by Matt Forbeck
“Hang on. We’re going to make it. I promise you that,” her father said through gritted teeth, as he slung the car around a corner toward the mountain pass.
The mouth of the tunnel suddenly appeared up ahead, and the road snaked into it. Even as it grew closer, it still felt so far away. At the same time, the dark purple starship loomed toward their car, drawing nearer by the second.
The nose of the vessel disappeared over the roof of the car. All Molly could now see was white light from its destructive beam plunging out of its gut toward the earth below and blotting out most of the sky.
Molly finally had to turn away. It was too close to bear.
“Gotam . . . ? Are you sure?” Her mother gave voice to the doubts that had been growing in Molly’s own mind. She wanted to believe her father’s words, but an unshakable fear had already gripped her heart.
“Giving it everything we got,” he replied, struggling to keep his voice composed.
There was no traffic. The road was vacant. To Molly, it felt as if they were the only ones left on Paris IV, the only ones still trying to survive. All the others, it seemed, had either made peace with their impending doom or had already met it.
But for some reason, her family had held out hope.
The car roared on, and Molly kept her eyes fixed ahead.
The bright, lethal light now blanketed everything on the right, crushing all of the shadows in the car and filling it with a searing heat. In front, the dark, safe tunnel rushed toward the vehicle. Molly’s fingers dug deeper into her seat’s armrests as waves of grit and debris from the beam’s impact on the valley below pummeled the side of the car.
The Covenant ship was right on top of them.
At any second, the blaze would consume them.
Her family’s desperate quest to reach the mouth of the tunnel felt so achingly slow, as though time had nearly stopped. Molly would later remember vividly how the vehicle hurtled toward the gaping maw, a dark and chilly refuge that promised to swallow them, to protect them from the fatal touch of the Covenant’s scorching light.
Molly began to bounce up and down in her seat, screaming as the overwhelming light forced her to close her eyes. She felt so full of unbridled terror that her seven-year-old self was trying to will the car to go faster by shaking the seat with all of her might.
“Go, Daddy!” she shouted. “Go, go, go, go, go!”
Her mom squeezed her hand so tight it hurt, but Molly didn’t complain. The pain meant she was still alive.
“Hold on!” her dad shouted. “Almost there!”
“Don’t stop, Gotam!” said Brigid.
Even with her eyes shut tight, Molly could see the melting beam’s wall of light through her eyelids, as it flooded into the car. It felt as if a tsunami of blinding heat were reaching out to devour them.
As they drew close to the tunnel, their back now to the ship, Molly risked opening her eyes. She could see trees and large boulders from the surrounding area being swept across the road directly in front of them, as though they were caught up in a cyclone.
The vehicle was just seconds away from the tunnel when the inside of the car suddenly became superheated, forcing Molly to gasp for air. In an instant, she felt as if she had been physically placed on a sun, her skin beginning to burn, her throat and eyes immediately going dry, as if being cooked alive. She could no longer see even the blackness of the tunnel’s mouth. The heat and light had blown everything out.
Molly closed her eyes again, expecting the end.
An instant later—
They emerged from the blinding nimbus and bulleted into the tunnel, miraculously swallowed by the darkness. Her eyes had trouble adjusting at first. Slowly, things came into focus, but her ears still pulsed with the beam’s churning cacophony, even as it grew farther away.
The rapid change in temperature was as if she’d jumped into an icy lake on the hottest summer day. As much as she welcomed it over the deadly heat, it shocked the air from her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t do anything but look into her mother’s face. Molly could faintly see a small smile of relief from the front passenger seat.
She also saw what lay ahead and couldn’t warn her father to slow down. She didn’t have the breath or the words. All she could do was point ahead when she saw the taillights racing toward them at full speed.
Her dad’s eyes hadn’t adjusted in time, and he spotted the problem too late. He slammed on the brakes again, but the vehicle’s momentum was simply too great.
Molly didn’t remember the impact, but she knew what happened.
Their car rear-ended a truck at full speed, the front end of their vehicle crumpling like a paper bag. The vehicle’s air bags must have instantly inflated, enveloping her in a cushioning cocoon, even as it tore her mother’s grip away.
The last thing she remembered was hearing her mother shout her name.
Then everything went completely dark, and she didn’t know anything else. Not for a while at least.
Sometime later—she couldn’t tell how long for sure—Molly awakened to find herself still strapped in her seat but unable to see anything in the pitch-black.
For a moment, she wondered if she was dead. Maybe this is what it’s like?
Molly’s parents weren’t religious at all, and they hadn’t done much to prepare her at such a young age for thoughts of the afterlife. For all she knew, a person’s body just stopped working, and the person was stuck inside it, unable to do anything else ever again.
But she was in too much pain for that to be the case.
Molly ached from head to toe, and her mouth felt as dry as a desert. She was exhausted and in agony, but most of all she needed water. She reached up to touch her face and had a moment of horrible panic when she realized that she couldn’t feel her hands.
Soon she figured out that the car had stopped and pitched forward at a sharp angle, and she was hanging from her seat’s safety restraints. The harness had cut off the circulation in her arms. Her hands were still there, though, and they worked, even if they felt clumsy. She brushed her hair from her face and felt something rough crusted on her skin.
Molly knew it had to be blood.
Then through the darkness came an awful stench, like rot mixed with spilled fuel and vomit. She wanted to plug her nose, and for a moment, she tried breathing only through her mouth. The scent was indescribably awful, but she tried to focus on other things.
How long have I been out? Is the Covenant ship still blasting the ground just outside the tunnel? What happened to my parents?
The cold silence from the front of the car answered the last question. Only when Molly was older would she realize that the smell had come from them.
She fumbled with the catch on her seat’s safety straps, but she couldn’t seem to work the release. Her fingers were just too numb, and she couldn’t make them function properly. She tried for as long as she could manage before giving up and letting them drop slack again.
As Molly hung in the car, feeling frustrated and hopeless, memories of what had happened began to flood back. She began to cry, softly at first, then in big sobbing gulps. She was tired, but somehow she had enough energy left for tears.
She pleaded with her mother and father to wake up. To be alive.
All she wanted was to give up.
For some length of time, Molly just hung there and let her mind be drawn into a black hole of grief. Then, without warning, the back window of the car shattered, showering her with broken glass.
The sudden noise startled her to the core, and she screamed in response, thinking that the Covenant had finally found her. It wasn’t enough that they had leveled her entire world. Now they had to find her here and finish her off too.
Molly bit back her cries, realizing that she should have been quieter. But it was already too late. They’d found her.
She took a deep breath and cringed as she waited to die.
Flashlight beams shone down into the car from behind her. S
he could now see that the car had tilted forward on impact. Its nose had jammed deep under the truck it had barreled into, lifting the entire back of the car off the ground.
That was when she saw them: the barest glimpse of her parents, still in the front. They didn’t move. They just hung against their seat belts. Limp. Gone.
“I found one!” a man shouted above her. “She’s alive!”
A wave of relief washed over Molly. She’d been convinced that it was the Covenant who’d discovered her, thinking she’d be hauled out by a giant alien with jagged teeth.
Instead, this was a human. She’d been saved.
Then Molly really began to weep, not from terror but from a chaotic mix of emotions she could barely understand. There was relief for certain, but it was blended with the overwhelming loss of her parents, as well as what she’d later come to know as survivor’s guilt.
She was alive and they were not.
Her parents hadn’t been alone in that. Most of Molly’s homeworld hadn’t made it either—including Grace, as she would only later discover.
“It’s all right,” the man said to her. “I got you.”
He reached in and cut one of her car seat’s shoulder straps with a large knife. Then he wrapped his free arm around her so she wouldn’t fall and gently sliced through the other strap. Once she was free, he sheathed the weapon and with his strong, callused hands pulled her backward and up through the car’s rear window, lifting her as if she were little more than a doll.
Molly heard other people, shouting, tramping in her direction, but she didn’t pay any attention to them. She just curled up against her savior’s broad chest and cried quietly into his uniform. When she opened her eyes, she saw the name stenciled on his shirt.
The image of it burned into Molly’s brain. It read: sgt. johnson.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
* * *
September 2558
The sky over Aranuka was bright and blue as Molly Patel strolled home from school. In the five years that she had lived in the vast city-platform, built above the original atoll that had long since vanished under the waves of the Pacific Ocean, Molly had come to love how new it seemed compared to anywhere else she’d ever been. It was almost as if it had been pulled fresh from a package and dropped right onto the water.
It may have seemed a bit too fresh to some. It still had a new-city smell—mostly because not enough people had moved back here after the war ended.
But Molly knew that’s what was bound to happen after the Covenant finally found Earth and attacked the ground anchors of the planet’s key space tethers in their invasion. Aranuka housed one of those spots, and the Covenant had nearly taken the tether there down. It made sense to her that people might be somewhat reluctant to shoot roots in a place that had been almost entirely removed from the map just a few years ago.
The tragic part was that the Covenant hadn’t been all that interested in the tether to begin with. Humanity had plenty of other ways to get into space, so a giant freight elevator wasn’t that vital a target for the invaders. According to records released shortly after the attack, they had apparently thought an artifact was hidden under the platform, something of incredible value to them, left behind by an ancient race of beings known as the Forerunners—a civilization that had long since disappeared from the galaxy.
They had been willing to tear the entire area to pieces to find it.
Not much had been left of the original Aranuka platform after the United Nations Space Command drove the Covenant off, though the space elevator itself had survived. That was probably why the Unified Earth Government had set to rebuilding the city so quickly. It was part of their global Project Rebirth, an ambitious drive to plaster over the gaping holes the alien ships had clawed out of the planet in places such as there and New Mombasa.
For the most part, it had worked. The Aranuka platform and elevator looked better than they ever had, a sparkling jewel strung on a glittering chain set in the center of the Pacific, thousands of kilometers from anywhere else. The only trouble was that not too many citizens were eager to move back in.
Besides, of course, the folks Molly referred to as her Newparents—the people who had adopted her after the destruction of Paris IV.
Back when the Covenant invaded Earth, Molly and her Newparents had been living in Wisconsin, seven time zones to the east of Aranuka—somewhat removed from much of the battle. But for a xenolinguist—Yong Lee—and an honest-to-God archaeologist—Asha Moyamba—the lure of properly exploring an archaeological dig such as the one the Covenant had started right beneath Aranuka proved far too appealing. Even though Molly had tried to deter them, no force on Earth could keep them from taking advantage of that opportunity.
Despite her objections, Molly and her Newparents wound up on the city-platform of Aranuka, and Molly was now slated to be part of one of the first graduating classes to attend all four years at Admiral Harper High School.
After finishing there, Molly had only one goal: she planned to join the UNSC.
This time, the decision would be entirely hers, and it would most certainly be over and against Yong and Asha’s objections. The tables would finally turn.
Yong had lost a sister who’d been a tough-as-nails Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, which had been tragic for everyone who was close to her. By all accounts, though, she’d known exactly what she’d signed up for, and she would have been the first to admit it. But because of that loss, Yong refused to risk losing anyone else in action. That included his adopted daughter.
Regardless, after how the military had saved Molly’s life back on Paris IV, she felt a deeply rooted obligation to serve in some capacity, no matter how dangerous a career it might be. Marines such as Sergeant Johnson were her heroes. And if she was completely honest, Molly wanted to be a hero for someone like her seven-year-old self too. Especially now that the future of the galaxy seemed as uncertain as ever.
The war might have come to a close, but rumors of chaos continued to abound. Apparently human insurgents had started to take up a lot of the slack in the terror department, a problem humanity had known well before the Covenant War had interrupted it.
And the Covenant wasn’t quite dead yet either.
Back in Wisconsin, Molly had felt fairly safe—at least until the Covenant had figured out the location of Earth. Wisconsin just felt so far away from anything that had to do with the war.
Here in Aranuka, though, the ghosts of the thousands of people who had died at the Covenant’s hands seemed to haunt every street corner. And in the years since, not too many of the living had showed up to crowd them out.
The UEG had rebuilt Aranuka—and a number of other Earth cities hit hard by the Covenant—in an effort to help the planet heal, but this remote island paradise still stood so hollow and lifeless. Businesses and the military continued to use the tether to move freight to outer space and back, but most of that had become automated long before the Covenant showed up.
Molly’s history teacher said that this tiny atoll had never really held a large population to begin with. Only about a thousand folks had lived there before its beaches had been swept under the waves. Maybe about ten times that many had called it home a few centuries later, just before the Covenant’s vicious invasion.
Still, the small population wasn’t all that bad for Molly. It meant that even on the salaries of a couple of academics, her family could afford a penthouse apartment in one of the nicest sections of town, with wide windows that opened onto the Pacific Ocean to the north and west. Maybe Molly didn’t see anyone else in the lobby when she entered the building, and maybe the elevator didn’t stop a single time on her way to the top, but the view at sunset was gorgeous. It was like something from a dream, even if a quiet and uneasy restlessness clouded most of her days.
But today was different.
The moment Molly walked into their apartment, she knew something was wrong.
Both of her adoptive parents’ briefcases sat n
ext to each other on a bamboo bench near the door. Given the dedication they had to their respective professions—especially since moving to Aranuka—this was disturbingly odd. They shouldn’t have been home this early.
Despite the circumstances of their arrival in her life, Molly loved them both. She didn’t have any other living relatives—or at least any willing to raise an orphan in the middle of a war. Asha and Yong had been college friends of her real parents, and after she’d survived Paris IV, they’d taken her in without hesitation.
Despite everything else that was going on in their lives, they’d graciously made room for Molly in their hearts, which even now gave her reason to pause and be thankful. If she hadn’t been utterly traumatized by the glassing of her homeworld, everything would have been picture-perfect. Looking back at the first few years after Paris IV, Molly realized that she had been a handful for them. At the time, she’d just wanted her real parents back. It didn’t matter to her how wonderful the substitutes might be.
Early on, her Newparents had even helped Molly look for Grace. Molly had fantasized that if her sister was somehow alive, Grace could have taken custody of her instead. Grace would have only been twelve at the time, but somehow that hadn’t mattered to Molly.
Grace was actual flesh and blood: family. At least the two of them would have had each other, Molly rationalized. That would have been enough.
Instead, within weeks, Molly and her Newparents had learned that the escape ship Grace and her friend’s family had filed onto was incinerated on the launchpad before it could take off. Molly remembered the day she found out. She even remembered exactly where she was.
They had been in Wisconsin. Asha and Yong had come home from work early to give her the news the moment she came home from school. They sat Molly down on the couch in the living room and broke the news to her as gently as they could.
It didn’t matter. It felt as if the Covenant had murdered Grace all over again. Molly cried for weeks, refusing to talk to anyone.