by Hugh Howey
“The Drenards began pushing out of their spiral arm a week ago,” Saunders said.
Molly turned back and saw he was addressing her.
“They’ve only hit frontier planets so far. Regan, Osis, a few others. As I told you before, and as you can now see, your parents chose unwisely to side with them.”
“Unwisely?” someone asked, winning a glare from the gray man beside Saunders.
Molly let out a sigh. She turned to take them all in. “Admiral. Everyone. These are not Drenards. I know for a fact. I—”
“How could you know?” one of the younger officers asked. “And why should we believe her anyway,” he asked the others. “You do know we came here to find you, right? None of this would’ve happened if it weren’t for you!”
Molly gaped at the young officer; his eyes flared with rage.
“Carlton, you’re dismissed.”
The young man turned to Saunders. “Sir, I’m sorry, it’s just that—”
“I said you’re dismissed, son. Go tend to the others.”
“Yes, sir.”
As soon as he’d gone, Molly turned to the Admiral. “Is that true? You came here because—it’s my fault that you—?”
Saunders waved her off. “Of course not. I mean—that this is your fault. The fleet’s defeat was mine. And don’t flatter yourself too much. One of the fleets had to check in on Lok. We hadn’t heard from them for over two weeks. I volunteered Zebra so we could pull double-duty, just in case you’d come home. We were expecting Drenard hostilities when we jumped in, just nothing like…”
He fell silent, and Molly shook her head.
“If they aren’t Drenards, what are they?” one of the officers asked. “Don’t tell me the Tchung are back from wherever they—”
“They’re called the Bern,” she whispered. “They’re coming from another galaxy—”
“Hogwash!”
“Silence,” Saunders told the group. “Go on,” he said to Molly.
She cleared her throat and glanced at the cup of water the gray man clutched in his thin fingers. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all.” He handed her the cup. “Captain Robinson, by the way.”
“Thank you,” Molly said, taking a gulp. She handed the cup back to him. “They call themselves the Bern, and they come from another galaxy. There’s a rift here on Lok. It’s what my parents uncovered. I think. Anyway, I know they were working to prevent this. The Drenards—”
Molly glanced over at Robinson, whose brow seemed knitted with worry.
“And the Drenards?” Saunders asked.
“The uh… the Drenards…”
“More water?” Robinson asked, extending the cup to her.
“Uh…” Molly looked to Saunders. She glanced once more at all the faces turned her way. “Sir? Can I have a word with you in private?”
••••
Saunders leaned against Parsona’s workbench. He had his arms folded over and resting atop his belly while Molly fumbled around in one of the cabinets. She finally brought out a bundle wrapped in a towel.
“What’s going on?” Saunders asked her. “Anything you want to tell me, you can say in front of my staff.”
“That’s the thing,” Molly said. She stood up and placed the bundle on the workbench. “I don’t think I can. Hear me out, and I mean really hear me out, just let it sink in before you react. I think these people that attacked you—I think they’ve been trying to get here for a long time. There’s a rift on Lok they’re coming through, and another one somewhere in the Drenard arm. I’m pretty sure the Drenards have been guarding that rift, preventing anything from coming out of it.”
“A rift?”
“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know what to call it, I’m not a scientist, but I do know what they look like. I saw the first ships come out of the one here on Lok. Walter and I were hiding in the woods nearby, making sure the escape pod was secure, when—”
Saunders pointed up. “You saw these ships come out of a rift?”
“Yeah.”
“And you didn’t tell anyone? Didn’t contact the Navy?”
“Are you kidding? Everyone on Lok saw them. They’ve been flying overhead for weeks and gathering in orbit. It hasn’t been a secret. And then the big one came through, and everyone thought that one—”
“Wait, go back to the Drenards. Why the bloodshed if they’re supposedly protecting us?”
“I didn’t say they were protecting us, they’re protecting the entire galaxy. That’s why they never push the war past their arm. Why they just defend their territory.”
Saunders rubbed his face. “That’s nonsense. Why wouldn’t they just tell us? And your little theory falls apart now that they are pushing out and attacking our planets.”
Molly thought about that. “Maybe it’s because the Bern are attacking here,” she said. “Maybe they’re looking for the other rift, or something.”
It sounded horrible, even to her own ears, like Cole trying to rationalize one of his theories by fitting the data to his bias.
“The timing sure is strange,” Saunders admitted. “Unless this is just a two-pronged attack—”
“Look at this,” Molly said, picking up the bundle and unwrapping it. “And don’t be freaked out, it’s not human.”
He stepped back, despite the warning. Byrne’s arm looked extremely lifelike; the flesh hadn’t even discolored. Saunders took it and immediately looked at the interior, which was neatly cut and seemingly made of some alloy with a few bits of detail, like metal piping and wires.
“What is this?”
“It’s the arm of a Bern, but my—I know someone who thinks they might not all be like this, that most of them are flesh and blood, just like you and me.” She grabbed the towel from him, then looked around. “Where’s the other one?”
“You have two of these?”
“Somewhere. I—well, the rest of the guy is in hyperspace for all I know. And this is why I don’t feel comfortable telling your staff about everything, and also why the Drenards couldn’t tell us about the rift. The Bern look just like us. They’ve probably infiltrated our Navy, even our government. I mean, this might be the only reason that we keep attacking the Drenards.”
“Flank me.” Saunders set the arm on the workbench and staggered to the center of the cargo bay. He looked outside before turning back to Molly. His jowls were sagging, his mouth open. “It makes perfect sense.”
“It does?”
He pointed at the arm, crossed back over and picked it up. “You’ve seen one of them?”
Molly nodded.
“And they look like us?”
“A lot.”
“I—” Saunders looked around the cargo bay. “There’s nobody else aboard, is there?”
Molly couldn’t help but glance at the cargo cam.
“Just us,” she said.
“We’ve been getting some weird orders lately. And there’s been a ton of sealed communiqués between interfleet staff, stuff I can’t even access. Then Alpha fleet was called out of Earth orbit and sent to—Flank! They’re defenseless. Earth—I how could I be so stupid? We need to get to a long-range radio. We need to—”
“And call who?” Molly asked. “Don’t you see the problem? Call a Bern, and you’ll get yourself killed. Call a human, and you’ll start a panic and get everyone killed. Trust me, I was in the same place as you not that long ago. Hell, you’re coming around faster than I did.”
“Your parents knew this, didn’t they?”
Molly nodded. They know this, she thought, but kept that secret to herself.
“I feel so idiotic. It never occurred to me that orders could be questioned. You obey, right? How many kids did I teach to obey? Oh, gods, the Academy. I—”
Saunders fell silent; his face went white, his fat, rosy cheeks turning to ash. Molly reached out for him as he stumbled forward, his eyes becoming unfocused. She grunted with effort, catching him under his arms and guiding him gently to the ground.
/>
“Admiral? Saunders, are you okay?”
He didn’t respond. She reached up and grabbed the towel from the counter, placing it under his head, then ran for some water. The ship’s collection of assorted cups and mugs were completely gone, so she held a clean rag under the faucet, then twisted most of the moisture out of it. She ran back to Saunders and draped it across his forehead.
“Sir, are you okay?”
He blinked several times before his eyes gradually came together, focusing on Molly’s face. He looked up at her in shock, his pupils twitching back and forth between hers.
“Lucin—”
“I’m sorry?” Molly leaned closer and dabbed the cloth across his forehead.
“Lucin,” he said, his face contorting into something between nausea and fear.
“What about him?” Molly asked, but the answer started coming as Saunders whispered his name again.
“Lucin—”
It was all he could say.
“Lucin…”
Over and over.
41
Cole whipped his head forward, snapping the welding mask in place and causing the world around him to fall black as blindness. He pulled the torch’s trigger and a blast of plasma illuminated his workspace in an eerie, greenish glow. Popping a few dollops of steel at a time, he worked along the joint and tacked the sheet of metal into place. Once it held, he ran back the length of the seam with a steady burn of the flame, concentrating on making a good, strong connection. Behind the torch’s passing, he left a long bead of beautiful, red, puddling steel.
The weld complete, he shut down the torch, lifted his visor, and watched the molten alloy cool—the rivulets of lava turning gray and then a dull silver. Cole stood up. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and surveyed the nearly completed box. On the opposite side of the cage, two other workers finished the wiring as they secured the last connection between the grav panels and the three separate power supplies. Cole nodded to one of the men who kept glancing up to survey his work, then moved to the next joint that needed welding. He was just about to flip his visor back down when a voice like dripping honey interrupted him:
“I hear you came up with this.”
Cole turned. Penny stood behind him, her hair as bright as liquid steel.
“Yeah,” Cole said, beaming. “Ryke said I get lifetime clever points for this.”
Penny pouted. “If it works.” She appraised the box skeptically, one hand perched on her hip, the other reaching out to touch a vertical strut. “You actually think anyone’s gonna risk their lives in one of these things?”
“Are you kidding?” Cole smiled at her. “It’s flawless. C’mere, step inside.” He ducked under one strut and stepped over another, entering the cage of steel. Penny followed. She even accepted Cole’s proffered hand and allowed him to steady her as she crawled through. When they stood up, they found themselves in a box just two meters on a side, divided in half by two solid walls of steel, pressed up together. Cole’s head had just enough clearance to stand upright.
“A little tight to jump inside of,” Penny said.
“We’ll be balled up, hugging our legs. Besides, we shouldn’t have more than one person in them at a time. Here’s how it works.” He slapped the solid walls standing vertically in the center of the box. “You’ve got two steel plates facing each other, right? At the moment, they’re just tacked in place with a few spot welds. There’s grav panels in each one, just like the panels in a ship’s decking.”
He reached up and traced the wires coming off the panels. “Everything’s wired in parallel and with three separate power sources, just in case the box jumps in the middle of something. But even if they do, a single cell from any of the battery banks should still have enough juice to drive the plates away from each other.”
“What if the grav plates jump in the middle of something?”
“It won’t matter,” Cole said. “That’s how they’re built in a ship’s decking, anyway.” He slapped the steel wall. “Besides, that’s the whole point of the design. We can’t jump inside a ship, because there might be something in the way. However, if these puppies become one with something else, they’ll drag all that material apart once the grav panels fire. It’ll create an empty box, no matter what it hits. And that’s what we’ll be jumping inside of a few seconds later.”
“I’m with you so far. The box jumps in, the grav panels engage, the plates fly apart and drag open a cube of empty space. You jump in a second later… so now you’re inside a box of solid steel. What next?”
Cole put his hands together and swished a perfect third angle attack. “We pop our swords, cut our way out, and take care of the crew.”
Penny ran her fingers back through her hair and surveyed the structure thoughtfully. She turned and looked Cole up and down. “You thought of this?”
“Don’t sound so surprised,” he said, grinning. “Though, I do think I had some help.”
“Yeah? Ryke, right? This is totally his sort of thing.”
“No, I think it was from the training.” Cole grabbed his imaginary sword and slashed at her with an angle-two. “Repulsion,” he said, smiling.
“More like attraction,” said Penny, stepping close. She reached around Cole, her face approaching his.
“I, uh—”
“This is wired wrong,” Penny whispered. She pursed her lips, then grinned at him coyly before stepping away.
Cole turned, blushing. He looked down at the wiring harness behind him. The leads from the grav panels were reversed, the polarity completely backward. The panels wouldn’t have flown apart—they would’ve been permanently locked together! He looked around for a screwdriver to loosen the terminals, then decided to bend down and check one of the other two battery feeds.
Same thing.
Cole glanced around the workshop to see if anyone was watching. As he contemplated the chances of wiring two panels backward, he felt a chill run up his spine, the hairs on the back of his neck tingling with danger. He turned to tell Penny, but the workshop’s double doors were already swaying back and forth from her departure. He looked around for Ryke, who had just been supervising another welder, when he saw the two workers in the neighboring cage peering up at him.
Cole looked away, then he realized what they were working on: another wiring harness.
“Hey—” Cole said, standing up.
The duo reacted as if shots had been fired. They took off, running toward the double doors leading out of the workshop. Cole crawled out of the cage and gave chase. One of the workers shoved open the doors as the other man turned, his arm a blur. Something glinted in the fluorescent lights, twinkling as it spun through the air. Cole felt the impact on his chin before any of it fully registered. A loud crack reverberated through his skull. He fell to the ground, dazed, as an adjustable power wrench clanged to the floor beside him.
Cole tasted blood in his mouth, could feel the laceration along the inside of his lip like a swollen ridge of tenderness. He shook his head clear, grabbed the wrench, and scampered to his feet. Stumbling forward a few steps—his legs still resistant to keeping the rest of him upright—he shouldered open the workshop doors, one of which slammed into someone on the other side.
“What in the hell?”
Doctor Ryke came into view as the door snapped shut. His annoyed expression moved from the men running down the hallway to settle on Cole.
“You boys need to—”
“Stop them!” Cole yelled to the handful of aliens milling through the hallway. He brushed past Ryke and gave chase as the two Humans disappeared around a corner. Cole ran as fast as his wobbly legs could take him. He skidded around the corner, caroming off a spinning Mortimor, who looked even more annoyed than Ryke.
“Watch where you’re—”
“Sabotage!” Cole yelled, pointing. He tried to think of the word for the people committing the act, but his head was even less clear than his legs were sturdy. He pushed away from Mortimor and continued
to run awkwardly, his arms windmilling, his grasp furious on the power wrench. Two aliens came out of a doorway, and Cole nearly plowed them over; he brushed against the hallway wall and took the next corner too fast, bouncing off an open door. He pounded his feet as fast as he could as the men ahead slowed to round another corner.
“Stop them!” he yelled once more, but the motley group ahead just turned from one curiosity to the other, everyone frozen by the spectacle of the footrace. Cole weaved through them, pushing aliens twice his size out of his way as he turned the next corner.
There was no sign of the men in the next hallway, but a smattering of gawkers turned from a closing door to look at him. Cole traced their bemused glares back to the door. He ran to it, pushed through, and found himself in a stairwell, could hear the rapid slap of descending feet below. He hurried down after, swallowing more blood as he slipped and slid down the steps.
He was a flight down when he heard a door slam shut, leaving the stairwell ringing with just his footfalls. The next landing was the last. Cole jumped past the last few steps and shoved his way through the door, suddenly remembering having come that way the day before. When he staggered into the skimmer garage, he wasn’t surprised. His trip to the Seer had begun and ended there. Nor was he surprised to see the hatch pulling shut on one of the vehicles, its engine whining as it slid down the ramp and toward the door, which led to the open, wet world beyond.
Cole hurled his wrench as hard as he could, a seemingly futile expression of his anger. It flew like a missile, his very hand making a whirring sound as it parted the air before him in a blur of augmented elbow. The momentum of his own limb threw him off balance, causing him to stagger forward as the wrench exploded through the rear of the hyperskimmer. The impact made a deafening crack, and the skimmer swerved to the side, crunching against the wall of the ramp as it continued to trundle along.
Cole stumbled ahead, regaining his balance as he ran past the other parked skimmers. He prepared himself to race down the ramp after the fleeing saboteurs—that’s what they were called—to chase them down and jump on the canopy if he had to. He was nearly to the top of the ramp when an alarm rang out and red lights began to flash, almost as if warning him of how bad an idea he’d just had. With a panicked stutter, Cole remembered what the alarms signified and cursed himself.