Page 54 of Reformation
Ten rolled hir eyes. “Okay? This is our lives you’re talking about; this is our very existence being called into question.”
“I know.” Cody’s smile was wide, his eyes a little too bright when he looked up at hir. “It’s gonna be so much fun.”
“That’s not your usual reaction to my experiments.”
“We’redoingsomething,” he insisted. “Even if it ends with both of us smeared across the upper atmosphere, at least we’ll have tried.”
Well, that sounded … hideously reckless. Not that Ten cared, really—ze’d be with Cody, and that was assurance enough for hir—but Cody actually had a support system that would miss him if he died.
One he’s already spurned, Ten reminded hirself. Cody knew what he was doing. And so did ze. “Let’s suit up.”
The suits were more than your usual atmospheric-pressure units—they were designed for deep-space miners, people who might vacillate between the hottest and lowest survivable temperatures within the same shift. They bulked them up with all sorts of additional venting and coolant and pockets in case of emergencies, and each one was equipped with a personal parachute. They carried enough oxygen to last for two hours, which was double what Ten expected they’d need.
“After all, we’re not the first people to do something like this,” Ten had expounded when they first started the project. “It’s been done successfully at least ten times before on different planets.”
“And how many times has it failed?” Cody had asked as they laid out the framework for the shield.
“Those failures are irrelevant to our success.” Which was a total lie, and Cody had made hir lay out all the ways something could break, lose power, or otherwise end their lives.
They’d handled those design flaws, though. This was going to work. It totally was. Ten wasn’t going to have it any other way.
“Let’s get to the airlock,” ze said once ze got hir helmet in place. The air it circulated was cold, a side effect of all the coolant, but it tasted fresher than the atmosphere inside the ship, particularly now.
The bike, massively redesigned though it was, still moved easily on its antigrav tracks. They carefully propelled it out of Jack’s ship and toward the internal airlock on the other side of their landing pad. “It would almost make more sense to steal his ship,” Ten lamented—just a little. “He’s not going to need it for anything.”
“We’d need clearance from central to open the airlock that much, which means Corva would see it,” Cody said. “And if we compromised the bay, it could lead to a massive depressurization. We’re not here to get people killed.”
“Just maybe ourselves.”
“Exactly.”
They stopped in front of the airlock. Ze input the code to open it—of course ze had them, ze hadn’t been idle even while ze was confined to working on the goddamn sewage system. The Drifter ship dumped more waste into space than it really should, and that meant that Ten got access to the basic codes.
The light flashed amber, once, then turned green. Ten frowned. “Strange.”
“What?”
“Prooobably nothing.” The lock opened, and they wheeled the bike inside. Ten turned back and shut it, then to be careful, input the naughty code ze’d learned from Livia that would jam the door hard for five minutes no matter what. It was used totorment people on the engineering teams, but Ten wasn’t going to take any chances. “Okay. The outer door should open in two minutes. Let’s get rigged.”
A hoverbike was not a spaceship. It wouldn’t protect them from the intense heat of deceleration or the brutal vacuum of space. Or at least it wouldn’t if they hadn’t installed a velocity-triggered, titano-mesh shield that spread out from a heat cone on the nose. Cody took the front seat, Ten took the back, and once they were in position, Cody activated the system.
Smart harnesses melted out of the body of the bike and closed around their limbs and helmets, holding them firmly in place. The nav system uploaded and immediately began scanning potential routes down onto the planet, their modified thruster fired up to give them the push they needed to fall toward the Box, and the shield itself unfolded like a translucent shroud around them. The heat displacement coils followed, and a final check of parachutes and safety redundancies followed that. All green.
“Looks good,” Ten said.
“Excellent. One more minute to open.”
“Cody, what thehellare you doing?” That came in over the loudspeaker, noisy enough that they could hear it through their helmets and the shield. They didn’t have a lot of mobility left but still managed to turn their heads back and look at Jack. He was punching furiously at the keypad.
“Huh. I guess it was an alarm,” Ten mused.
“Cody! This isn’t funny. Deactivate your stall code and get back inside the ship!”
“He won’t be able to hear me if I speak,” Cody said.
“Nope.”
“Good. ’Cause I don’t have any words for him anyway.” He turned his face resolutely forward.
