Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

Riding the Drop

Written by Graham Edwards

I nudged Tumbleweed to the edge of the drop. The front tracks squealed in the mud, lost traction, dug in again. Trusting the brakes but not the terrain, I tossed a couple of anchors aft. Tumbleweed settled, motors back-hammering, ready to ride.

I closed the cockpit and opened a line to the Wishbone Outpost.

‘You there, Jeke?’ I said.

‘Where else would I be?’ Jeke had the temper of a turtle. With a powder storm brewing, he got snappier than ever. But he ran the outpost single-handed, so when I fetched up there he was all I’d got. ‘You know, Tanager, you didn’t finish your soup.’

‘Chicken gives me wind.’

‘When a person goes to a lot of trouble for another person, the least that person can do is eat the chicken soup.’

‘Look, Jeke. I appreciate you putting me up. You keep the outpost nice. I like the doilies. But I’m on a schedule here. Keep the damn soup warm - I’ll eat it next time. Right now I need a forecast. You got one?’

‘Oh, so what am I now? Your pet weather man?’ Just what I needed: a turtle in a sulk.

‘I think you’re the only guy can tell me it’s safe to steer my payload off the edge of this world and into the jaws of twelve different hells.’

‘Tanager, as usual you’re misrepresenting the facts. As you very well know, the concept of hell is purely ...’

‘Just give me the forecast, Jeke.’

Static choked the board. Jeke’s voice turned to mush. I thumped the transmission box. The mush turned to bubbles; inside the bubbles I heard two words:

‘... love you.’

After that, it was just the static. I hit the box again. The static cleared, but Jeke was gone.

My surprise hung around.

I checked the back window. The outpost was just visible through the murk: a squat column of white stone. The top quarter was all lookout glass. A tall silhouette brooded behind it.

‘Timing was never your thing, Jeke,’ I muttered, ‘but I got to say that was a real doozie.’

The murk swallowed the outpost. A full-blown powder storm crashed in. Goodbye comms. Volts jumped from one dust particle to the next to the next, turning the sky to a brilliant cobweb.

I went to the front of the cockpit, looked down at the drop.

Tumbleweed was perched on the edge of a vast abyss. The abyss was a hole in just about everything. Looking down it was like looking down a well - a well big enough to swallow Jupiter. The god, not the planet. The god’s bigger. I’ve seen him.

Whatever world you’re in, the drop looks the same. Pour sulphuric acid down your throat, the drop’s what your throat looks like after. There’s rips in space, rips in time, the raw torn seams of over-buckled branes. Tattered lengths of cosmic string hanging limp like cat-clawed knitting. The drop’s an abomination, somewhere no sane person would go.

And here I was hanging off the edge in a bruised-up dropship with only a pair of Rickenbach anchors lodged in mounds of sticky mud to stop me falling off the end of the outpost runway.

What a way to make a living.

Storm water poured past Tumbleweed’s tracks, turned to foam where it hit the rips in reality. Turned to other things too, things with teeth and claws, things best not seen. I could hear them beating on the hull. But Tumbleweed’s tough. She has to be. As for the rest of the runway - that was deserted. Nobody came here any more, except those crazy enough to do what I was about to do.

Crazy enough to drop.

A run of volts grounded a hundred yards away. The drop edge exploded; muddy bedrock showered into the abyss. It fizzed as it fell through slice after slice, turned to silver, to flesh, to a whip of orange light that cracked and vanished in the dark. Things change when they drop, change in ways you’d never think. Every time it’s different; most times it’s bad.

Lucky for me, Tumbleweed doesn’t care for change.

I dumped myself in the front chair, revved the motors. Who needed a forecast? I’d only wired up to hear one last voice before I went over. Even one as snappy as Jeke’s.

‘... love you,’ he’d said.

I popped the clutches, jerked the anchors loose, goosed the throttle. Tumbleweed’s treads slithered, then bit. She tipped forward. Stale food rolled from under the pipes, across the tilting floor. The horizon climbed the window. Then the gimbal caught up and the whole cockpit was swinging like a fairground ride. There was a groan from the exoskeleton. The tracks retracted, foils deployed. Suddenly we were free of the mud, free of the edge, falling free through chasing volts and powdery light, falling into the drop.

The slices rushed past like floors in an elevator shaft, one after the other, each slice a hole in the bulk, a gateway to another place. Most were blocked with flotsam: shattered cities, mountains of soil and slops, the crammed bodies of hapless refugees. The worlds were shrinking out of the bulk and this chaos was the result. I let Tumbleweed fall, ignoring the dead, and the creatures that fed on them.

On the wall behind me, the clicker counted off the worlds at the rate of two hundred and twelve per minute.

... love you.

I kicked the throttle: time to really open her up.

There was a bang from the motor bay.

Tumbleweed shuddered, started corkscrewing. The clicker went crazy as the worlds bunched in. You start spinning in the drop, you find a whole new set of dimensions you never knew existed. I flinched as we glanced off the splintered edge of a recurved brane. Capillaries opened up all round, jabbing blacklight through the windows. The gimbal squealed once then shut down completely. The cockpit tossed me sideways. Tumbleweed creased down the middle, hit something hard, stopped.

The clicker fell silent. The cockpit rocked forward, then back. There was a thick grinding roar. The front window bulged until I was sure it would shatter. The glass straightened with a pop. Tumbleweed’s foils sank inboard; out came the tracks. The hull trembled as they tried to bite down. But we were stuck between the strings. There was nothing to bite.

I was on the floor. My head felt like an egg. It was silent except for the odd clank as Tumbleweed cooled. The windows were fogged with cracks. I had no idea where we were. Limbo, or maybe Oblivion.

The cockpit floor hatch opened. The hinges creaked, fighting the warped frame. A young man - scarcely more than a boy - climbed up. He was followed by smoke and covered in oil.

‘I’m sorry, miss’ said the stowaway. ‘But I think I might have broken your ship.’

***

He let me tie him to the chair. I cursed him as I tightened the knots. Over-tightened, just because I could. He didn’t flinch, just took his punishment. If he hadn’t, I might have killed him. I guess he knew that.

I closed the hatch, set the fans to dump the smoke. Ten minutes, I could get down there and check out the mess.

I sat on the helm and stared the stowaway in the eye.

‘So spill the beans,’ I said. ‘Start with who the hell you are and finish with what the hell you’re doing on my dropship. And I’ll take a side order of where the hell you came from in the first place.’

‘My name’s Daniel,’ he said. Long hair heavy with oil flopped over his brow. He flicked it back. ‘And I’m really sorry.’

‘Time for sorry’s gone. It’s answers I want.’

The floor dropped six inches. Tumbleweed was settling into whatever unimaginable mire she’d grounded in. I listened - I know what most things sound like against her hull. I identified teeth.

Daniel’s eyes had widened with fear. ‘Is it safe?’

‘Nothing’s safe!’ I watched his lower lip tremble. He was very young. I relented. ‘Okay, it’s safe. For now. So talk.’

‘Well, if you are going to help me I suppose it’s only fair you should know all the facts.’

I didn’t answer that one, just glared. It got him talking.

‘I don’t really know how I got here. I was following my dad and kind of got lost. My dad’s been acting funny for the last few months, ever since my mum died. My mum had cancer. When it got really bad, she killed herself. She took a load of tablets and jumped in the canal. She left a note that said she did it for us, so we wouldn’t have to see her suffer any more. My dad’s ... well, I guess he’s gone a little crazy.’

‘Hold up,’ I said. ‘Too much, too fast. All this happening in the Wishbone?’

‘What?’

‘The Wishbone. That where you live?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

I went to the window, stared at the crazed glass. ‘You know what the bulk is?’

Daniel shook his head. ‘Never heard of it.’

‘The bulk’s everything. The ocean all the worlds swim in. Wishbone’s one of those worlds. The place we just came from, the place you hitched a lift. So I’m guessing it’s where you live. Savvy?’

‘Why do you call it the Wishbone?’

I picked at the cracks in the glass, wishing I could see through it. ‘You’re the one telling a story here. Get on with it.’

***

‘Dad always walks the dog after supper. She’s a Red Setter, a real beauty. Her name’s Mizzy. After mum died, the walks started taking longer and longer. Sometimes he’d be gone two or three hours. And I mean there’s nowhere to go round where we live - it’s just streets and skateboard parks. It didn’t bother me at first - most evenings I’m busy with college work - but pretty soon I found myself watching the clock, waiting for the door. One night he was out for over four hours, didn’t get back until gone midnight. When he came in he was soaking wet. Mizzy was caked in mud and all scratched down one side, as if she’d run through brambles or something. And this is in the middle of the city, in the middle of summer. There’s been a drought. It hasn’t rained for months.

‘I asked him where he’d been but he just told me to mind my own business. He’s a big man, my dad, and I’ve never had the courage to cross him. He put his clothes in the washer, told me to clean Mizzy up and went to bed. Later, when I went up myself, I heard him crying in his room.

‘So tonight, when he went out, I followed him.’

Daniel paused, shifted in the chair. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but these knots are really tight. Is there any chance you could ...?’

‘Keep talking,’ I said.

He went on. ‘I kept to the shadows. It was hard, because the streetlamps are so bright. When you live in a city, the night sky’s orange. There’s no stars. Anyway, I followed my dad through the underpass to the canal. I hate the canal. Not just because of mum. Nobody goes down by the canal at night. Christ, even in the day most people avoid it. People get attacked down there, but mostly it’s just ... just creepy. Everything down there feels wrong, you know?’

The teeth outside had started chewing on the hull. But the boy had my attention. ‘Wrong how?’

Daniel shuddered. ‘I don’t know. There’s a smell, like toffee burned to a pan. And there’s always a wind blowing, even when everywhere else it’s calm. The whole place feels like ... it feels like a scab on an old cut, you know? It tingles. It feels like ... like something’s getting ready to pick it off - to pick you off - and expose the new flesh growing underneath ...’

He broke off. He looked ready to cry. I felt sorry for him: a bashful boy tied to a strange woman’s chair, scared she wouldn’t believe his fairy tales.

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ I said.

He took a deep breath, said, ‘I followed my dad down the towpath to the lock. Half a mile or so. When he got there, he tied Mizzy’s lead to one of the bollards and started shouting at the gates.’

‘Gates?’

‘The lock gates, you know.’

‘What did he shout?’

‘My mother’s name. He shouted it again and again. He was leaning right over - I thought he was going to fall in. But he didn’t. Mizzy was barking her head off, pulling at the lead. Dad just kept on shouting. So I crept closer. That’s when I saw it.’

The chewing sounds were getting louder. The fans were still pumping. I checked the board: five minutes before the smoke cleared. Good job the hull was tough.

Time enough for the kid to finish.

‘What did you see?’ I said.

‘A window.’

I never knew your ears could actually prick up. They can. ‘Window?’ I said.

‘Yes. Set into one of the lock gates. A window, like a window in a house. It was low down, half-submerged. It was only visible because the water level was so low - you remember I said there’s been a drought? Anyway, suddenly my dad stopped shouting and jumped into the canal. The water only came up to his knees. He went up to the window, bent down, put his hands on the frame, started shouting again. I saw someone on the other side of the glass. That’s when I knew I had to be dreaming.’

I went close to Daniel. ‘That why you’re so calm? Because you think all this is a dream?’

He blinked guileless eyes. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘What happened next?’

‘My dad opened the window and climbed through it.’

‘Climbed through it?’ I stared at my captive, intrigued. ‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing at first. I froze up. Then I went to where Mizzy was and untied her. As soon as I did that, she jumped off the towpath and into the canal, just like dad. Only she didn’t land in the water - she landed on it, like it was concrete. The burnt toffee smell was much stronger now. The air was sort of ... crackling. I shouted to Mizzy but she didn’t take any notice. So I thought, “What the hell,” and jumped after her. It was a dream after all.

‘The water was kind of spongy, a bit like that rubbery stuff they use on kids’ playgrounds. It didn’t seem to bother Mizzy that she was walking on water. It bothered the shit out of me though. I saw the lock gate had opened. Mizzy ran into the lock and out the other side. I chased after her. Eventually I caught her up. We weren’t walking on water any more - we were on a wide muddy road. The city blocks were gone. I couldn’t see much of anything really. The sky was dark and full of clouds. I saw a building up ahead. It looked a bit like a lighthouse. It started raining. I dragged Mizzy through the mud to the building and knocked on the door. A tall man let me in. He said his name was Jeke. He was putting on boots, getting ready to go out. When he saw me, he changed his mind. I could smell chicken soup. He took us in and fed us. The upstairs room was full of all this weird equipment, like the inside of a submarine or something. I was dazed, didn’t really know where I was, or what was going on. Jeke told me I’d lost my way, but he knew how to get me home. He pointed through a window at this thing lying in the mud. It looked like a giant lobster. It was hanging off the edge of a precipice. He said it was a vehicle about to set off on an important mission. He told me if I delivered something to the pilot for him, he’d get me home.’

The kid had lost himself - a kind of total recall. Now he was coming out of it. He blinked like he’d just woken up.

‘Could you free my right arm please?’ he said. ‘Just for a minute. Then you can tie it back up again if you like.’

He looked so sorry for himself I did what he asked. When his right hand was free he used it to pinch the flesh of his left arm. He flinched, did it again. ‘I’m not dreaming, am I?’

Outside, the chewing stopped. Something hit Tumbleweed like a dozer. Nasty harmonics shook the subframe. The something bellowed. I slipped the rest of Daniel’s knots, let him stand up out of the chair.

‘You’re letting me go?’ he said.

‘Right now you’re the least of my worries. Plus maybe you can help.’

‘If I do, can you get me home?’

‘We’ll see. First we got to get out of this.’

There was a double thud as a second bellowing thing ploughed into the hull. Daniel and I hit the back wall together, bounced into each other’s arms. He held me tight. Convincing himself I was real.

‘What’s out there?’ he said. Green lights flashed on the board.

‘We get Tumbleweed fixed, you don’t ever need to know. Now show me what you broke.’

I grabbed a toolbox, popped the hatch, followed him down the ladder. The smoke was mostly gone; it was still like plumbing a volcano.

‘Oh, this is what Jeke gave me to give you,’ Daniel said when we reached the bottom. He was holding a little red box. He pressed it in my hand.

I opened the box. Inside was a little velvet cushion. On the cushion was a gold ring. In the middle of the ring was half a ruby.

‘Was there a message?’ I said. My throat was all choked up. Probably the smoke.

‘No message,’ said Daniel. ‘Just the ring.’

Tumbleweed screamed. Something was trying to peel her like an orange.

‘Let’s get to work,’ I said.

***

I’d been wondering how the kid got aboard. I keep Tumbleweed wrapped up pretty tight, especially when she’s about to go over. Not as tight as I’d thought.

‘There’s a sort of access panel,’ Daniel said when I asked him. We were in the motor bay now. The air was like black porridge, despite the fans. The floor was slick with oil. ‘Here it is.’

Coughing, he knelt. The floor was popped open. A sliver of light crept in through the break in the hull. Alarming, but I was more bothered by the shadows moving on the other side of the break.

‘I tried to close it, but it wouldn’t latch. I sort of forced it and I think a pipe broke. That’s when everything went wrong.’

It wasn’t the first time Tumbleweed had surprised me. We’d been riding together two years now and there were a hundred crannies I hadn’t explored.

‘Jeke tell you about the secret passage?’ I said.

‘No, but he did suggest I find an alternative to the front door. He thought if I just knocked you wouldn’t let me in. I suppose I just got lucky.’

‘Matter of opinion,’ I muttered.

I put down the toolbox, picked out a spanner. The pipe wasn’t broken, just pulled from its socket. I pushed it back, tightened the grubs.

‘Six minutes, we’re out of here,’ I said. I hooked a wrench on the rogue panel, pulled it shut. Just before it latched, something crashed against it, snarling.

‘That’s what I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ said Daniel. ‘Where exactly is here?’

***

Back in the cockpit, while the motors rebooted, I gave him the short version.

‘The place you live,’ I said, ‘isn’t the only place there is. That feeling you described? The one you get down by that canal of yours?’

‘What, that the whole area feels like a scab?’

‘Yeah. That’s not bad. World as scab - it’s only when you pick it away you get to the real meat. Well, that’s where we fetched up: the meat between the worlds.’

Daniel was trying to see through the crazed front window. ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

‘Okay, look. First off, there’s more worlds than you can count. Each world’s connected to the next. It’s like bones in a skeleton. You know, the toe bone’s connected to the ankle bone? Only this skeleton’s got more legs than you’ve had wet dreams. And like any skeleton, it’s surrounded by flesh. In this case, the flesh is called the bulk. The bulk’s everything that exists outside the worlds. It keeps the worlds cushioned and fed. In return the worlds stop the bulk flopping like a custard.

‘Only trouble is, the bulk got sick.’

I could see him wanting to believe me. He’d turned from the window; he was studying the patch of red skin where he’d pinched himself. Behind him the glass was starting to clear. Rejuvenation’s one of Tumbleweed’s neater tricks. I hoped he wouldn’t look round again. Now the things outside were coming into focus, even I was getting twitchy.

‘What do you mean,’ he said, ‘got sick?’

I checked the motors. Nearly there. Visible through the half-cleared glass was something like a sunset. Or a huge fire. Shapes like soft factories were loping through mountains of flame. Closing in.

‘Let’s just say things are going to pieces. There’s cracks in the bulk. If it really were a body, it’d be coming apart at the joints. That puts strains on the bones trying to hold it together. Strain on the worlds. It’s why you were able to punch through to the outpost, walk on water even. Places like that canal of yours - they flag the weak spots.’

One of the factory-beasts slammed its horns into Tumbleweed’s flank. Fire burst from its blowhole. A vertical row of two hundred eyes blinked in a funky Mexican wave.

Daniel turned to look, and screamed.

The glass had cleared, revealing giants that were half fungus, half architecture. One looked like a power station, or a rhinoceros. It bit the head off its neighbour and tossed it towards the window. A flying horn hit the superstructure, threw Tumbleweed on her side. Alarms shrieked. We crawled over the walls, grabbed the chairs, strapped ourselves in with heads down and feet up. I stretched for the helm, punched the drop sequence. Shut my eyes.

There was a jolt as something serpentine hit the hull. A tail lashed, shedding scales like puffball spores. Tumbleweed self-righted, lunged for the drop, trailing flames. The snake-thing dropped coils on her tail, dragging us down. I deployed the anchors; they hit like scorpion stings. The snake-thing fell back, writhing. The pull on the anchors killed our momentum so I cut them loose. Tumbleweed sprang forward, took the edge like a gazelle, sliced her way into the drop and we were falling again, motors whistling, falling clean and free.

***

Daniel was quiet for a long time. I left him to brood. There was work to be done: cleaning up, checking Tumbleweed’s criticals, replotting the Juncto trajectory.

I lost myself in the work. It was good to get dirty, work up a sweat. We’d had a close call - not as close as some, too close for comfort. It was an hour before my hands stopped shaking.

Getting too old for this, I thought.

Turned out the motors were running sweeter than ever. Looked like that pipe had been leaking a while. Maybe the kid had done me a favour.

When I’d finished degreasing the floor, I sat in the shadow of the motors. It’s my favourite spot for a break. The motor housing’s like a cathedral: twelve storeys of chains and crystal and crazy spinning looms. How it works I couldn’t say. I just trust it to go and it does. Trust’s a big part of what we do together, Tumbleweed and me. Without it, we’d be nothing.

Jeke now. He was a different fish. With Jeke, trust didn’t come into it.

I looked at the ring he’d sent me. A single ruby, cut through the middle. No prizes for guessing who had the other half.

What a sap.

The ring was beautiful. Trouble was, it didn’t add up. Jeke had never given me the first clue he felt this way. The opposite, actually. Whenever I turned up at the Wishbone Outpost - which was maybe six times a year, tops - he just fed me soup and gave me a hard time. Smokescreen? Hiding his true feelings? Not how love’s meant to be, not in my book.

I shut the box without trying on the ring. I knew it would fit. Jeke would have got that much right.

A shaft of light swung across the motor housing. Daniel stood in the hatch.

‘Now that we’re safe from those ... things,’ he said, ‘I wanted to say I think all this is pretty cool. I mean, it’s like dimensions or something, isn’t it. You and your ship. You travel between worlds!’

I shrugged. ‘It’s a living.’

‘Only, I was thinking. When I was telling you about my dad and what happened at the canal, you were only half-listening, like you’d heard it all before. Right up until I mentioned the window in the lock gate.’

‘What did I do then?’

‘Your ears pricked up like Mizzy’s when she smells a rabbit.’

I stuffed the ring box in my pocket. ‘So what?’

‘So I think you really do know how to get me home. I also think you know what happened to my father.’

I said nothing, just stared up at the spinning looms of Tumbleweed’s motors.

‘Will you tell me what you know?’ he said. ‘Please?’

I stared at him, a young man both brave and scared. The best combination. He reminded me of someone I knew, a long time ago.

‘Come with me,’ I said. ‘I want to show