s a techsoul doing down here?” one said,
yelling over the noise.
    It became apparent to me then that these weren’t
just people. They were human people. Bona fide
hundred-percenters, the kind without a scrap of synth in their
bodies. As in, one step above Neanderthals.
    I wasn’t sure whether the guy was talking to me or
to his friend, but in no uncertain terms, I told them both to mind
their own business.
    “That’s an awfully rude thing to say, for a tool who’s gotten himself into a bind like you have,” said
the other guy.
    Humans call us ‘ tools ’ to make themselves
feel better about being the worst.
    Since insulting them