POV: nomad
Summary
Nomad, perched in the centre of the four-seater hovercycle with Aux shaped as a shield over his pilot's back, taps the woman rescuer's shoulder and thumbs back toward the pursuit. She bites off a curse, slaps his hand away from her rifle, and pulls them higher. He could kick her off and steal the craft — he is reasonably sure he could fly it — but the moment they climb, something in the cold rushing air against his face works on him like a moral decongestant. It reminds him of better times, of the man whose wordplay it would have amused. He smiles. He decides against the theft.
Behind them the pursuit is two long, flat-decked warships — speedboat-shaped, cockpit aft, foredeck crowded with ember warriors clinging to the rails as the wind stokes their chest-fires brighter. They are plainly faster than the hovercycle. A sharpshooter in the white coat of one of Glowing Eyes' officers steps out from a cabin side door and begins firing — not at Nomad, not at the woman, but at a single point on the cycle's central fuselage. The driver curses. Aux's shield goes transparent so she can see. The shot blows a panel free and exposes a glowing red-orange chunk slotted into a hatched compartment. Nomad slides down the housing and plants himself between the gunner and the cell, taking the next blast on the shield. They are trying to kill the cycle outright. Aux confirms what the cell is — a power source, "almost assuredly" — and estimates twenty or thirty of them might be enough to pay for a Skip off this planet, but only once absorbed; the test, he advises, should wait until they are no longer flying.
Nomad glances forward. There is no fortress on the horizon, no reinforcements scrambling to meet them — only black cloud. He notes that the rings overhead have visibly shifted angle against the stars even on this short run, which means the planet is small enough to be rounded in a hurry, and yet the gravity is ordinary, which means an unusually dense core. He cuts himself off mid-calculation. He is not that man anymore. Ahead of them an oppressive cloud cover swallows the ringlight; the woman drives them straight for it.
The ember warships close. The ember warriors crowd the front of their platforms and prepare to leap. With four already poised and four more behind on the second ship, Aux asks pointedly how Nomad means to survive this fight without fighting. He answers, hopefully, that the Torment might take pity. Aux's reply makes clear that it will not.
So he runs the length of the cycle, jumps. Wind on tattered clothing, horizon below, an infinite expanse above. He is stronger now than he was a few hours ago — a leap that had nearly defeated him at the arena carries him clean over the first warship's foredeck and slams him into the cabin wall hard enough to shake it. He drops in among the four ember warriors and reaches for a sword that is not coming; Aux arrives instead as an oversized wrench. Nomad does not swing. He spins, becomes a moving shield, lets the ember warriors batter themselves on the transparent metal, and is careful never to push hard enough to set the Torment off.
The second warship is closing on the cycle. He shoves between two ember warriors and jumps again — wind, air, the moment in the sky — catches the second deck by his fingertips, hooks Aux as a ladder to a railing, and scrambles up. The pilot in shock veers them toward their sister ship, narrowing the gap; the four warriors on the other deck take the jump and join the fight against him. Eight on one is, as he notes with dry satisfaction, perfect. In a melee against many, chaos favours the lone fighter; these ember warriors are conditioned to overwhelm individually and have never learned to fight as a squad. He rolls, blocks, shoves one back into several, and skids to a hatch set into the deck.
He cracks the hatch with Aux as a crowbar. The power cell underneath glows the same colour as the spear-embers but cleaner, less violent. He sheathes his hand in a forged gauntlet, reaches in, and rips the cell free. The ship drops out from under everyone on its deck. Nomad lands his last clean jump back to the first warship; the second goes into the mud below, eight ember warriors with it. From the rail he counts. All eight pull themselves up out of the muck and stand again. These people are very hard to kill.
He turns toward the cockpit of the warship he is on. The sharpshooter panics and unloads through the windshield, bouncing every shot off his shield. They try to drop a blast plate over the window; he jams Aux into the mechanism so the cover hangs half- closed. He advances on them unarmed and, of course, unable to harm them — but they cannot know that. He points at the gun. He glares. He is the tall one in the room, here. The sharpshooter throws her rifle through the ruined window. The pilot rolls the ship; Aux forms a magnetic boot under Nomad's foot and holds him in place. When the world rights, the sharpshooter is on the floor and the pilot is staring up at him.
Nomad raises the dimming cell to his face and inhales. The motion is psychological — he is reasonably certain — but it helps. The cell goes dark in his fingers like a depleted gemstone. Inside his head Aux sighs with satisfaction: that bumps the reserve to over ten percent. Nomad asks for the Connection to the planet so he can understand and be understood; Aux says a few minutes will do it. He levels the rifle on the pilot, stoic and unblinking — pretending the stiffness in his arms is intimidation and not the Torment — then gestures the man back to the fleeing hovercycle and mimes a clear warning: do not follow. The pilot peels off as soon as Nomad jumps across.
He lands beside the woman driver, who has only just noticed that one of the chasing ships has vanished and the other is in retreat. She gapes. He climbs into the front-right seat, catches his foot on the way, and drops the rifle over the side. He shrugs at her, settles in, and asks — in Alethi, the language he uses with Aux when he does not want a local listening — whether she might have anything good to drink. The hovercycle plunges into the wet darkness ahead.