Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

They dragged him outside, the cold air and searing light washing over him. The light flashed through his eyelids, his thin flesh filtering the photons to the redness of glowing steel. Part of him wanted to open them a little—just to cauterize the image of the severed legs out of his memory. He instead forced himself to concentrate on other sensations, both to get a feel for his surroundings and to be distracted by something.

The first thing he noticed was a slight breeze swirling around his neck and flecks of freezing snow on his face. He could feel dollops melting in his hair, turning it wet. Forceful hands gripped his arms and shoulders on both sides, and hinges squeaked behind him as the door was pushed shut. Just before it clanged tight, Cole heard agonizing moans leak out from his friend, the sound bringing back the very images he was trying to avoid.

“Goggles!” Joshua barked.

Cole tried to shake the echo of the moans out of his head. He focused on the other sounds around him: the groaning of metal as if massive sheets of it twisted under pressure; the stomping of feet on steel decking, vibrations coming up his own shins; people shouting commands in the distance; the clatter of a sparse crowd. Behind it all—the sound of a soft yet persistent wind; the crunching of packed snow and crackling ice; a slight sway in the deck, like a boat at sea, or a ship with dying grav panels.

Hands went to Cole’s face. He tried to pull away, but his arms were still strapped behind his back, and somebody had him by the shoulders, fixing him in place.

“Keep still,” a voice said.

He felt something tight come down over his head—hair ripping out painfully—before the cups snapped over his eyes. Someone slapped him on the back of the head, either to tell him they were done or to punish him for being difficult, he didn’t know.

With the red glow gone from his vision, Cole tried cracking his eyelids. Blinking, he looking down at his feet and away from the dangerous light, but everything looked… normal.

They pulled him forward again, forcing him to take in his surroundings on the move. A clump of his hair had been trapped inside the goggles, obscuring his vision, but he could still see pretty well. Around him stood several small huts; they would’ve been normal looking if they weren’t made of metal plating. Cole recognized the colors on quite a few. Navy black and gray with words stenciled in blocky white letters:

Each phrase stood at odd angles or upside down, the hull they used to be a part of long disassembled and the shape of the crafts beaten flat with hammers. Cole saw a few ship names and designations that qualified as antiques, Navy hardware that hadn’t been used since the galactic expansion.

Their group weaved in and out of the square structures, through little alleys of zig-zag confusion. Cole looked down at his feet and wondered what they meant by putting Riggs’s legs back on and how he was going to “meet his maker.” His boots clomped on the steel decking dusted with the barest cover of snow. The rivets that dotted the deck and the thick welds that held the plates together gathered the white flakes in small ridges, like miniature drifts. Here and there, these drifts were crushed flat by the boots ahead of him, pressed with the designs of mismatched soles.

They rounded another shed and popped out into a clearing—an expanse of flat steel. The area bustled with fur-clad people carrying things, coiling lines, someone welding amid a shower of golden embers. In the center of the square, a cluster of men clashed with sticks, as if training. Everyone looked exclusively human where the absence of fur revealed anything.

Cole looked down at his getup of flightsuit and jumper and wondered how they weren’t burning up in all that fur. He was cold, but not freezing. His trio of escorts, Joshua, Kelly, and whoever had joined them outside the door, pulled him through the square and toward the far side. Getting away from the tightly packed buildings gave Cole his first vista of the overall area, allowing him to appreciate the size and scale of the massive ship. The deck stretched out thirty or so meters to either side and probably a few hundred or more to the far end. Through gaps in the buildings to his left, he could see a railing at the very edge and a white field of snow beyond. Out there, the flakes continued to move sideways in thick sheets, even though only a smattering of flakes fell over the village. It reminded Cole of the smaller craft he had been on. He assumed a barrier up front was parting the heavy snow, and that the sounds and vibrations in the steel meant the entire metal village was underway, sailing across the snow-covered land on large runners.

They were halfway across the square before Cole finally noticed the fleet overhead. Ships, dozens of them, possibly hundreds. Large and black, they looked menacing beyond the veil of snow, fierce in the way only half-hidden things could be. It was impossible to count them, which added to their awful potential, but there were enough to blot out the sky. Anywhere he could see through the flurry, dark hulls loomed, their overlapping forms creating an artificial cosmos to replace the harsh whiteness he’d seen from the Firehawk’s belly. Across that black, the snowfall whizzed horizontal like speeding stars in some holovid’s corny rendering of what traveling through hyperspace might be like.

Joshua spoke with the other two escorts as they dragged him along, but Cole couldn’t concentrate on what they were saying. Besides the fleet, there was another distraction: a massive tower—a larger version of the mast-like pole from the smaller vessel—that rose above a cluster of steel buildings ahead. Cole tried to follow it up to the top, but the spire rose further than he could see without arching his back. His group seemed to be heading straight for the strange object.

Beyond the tower, he could just barely make out the tall walls of dull steel that seemed to form the prow of the monstrous craft. The high barrier, shaped like a “V,” must be what broke the driving snow to either side. The sheets of steel had to be three stories high, at least. Between them and the mast there was another large clearing on which sat a few ships. Cole could see their tails sticking up over the squat buildings, the light snow swirling around them. One of the tails he recognized as a Firehawk, the rest were alien. Not just indistinguishable: alien .

“You sure about him, boss? This is the guy from the prophecy?”

A fragment of the conversation grabbed Cole’s attention, and something told him they’d been speaking of him for a while. They passed through an alley on the far side of the clearing, exiting at the base of the tall mast. Cole tried to focus on what was being said, but yet another curiosity caught his attention: another group of men were practicing with wooden sticks ahead of the mast, but they were doing it in slow motion.

Then Cole saw that everyone up ahead was moving slowly, all across the wide deck as far as he could see. A figure descended from one of the ships, taking forever to move between rungs. A woman walked across the deck in half-speed. She had fur up to her neck, black goggles over her eyes, and her long ponytail swayed side to side like a pendulum through viscous water. A man with a blowtorch cut away at one of the ships, but the shower of sparks flew up as slow as lazy bugs, arcing out forever and drifting down as if frightened of actually landing. Cole looked at his own feet; they appeared to be moving at a normal speed.

He started to ask Joshua about the effect, then saw they had almost reached the base of the large tower. About ten meters wide and perfectly round, it appeared to have a flat top—like a squat cylinder sitting on one end. The tower rose up from the center of this platform: thin and wide like a blade, but with dozens of slits running its length.