Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

“What’s going on up there?” Scottie yelled from below.

Molly ignored Scottie’s shouts. “Hold still,” she told the pilot. She grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him down before reaching for the clasps on his helmet. The dome popped off, revealing a young spaceman with sweat-matted hair and eyes wide with fear.

“It’s okay. Calm down.” Molly looked him over for signs of injury. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Higgins. Private Higgins,” he said. “Deck maintenance, third shift. I—” his eyes focused on something beyond Molly. “Where’re the others?” he asked.

“Keep calm.” Molly handed him a bottle of water from the medkit. “You were smart to get plugged in,” she told him.

Higgins took a long swig from the bottle, wiped his chin, then looked down at his flightsuit. “Jonesy,” he said, rubbing his fingers over the name patch. “He told me to do it. Gave me one of his extra flightsuits. I think he knew we were going down before we even got hit. He ran off for the Admiral, I think he was trying to save the old man—”

“Saunders?” Molly asked.

Higgins nodded. “Yeah.” He stopped and looked up at Molly. “Are you a part of some kinda rescue operation?”

“I— Not really. There might not be anyone else to rescue,” she said.

“Everything okay up there?”

Molly went to the edge of the wing and looked over. “A scared mechanic. He jacked into the life support. The antigrav suit kept him alive. Gimme a sec with him so he’ll be okay to climb down—”

Loud banging echoed down the line of ships, cutting her off. Scottie and Cat turned and looked toward the sound; Molly followed their gazes. In the distance, she could see Urg waving his arms and pointing up to another Firehawk.

“Pants on fire,” Cat whispered. “I think we have more survivors.”

There were eight of them in all. Five pilots, two navigators, and Higgins. The two paired-up crew members had been on deck, ready for lift-off, when the grav panels failed. Everyone’s story was the same and equally awful: they had held tight in abject terror while the ships were flung from one side of the hangar to the other, everyone fearful their Firehawk would rattle out the open hangar doors, or they would lose life support.

Certainly, some others had.

None of the Gs suffered had been too much for the flightsuits, and everyone seemed fit, if dehydrated and terrified. Molly and her little rescue crew stayed so busy crawling across the wreckage, cutting people out and getting them food and water, that she hardly noticed the odd dynamic forming. Pilots—some of them twice her age—were looking to her and her friends as if they were in charge.

While Urg continued to search for anyone left alive in the tangled mess—refusing to give up even when it seemed unlikely there were any more—Molly and the others sat with the crewmen, trying to console them. They all had a defeated, dazed look, almost like animals after a near-drowning.

Molly peeled the wrapper off a protein bar and handed it to one of the pilots. His eyes were unblinking, wide and wet.

“It was the Drenards, wasn’t it?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “No. It’s something worse. Now listen, we need to figure out—”

“What’s worse than Drenards?” someone else asked.

“Is it the Tchung?”

“It’s not the Tchung,” Molly said.

“Gotta be the Dremards. I heard they were coming out of their arm of the Milky Way for the first time. They attacked Rigel!”

Molly held up her hands. “It’s not Drenards—”

“What then? Did you see them? What was it?”

“Listen,” she said. “The first thing we need to do is help the rest of the crew. See if any of the staff survived. Then we can—”

“Survived?” Higgins squeaked. “Nobody but us survived! How could they? There was almost ten thousand people on this ship, and now there’s eight!” He looked at his palms. “Darlene,” he said, then started sobbing, covering his face with his hands.

Molly rose and went to him. She wrapped her arm around his shoulders and looked to the others. “We’ll mourn when we can and for as long as they deserve, but right now we need to—”

“We need to get off this ship!” someone said.

“And we will,” Molly told them. “We will. But first, we need to see if anyone else survived. According to Higgins, here, one of the pilots went off to help the senior staff—”

“They’re dead!” one of the pilots said. “C’mon, the only safe place in this bucket was to be rattling around in one of our little tin cans.”

“That’s not true,” Molly said. “There’s one other place we need to check. Just in case.”

One of the pilots—Roberts, according to his name patch—met her with a solid look. His eyes were aware, vibrant, not as red as the others.

“Where’s that?” he asked.

“The simulator room,” Molly said.

They left the survivors behind with Urg, who insisted on continuing his search for life among the debris. Several of the pilots suggested they come along and help, but Molly stood firm, pretending to be looking out for their well-being. In reality, she didn’t want to get bogged down if they came across bodies of people they knew, forcing her to tend to their nerves instead of potential survivors. Also—and she hated to admit it—she didn’t want to get outnumbered if any of them found out who she was. According to the report she’d found in the Navy database, she and her ship were the highest of high-priority targets. And now they were back on the same damned Navy StarCarrier she had once escaped from.

She swiped one of the pilot’s badges through a door reader and let Walter go through first. He led the way with his computer, the schematics for the ship pulled up from his last hack of the place. Molly looked at the badge in her hand, the one that had opened the door, and wondered if the gesture had even been necessary.

They made haste down the hallway that led to the stairwells, not trusting the elevator shaft after a crash landing; it could easily be just as twisted as the Firehawks. They each carried biotubes from one of the pilot’s survival kits, and Cat had a flashlight, just in case.

Inside the landing of the stairwell, they came across their first bodies, barely recognizable as such. Not welded down like everything else aboard the ship, they had been flung all over the stairwell when the grav panels had temporarily failed. They left behind not much more than smears of red wetness on the walls and on the underside of the rising flight of steps. Flightsuits lay scattered in lumpy reminders of what the mess had originated from.

Molly tried to focus into the distance as she stepped gently through the slick, chunk-filled puddles. She gripped the railing to the side. When her hand went into something wet, she had to stifle her gag reflex and fight to remain in control of her senses. She led the way down the steps, two flights, both of which were covered with and reeking of human remains.

Behind her, Scottie coughed into his hand. Molly reached back and clutched Walter’s sleeve, helping steady both of them, physically and emotionally. She scanned open the door on the crew deck and waved them through, each of them pale and holding their breath. All except for Walter, who didn’t seem fazed; his attention was firmly locked onto his computer.

“This way,” he said calmly.

Scottie leaned against the bulkhead, his head bowed down. “We’re gonna have to find a different way back,” he said. “I’ve seen some flanked-up shit in my day, but nothing like that.”

“They were probably told to—” Molly fought hard to swallow, “—told to get in the stairwell. Like an emergency drill. Either that, or everyone thought of the suits in the hangar and got backed up trying to get there.” She grabbed Scottie’s arm and led him after Walter, who was waiting at the next turn.