Plummet to the Moss Canopies

How far a raider could fall before the cold void sucked the breath from her lungs was a calculation Tala had never intended to make with her own ribs.

The green slipstream of the oxygen river shrank into a bright, roaring ribbon overhead, leaving her in the freezing silence between moons. Thin air tore at the leather bindings of her harness. Her left arm flared with pain where the pursuer's arrow had ripped the winglet flap, flapping uselessly against her bicep as the whistling wind accelerated her plunge. Below her, through the swirling vapor banks of the Amber Wake, the vast rust-colored swirls of the gas giant loomed like an open throat, hungry for anything that lost its footing in the upper currents.

Tala clamped her jaws shut to keep the thinning air in her chest. Her severed grapple tether whipped wildly about her waist, the frayed vine ends stinging her thighs.

She needed mass to kick against, and she needed it before her airspeed broke her bones.

A dark shape crested through the vapor three hundred paces down. It was a wandering ridgeback sky-whale, its mile-long bulk drifting along the lower thermal margins where the moss moons shed their humidity. The beast moved with primeval indifference, encrusted in barnacles of fossilized resin and thick layers of cloud-moss.

Tala adjusted her good right flap, tilting her torso to angle her dive toward the creature's sloping flank.

The wind roared against her teeth. The whale grew from a speck of floating rock into a wall of ridged chitin and gray blubber. If she struck at terminal velocity, she would splatter like a dropped pit-fruit. If she missed, the void beneath would take her in minutes.

Ten paces. Five paces.

Tala unhooked the kinetic amber club from her thigh strap and gripped the cord-wrapped handle with both hands. The glowing orange core within the polished stone thrummed against her palms, charged with a fresh nodule she had hastily jammed into the socket from her loot pack.

As the creature's barnacled carapace rushed up to meet her boots, Tala twisted mid-drop and drove the heavy amber head straight into an outcropping of solid fossil resin.

The amber discharged with a concussive crack.

The kinetic shockwave rebounded straight up the shaft into her shoulders, teeth jarring violently against her tongue. Instead of breaking her body against the beast, the stored repulsion force violently arrested her downward speed, flinging her horizontally in a soaring arc away from the creature's back.

The sky-whale let out a low, resonant groan that rattled the mist, barely disturbed by the impact as Tala skipped off its shell like a thrown pebble.

She shot across the boundary current of the nearest drift-moon, tumbling head over heels into the warm, oxygen-rich envelope of Pulo's outer canopy.

Green leaves slapped her face. Giant staghorn ferns and thick blankets of hanging moss snatched at her limbs, tearing at her flight suit as she crashed through the upper tier of the forest.

Branch after branch shattered beneath her weight, each layer slowing her descent until a massive web of spongy hanging lichen caught her chest. Tala rolled through the yielding mesh, dropped six paces through empty air, and landed hard in a bed of damp root-rot.

The breath left her in a sharp wheeze.

For several seconds, she lay flat on her back, staring up through the hole she had punched in the green ceiling. Moisture dripped onto her forehead from crushed fronds. The air here was thick and warm, smelling of rotting wood and rich, living spores.

Tala sat up slowly, testing her limbs. Her left arm throbbed, and her shoulder burned from the club's recoil, but nothing gave the sickening crunch of snapped bone.

Her hand immediately went behind her neck. She pulled the massive war-conch from its shoulder sling and inspected the flared spiral lip. The pearlescent shell was caked in black humus, but the spiraled horn remained uncracked.

Tala wiped a streak of wet loam from the mouthpiece and exhaled a ragged chuckle. "Still in one piece. Good. Roda would never let me hear the end of it if I broke the horn before I broke my neck."

She rose to her feet, sinking calf-deep into the spongy carpet of the moon-forest. The canvas loot pack was still cinched securely against her hip. She loosened the drawstrings just enough to feel the smooth, rounded faces of the thirty-six refined amber nodules inside. They clinked together like heavy river stones, warm to the touch and humming faintly with dormant repulsion power.

A thin trail of black smoke drifted through the canopy three hundred paces to the east.

The courier glider had come down too.

Tala drew her flint knife from her belt and cut away the torn strip of leather flapping at her left elbow. She tucked the blade back into its sheath, hoisted her amber club onto her shoulder, and picked her way through the tangled undergrowth toward the rising plume.

The terrain of Pulo's outer edge was a treacherous maze of airborne roots and hanging moss islands, suspended over the lower mist by fibrous vine bridges. Tala leaped across a yawning gap between two buttress roots, using her club to vault over a rotting log covered in luminescent shelf fungi.

The smell of burned resin and scorched pterosaur skin grew stronger.

She parted a curtain of weeping moss and stepped onto the edge of a fresh scar in the forest floor.

The courier glider had cleaved a thirty-pace trench through the ironwood saplings before crumpling against the base of an ancient hollow trunk. Its broad bone mast was snapped in three places. The gray pterosaur-hide sails lay shredded across the brush, smoldering where friction sparks had ignited the dry pitch coating the frame.

Neither of the two sentries she had fought in the sky were visible; they had likely been thrown into the void when the glider lost control and tumbled miles above.

Tala approached the wreck with measured steps, her boots squelching in the churned loam. She circled the twisted bone chassis, eyes scanning the tree line for any sign that the escort war-kites had followed the crash down through the mist. The canopy above remained quiet, save for the distant trill of canopy gliders and the drip of condensation.

She climbed onto the shattered hull.

The reinforced cargo bay beneath the pilot's bench was buckled, its wicker framing crushed under a heavy spar of ironwood. This was what the Sun-Chieftain's personal guards had fought so fiercely to protect over the oxygen river.

Tala wedged the flint blade beneath the bent locking pins of the cargo hatch, threw her weight backward, and levered the hatch open with a sharp splinter of dry wood.

Inside lay no rations, no bundles of smoked fish, and no tribute pottery from the moon-clans.

Resting in the cradle of padded moss was a single, heavy slab of cured mammoth hide, nearly three feet across and rolled tight within a protective sheath of boiled resin.

Tala reached in and hauled the heavy roll onto her knee. Her flint knife slit the resin seals with a crisp snap.

She unrolled the stiff hide across the flat of the shattered mast.

Etched deep into the cured skin with heated bone needles were lines of intricate geometric circles, radiating outward from a single massive anchor point: the Great Tree of the Inner Rim. Surrounding the rings were precise angular notations, tracking the seasonal ebb of the oxygen rivers and the convergence points of the Sun-Chieftain's high-altitude focusing mirrors.

Tala touched the scorched groove marking the primary beam path. The alignment did not merely threaten a single hunting route. The markings showed three major atmospheric rivers intersecting directly beneath the focal point, poised to be severed in a single solar sweep.

A low whistle escaped her teeth.

She had set out to steal a pocketful of fuel stones. What she held in her hands was the Sun-Chieftain's timetable to burn the sky.