Swords & Steam Short Stories by S.T. Joshi

Author:S.T. Joshi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
Published: 2018-12-03T10:20:17+00:00

Spectrum

Liam Hogan

Neha rubbed the scar that ran down her cheek. It went further, as well; split and twisted, both inside and out, a permanent, painful, crippling reminder of their disastrous arrival twenty-five years ago: the Accra plummeting through the magnetic storms in Icaria’s turbulent, alien atmosphere; navigation, guidance, and even life-support systems glitching out before their inevitable crash.

Then: the desperate fight of the survivors to awaken the sleeping cargo before the cryo-pods failed as well. The horror of that day; the futile efforts, the terrible losses.

Instead of a colony of a thousand, with the best tools and technology their mother planet had to offer, they had been reduced to a mere fifty, reduced also to improvised and temperamental steam engines, every electronic component more complicated than a resistor snuffed out in the eddies and whorls of that unforeseen electromagnetic maelstrom.

Almost unforeseen: of those awake for the landing, only Neha had seen the purple clouds spitting and snapping below, had not understood why no-one else on the bridge seemed concerned.

It was a talent she’d long had, even though she’d never actually known it for what it was. Her uncanny ability to identify dead circuitry was part of it; a talent that had paved her way through University, that had earned her Second Engineer status for this prestigious African Federation mission. A skill that spoke to her superiors louder than her youth, her sex, or indeed, her mixed parentage; Indian mother, Ghanaian father: neither native nor foreign, an outsider wherever she went.

A skill that, this day at least, was turned to new purpose.

They were up on the high plateau a half mile from the crater the Accra had dug and where, in the aftermath, the settlers had carved their homes in the shattered rock. Neha had been hauled up by two of those born to this planet, young men who lifted her and her wheelchair over the boulders and crevasses. She had spent more time being carried than pushed; an undignified and arduous journey, but necessary.

She’d consulted and advised on the plans for the flyer, The Daedalus; worked on the manual controls for rudder and aileron. But it was still so much more fragile than she’d expected; a chimera of pot-bellied stove and the glistening wings of a dragonfly, hi-tech material from a scavenged solar-sail stretched taut over a rude wooden frame.

She marvelled at the bravery of the young pilot destined to sit in the cramped space behind the boiler. The young female pilot; it had to be a woman and a slim one at that, to attain the height they hoped to achieve.

But her bravery would be for naught unless Neha could identify a window of opportunity for her ascent.

She watched the electrical bands form and reform, tangled sheets dancing across the sky, sometimes threatening to dip to ground but never quite able to, torn to wisps still high above the plateau.

“How long will it take you to get to altitude?” she asked the pilot.

“Twenty to twenty-five minutes,” Ama replied, after a look that travelled the length of Neha’s broken body.

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