Alexa almost immediately regained her senses and found herself free of Morrison’s projected gravity field. She scanned the sky below her with thermal imaging. Cotton was falling below her, screaming, while Grady descended farther off—probably impossible to reach at terminal velocity. However, Morrison appeared to be moving to intercept Grady—sparks issuing from his combat assault armor.
“Damnit!” Alexa soared down to try to catch up with Cotton before he hit the forest thousands of feet below. She tucked her arms onto her thighs to streamline her aerodynamic profile and descended at much more than a hundred miles an hour.
Grady’s heart pounded in his chest as the rushing air buffeted him. His watering eyes saw the dark forest racing up to meet him, and he realized that these were his final seconds of life. He glanced up at the stars above him. The beauty was heartbreaking. However, his time in Hibernity had taught him how to manage fear, and he turned toward the approaching trees—determined to see his life right up to the very end.
But suddenly he felt cold, armored hands grab his arms, and his direction of descent lurched forward—only a thousand feet above the shadows of the trees.
Grady turned to see Morrison’s onyx face mask.
“You’re a real pain in the ass, you know that, Mr. Grady?”
But then Grady noticed that they had not entirely stopped falling, and he felt conflicting gravity fields over about half of his body. Classical “down” was still to some extent in force.
One of Morrison’s gauntlets released Grady, and he seemed to be struggling to get something functioning. Purple sparks burst forth occasionally from the melted front plate of the suit. Morrison’s visor popped open with a hiss, and smoke issued out of it as the red reflection of a dozen flashing warning lights lit up his face.
“That traitorous bitch! A fucking positron weapon! She fried the power system—and most of my auxiliary.”
They started to buck their descent a bit as Morrison concentrated on working his suit’s systems. But a glance below them showed Grady they were still coming down at dangerous speeds.
He grabbed onto Morrison’s armor and shouted into his face over the rushing wind. “If you don’t have enough power to maintain the size of the gravity mirror, cut stabilization!”
Morrison frowned in confusion.
“If this suit is based on my technology, then there must be stabilization—or we’d be spinning like crazy. When two gravity fields interact, they’ll revolve within each other like—”
He could see the trees accelerating to meet them at much more than seventy miles an hour.
“JUST CUT THE FUCKING STABILIZATION!”
Morrison calmly nodded and manipulated unseen controls.
Suddenly they slowed dramatically—but started spinning like a merry-go-round on two different axes. Grady held on as Morrison’s armored arms embraced him.
They plunged through a thick canopy of trees at ten or fifteen miles per hour, smashing through branches on the way to the ground. In darkness, they bounced off the forest floor, Morrison on the bottom, and hit again, then splayed next to each other. The sound of crickets suddenly was all around them.
There were several seconds without movement.
“Well. That’s something for the manual, Mr. Grady.”
Morrison struggled to sit up, his suit still issuing occasional sparks. He appeared to be having trouble moving the heavy suit as smoke issued from several crevices.
Grady leapt on top of him—slugging Morrison through his open face mask. “You son of a bitch!”
“Ah, fuck!”
The sound of servomotors whined, but Morrison didn’t seem to be able to make his suit do what he wanted it to—or even close his face plate with all the smoke issuing from inside.
Grady punched him several more times until he was sure that Morrison was unconscious.
As he kneeled on top of Morrison’s armor-clad form, Grady turned at the sound of crashing branches. In a moment, Alexa descended from the sky, clutching a struggling Richard Cotton.
Cotton fell from her arms to kiss the ground. “Oh, thank God!”
Alexa looked down at Morrison with concern. “Is he…?”
“No. Unconscious—although I don’t know for how long.”
She looked relieved and leaned down to pull a device that Grady recognized from Morrison’s belt—a psychotronic weapon. Alexa aimed the laser dot at the old commando’s head and keyed it for several moments. Then she took a reading. “Now he should stay asleep for twenty or thirty minutes.”
Grady looked at her and nodded. “Thank you for rescuing me. If that’s what this is.”
She grimaced. “I’m not sure what this is. I only know I can’t be partner to the type of evil you experienced. And that we have to stop what’s happening at Hibernity.”
“Do you still believe in your probability projections for disruptive innovations?”
She stared at him and shrugged. “I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
Cotton stood next to them in his ridiculous orange body armor. “I hate to interrupt, but the wrath of God is going to come down on us any fucking second. So if we could have this conversation elsewhere, that would be fantastic.”
“Cotton’s right.” Alexa pulled a metal stylus from her harness and activated what appeared to be a laser-cutting device—its needle-thin beam burned wickedly in the darkness. She used it to carefully carve out a tiny nodule on the shoulder of her flight suit. She repeated the process on her boots.
“What are you doing?”
“Removing the EDSP tracking devices.”
Grady nodded. “Yeah, good catch.”
Cotton was standing over Morrison. “If someone would help me get this body armor off, I’d like to take a piss on Morrison’s face.”
She glared at him. “Leave it, Cotton. You’re lucky to be alive. Don’t make it personal—it’ll be just another reason for him to come looking for you.”
Alexa then started dumping most of her equipment onto the forest floor.
“What are you doing?”
“They all have integrated trackers. We take our tech level containment seriously. Cotton’s right. They’ll come for it soon.”
Grady gazed down at Morrison. “What about him?”
“Leave him.”
Grady studied Morrison’s armor. “What about his suit? It’ll buy us more time if we strand him out here without it. No comms. At least dump it a few miles away.”
Alexa considered this.
“Can we get it off him?”
She nodded. “There’s a medical access override, if you have the clearance. Which I do.” She knelt next to Morrison and felt around the side of his helmet. She touched a control button and spoke into her own microphone. “Emergency medical access requested.”
Suddenly Morrison’s armor started to unfasten around him, opening like flower petals.
“I’ll be damned.”
She stood. “Can’t cut diamondoid armor off with scissors.”
Grady picked up a shoulder plate and hefted it. “This doesn’t even weigh all that much.”
“And yet it’s the hardest substance known.”
They took a few moments to gather the plates of armor—Alexa being careful to toss aside the four pieces that had integrated tracking particles. As they were finishing, Morrison began to wake up.
Cotton raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, he’s about fifteen minutes early. Tough son of a bitch, isn’t he?”
Morrison felt around himself for his armor and weapons, but his equipment was in a pile some yards away.