Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace tbs-4

by Hugh Howey

  His foot caught on a bit of rubble. He nearly tripped and fell, but managed to catch himself. As he regained his footing and remembered the task at hand, the wire trailing behind him pulled taut. Ryke dropped the few loops that remained and saw they had just a few more meters of wire than they needed.

  Scottie and Ryn left the console in a bare patch, right beside an old worklight someone had left lying on its side. Ryke pointed them to the exact spot in a now nonexistent wall, right over a gap in the foundation where the frame of the cellar door once stood. The boys paid no attention to him, knowing as well as anyone where the old rift lay. They approached the paper-thin opening to hyperspace edge-on to stay out of the harsh glare leaking out to either side. All around them swirled melting flurries of the strange and twinkling snowfall.

  Ryke powered on the console and fanned his hands over the top of it, as if the drifting flakes would shoo away like bugs. As the other two arranged the cross at the rift’s base, he resisted the urge to look up at the massive hole in the sky above him, at the widening body of that great tear soaring thousands of meters overhead, taking a scale and shape he had known to be theoretically possible but had never imagined coming to life. He concentrated instead on the thin crack right in front of him, on the sliver of light and drifting ice no thicker than foil at that angle and yet the source of so much consternation.

  Even though the rift was narrow near the planet’s surface, the escaping photons—energized and angry—were difficult to look at. As Ryke concentrated on his console, fiddling with its knobs, he could see a vertical green bar in his vision where his retinas had been seared from just the briefest of glances at the relatively tame leakage. Working as fast as he dared, he began repairing the rift, closing up the old opening for the second time in his life. But now, so many years later and with a ton more experience, it would be different.

  “This time,” he said to himself, “you’ll stay closed.”

  A rumble in the atmosphere disturbed the determined promise. Ryke looked up; he shielded his eyes from the rift, and saw the source of the sound. Three enemy ships were screaming through the atmosphere directly toward them. One seemed to be coming from the rift; the other two arced down as if from orbit.

  “I guess there won’t be any this time,” Ryke said to himself, sadly.

  ••••

  Arthur Dakura staggered from the cockpit and into the smoke-filled cargo bay, shouting Mortimor’s name. Cole looked up and saw him, saw the older man’s face smeared with blood and grime.

  “Over here!” Cole shouted.

  Arthur turned, his body stiff and unsure of itself, reinforcing the likeness he shared with his robots. He stumbled stiffly over and sank to his knees by Mortimor’s side, groping his neck for a pulse.

  Cole shook his head softly, unable to speak.

  “Get him flat,” Arthur demanded, grabbing Mortimor by the armpits.

  Cole and Penny helped, untangling themselves from their crash positions and doing most of the heavy lifting while Arthur cupped the back of Mortimor’s head with one hand, lowering it to the deck.

  Penny crouched over the scene, her face intent, her eyes wet and wide. Cole settled back against the bulkhead, his ears ringing, both his body and mind weary and sore. He watched with a sort of wounded detachment as Arthur—a quadrillionaire famous for both his obsession with immortality and his lack of real human bonds—dealt horribly with the death of his closest friend.

  Arthur locked his arms and began performing stiff thrusts to Mortimor’s chest. He stooped now and then to force air into the man’s lungs. But the textbook resuscitation methods soon slurred into textbook depression. Perfect form degenerated into pounding fists as denial slipped into rage.

  It all took place in slow motion but seemed to happen so fast. Time toyed with them, as if its governing particles could reach through hyperspace with the melting snow and the perishing photons. It seemed to usher along the most wicked of events, then force them to linger at their worst.

  A muffled haze filled all of Cole’s senses, like cotton balls forced in his ears, his mouth, even a wispy gauze of it over his vision. The coughs in the smoky hull came slow and quiet, the wails muffled to a background hum. Someone’s shouts became whispers. He heard it, over and over, someone saying his name, mere whispers—

  “Cole!”

  He finally heard the shouts when Penny shook him by the collar. She forced his chin up with her one hand, caught his eyes with hers, then pointed to the side.

  “Cole!”

  Larkin, the translator from his raid group, stood by the rear of the cockpit hallway. Cole realized the young man had been yelling his name for a long while.

  “Larkin,” he croaked. He waved an arm to help him locate them in the haze. He felt himself rising from the floor, his back scooting up the bulkhead.

  Larkin turned and peered through the smoke. His eyes widened; he ran over, glanced down for a moment at Arthur, who had taken to silently cradling Mortimor’s head.

  “There are ships incoming,” Larken said. He pointed toward the cockpit. “The rest of our squad is gone.”

  Why tell me? Cole thought to himself. He started to complain, then saw Larkin’s countenance: the wild, unblinking look in his eyes. He realized Larkin was in shock and looking for a chain of command to padlock his sanity to.

  Cole felt like explaining the futility of it all. He wanted to say that he was no more in charge than anyone, but Larkin pulled him upright before he could complain and tugged him toward the cockpit.

  “We’ve got to get these people out of here,” Larkin said. He shoved Cole forward, through an aisle of shattered and sparkling carboglass. At the end of that glittering path he saw Arthur’s seat, now vacated, but covered in smears of someone’s blood. In the other was the pilot from Cole’s group, slumped over the dash and obviously dead.

  Larkin leaned over the empty seat and pointed up through the hole in the carboglass. Cole squeezed against the dead pilot and numbly obeyed the gesture.

  Sure enough: Bern ships. Three of them, roaring down through the atmosphere. Cole nodded, confirming Larkin’s assessment of the situation and resigned to have it play out to its end.

  “We need to get these people out of here!” Larkin yelled, shaking him.

  Cole knew he was right. He knew the translator was trying to coax some sense into him, trying to stir Cole’s spirit to action. And from the hollow pit of the cave into which Cole had crawled, he wished his crewmate the very best of luck.

  46 · Lights Out

  A light by the elevator doors lit up just before the lift slid open. There was even a quiet ding, as if to announce Cat’s arrival. Wherever her knob-turning and card-swiping had taken her, she was glad to be there.

  She emerged from the long ride whole—almost fully healed—but still pale and covered in her own blood. With the new flesh of her legs and the sticky mess all over, she felt like a fresh babe delivered into the world. A babe made new and not broken as she’d been the first time she was born.

  The birth analogy was made perfect by the room that awaited her: Scattered with men in clean uniforms and chock-full of machines freckled with purposeful lights, it looked like the sort of place wealthy people gave birth.

  The machines were everywhere and expensive-looking, Cat noted. Very expensive-looking. And they all seemed to be manned by equally important-looking people.

  There was no sign or scent of Molly, however, which filled Cat with a powerful sadness. The ship they were in was far too big for some chance encounter. She had taken a wrong turn and would likely never see the girl again. For all Cat knew, Molly could be at the opposite end of the structure. She frowned at her failure and stepped out of the elevator—a bloody, alien samurai strolling into the scene of some science fiction vid.

  None of the uniformed Bern tending to their machines seemed to notice her arrival. Their attentions were fixed on their screens and the constellation of indicators before them, their bored everyday minds n
ot able to register the exciting in their peripheral.

  Cat looked out over the assemblage, both of man and machine, and realized that she had gone about her search for Molly in the wrong manner. Completely, horribly, ass-backwards wrong. She had approached the mission as someone else might: trying to be sneaky, and to not get caught. There was, of course, no way she could’ve ever found Molly on that massive ship, but she hadn’t ever needed to. What she should have done was cause some trouble—as much of it as she could—and then wait for them to subdue her, maybe even beat her senseless, and take her to wherever they’d taken Molly.

  The old Callite smiled at the plan, one that gave her logical license to flank some shit up. It also held the promise of a severe beating at the end. She wanted to kick herself for not thinking of it sooner.

  But then, looking around, she realized it wasn’t too late to try, and there was probably no better room on the massive ship in which to start. She had taken the lift to its limits, and that’s where she’d wreak some damage. She flicked her buckblade on, wrapped her hand tight around its hilt, and then the grizzled and wounded Callite ran out into the room of blinking lights and swiftly widening eyes. She darted straight into them, cutting man and machine in half with the effortless and unfeeling lack of resistance only a good buckblade could provide. And Cat did it all in a manner and style only possible by someone who could not only feel no pain—but had struggled most of their life to overcome that deficiency.

  ••••

  The control console hummed beneath Ryke’s fingertips like a drum of agitated bees. He adjusted the hyperdrive’s gain and watched a needle quiver beneath its window of glass. He released the knob as it settled in at just the right mark, the tip tickling a preset indicator drawn on the clear shield in magic marker. Ryke brought both hands away gently, leaving the machine in perfect balance. It wouldn’t matter, what with the ships roaring down toward them, but Ryke didn’t know how to do anything any other way. He was a tinkerer and a perfectionist to the last.

  And besides, dying anywhere near a poorly calibrated device seemed to him the worst sort of death possible. He watched the needle quiver in synchronicity and felt a sort of peace within himself. Stepping back, he joined Scottie and Ryn, who were squinting up at the sky with their hands shielding their eyes. Ryke reached into a vest pocket and drew out a dark monocle. He screwed it into one eye, kept the other tight, and looked up.

  He saw the three Bern ships from before, roaring their way. Two were speeding from orbit, one from the rift. The latter seemed to have a different vector, though.

  Ryke twisted the monocle’s rim, and green lines projected the foremost craft’s destination like an overlaid SADAR image. It seemed the craft from the rift was going to pass overhead, heading out to finish Mortimor’s downed ship. The other two, he didn’t need to bother tracking. They were both barreling straight for him and Parsona, preparing to make a crater where his old home used to lie.

  “It’s been a good run with you fellers,” Scottie said.

  Ryke felt one of his friends pat him on the back. The three of them knew what was about to happen, and they remained motionless, waiting for it. They had all been on the other side of their current predicament, and so they knew the running made no difference. The cone of destruction about to be unleashed by the ship’s lasers would be wider than the old village, swallowing even Parsona in the blast.

  Ryke opened his unshielded eye and checked the rift. The narrow crack of light ahead of them had disappeared, the rip in space zipping up from the bottom. It was good to know the device was working, even if it didn’t have time to finish the job—

  “Watch out!” Scottie said, squeezing his arm.

  Ryke flinched and looked up, shutting his naked eye just a tad late. Through the monocle, he could see laser fire lance out from one of the ships coming their way. They were firing from an extreme range, probably picking up the closing of the rift on SADAR and wanting to put a stop to it.

  For that reason, maybe, the over-eager shots made some sense. But what didn’t compute, what Ryke couldn’t figure, was why the trailing ship seemed to be firing first.

  ••••

  Cat’s balletic dance through the engineering space took a brief intermission when a direct hit from a blaster took her arm off at the shoulder. Her limb spun to the deck, the buckblade still in its grasp. Cat bent over—a brief bow for her audience—and tugged the sword from one set of her fingers with her other hand. She rose, and the performance resumed, an arc of her thinning blood spinning around her as she twirled to dispatch the shooter. The artery closed itself quickly, pinching tight, but she could feel the giddy dizziness from having lost even more of her dwindling supply. She tiptoed through puddles of it, the fresh balls of her bare feet gripping the deck better than her old boots would have. Two more defenseless workers were split open, then another guard, then one of the several Bern whose body sprayed sparks when it was cut in half, rather than blood.

  Cat kept at the equipment as well, enjoying the fountain of lights that erupted from some of them—pyrotechnics for her show. She felt pinpricks of joyous sensation as burning embers settled on her skin. Warning domes mounted to the ceiling choreographed her movement, all their lenses the same shade of danger red Humans were fond of. Each of them throbbed with an impatient pulse, throwing their cones around and around, sliding over the far walls and rows of hurt Bern and machinery.

  Another device as big as a refrigerator was split in half. It was an important looking one, and Cat’s lightheadedness intensified.

  Then she realized the machine must’ve had something to do with the grav panels, as she saw several dead workers drift up from the deck, their body parts propelled like stuttering rockets with a red, arterial plume of exhaust.

  Cat’s ballet of dismemberment seemed to move underwater as the gravity in the ship lessened, then disappeared altogether. She kicked off a tall server cabinet, propelling herself through the zero-G toward a Bern firing wildly with a plasma gun. She sliced through him and the large machine behind him, and the lights and sirens stopped their blaring and throbbing. She hit another piece of equipment—the one that must’ve controlled the air moving through the vast ship—and another—one for the overhead lights—and the whirring vents fell quiet and the room descended into near darkness.

  Cat’s eyes adjusted as she cut through more of the Bern and their machines. She looked around for anyone left to murder, but her raucous audience had become wide-eyed and politely still in the darkened room. She swiped another machine, giddy with the pain coursing through her brain. A blaster wound in her thigh hurt so badly, her leg almost felt numb with agony. It was a sort of numbness she hadn’t known in almost forever. She didn’t have much time left, she knew. Her head was so light it could hardly corral a clear thought. She had pushed herself far past her body’s ability to heal. She had, as always, gone much too far.

  Cat slashed through a few more machines and the remaining indicators and twinkling lights on their panels went dark, signifying the end of her show, her final performance. What small amount of blood remaining within her thumped with a rapid, shallow pulse that she could hear in her temples. It beat with the patter of tiny, galloping feet. It was—sadly—the only sound approximating applause that Cat the Cripple would ever know.

  But then, Cat had never performed for the simple pleasure of her audience. As her eyelids grew heavy, and a final curtain of darkness descended before her, Cat knew that this last hurrah of hers had been, as with all her prior shows, mainly for herself.

  ••••

  Lady Liberty grew warm as the ship hit the outskirts of Lok’s atmosphere. Anlyn and Edison had stopped fiddling with the controls and struggling with the flightstick long ago. Nothing they did so much as altered their ship’s fall through the field of artificial gravity that surrounded them.

  Instead, they chose to hold hands.

  Around them, other crews were likewise finding ways to cope with their inevitable
demise. The entire Darrin fleet had arrived in Lok’s orbit intact, and all were meeting the same fate Zebra fleet had: They were plunging toward a fiery reentry and crushing impact below.

  It wasn’t long before a pale glow filled the cockpit with the first sign of atmospheric reentry. A nasty, tumbling, disintegrating death loomed. Anlyn reminded Edison, once more, of how much she loved him. Her ears popped, the sign of a hull breach somewhere. Another pop, followed by a beep—

  And Anlyn realized those weren’t pops at all! They were power relays kicking back to life. And the glow she thought had come from the heat of reentry was actually emanating from the dash! When the grav panels came back online, Anlyn felt her body sag in her seat, even as her spirits soared in the opposite direction.

  Edison roared with excitement. His hands danced across the dash, giddy and alive. The radio crackled with whooping wing leaders cheering and barking instructions. Anlyn took the controls and Lady Liberty pulled up, her thrusters warming as she rose, a battalion of tear-streaked faces and wide smiles forming up around her.

  She aimed for the Bern fleet, and the first thing she saw was that the largest ship had gone perfectly black. All the lit portholes, the observation windows, the red flashing lights atop their spindly towers, all of them were dead and dark. There were no signs of explosions from the missiles, but she assumed they were embroiling within the belly of that beast.

  Whatever the reason, she and her wingmen from Darrin were a fleet once more—a grinning fleet full of the sharpest of teeth. The other craft took up their positions around Anlyn, forming up on their wing leaders, and they accelerated toward a formation of Bern ships now in chaos.

  The fleet from Darrin moved to wage war.

  47 · Lok

  Cole peered out the maw of the Bern craft’s broken windshield, past the jagged carboglass teeth lined up top and bottom, and watched the diving ships head their way. One of the enemy craft had fired on another one, sending it into a smoky spiral. Those two seemed to have been heading toward the ruined village just ahead. The third ship—the one that had been heading straight for them moments ago—began to bank around, racing back to help its wounded comrade.