Chapter 10 – Out of Time

“Jolly here. Connecting video feed with Dingleberry now!”

The Silver Stream crew immediately paused with nervous anticipation of the young Glider’s finding. After a few seconds, a viewing screen before them showed a glowing metal ball in Dingleberry’s hands, the same type that they had been retrieving.

“What?! That is extremely, infallibly, a hundred percent a bomb! Where’s the alarm?!” Queen yelled through the comms. Her exclamation sent a shiver down everyone’s spine.

“No radio wave detected! This one is unlike the others! It’s completely analog!” Jolly said after a scan.

As if frozen at the realization that he was holding a bomb, Dingleberry’s eyes glazed over before he started bobbling the sphere.

“N-N-No, no, no! W-Whaddo I do?”

The bomb slipped from his grip, bouncing on the ground before rolling away and revealing a timer.

“It’s not a remote detonate. Nothing can block it. How much time do we have?! I’m the closest to him right now!” Arwain called to Jolly.

“Only two minutes and forty seconds… thirty-eight… thirty-six…”

“Gah! That’s nowhere long enough to send it out of the city!”

It took most Gliders at least ten to fifteen minutes to reach the disposal site. Arwain would arrive on the scene in the next twenty seconds at full speed. He gritted his teeth as he forced himself to slip through the buildings without slowing down. He had to take charge. He had to keep the newbie safe.

Arwain quickly approached Dingleberry’s location, a Speedy X convenience store on a busy flight intersection. Given the bomb’s range of half a kilometer in diameter, it would knock out thousands of Flyers in an instant. The first bomb had gone off in between buildings, the majority of stripped wings having safely found solid ground inside the high rises. There wouldn’t be enough Gliders around to save everyone this time.

Arwain’s feet touched ground as he broke into a run to control his flight momentum. Waving his arms like a madman, he brought attention to everyone to get out of his way.

“MOVE IT! THERE’S A BOMB HERE!”

People loitering in front of the store heard the message as they dove off the platform to escape, leaving Arwain an open path to crash through the doors of the Speedy X where Dingleberry was flailing around, crying about where to go. His head craned to the explosive entry of shattered glass and toppled shelves.

“Dingleberry! Pass it here! We don’t have time!”

With a nod from his panicked, sniffling face, he chucked the hot potato to Arwain, who safely cradled it before bolting right out of where he came. A puff of propulsion steam blasted him upwards as quickly as he could go in hopes of finding somewhere to toss the bomb.

“Arwain, one minute and fifty seconds left!”

“Jolly, even at my speed, the best I could hope for is to take it up high where less people fly. Give me an alternative in the next ten seconds so I don’t do anything stupid!”

“Ahh, errr, I know! Drop it in the cannon! I’ll fire it out of range!”

New coordinates popped up in his HUD, showing that headquarters was only thirty seconds away. Arwain traced the nearest building up until he could see the top of it, confirming that the cannon that they used to launch packages was primed and ready. It was pointing through the gaps in the downtown buildings, high enough up that it would sail over the remaining skyline of lower buildings further out.

“Alright, if we go down, we go down together!”

With full thrusters, Arwain zoomed to the barrel of the cannon, slowing down just enough to pass the bomb into the far opening and letting it roll down to the base.

“Bomb secured! Launch film applied! Fire!”

Arwain gulped and covered his ears as the cannon let out a deafening boom, the package sailing out of the barrel at several times the top speed of a Glider. The two of them waited nervously as it became too small to see as the countdown reached zero.

An orb of purple light flared up, expanding over the outer buildings of Stratos. It reached full impact with a comfortable margin away from the top floors. Jolly and Arwain heaved a giant sigh of relief at their success.

“Bomb neutralized! That was a success!” Arwain pumped his fist in the air.

But then, a gasp on the comms cut off the excitement.

“No… no, it wasn’t. That wasn’t the only one…”

Sarge’s voice interrupted the momentary celebration, bringing a different reality crashing down upon them.

Arwain’s heart dropped as his HUD was soon filled with screens of other places where the timer bombs had gone off, all at the same time. They had been so focused on delivering this one to safety that they had forgotten that a single outlier was unlikely.

Or rather, they had subconsciously hoped that it wouldn’t happen because nothing could have prepared them for it.

With a shaky voice, Arwain called out to his crew, bracing his wings for overtime.

“Team, pause all operations and focus on rescue now.”

-----

The day ended on a tragic note. As initially feared, other bombs had been placed around the city with timers. Since the Gliders were primed to believe that the bombs could be found from radio waves, no one thought to check for other types until it was too late.

As a result, a total of five explosions had rocked busy areas of the city, sending teams scrambling to catch falling victims.

Arwain couldn’t focus on anything but the people in front of his eyes. Their screams echoed in his eardrums, and the beating of their flailing limbs hammered a sense of urgency.

He heaved with exhaustion as he fought to save one more person, shave off one more second, and push his wings beyond the limit.

Stratos was high-tech city that was constructed as a paradise for Flyers. As such, even the gravity was manipulated to a certain degree to promote a better lifestyle. But even at one-fourth the standard gravitational pull, a falling person had barely four minutes tops before colliding with solid ground.

Just two hundred and forty seconds to contemplate safety versus death. That had to be running through the minds of the victims as they stretched their hands to the heavens for help. Or maybe, they looked down to curse Daedalus for exploiting a fault in their ascension.

Arwain lost count of how many he managed to grab and toss to safety. He couldn’t even bother to look at his altitude counter in fear of the incoming doom. The other Gliders around him likely thought the same as they gradually plucked people out of the air.

The clouds below were quickly approaching. His nerves pricked at him once again. Diving into the foggy atmosphere, he had to rely on slight aberrations in heat signature to find the next victim.

“Arwain! Stop! You’re going to crash!”

In an instant, he pulled up, realizing that his head had also been in the clouds, too hyperfocused to notice that he had already passed below them.

But as he stopped, one look at the surface caused him to choke.

He had saved many, but it was a fraction of those that hadn’t been. All around the surface, people who lost their wings had crashed into the surrounding areas occupied by No-Flyers. Crowds of them had streamed out of their residences and offices, staring up at the skies with fear and anger.

Their eyes blamed the Gliders who had stopped in despair at falling short. To them, any thought of the sky falling had been waved away by the promise of a model city for humankind. It had been a guarantee that now came back to betray them.

Trembling shook Arwain as tears filled his goggles. He felt a pair of strong arms wrapping him in an embrace from behind.

“There, there, Arwain. You did good.”

“S-Still. I wanted to save them, Jester.”

“We’re not heroes on the battlefield. We simply deliver to the best of our abilities. Even the best juggler in the circus cannot hope to catch every ball thrown by an audience.”

With that, Jester dragged a teary-eyed Arwain away from the disaster, the other Gliders floating up to follow suit.

The mental rift between Flyers and No-Flyers grew dramatically on that day. The city could no longer keep the existence of Daedalus and the bombs as a passing troublemaker anymore.