still shimmering from the passing floods, the gutters gurgling the last inches of water down their drains. He skipped over the crumbling bridges and through the crowded sidewalks, churning his legs for home. He had one last chance to make things right, to get the rewards he deserved for bringing all of Palan’s pirate clans to their knees while lifting Hommul above the rest. His mother, surely, would understand what he’d done and duly lavish him.
He ran past the Regal Hotel, disgorging its lobby of low-lifers, then around the corner and into his alley. Walter wheezed as he clomped up the steps to his door. His picks shook in his hands while he tried to unlock the deadbolt.
“Momma, I’m home!”
He yelled the greeting through the stubborn slab of wood. Tears of frustration were already welling in his eyes as he secured the first tumbler.
“I’m back from promotions, Momma!”
Walter still wasn’t sure how he was going to break the news that he hadn’t been promoted. The next tumbler succumbed to his frustrated machinations. Walter bit his lip and concentrated on the third and fourth, his damned hands shaking like a Junior Pirate’s.
Finally, the lock clicked open. Walter threw his picks in his pocket without bothering to arrange them back in their case. He shoved the door open and rushed straight for her bed, not noticing how quiet the machines were as he weaved around them to get there.
“Momma,” he gasped, wiping his nose and plopping down on the foot of the bed. “You’ve gotta do something about Uncle. You’ve gotta talk to him. The Hommul Clan is—”
Walter reached for his mother’s hand, but stopped himself just before grabbing it.
“Momma?”
The plastic bubble of a mask stood over her nose and mouth, its surface dry and clear, not fogged with her breath as it normally was. Walter could see the dull shimmer of her slightly parted lips through the clear shell.
“Mom?”
He shook her knee. His mother’s body felt like part of the furniture: still and lifeless, absorbing his movement and dissipating it to nothing. His mind, already stunned by the day’s disappointments, could not wrap itself around the obvious.
“Momma, wake up, I need to talk to you.”
Walter slid up the bed and wrapped both hands around one of hers, holding the wires and tubes along with her fingers. So much of the apparatus had become a part of her, anyway.
“No,” he said. He shook his head and patted the back of her hand. “Momma, wake up.”
He turned to the machines around her. One or two were still running, monitoring the awful. Walter could’ve read their screens and graphs at any other time, but right then, the silence was deafening. His head thrummed with the lack of whirring; it roared with the absence of kicking tubes and fan-compressed air. There was a whole lot of nothing going on in the room. The machines that kept his mother alive had all gone dead.
It was the first time his brain nudged up against the concept. He pushed away from the bed and stomped toward the breathing machine. The screen showed an auto-shutdown procedure, responding to an input from the pulse monitor. It wasn’t Walter’s prior nemesis that had let him down—it had been another machine.
Walter turned to the pumps that kept his mother’s lungs dry. That machine was also calling out at him with its silence. Its screen showed an error message, an indecipherable code of digits and letters that might mean something to whoever possessed the manual. Walter spun around to the back of the unit, his multi-tool materializing in his hand. He fumbled for the screws, his mind spinning.
“Hold on, Momma,” he said. “Hold on.”
Tears coursed down his face, obscuring his vision. He dug and gouged at the screws, working them loose in fits and starts.
“We’re gonna get those lungs dry,” he told his mom. “Don’t you worry. You just hang in there.”
He ripped the panel free once the last screw was loose. Walter threw it out of his way, sending it clanging and skidding across the cracked tile floor. The stench of electrical fire, of charred silicon chips, wafted out of the machine. Walter shined his light into the bowels of the pump unit, scanning the miss-mash of cobbled gear, antique spares, hasty wiring, and deep scratches haloed with rust. He sniffed hard, tracking the odor to the offending part, when his cone of light caught a tiny gray wisp of coiled smoke rising up from an electrical board.
Walter stuck his head in and turned to the side so he could get a good look at the board.
It obviously didn’t belong.
The board was affixed in place with ugly gobs of yellowed and aged glue. In fact, the board wasn’t even being used for its original function. It was a piece-board, something Palans did when they wanted to use individual components on a PCB board without taking the time to remove the pieces. A tangled web of colored wires were soldered to the board here and there, hijacking the use of a resistor or a capacitor, three wires soldered to what looked like a timing chip. Walter felt a wave of relief as he realized he could just replace the components with spares ripped out of one of the other monitoring machines.
“You hang in there,” he told his long-dead mother. He reached in and pushed the wires to one side so he could see which unit would need which transistor or rheostat. He bathed the board in the full glare of his light, memorizing the location of each component—
And that’s when he saw for the first time just what he was looking at.
He was seeing it straight-on, all the chips arranged just so.
And he’d seen it before. He’d seen it in a schematic, laid out so pretty and clean. It was just the sort of Navy hardware that made for a perfect piece-board. Just the sort of top-secret, unhackable device one could only use for a spare part, a resistor or two.
Walter gazed at the barest whiff of smoke rising up from the fried unit. He watched it spiral its way out of his cone of light, up into the darkness of the machine’s innards.
The hyperdrive board sitting before him was dead. It was as dead as the hyperdrive boards in all the other ships in the Palan system. It was as dead as his mother.
And Walter had killed it.
39 · Felony Falls Penitentiary
One of the wheels of his food cart spun with a mind of its own. It would rise from the uneven floor of the prison hallway and do a spastic dance. It would make contact once more, jittering the cart sideways. Then it would squeal out, jump back in the air, and do it all over again.
Walter watched the unbalanced wheel go through this routine. He kept his head bowed, the weight of his shoulders supported mostly by the other three wheels as he pushed the cart along. He followed the crazy wheel’s rise and plummet, its howling complaint, its inability to do what the other wheels did, and he wondered—as if the wheel had a mind of its own—why it bothered.
On top of the cart, tin cans sloshed water dangerously up their sides. Other cans of brown food pellets rattled as the unappetizing nuggets did their little dance, jiggling themselves deep into their brethren while other pellets jostled up to take their place. Walter scrutinized this interplay for a while, imagining each pellet like a pirate clan enjoying its brief stay up top before it was swallowed by the rest. He thought about how long that ordeal had persisted, probably as far back as his people had grown legs and crawled out of the muck.
Walter shook his head and sighed aloud. None of the metaphors were apt any longer. He had seen to that. Palan was in chaos. The loss of pretty much every ship in the system was nothing compared to the clan heads that had gone missing along with them. The pilot of their own ship had been right: None of them were heard from. They didn’t show up at Earth. They were just
And now Junior Pirates were trying to be Senior Pirates. Outcasts were muscling back into old clans. And the coming of a second flood so soon after the last had been seen as an omen of sorts, a harbinger of more turbulent years ahead. Already, the meteorologists and armchair prognosticators were saying many more floods were on their way. What had been a slow year was now forecasted to be one of the most severe in centuries. They said it was a
