Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
Nila patted herself down, checking for wounds. Her camouflage coat was shredded along the side. It’s minute embedded circuitry and synthetic fibers melted and fused and covered in blood. Her side was full of shrapnel, some of it smouldering and fizzing in her own blood.
Fortunately, she hadn’t been hit by the slug from the railgun, instead only shrapnel. There was more in her side than would have come from the coat and her shirt. Probably from the car, which was riddled with more holes than she had noticed at the time. The panels that still worked flickered and glitched, illuminating the acrid smoke in the cabin.
There was thumping on the exterior, and the right-side door which was now cocked upwards at an angle opened partially, letting in more consistent light. She could see Luc’s face peering through.
Luc had pushed passed Etelka into the cargo bay. The black oval remains of his once sleek car angled upwards and twisted 45 degrees sideways. Shredded carbon fibre reached up like a thousand little fingers from the perforated fusilage, grey and black and dark, dark green. The nearest door was wedged shut against the floor, so he had climbed up and over, boots clinging to the surface.
Behind him, Etelka came in and pushed the lever to raise the lift, with Pool behind her, still himself covered in dust. The wheels ground with broken bearings. The floor gaped around the car’s back end, open over the sea.
The gullwing door on the accessible side of the car was canted upward so that the angle of the vehicle and the ceiling of the cargo hold prevented it from opening fully. Luc pulled at it, stressing the servos, while talking to Nila inside, to make sure she was alright.
He jumped down, nearly missing the opening on the floor. “I need a bolt cutter or something…,” he said, his voice filled with agitation.
In the background, Nila could hear Etelka yelling up to the cockpit, that they needed to jump right this instant, please, Captain!
Pool stepped past, testing his foothold on the exterior of the car, and hesitantly climbed up. His shoes didn’t have the tred that Luc’s boots had, but sufficed to get him up to the upper edge. Without consideration, he pulled at the door, having more luck with it than Luc had.
Etelka heard a grinding, tearing sound, and before Luc could return, Pool had twisted the door on its hinge in a way that made the opening accessible.
“Good Day, Ms Tagore. May I be of assistance?” He called down into the vehicle. “Are you alright?”
“Hey, weren’t you just Luc a second ago?” Nila responded. “I’m fine. The car is fucked though.”
“Let me offer you my hand,” said Pool. It would be nice to out do the swarthy bloke, for once, he thought.
He reached down, through the opening. The gap was more than enough for Nila to slide through. Pool reached down with his arm and felt her hand clasp his forearm, as his did hers. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever touched Nila before. Strange, that. He’d known her for years and they’d fought side by side, in the thick of it, so to speak.
“Pool, what can I do…?” Came Etelka’s voice, just as Luc returned with a long prybar.
As he stepped across the threshhold, the cargo hold was punched by a dull thwack, the sound of metal cracking. A pair of holes opened nearly simultaneously on both sides of the room, angled downwards slightly.
The prybar hit the grate of the flooring with a much louder clank than the projectile had made as Luc dropped it and pulled Etelka down to the floor. It wouldn’t have made any difference. There was no relevant cover.
“What!?” Elelka stuttered. “What was that?”
“Railgun…” then realizing her unfamilairty, quickly added, “electromagnetic projectile.”
Pool had Nila halfway out of the gap in the open door, where they both flopped and strained against the surface.
“Pool…Nila…,” started Etelka, when two more thwacks hit the room (that they could hear, anyway.)
Before their eyes, in a quiet surreal way, Nila’s and Pool’s locked arms exploded in a mist of metal, carbon fibre and bloody gobs of flesh. The expression on Nila’s face was one of shocked disbelief, Pool’s as well. He looked up at his tattered sleeve as if he didn’t understand what had happened.
“Fuck,” said Luc, leaving Etelka on the floor grate. He jumped up and finished pulling Nila out of the door. Without thinking he had his shirt off and made a tourniquette around the spurting stump of Nila’s arm. Her face was a ragged mess as well. He couldn’t tell if it was a separate shot or if it was from shrapnel. “Fuck fuck fuck …”
Meanwhile, Etelka had rushed to Pool, in an attempt to tend to his wound, but found herself perplexed.
She and Pool both looked at the shattered stump of his arm. Where there should have been ripped flesh and bone, dangling on scraps of skin, there was dry metal and leather, tangled with the remains of his sleeve.
She looked at him, matching his glance, saw the confusion on his face. Looked at Nila, whose injuries were extreme. Etelka wanted to point Luc’s attention to Pool, but clearly could not. Nila needed immediate aid.
Luc, steadying Nila slid the rest of the way down the car’s surface. Laying Nila out gently on the floor.
“Can you…” he started, then looked at Etelka and Pool and Pool’s condition, stopped what he was about to say. “Attila…Beatrix…,” he shouted in the general direction toward the front of the airship, as he scrambled up the surface of the car, digging the toe of his boot into a fresh hole on the surface, before squirming headfirst into the still partially open door.
A second later, a red box appeared in the gape and slid down the surface.
The adrenaline coursing through Luc, not so much subsided, but refocused. The medkit had a proper tournaquette as well as pain meds, stabilization gells and, as he hoped, a couple vials of stasis inducers.
He quickly had Nila’s wounds, her shattered arm and the gash on her head and neck…part of her face was mangled, plastered. She was dosed with anti-infection meds and quickly in a near coma. Her arm was unsalvageable. Not that he was medically savy, but looking at it…it was just fragments.
During the chaos, they didn’t notice the jump through time that occured.
His concern for Nila not withstanding, he turned his attention to Pool.
He had not had a chance to process what had happened to the man, but it clearly was not the same as what happened to Nila.
Etelka was poking at the stump of Pool’s arm, while Pool himself was looking on, still bewildered and in disbelief.
Etelka picked out a bent gear mechanism and held it up, in the beam of light coming through one of the handful of two centimeter holes in the gondola’s wall.
“Has he always been synthetic?” Asked Luc earnestly.
“What?” Responded Etelka and Pool at the same time.
After a moment, Pool responded, “Not to my knowledge, Mr Maron. Not to my knowledge.”
Ion Fyr 