She watched them glide across, flying on almost invisible lines, then smiled to herself as she stepped up to the side and casually flipped her blaster from her belt and glanced over her shoulder.
“Your ship, old friend,” she called before leaping off herself. “I’ll see you when we’re done.”
The commander of the tower swore under his breath, using words that would make even a guardsman blush as he recognized, too late, the situation for what it was.
“Pirates,” he swore, almost more angry at himself than at the criminal swine flying outside his station.
In the months since the regent took over the empire, piracy had been on the climb, malcontents looking for any sign of weakness in the armor of the state so they could act. There was no weakness, but some of them would still succeed. Most would be stamped out, but as he watched their actions and checked the network for the guardsmen’s response time, he didn’t think this bunch would be among them.
Not yet anyway.
That’s former Cadre all right. No one else coordinates like that.
He’d been a guardsman himself in his younger years, but though he’d taken the aptitude tests for Cadre—everyone did, at least once—he’d never been considered for a slot.
He’d heard that some of the group’s former members had bought into the conspiracy bullshit about the regent overthrowing the Imperial Family, but he’d thought they were just rumors. No one with any sense believed that nonsense for an instant.
There was nothing more dangerous than an insane Cadreman with a cause, however, and the Cadre was composed of men and women like everyone else. No matter how skilled and powerful they were, they still made mistakes, still believed nonsense.
“What do we do, commander?”
“Do?” he snorted. “Nothing to do. We hit the alarm. Now all we can do is watch the brazen bastards and hope they don’t kill anybody.”
“Get that disrupter into position,” she ordered. “I want all the passenger capsules off this line in three mikes, or you’ll have to answer to me.”
The men didn’t respond, bending to their task as she jogged along the line of cars, easily hopping the space between each car despite the gap being over ten times her own height. The lesser gravity of being forty-plus miles up came in handy sometimes.
She slowed as she arrived at the traction engine, giving one last hop and tucking her arms and legs in close as she dropped between the cars and came to a stop on the engineer’s landing at the back of the engine. The hatch unlatched without a fuss, and she wrenched it open. It was easier than it should have been. The interior was pressurized, and she had to twist out of the path of the door before it could knock her out into the clear skies beyond.
It was a long way down.
The engineer and mate were scrambling for breathers when she stepped in, and she gently tapped the pommel of her blaster against a wrought handgrip to get their attention.
“Gentlemen,” she said, “a moment of your time, if you please.”
The two looked at her, clearly out of their depth and likely wondering where the hell she’d come from.
It wasn’t often that someone boarded an engine in flight, especially just after it had breached atmo. She wasn’t planning on giving them time to come to terms with these new circumstances.
“Retract the air brakes,” she ordered.
“We’ll crash into the tower!”
Her grip shifted slightly on the blaster, and the gaping maw of the weapon turned toward the engineer. She rested the tip against his throat. “Did I ask for your expert opinion?”
“N-no.”
“Then pull in those brakes,” she ordered again. “And let me worry about what we’ll crash into … or I can toss you off right here and pull them in myself. You choose.”
The cold delivery of the statement probably convinced him more than the words, but whatever it was, the engineer only hesitated a moment longer before nodding and dropping back into his seat. A tap on the controls unlocked the system, and then he pulled the big hydraulic levers back one by one until they were in the closed position.
Fearfully, he looked back at the woman. “N-now what?”
She smiled, which would have almost made her beautiful if it weren’t for the sardonic twist of her lips and the cold gleam in her eye. The captain leaned in as she reached over him and tapped commands into the controls. “Now watch and learn something they don’t teach you at your little engineering academy.”
When the air brakes retracted on the Four Nineteen, the commander almost needed a new pair of pants. Things didn’t get any better when his scanner tech spoke, his voice shaking and unsteady.
“Commander, the Four Nineteen is accelerating again.”
He didn’t curse this time, but only because he was too caught up in visualizing the results of the tractor engine slamming all that mass right into his tower, accelerating all the way. The tower was constructed of crystallized carbon in chain molecules, one of the hardest and strongest materials in existence, but even that wouldn’t stand up to a traction sled with thirty million tons of material backing it.
The skyway ended before impact, of course, but that much weight would jump the quantum fold in space-time with almost no effort. At hypersonic speed, the tower would be decapitated before they could even begin evacuations.
After that, well, it was a long way down to a very abrupt stop at the bottom.
Quantum-locked states made for interesting and spectacular visuals on the smaller scale, particularly as a demonstration of quantum levitation.
For a traction rig, the effect was largely similar. A superconducting system with sufficient power running through it could actually bend space-time sufficiently to create an artificial “track.” Once that existed, then all you had to do was lock a traction rig into it, and you could generate propulsion of immense power by “crawling” along the twisted section of space-time.
Acceleration wasn’t impressive, but low-end power truly was. A traction rig would effectively tow anything that wasn’t itself locked into place, either via a quantum lock or a vast enough gravity field (which was, in many ways, the same thing).
That made the system ideal for bulk transport and a low-cost passenger service. Since initial acceleration was slow, however, it was really only useful for long distances where velocity could be built up gradually to incredible speeds, with braking applied rapidly toward the end of the run.
Few people, other than some of the designers of the system, were aware that it was possible to make a traction-engine jump track. That was mostly because there was so little point to it. Once free of the quantum track, the traction engine no longer had any, well, traction. Without the track to crawl along, it would spin its proverbial wheels.
Of course, even fewer people were aware of certain other minutiae of the system.
The traction engine jolted slightly, and the captain smiled. The passenger cars had been disconnected, and they’d slow to a stop before the end of the skyway. She had nothing against, nor any use for, the peons traveling from the capital to work their dead-end jobs.
Her interests lay elsewhere.
A figure dropped in the back of the engine, but she only bothered to tilt her head slightly in acknowledgment.
“We’re clear and cut, skipper.”
“Excellent,” she said with a thin smile. “Hold on. This is going to get a little rough.”