Shadow of the Mothaship by Cory Doctorow (100 books to read in a lifetime .txt) 📕

the mothaship. I had the dregs of the solvent that he'd sold me, and I used that to dissolve a hole in his door, and reached in and popped the latch.

I didn't make a mess, just methodically opened crates and boxes until I found what I was looking for. Then I hauled it in batches to the elevator, loaded it, and took it back to my coffin in a cab.

I had to rent another coffin to store it all.

#

The Process-head stays at the airport. Praise the bugouts. If he'd been aboard, it would've queered the whole deal.

I press my nose against the oval window next to the hatch, checking my comm from time to time, squinting at the GPS readout. My stomach is a knot, and my knee aches. I feel great.

The transition to Process-land is sharp from this perspective, real buildings giving way to foam white on a razor-edged line. I count off streets as we fly low, the autopilot getting ready to touch down at Aristide, only 70 kay away.

And there's my Chestnut Ave.

God*damn* the wind's fierce in a plane when you pop the emergency hatch. It spirals away like a maple key as the plane starts soothing me over its PA.

I've got a safety strap around my waist and hooked onto the front row of seats, and the knots had better be secure. I use my sore leg to kick the keg of solvent off the deck.

I grab my strap with both hands and lie on my belly at the hatch's edge and count three hippopotami, and then the charge on Stude's kegger goes bang, and the plane kicks up, and now it's not the plane coming over the PA, but the Roman tyrant's voice, shouting, but not loud enough to be understood over the wind.

The superfine mist of solvent settles like an acid bath over my Chestnut Ave, over the perfect smile, and starts to eat the shit out of it.

I watch until the plane moves me out of range, then keep watching from my comm, renting super-expensive sat time on Dad's account.

The roofs go first, along with the road surfaces, then the floors below, and then structural integrity is a thing of past and they fall to pieces like gingerbread, furniture tumbling rolypoly away, everything edged with rough fractal fringe.

#

Dad's greyfaced and clueless when I land. All he knows is that something made the plane very sick. He's worried and wants to hug me.

I totter down the stairway that a guy in a jumpsuit rolled up, ears still ringing from the wind and my big boom. I'm almost down the step when a little Process-troll scurries up and says something in his ear.

I know what it is, because he's never looked so pissed at me in all my life.

I'm a fricken *genius*.

—

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End of Project Gutenberg's Shadow of the Mothaship, by Cory Doctorow