Jainan cast him a wary glance, “I would still like permission to withdraw from the project.”
“You don’t need my bloody per—” Kiem started to say, but was stopped by a muffled bang that shook the whole flybug.
Both of them broke off. “What was that?” Jainan said.
“No idea.” A beeping noise started to blare: an alarm Kiem didn’t recognize. He grabbed for the steering with one hand and keyed up the display with the other. “It’s not—shit, it’s not responding.” The filaments were dead and inert around his hand. And both of them felt it at the same time—the slow curve of the flybug as it lost its forward momentum and started to point inexorably downward.
“Hell!” Kiem yanked at all the backup controls, trying to get some sort of response.
“That patch of snow,” Jainan said, leaning forward intently. “Can you land—”
“We’re too far up,” Kiem said grimly, as the sickening feeling of an uncontrolled drop took hold. “I’ll aim for it, and maybe if the landing brakes are still—”
He didn’t even make it to the end of the sentence. Another shattering blow flung his head forward. The snowy ground spiraled up in front of him, but he wasn’t aiming, he couldn’t make his arms move. He didn’t feel the crash.
CHAPTER 16
Pain had its uses, Jainan thought. It put things in perspective. There was something clean about the way it cut through the emotional tangles and reminded you that things could be worse.
He hurt quite a lot. It took him some effort to ignore it, but eventually he noticed something clammy pressing into his shoulder. He stared at the short expanse of snow in front of him—which was inexplicably sideways—and at the icy-blue sky beyond it. It took him a while to realize that the wetness pressing against his shoulder was also snow.
Once he had realized that, everything else rushed in. The flybug was a mangled wreck around him. He was still strapped to a seat that lay among a crystal pile of safety glass shards, and his security harness was a line of pain across his chest. He drew in a breath of freezing air and attempted to release the harness; he was shaking so much he couldn’t press the button. His shoulder ached fiercely.
On the second try, he managed to release the catch and tumbled the last couple of inches into the snow. The last of his breath went. He rested his forehead in the snow and reminded his lungs how to expand.
The cold wasn’t making it any easier, but it did him a favor in making the discomfort of his rapidly soaking clothes so unendurable that he had to push himself up. He was already starting to shiver. He turned and looked for Kiem.
He wasn’t there.
Jainan stared at the wreckage of the flybug’s dome and empty seat for a full three seconds before he looked farther and saw a dark form lying at the end of a track gouged in the snow. It was suddenly very hard to breathe again. His head must still be hazy, because there didn’t seem to be any time at all between spotting Kiem and kneeling down next to him, shaking so badly he had to stop with his hand an inch from Kiem’s face. Kiem’s eyes were shut. It wouldn’t help to touch him. What would help? Jainan was useless.
As if he felt the heat from Jainan’s hand, Kiem stirred. His eyes opened and he raised his head, pushing himself up on one elbow. “Ouch.”
Jainan crouched back so suddenly out of relief that he sat down in the snow, saving himself with his hands. “Kiem.”
“Urgh. Here,” Kiem said. “At least, I think I am. Ow.” He sat up, in spite of an involuntary noise of protest from Jainan, who was thinking about broken ribs and internal injuries. But the movement didn’t seem to cause Kiem any more pain. He rubbed his head, looked around and said, “What h— Oh. Shit.” He jerked forward, drawing another half-formed protest that Jainan hadn’t meant to make, and grabbed Jainan’s arm. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” Jainan said, and Kiem released his grip. Jainan looked Kiem over closely. He raised his hand to a red graze on Kiem’s temple, not touching it. “You went through the dome.”
Kiem started to say something but seemed to stutter. His eyes went to Jainan’s hand, and Jainan became aware he had brushed the hair away from Kiem’s forehead as if he had some sort of right to. He drew his hand back.
Kiem cleared his throat. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that wasn’t in the plan. It’s just a graze. Could do with a stim tab, maybe.” He pushed himself to his feet, and dismay wrote itself across his face as he looked at the flybug. “Tell me this wasn’t because of the stunt we pulled with the river.”
Jainan stood as well, finding his limbs unexpectedly clumsy. It was hard to balance. “No,” he said. Planetside craft weren’t his specialty, but he knew the basics. “Nothing the stabilizers are linked to would have that effect.”
They both looked in silence at the remains of the flybug. The bulk of the shell was intact, but the front had been comprehensively smashed by the sheet of rock below. Much of the crumpling would have been intentional, built into the structure, but it was still only chance that they had survived.
“We got lucky,” Kiem said. “We were flying very low.”
He was right. If they’d been at a normal flying height, or in the tunnels, they would have had no chance. “Yes,” Jainan said. He didn’t want to think of the implications. The cold wind felt like it was boring into his bones.
“It was … an accident?” Kiem said. He sounded as if he would like that to be true but wasn’t holding out a lot of hope.
Jainan jerked his head around to look at Kiem. Of course, Kiem wasn’t an engineer, and he wouldn’t have understood the sound and location of the explosion. “It was a compressor failure.”
“Is that what took out—”
“—Taam’s flybug?” Jainan said emotionlessly. “Yes.”
Kiem winced. “I’m starting to hate flybugs.” He leaned over it and thumped one of the crumpled panels, which broke off. “We’ve clearly pissed someone off. Shame we have no idea who.”
Jainan shook his head mutely. If someone had set the explosion on a timer, the explosion could have been caused by anyone at Hvaren Base or anyone in the palace. The garages at the palace were secured, but only from the public, not from the palace’s own residents. Jainan tried to shake off the feeling that it was his fault. He had been the one to stir up the hornet’s nest by going into Taam’s private files.
Kiem gave a crooked smile. “I suppose there’s not a lot we can do about it from here, anyway,” he said. He pulled aside a twisted panel and dislodged the first aid box, a bright red stain against the snow. He made an aha noise, pried out the sleeve of stim tabs, and shoved three on his tongue. He held them out to Jainan. “Probably don’t take three.”
The tabs would give him a slow-releasing drip of artificial energy and reduce the pain in his shoulder. Jainan took the sleeve and detached one. One might not have a great effect, but he was wary of anything that interfered with his perceptions, and he disliked stim hangover. It dissolved into bitterness on his tongue.
Kiem tramped over to the flybug and rested a hand on the intact part of the curved hull, looking into the interior. He shook his head, shot Jainan a rueful glance, and looked up ahead. “Well.”