Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

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.

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 not 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.