by Hugh Howey
But then she heard something else, something easier to recognize. It was a thumping sound, rhythmic, just like the footfalls of someone running.
And it was getting louder.
•• 2 ••
Cole finished his second sweep of the port side, seeing nothing more than the messes he had left behind the first time. He reached the cockpit after Marx and helped the large Callite drag Bern bodies out of the way. It looked like the pilot and co-pilot had cut down several Bern in taking over control of the ship.
Despite the design of his Underground boots, made to grip through blood and ice, Cole found himself slipping and sliding as he drug a Bern’s torso out of the cockpit’s narrow hallway. There was a gruesome normalcy to the task, like arranging furniture, that nearly made Cole gag. He forced himself to not look the dead man in the eye as he added him to a pile Marx had already started. The Callite threw a plastic tarp over the figures while Cole looked for something to mop up the blood. There was no way they could work with such a thick pool of it right in the cockpit. He pulled a jacket off one of the Bern crewmen, looking away from the Human-like face as he did so. He threw the jacket down into the spilled gore and pushed it around with his boot, trying to mop a path through the mess.
“Ryke was right about the windshields,” Cole heard the navigator say. “They’re already darkened, so we won’t be needing our goggles.”
“Keep em around your necks anyway,” someone else in the cockpit barked.
A third voice burst out in a strange language, causing Cole to pause from his dirty work and scramble for his buckblade. The cadence and inflection of the words sounded similar to what several Bern crewmen had been shouting before Cole had cut them down.
“Shhh!” somebody hissed. “Complete silence!”
Cole left the soiled jacket wadded up against the bulkhead and stuck his head in the cockpit. He watched as Larken, the squad translator, leaned forward from one of the seats and spoke foreign words—the same type of words—into the mic. Everyone froze, anxious and tense.
When he stopped speaking, a voice came through the radio again. Larken held his eyes closed and turned to face the pilot. He nodded now and then as the rapid Bern continued.
“What was that about?” the pilot asked as soon as the voice fell silent.
“They want us to check for any problems. One of the other ships called something in, and now they won’t respond.”
“You want me to go check?” the navigator asked, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder.
“Moron,” the pilot said. “We’re the problem.”
“One of the other squads must be in trouble,” Cole said.
“That’s why we sent five groups,” the pilot muttered. He turned to the navigator. “Call HQ on the carrier frequency, but keep it short. Just give them our velocity and the coordinates for our cargo bay, one meter off the deck. Tell them we’re secure and can hold as much as they can send.”
The navigator nodded and pulled his long-wave radio from his pack.
The pilot looked over his shoulder. “Marx, you and Cole head back to the cargo bay and coordinate our arrivals. Let’s pack as much as we can into this puppy, just in case we’re the only ones who make it through to the other side.”
“Yes, sir,” Marx said from behind Cole. The Callite stomped aft through the thin skim of drying blood.
Cole took off after him, his thoughts divided between how well his squad had done on their portion of the raid—and on which of the other groups had run into trouble.
•• 1 ••
Penny raced through the ship’s corridors, the dying screams of the last Bern crewman echoing in her ears. She slowed to round a bend in the passageway, then found herself in the aftermost section, the rumble of powerful thrusters audible through the thick bulkhead.
The sound intensified as a door opened. A Bern engineer stepped out, his gray coveralls spotted with grease stains. Penny sliced him in half before he could even register her presence. She watched the two pieces of meat fall to the deck, strings of interior organs spilling out in a thick soup. She studied the odd arrangement, the fleshy interior, and felt more curiosity than horror.
A rhythmic clanging rang out over the roar from the open thruster room. Penny kicked the door shut to hear better. It was footsteps. Someone running. She prepared her blade just as Mortimor jogged around the corner and came to a panting stop.
“You okay?” he asked. He pulled his blood-specked hood back and ran his fingers through his graying hair.
Penny nodded and lowered her sword. “I think this is the last—”
Before she could finish the sentence, Penny flew into the air and slammed into the rear bulkhead. Mortimor followed, his limbs flying out for balance. Gravity returned, and they both fell to the deck. Penny felt her weight lessen again, like the ship was dropping altitude, but the grav panels should’ve more than compensated for any maneuvering. She looked across at Mortimor, her hands splayed wide and her fingers digging into the grating on the floor.
“The cockpit!” Mortimor yelled.
Penny pushed herself to her feet. The whine of the thrusters in the next room suddenly lowered in pitch—and then the engines began screaming higher and harder than before. Something was wrong. She took off, churning up the meters back to the cockpit, her legs hammering away at the artificial gravity, her mind willing it to last.
•• 5 ••
The pounding of the approaching footsteps came faster than Anlyn could retreat. She stood, frozen in place, comprehending the noise but not understanding how it was possible. When the Bern rounded the corner, dressed in a suit of all-white, she collapsed in stark horror, her already fatigued legs turning to soup. Her brain boiled with confusion and fear. She scrambled back from the figure and tried to scream for Edison, but her voice wouldn’t heed her. In the back of her muddy mind, she finally matched up the banging sound she had heard with a ship locking to theirs. She imagined a squad of Bern troopers boarding their craft. She wondered what mistake she’d made to end their ruse.
We’re doomed, Anlyn thought. The figure approached, his eyes wide and his hands clenched together high over his head. Someone else ran up behind the Bern—some unknown race—also with his hands double-gripping an unseen device.
“What are you waiting on?” the alien in the back yelled.
In some fuzzy corner of Anlyn’s mind, she realized he had yelled it in English. This alien, also in all white, tried to get around the Bern, pushing him to the side.
“It’s a Drenard, man!” The Bern held the alien back and looked toward Anlyn. “Maybe she’s like a sex slave or something.”
“Sex slave? You stay away!” Anlyn yelled. She kicked her feet at the decking in an attempt to scramble toward the cockpit.
“Stop moving,” the Bern said. He leveled some sort of object at her.
“Wait!” The unknown alien reached for the Bern ahead of him. “She speaks English?”
Another Bern ran up behind the other two, his uniform identical.
“What the hell is going on here?” he asked. He spotted Anlyn. “What the flank?” He spoke some Bern to her while he reached for something on his belt.
“She speaks English,” the other Bern said over his shoulder. He looked again to Anlyn, his eyes narrowed warily as he stepped forward. “Where’s the rest of your crew?” he asked her.
“Screw this diplomacy,” the other Bern said. “We need to secure the cockpit!”
All three figures moved closer—and then the faces of the two Bern turned as white as their suits. Their eyes bulged as they gaped high over Anlyn’s head.
“Desist!” Edison roared from behind her. He followed with something equally terse and forceful in Bern.
Anlyn turned to see her fiancé reared up, the fur along his arms waving as if in a stiff breeze. She scrambled away from the three figures and tried to get to the other side of Edison, eager to put his imposing bulk between herself and this strange threat that had invaded th
eir ship.
•• 1 ••
Penny sprinted toward the cockpit, fearful of the mechanical failure that had lifted her and Mortimor off their feet before slamming them to the deck. When she reached the ship’s cargo bay, she noticed a bright light flooding down the corridor from the cockpit: It was the telltale flash of hyperspace’s unshielded and blinding photons.
Penny pulled her goggles out of her collar and forced them in place with one hand. She heard the drone of a steady wind and felt the air in the ship grew colder as she got closer. She stepped over two dead Bern, their guts spilled and dripping through the deck grating. The ship’s grav panels lurched again, sending her sideways into another bulkhead. Penny bounced off and staggered forward, calling for Jym, their group’s pilot. A flurry of snow swirled around her, melting in the air.
“Up here!” Jym yelled. Penny ducked into the cockpit and saw the Pheron pilot peering back from one of the flightseats. Beyond him, the ship’s canopy had been blown wide open, letting in the snow and light. The fur on Jym’s face whipped around in the breeze, but even that, coupled with his black goggles, couldn’t hide all the alien’s panic.
Penny ran toward the nav seat to help with the flight controls, then saw the spot was already occupied. A beheaded Bern, his arms still twitching, sat behind a collection of smashed instrument panels.
“What happened?” Penny asked. She attempted to pull the body out of the seat, but it must’ve weighed a ton.
“No flankin clue!” Jym yelled. “And that thing ain’t flesh.” He let go of the controls and waved a hand at the Bern. “Took its head off from behind, and the flanker went ballistic, smashing the dash and the canopy. I think the grav systems are toast. I’m not gonna be able to keep us airborne!”
Penny peered through the hole in the canopy, past the snow billowing in to dust the controls and ice everything over. Beyond the craggy hole lay the endless white of hyperspace and the flurries she hated so much. Looking down at the beheaded Bern, she didn’t see any organs inside the neck, just the sheen of metal. It made her feel nauseous, looking at it. She pulled out her sword and gritted her teeth. Carefully, using slow motions, she carved the mechanical Bern and his chair in half, right down the middle. Another clean sweep sideways—careful as the ship lurched again—and she had pieces small enough to carry out of the cockpit. Again, no blood and hardly any oil or grease.
After the body parts were removed, Penny crouched behind the nav controls and tried to help Jym pull the ship’s nose up. The SADAR screen ahead of her was demolished, giving her little to go by, so she looked to Jym’s instruments as a guide. A voice crackled through the radio, barely audible over the whipping wind. It said something in Bern right as Mortimor staggered into the cockpit, breathing hard.
“Did you catch that?” Penny yelled back to Mortimor.
He reached for the mic. “Yeah,” he said. He surveyed the damage to the dash and sucked in a deep breath. “Both of you keep quiet.”
“What’re you gonna say?” Jym asked.
Mortimor shot him a look. His chest heaved with another deep gulp of air, his beard catching the snow. “I’m going to tell the rest of the Bern fleet that we’ve suffered a mechanical failure so they won’t think anything’s amiss.” He looked to Jym’s instruments as he brought the mic up to his mouth. “And then I’m gonna inform them that we’re going down,” Mortimor said grimly.
•• 2 ••
Cole and Marx coordinated arrivals as the Underground kept their jump platforms busy evacuating the base of its personnel and essentials. Anyone assigned to Support Crew, they directed aft. As members of the Evac Crew appeared in the cargo bay, they assigned them duties and loaded them up with the gear also coming through every five seconds or so. Cole marveled at the military precision of it all. An absolute flood of people and supplies were washing aboard the ship.
Up in the cockpit, the flight crew did an incredible job of holding the Bern craft steady while updating HQ with coordinates. Each arrival appeared in the exact same spot of empty air. The more that came aboard, the more Cole felt a step closer to getting out of that infernal place and tracking down Molly. He was so close he could practically remember what her hair smelled like, when just a few days ago he’d had difficulty picturing her face—
“We’ve got trouble!”
The shout from the cockpit shattered Cole’s thoughts. He and Marx glanced at each other. Marx pulled a large sack of supplies out of the arrival point and handed it off to the alien who had jumped in just prior.
“I’ll go,” Cole said.
Marx nodded as another member of the Underground fell out of the air and landed in a neat crouch. “I’m gonna insist Arthur come with the next group,” Marx said, reaching for his radio. “Protocol and seniority be damned, we need him here.”
“Agreed.” Cole slapped Marx on the shoulder and ran to the cockpit.
“What’s going on?” he asked the flight crew.
Larken spun around. The mic was trembling in his hand. “First group’s going down,” he sputtered. “Someone from the ship broadcasted a mechanical failure in Bern. I’m pretty sure it was Mortimor.”
The pilot took one hand off the steering column and grabbed Larken’s wrist; he pulled the mic away from the translator’s mouth. “You’re not gonna transmit anything to them, are you?”
“No, man! I’m just waiting for the Bern to get suspicious!”
“Calm down, both of you,” Cole said. He stepped up behind the translator and checked the strange-looking SADAR, which was a beehive of blips and odd figures. “Where does it show their altitude?” He glanced over the shapes on the screen, not recognizing any of them as numbers.
“Right there.” The pilot tapped the screen. “And that’s group one’s ship.” He indicated one of the blobs. “They’re going down soft by the looks of it. Not far from the Luddite camp.”
“Is that their camp there?” Cole reached over and tapped the screen.
“Only thing low enough,” the pilot growled.
“Well then, they aren’t going down near them,” Cole said. “I think they’re trying to land on them.”
The radio squawked with more rapid Bern. Larken turned to the pilot, his knuckles white around the mic.
“I think he’s right, sir.”
•• 5 ••
The trio of white-clad warriors shuffled down the corridor toward Edison and Anlyn, their courage seeming to have rallied as they raised the strange cylinders in their hands.
“Desist!” Edison roared once more. He berated himself for leaving his lance in the cockpit as Anlyn scooted safely around him. “Stay where you are!” he tried in Bern.
One of the Bern stiffened and pulled back on the alien ahead of him. “We’re taking over control of your ship,” he returned in Bern. “On your knees!”
Edison took a step back and growled at Anlyn to return to the cockpit. As she ran off, the three attackers surged forward, the one in the front bringing his empty hands up high as if wielding an invisible club.
Edison threw his feet forward and fell flat on his back, sending a shiver through the deck. He brought his knees up to his chest as some unseen thing whizzed through the air above him. Kicking out with his legs, he caught the figure in the chest and sent him sprawling back into the other two.
Something clattered to the ground nearby. Reaching forward to grab it—a metal cylinder of some sort—Edison paused. The bulkhead to the side of the device was sparking. A thin line of destruction streaked across the solid steel as the cylinder rolled across the deck toward him. Edison’s scientific thought processes kicked into high gear. He picked the thing up, keeping the laser end pointed away. He leveled the device at the three men.
Nothing happened.
Insufficient range, he figured.
He took a step forward, and the other two figures in white dropped their cylinders and raised their hands.
“We give up!” one of them said in English.
“Exc
ellent maneuver.” Edison aimed the strange cylinder at the one who had spoken in Bern and switched to that language himself:
“Now, who in hyperspace are you people?”
•• 2 ••
Cole watched the blip on the SADAR, the one showing Mortimor’s ship descending toward the frozen wastelands of hyperspace. The pilot and translator were yelling back and forth, arguing about what to do for them, but it was mere background noise. All Cole could think about was what might have gone wrong with Mortimor’s group and how he should’ve been there with them.
He snapped himself out of the unproductive thoughts and looked around at the bickering crew. The raid was going to fall apart over this, he realized. Mortimor’s mythical status as leader of the Underground was now going to be a distraction rather than a motivating force.
Cole ran out of the cockpit and returned to the cargo bay. He tore open one metal cabinet and locker after another, looking through the ship’s supplies for anything resembling a gravchute, or even an old-fashioned glider. Every five seconds or so, he heard a soft pop as more people and gear arrived from HQ. The finality and awfulness of the raid, of using up what remained of the fusion fuel, of abandoning the Underground’s headquarters, it all dawned on him as a colossal mistake.
Someone grabbed him by the shoulder. Cole turned to find Arthur Dakura frowning at him.
“What’s the emergency?” Arthur asked. He looked annoyed to have been brought aboard out of order.
“One group is going down,” Cole said. He slammed a locker shut and flung open another. “And I’m going down after them.”
Arthur grabbed Cole’s shoulders. He pulled him away from the cabinet just as Cole started rummaging around inside it. “That’s a negative,” Arthur said. “Drawing any more attention will just threaten the other squads. Now, which group did you say is going down?”
Cole clenched and unclenched his teeth. “I told you,” he said. “Group one.”