Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions tbs-3

by Hugh Howey

  “Keep calm.” Molly handed him a bottle of water from the medkit. “You were smart to get plugged in,” she told him.

  Higgins took a long swig from the bottle, wiped his chin, then looked down at his flightsuit. “Jonesy,” he said, rubbing his fingers over the name patch. “He told me to do it. Gave me one of his extra flightsuits. I think he knew we were going down before we even got hit. He ran off for the Admiral, I think he was trying to save the old man—”

  “Saunders?” Molly asked.

  Higgins nodded. “Yeah.” He stopped and looked up at Molly. “Are you a part of some kinda rescue operation?”

  “I— Not really. There might not be anyone else to rescue,” she said.

  “Everything okay up there?”

  Molly went to the edge of the wing and looked over. “A scared mechanic. He jacked into the life support. The antigrav suit kept him alive. Gimme a sec with him so he’ll be okay to climb down—”

  Loud banging echoed down the line of ships, cutting her off. Scottie and Cat turned and looked toward the sound; Molly followed their gazes. In the distance, she could see Urg waving his arms and pointing up to another Firehawk.

  “Pants on fire,” Cat whispered. “I think we have more survivors.”

  ••••

  There were eight of them in all. Five pilots, two navigators, and Higgins. The two paired-up crew members had been on deck, ready for lift-off, when the grav panels failed. Everyone’s story was the same and equally awful: they had held tight in abject terror while the ships were flung from one side of the hangar to the other, everyone fearful their Firehawk would rattle out the open hangar doors, or they would lose life support.

  Certainly, some others had.

  None of the Gs suffered had been too much for the flightsuits, and everyone seemed fit, if dehydrated and terrified. Molly and her little rescue crew stayed so busy crawling across the wreckage, cutting people out and getting them food and water, that she hardly noticed the odd dynamic forming. Pilots—some of them twice her age—were looking to her and her friends as if they were in charge.

  While Urg continued to search for anyone left alive in the tangled mess—refusing to give up even when it seemed unlikely there were any more—Molly and the others sat with the crewmen, trying to console them. They all had a defeated, dazed look, almost like animals after a near-drowning.

  Molly peeled the wrapper off a protein bar and handed it to one of the pilots. His eyes were unblinking, wide and wet.

  “It was the Drenards, wasn’t it?” he asked her.

  She shook her head. “No. It’s something worse. Now listen, we need to figure out—”

  “What’s worse than Drenards?” someone else asked.

  “Is it the Tchung?”

  “It’s not the Tchung,” Molly said.

  “Gotta be the Dremards. I heard they were coming out of their arm of the Milky Way for the first time. They attacked Rigel!”

  Molly held up her hands. “It’s not Drenards—”

  “What then? Did you see them? What was it?”

  “Listen,” she said. “The first thing we need to do is help the rest of the crew. See if any of the staff survived. Then we can—”

  “Survived?” Higgins squeaked. “Nobody but us survived! How could they? There was almost ten thousand people on this ship, and now there’s eight!” He looked at his palms. “Darlene,” he said, then started sobbing, covering his face with his hands.

  Molly rose and went to him. She wrapped her arm around his shoulders and looked to the others. “We’ll mourn when we can and for as long as they deserve, but right now we need to—”

  “We need to get off this ship!” someone said.

  “And we will,” Molly told them. “We will. But first, we need to see if anyone else survived. According to Higgins, here, one of the pilots went off to help the senior staff—”

  “They’re dead!” one of the pilots said. “C’mon, the only safe place in this bucket was to be rattling around in one of our little tin cans.”

  “That’s not true,” Molly said. “There’s one other place we need to check. Just in case.”

  One of the pilots—Roberts, according to his name patch—met her with a solid look. His eyes were aware, vibrant, not as red as the others.

  “Where’s that?” he asked.

  “The simulator room,” Molly said.

  ••••

  They left the survivors behind with Urg, who insisted on continuing his search for life among the debris. Several of the pilots suggested they come along and help, but Molly stood firm, pretending to be looking out for their well-being. In reality, she didn’t want to get bogged down if they came across bodies of people they knew, forcing her to tend to their nerves instead of potential survivors. Also—and she hated to admit it—she didn’t want to get outnumbered if any of them found out who she was. According to the report she’d found in the Navy database, she and her ship were the highest of high-priority targets. And now they were back on the same damned Navy StarCarrier she had once escaped from.

  She swiped one of the pilot’s badges through a door reader and let Walter go through first. He led the way with his computer, the schematics for the ship pulled up from his last hack of the place. Molly looked at the badge in her hand, the one that had opened the door, and wondered if the gesture had even been necessary.

  They made haste down the hallway that led to the stairwells, not trusting the elevator shaft after a crash landing; it could easily be just as twisted as the Firehawks. They each carried biotubes from one of the pilot’s survival kits, and Cat had a flashlight, just in case.

  Inside the landing of the stairwell, they came across their first bodies, barely recognizable as such. Not welded down like everything else aboard the ship, they had been flung all over the stairwell when the grav panels had temporarily failed. They left behind not much more than smears of red wetness on the walls and on the underside of the rising flight of steps. Flightsuits lay scattered in lumpy reminders of what the mess had originated from.

  Molly tried to focus into the distance as she stepped gently through the slick, chunk-filled puddles. She gripped the railing to the side. When her hand went into something wet, she had to stifle her gag reflex and fight to remain in control of her senses. She led the way down the steps, two flights, both of which were covered with and reeking of human remains.

  Behind her, Scottie coughed into his hand. Molly reached back and clutched Walter’s sleeve, helping steady both of them, physically and emotionally. She scanned open the door on the crew deck and waved them through, each of them pale and holding their breath. All except for Walter, who didn’t seem fazed; his attention was firmly locked onto his computer.

  “This way,” he said calmly.

  Scottie leaned against the bulkhead, his head bowed down. “We’re gonna have to find a different way back,” he said. “I’ve seen some flanked-up shit in my day, but nothing like that.”

  “They were probably told to—” Molly fought hard to swallow, “—told to get in the stairwell. Like an emergency drill. Either that, or everyone thought of the suits in the hangar and got backed up trying to get there.” She grabbed Scottie’s arm and led him after Walter, who was waiting at the next turn.

  “I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to be in there,” Cat said.

  The words popped a visual in Molly’s mind: the tight confines, packed and rattling with dozens and dozens of Gs. It would’ve been awful.

  “We’re not gonna find anybody down here,” Scottie complained. “I’m thinking we should head back.”

  “It’s just around the corner,” Molly assured him. Walter had shown her schematics of the carrier; the sim room and the hangar were situated above and below the pilot’s quarters, as if to reduce their foot travel.

  Walter ran ahead, leading the way to the simulator room. The smell of blood and oil seemed to permeate the lower decks as fluids leaked out of broken things. Molly fought to ignore
the occasional body they went by. Even the sight of a bag of laundry, open and disgorging crumpled Navy blacks, filled her with sorrow. What was left of the person who had been rushing off to wash those? she wondered.

  As they caught up to Walter and neared the simulator room, Molly realized Scottie had been right. They weren’t going to find anyone alive down there. If someone had survived in a simulator pod, they would surely be running up and down the decks by now, looking to rescue others or trying to flee the ship.

  Expecting to find the room intact, the pods empty or full of more horror, Molly stepped inside with her hopes low—when she should’ve been concentrating on keeping her defenses up.

  Hundreds, maybe thousands of crewmen had been packed in the simulator room—it was impossible to tell exactly how many. Their bodies formed a wall of gruesome death on the far side of the room, stacked up in a scene eerily reminiscent of the Firehawks piled high in the hangar. Jumbled up, mounded like a snowdrift, they formed a slope of tangled forms, their individual parts woven together and indistinguishable.

  The marks their flying bodies had made spotted the room, dotting the pods, the floor, even the ceiling with bright marks of crimson. Molly caught herself on the doorjamb and tried to wave away the others before they joined her. The sound of Scottie gagging behind her let her know she’d been too late.

  “Flank me,” Cat said. “They were all thinkin’ the same thing.”

  “Let’s go,” Molly told them. She pushed her way past her friends and back into the hallway, which suddenly seemed positively laden with fresh air. She tried not to think about what those people had gone through, what their last moments had been like. The crowded panic, the fearful silence, and then… the horrible rattling and crushing.

  “Ssomethingss knocking,” Walter said from the room.

  “I think that’s my knees,” Scottie said. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “Ssssshhhh,” Walter hissed.

  Molly stepped back by the door but didn’t dare look inside. She listened around the corner for a sound, but could only hear her heartbeat in her ears. Scottie came out bent over and covering his mouth with the back of one hand.

  “Damn, I think I heard it too,” Cat said.

  “It’ss coming from the podss,” said Walter.

  Molly steeled her nerves. Keeping her eyes low, she reentered the room. She stood there, perfectly still, holding her hands out to urge the others to be as quiet as possible.

  There. A muffled pounding. Running to the nearest pod, she clanged up the steps and slapped on the egg-shaped compartment before pressing her ear to it.

  “You hear anything?” Cat asked, climbing up the steps.

  “Someone yelling, I think. But these things open from within, so I don’t get why they’d need help.”

  Cat ran up the steps of another pod and rubbed her hands across the hatch. “Are they damaged?”

  “Doesn’t look—”

  The pod twitched, rotating in its base. Molly stepped back. Walter hissed at the pod closest to him, which seemed to have moved in unison.

  “Of course!” Molly ran down the steps and toward the control room.

  “Of course, what?” Cat called out after her.

  “A simulation is still running. Somebody must’ve—”

  She stopped when she entered the control room. The remains of that very somebody were smeared all over the small booth. Their body lay crumbled in a heap in one corner, the spaceman’s flightsuit so flat it appeared empty. Molly looked away, but the sight was seared on her retina, overlaid onto so many other horrific images. She thought about the sacrifice this person had made and silently honored him.

  The keyboard and screen were a mess, but she had to do something about the pod controls. She pulled the medkit over her shoulder and around in front, then groped inside for a gauze pad. Using the medical fabric to remove a smear off the screen made it impossible to imagine the mess as anything other than blood. The pad soaked it up dutifully.

  CONTROLLER - GERALD “JONESY” RICKSON

  PROGRAM - ZERO G MAINTAIN

  E.T.C. - 1:42

  ENEMY TYPE - NONE

  ENEMY COUNT - 0

  POD LINK - ALL

  CONTINGENCY - DISABLED

  Molly glanced at the flight routine summary. The adjacent SADAR screen showed a cluster of virtual Firehawks drifting in space. The routine still had almost two hours to go, a gross overestimation for how long the crash would take. Then again, she probably would’ve done the same thing, taking no chances on an early exit.

  Using the gauze to hold down the CTRL button, she jabbed the BREAK key with a knuckle, then ran back outside while the simulation wound down.

  “Scottie, we’re gonna need you in here,” she called out the door. “Everyone, get ready to guide any survivors out. Keep their focus away from the back of the room. We’ll form up and meet in the hallway.” She turned to Cat. “Come with me,” Molly said.

  She ran toward the far pods, the ones that would be closest to the tangle of bodies. It would be important to get any surviving occupants away as quickly as possible. Molly wasn’t sure how, but having something to work on—people to be responsible for—made crossing the room possible. She felt grateful for the temporary immunity and focused on the slim chance that the simulators had kept the Admiral safe.

  She forgot, for just a moment, that she might not be safe if he was.

  ••••

  The hatches started popping open as soon as the simulation shutdown procedure completed. Cries of anguish and relief spilled out of the pods just before the people did. Men and women exited their simulators and shouted for one another. As they emerged, it proved impossible to keep them from seeing what lay at the far end of the room. Moans of agony and peals of disbelief rang out, along with a smattering of curses. Molly found herself yelling at grown men to head for the exit, the white hair and beards on many of them signifying rank their borrowed simulator suits belied.

  Everyone seemed too stunned to care that they were being yelled at by a teenager, a Callite, a Palan, and a roughneck local. Their state of shock made them more like cattle, giving Molly and her friends easy verbal control of them. She felt a wave of confidence and surety wash over her—the hours they had already spent around the horror had put her group in a much better state than these survivors. The four of them had descended through the gore in stages, rather than hatching directly into the worst it had to offer.

  Molly corralled a dozen survivors together and guided them, pushing and prodding, toward the hallway. They clung to one another like refugees, knees weakened by an emotional ordeal no less taxing than a physical one might be.

  Cat lagged behind with another cluster, including a few women. In fact, ahead of Molly—clustered around Walter and Scottie—there seemed to be quite a few women among the survivors. Further ahead, an older gentleman leaned against the rear of a pod and threw up on the decking. Several other people seemed to have been physically sick. Molly swallowed hard and tried to focus on getting everyone out of there.

  “Into the hallway,” she yelled.

  Most of them didn’t need to be told. Many ran out, clutching their stomachs or sobbing into their hands, men and women alike.

  As she guided her own group forward, Molly heard someone yelling from inside one of the simulators. She left Cat in charge of her survivors and stomped up the steps, only to find yet another level of disgust: someone hadn’t gotten their suit plugged in. Either that, or the grav link had failed. The other occupant, a young man, seemed unscathed but in a state of shock. He held the body in his lap, the arms of the deceased dangling to either side with the litheness of a hundred joints.

  At least, thank the gods, the suit’s seals had remained intact.

  “I need you to come with me,” Molly told him. She ducked into the pod and reached for the limp body in his lap. The survivor stared at her, visor open, mouth slack, a dull whine leaking out. It was the sound of distilled agony. Of confusion and regre
ssion.

  Grabbing the limp figure, Molly shifted it to the other seat and nearly threw up inside the simulator pod. The form inside the outfit felt pulverized. Chunked. She bit down on her tongue to divert her attention with some pain while she folded the suit and its contents out of the man’s lap.

  “We need to go,” she told him. She unbuckled his harness and pulled him toward the open hatch. The man continued to make a strange moaning sound as she guided him out and down the steps.

  They were the last two out into the hallway. As they approached the door, Molly felt the need to turn around, to make sure there weren’t more people to help. It was hard to do with the knowledge of what lay behind, but she looked anyway. Everyone that could be saved was out. The percentages—seeing how many didn’t stand a chance—it made her feel sick.

  In the hallway, she found most of the survivors sitting along the wall, some of them prone. The medkit felt ridiculous across her back; nobody needed so much as an adhesive strip. What they should’ve brought down was more water and rations. Molly saw that the little nourishment they did have was already being passed around; she worked her way down the line of bedraggled spacemen, checking eyes for alertness—when she found him. Found herself face-to-face with Admiral Saunders.

  Their eyes met—and his widened.

  “You.”

  Molly nearly burst out in tears to see someone she knew, someone from her seemingly long-ago past. Saunders represented a thread back to normalcy; she could see him and remember being young and only miserable in frivolous ways. She could remember, with longing, the simple pain of being yelled at, of being treated poorly. She approached, holding out a bottle of water, but he slapped it away.

  “You need to drink,” she told him.

  He looked to either side of himself, surveying those nearest him. Molly noticed the men and women clustered around him had the most gray in their hair and the least trauma in their eyes. They bore the haggard look of veterans, the creases made by years of worry had become permanent in expressive wrinkles.

  “Arrest her,” Saunders said meekly, looking to his subordinates. “She’s the one—”