by Hugh Howey
Molly knelt down and rested a hand on his shoulder. “We need to get everyone out of here,” she said, “and you need to drink some water. You can airlock me later, if you like.”
He frowned as she pushed the water into his hand. A thin man with wispy gray hair slid close and grabbed the bottom of the bottle, moving it to Saunders’s lips. The gray man met Molly’s eyes with his own; he nodded slowly to her as the Admiral slurped from the bottle.
Molly stood up and looked around herself. There had to be almost a hundred of them. With what few they had rescued above, it was but a sliver of a fraction of a percent of the total crew. The tragedy of this one act alone was mind-numbing. The thought of it happening throughout the galaxy was too terrible to even register. At least one cruiser had also gone down, then there were all the Firehawks and support craft—
Molly left Saunders in the care of the others and walked back down the center of the hallway. She wondered how they were going to get everyone through the stairwell and into the ship. And how many flights back and forth with Parsona would it take to keep everyone comfortable? And where would she take them? All the way back to Bekkie?
She was mulling this over, surveying the crowd, when she noticed Walter standing by the doorway of the simulator room, staring inside. His eyes were narrowed, his silvery, stubbly head leaning forward as he gazed in the direction of the far wall.
“Don’t look at it, Walter.” She walked up and put her hands on his narrow shoulders, trying to turn him away.
“Ssomething’ss wrong,” he hissed.
“I know, buddy, but we’ll get through it together, okay?”
“No.” He shrugged her hands off his shoulders. “Ssomething’ss really wrong. It moved.”
Molly forced herself to look at the pile of bodies in the distance. “Nothing moved in there, Walter. Your eyes are playing tricks on—”
One of the bodies on top of the steep pile fell away from the rest; it rolled sickeningly across the simulator room, joints folding in ways they shouldn’t. And then it came to a sudden halt. Several other bodies followed suit, all of them coming to a stop at the same place, their limbs tangled and supple.
Suddenly, a large chunk came loose—a crowd. The rest of the wall followed in a sudden avalanche of bodies. The corpses tumbled across the steel decking together, skidding to an eerie halt in a wide dune of the dead.
Walter pulled back from the room, hissing.
“What’s wrong?” Cat asked, walking over and steadying Walter. She peered past Molly. “What in the hell?”
“Get everyone together,” Molly whispered. “We need to get out of here.”
“What’s going on?”
Molly turned to Cat. “The grav panels are failing.”
Part XV – Coming Together
“What greater tragedy is there than two lovers, racing for each other, desperate and longing, only to pass, unbeknownst, in the darkness?”
~The Bern Seer~
37
Cole held the wooden sword with his right hand and twirled it in the air. It made a satisfying, swooshing sound. Arthur frowned at him.
“More wrist,” he said. “You don’t have a new shoulder, so the power has to come from your elbow and wrist.”
“Why not just give me a new shoulder?” Cole asked, smiling.
“Because it’s expensive and parts are hard to come by. But more importantly, where would you want me to stop? Replace everything from the neck down? At what point would you quit feeling like you?”
“Maybe everything from the neck up would be better,” someone said.
Cole turned to the voice—
It was the girl with the red hair. She had on one of the same training suits he’d been given, her bright locks up in a tight bun and a wooden sword in her hand.
“Have you two officially met?” Arthur asked.
“That’s a good question,” Cole said. He stepped forward and extended his hand. “Have we?”
“Penny,” the girl said, grabbing his hand and squeezing it. Hard.
Cole tried to pull away, but she had an iron grip.
“I don’t think we have,” she said, smiling. “Not officially.”
Arthur clapped his hands together. “Okay, you two square off. Just the basics today. Bear with me, Penny, and go easy on the lad.”
“I will,” she said, winking at Cole and freeing his hand.
He looked down at it and flexed his artificial fingers, marveling at the pain interface.
Arthur turned to Cole. “Any fencing at the Academy?”
“Two semesters,” he said proudly.
“Aw, hell,” Arthur said. “Well, do me a favor and forget all that nonsense. Buckblades aren’t swords.”
“Buckblades? The invisible things?”
“That’s right.” Arthur stepped over and adjusted Cole’s grip on the handle. “Buckminster Fuller came up with the design hundreds of years ago. Well, sorta.” He ran his hand down the wooden approximation of a blade while he talked. “It’s a single matrix of carbon laced with iron, neodymium, and cobalt. Extremely ferromagnetic, okay? Super sharp. But the trick is in the blade’s handle, that’s where the electromagnetic field is created that spools the wire out and keeps it stiff. The blade’ll cut through damn near anything.”
“Even each other?”
“Sharp kid,” Arthur said, looking at Penny and jabbing a thumb his way. She shrugged and twirled her stick in a graceful pattern, so fast Cole could hear the air screaming in protest as it tried to move out of the way.
“No, not each other. Buckblades have orthogonal magnetic charges, otherwise they’d fly out of your hand and stick to something metal, get it?”
“Orthogonal?” Cole asked. “Is that positive or negative?”
“Neither. There’s two other kinds of magnetic fields, monopoles that can be harvested here in hyperspace. All Buckblades have the same charge, so it’s almost impossible to get them together, much less cut through one another.”
“They fly away from each other? Why not make some of them with the opposite charge, then?”
Cole tried to mimic the pattern Penny was making, which made her laugh.
“You just lost your clever points, son. Now I have to assume you got lucky before.”
“What do you think would happen?” Penny asked, taunting him.
“They’d stick together?”
“That’s putting it mildly, now pay attention. When someone swings at you, you can’t get hit. Not even a little, okay?”
“I think he’s learned that lesson,” Penny said. She darted forward and smacked the back of his right hand with her sword.
Cole dropped his weapon and shook his hand, glaring at her.
“Good point, Penny. Now, Cole, keep a firm grip on your sword.” Arthur bent down, picked it up, and handed it back to him. “Don’t crush the thing, but try not to drop it.”
“Why’d you make the thing feel pain?” Cole asked, rubbing his hand.
“Same reason God made the other one that way. So you’d take care of it. Now listen, you don’t want to get hit. Not once. And you can’t really block your opponent’s attacks, they’ll just repulse each other—”
“How does this work, then? He who swings first, wins?”
“The other way around, usually. See the slits on your sword?”
Cole inspected the wooden blade. There were deep cracks running down the length of the thing. He nodded.
“When you swing the practice swords at each other, internal sensors calculate where they would be repulsed to. Lights in the blade shine out and your suit picks them up—”
“Oh, so it’s like a game of billiards. It’s all about the bank shots.”
“Okay, another clever point for you. Now, most fights end with someone’s own sword coming back and hitting them. With the right block and a forceful enough stance, you can send most attacks back where they came from. Think of your sword more as a shield. It’s your opponent’s sword that’s your real
weapon, and your sword is theirs. Get it? So learn to fear what you’re holding and figure out how to attack with what their wielding. Now, Penny will show you the basic attack angles—the safest ones. They aren’t what you’d think, so pay attention and unlearn your fencing.”
Cole nodded and tried to take the same stance as Penny: feet apart, shoulders square, pretty much the exact posture that would’ve gotten him a beating from Lieutenant Eckers, his old fencing instructor.
“The power is from side to side,” Penny told him. “It’s in your hips.” She moved hers back and forth while Cole watched.
“You’re supposed to try it too,” she said, reaching out and smacking his sword.
“Oh, yeah.” He moved his hips side to side, swinging the wooden stick just like she did.
“It’s a lot like a judo throw, or a good roundhouse. If you don’t get your whole body in on it, you won’t go far.”
“Gotcha,” Cole said, trying to ignore the way her suit hugged her body.
“Give me your best shot.”
Cole’s feet shuffled automatically, trying to get back into a proper fencing stance. Penny lashed out with her sword, which he instinctively blocked. Solidly. The wooden shafts smacked together with a satisfying crack.
Both thighs on his suit lit up, showing him where he would’ve lost them.
“You’ve got no power like that,” Penny said, tapping his hip with her sword. “This isn’t a contest where you score points and gab with your opponent about whose mother smells worse.” She rapped his sword with hers, then tapped him in the stomach. “There’s nothing noble or fun about this, okay? It’s one swing and you’re dead. There isn’t anything heroic about it, and nothing fun or pleasant, even for the winner.”
Cole nodded, resuming his square-on stance. “Have you been in real fights with these?”
“Do I sound like I’m reading from a textbook? Trust me, it isn’t pretty.”
“I’ve seen what they can do,” Cole told her.
“It’s different when you’re the one doing it. Now, there are three major angles you need to learn and two sub angles—they’re your safest attacks and the hardest to parry. Forget thrusts altogether, okay?”
Cole nodded as she began the first lesson; he tried his best to absorb it all. He also tried to watch her hips only when she told him to. Finally, he tried his damnedest to pretend that Arthur—standing to one side and offering suggestions—was Molly. Watching him. Reading his mind with a D-band. Forcing him to stifle his thoughts.
It helped him to imagine Penny was someone else. Anyone but the flaming girl from his strange dream. And finally, as they began to spar, their swords clashing while they discussed angles of deflection, he tried his damnedest to ignore her red hair. He pretended instead that Penny was a blonde.
The one who had taken his arm.
38
“Move swift, but stay calm,” Molly told everyone, as the survivors marched past in a black column of Navy flightsuits. They jogged, but refrained from pushing on one another. Their brains may have checked out, but the military training remained, coming back thanks to the hint of danger—the fear propelling them forward. Ahead, Scottie stood by the door to the stairwell, waving the crewmen through.
When a logjam forced everyone to a halt, Molly fought her way through to the stairwell where she found several people on the ground, sliding in the spilt blood and gore.
“Grab the rails!” she told them. “Help each other up! C’mon, let’s go!”
Back in the hallway, someone screamed, and it soon turned into a chorus of frightened shouts. Molly stuck her head back into the hallway and saw—in the distance—bodies dripping out the door of the simulator room.
The panels were failing in sequence.
Pure terror coursed up through Molly’s body. She expected, at any minute, the gravity holding her to the deck would simply vanish. She imagined the ship as she’d seen it from outside, its thrusters up in the clouds. The visual gave her vertigo. She realized, suddenly, that she was standing on the face of a cliff. The thought made her feel faint; people began pushing past her, scrambling up the slick steps, some of them on all-fours.
Molly found herself swimming amongst them, pulling herself ahead, racing up wet steps and over bodies alive and otherwise. The fear was gone, replaced with a keen awareness of what could happen next.
She needed to get to Parsona, and fast.
At the top of the stairs, she came across Cat, who was helping people up and through the door. The entire front of her was smeared with blood; Molly looked down and realized she was covered in it as well.
“I have to get to the ship. Get everyone to me as fast as you can!”
“Will do!” Cat yelled as she helped another person up. The two of them locked eyes, and Molly saw none of her own panic and fear in the Callite’s eyes. If anything, they sparkled with life.
Molly turned away and bolted through the door. She ran at a full sprint down the hallway, urging the stumbling survivors on as she passed them. She yelled for them to get to the hangar bay and into her ship. As she ran ahead, she tried to picture the layout of the StarCarrier to figure out which direction the panels were failing. She wondered whether she was heading toward the problem panels or away from them.
Away, she finally decided. Otherwise she would probably have already met them.
She skidded through the open door halfway down the hall and burst into the hangar; she slipped, fell, then scrambled back to her feet. “Get to the ship!” she yelled to Urg, who was still ranging up and down the line of Firehawks in the distance, looking for survivors. She didn’t see the other pilots at first, but saw movement inside Parsona. She pictured the number of upright people she could cram in its hull as she sprinted toward her ship and past the staggering survivors who had reached the hangar ahead of her.
“What in hyperspace?” one of the pilots asked as she stomped into the cargo bay. Molly imagined how she must look to them, all covered in blood. She thought about what they were in store for.
“Get ready to help,” she told them. She flipped the thrusters on and looked through the carboglass at the line of survivors spilling out the door. “There’re bottles of water in the cabinet above the fridge. We’re gonna need to pack people into every corner of the ship, even the lazarrette and cargo holds. Get them open. And grab that med kit over the sink, just in case.”
Several of the pilots went to work, their focus galvanized by her tone. Higgins leaned over the control console. “What can I do?” he asked, jumping back as the Wadi took its place on Molly’s shoulders.
“Help the others,” she said. “Actually, get out there and yell at Urg to get a move on.” She looked up. “There’s no time to find any more—”
She stopped and sucked in her breath. Urg was sliding across the steel decking, toward Parsona, followed by a wall of tumbling, ruined starships.
He came to a sudden stop before reaching the door the survivors were streaming through. Molly held her breath; she watched him glance over his shoulder at the pile of plasteel and carboglass heading his way. The long queue of surviving crewmen filing out of the hallway door ducked and turned at the sound of it all; some of them covered their heads with their arms. Molly could see Walter among them, tugging on someone in black, urging them toward the ship.
She looked back toward Urg, but he had disappeared under the line of sliding debris. Gone. The end of his life missed behind her blinking eyelids. The entire tangle of ships had come to rest in a long line, signifying the temporary boundary between failed panel and good.
Several more survivors staggered through the door in the distance as the first of the crewmembers stomped into Parsona. Molly could hear some of the pilots directing them aft and urging them to take water. She saw Cat in the distance, helping someone along who seemed to be limping, their front solid red.
The dune of debris behind them shifted once again. One of the Fire-hawks flipped over on its side. Cat and the crewman left their fe
et, sliding ahead of the ships and across the deck, everything falling toward Parsona.
Cat popped to her feet as soon as she came to a halt at the next line of functioning grav plates. Molly saw her look back over her shoulder at the man she’d been escorting, but she seemed to know better than to struggle with him. She dove forward as the rolling crush of taxpayer dollars ground to a halt right behind her, smashing the crewmember flat.
Molly silently begged Cat forward as she feathered the thrusters. They were warm enough for lift, but not much more. She aligned the ducts ahead of time and looked over her shoulder to see how things were going in the cargo bay.
The staterooms must’ve already been packed—the hallway had filled up, and people were crammed together up to the galley. The last large crush of survivors could be heard working their way inside—only Cat and a few stragglers remained.
That’s when the struggling grav system gave up the ghost—the last of the panels giving away completely. Molly felt it shudder through Parsona before she saw the effects outside. She could hear the screeching of the ship’s landing pads as they scraped across the deck, could see the walls outside shift forward as Parsona slid back along the hangar floor. Beyond the wall of tangled Navy ships, she could see through the top of the StarCarrier’s airlock door to the bright, blue Lokian sky beyond.
The view disappeared as the jumbled mess of Firehawks ground forward, chasing after Parsona. Between the two, Cat and a few other crewmen slid on their backs, their screams deadened by the roar of all else. Everything was in free-fall, like all the players had been tossed over a cliff.
Molly pulled Parsona up to stop her slide backward. She retracted the landing gear to get it out of the way, but left the cargo hatch open. Behind her, passengers were screaming. She glanced at the chase cam and saw several forms falling away behind, people that had not quite made it to the loading ramp.
There was nothing she could do for them. She wasn’t even sure she could save the rest. The thrusters were still warming up, barely managing the vast weight onboard, the turbines wailing in complaint. Molly fought to hold the ship steady; she watched as Cat and the others slid across the deck ahead of the tumbling crush of ships.