Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

“I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to be in there,” Cat said.

The words popped a visual in Molly’s mind: the tight confines, packed and rattling with dozens and dozens of Gs. It would’ve been awful.

“We’re not gonna find anybody down here,” Scottie complained. “I’m thinking we should head back.”

“It’s just around the corner,” Molly assured him. Walter had shown her schematics of the carrier; the sim room and the hangar were situated above and below the pilot’s quarters, as if to reduce their foot travel.

Walter ran ahead, leading the way to the simulator room. The smell of blood and oil seemed to permeate the lower decks as fluids leaked out of broken things. Molly fought to ignore the occasional body they went by. Even the sight of a bag of laundry, open and disgorging crumpled Navy blacks, filled her with sorrow. What was left of the person who had been rushing off to wash those? she wondered.

As they caught up to Walter and neared the simulator room, Molly realized Scottie had been right. They weren’t going to find anyone alive down there. If someone had survived in a simulator pod, they would surely be running up and down the decks by now, looking to rescue others or trying to flee the ship.

Expecting to find the room intact, the pods empty or full of more horror, Molly stepped inside with her hopes low—when she should’ve been concentrating on keeping her defenses up .

Hundreds, maybe thousands of crewmen had been packed in the simulator room—it was impossible to tell exactly how many. Their bodies formed a wall of gruesome death on the far side of the room, stacked up in a scene eerily reminiscent of the Firehawks piled high in the hangar. Jumbled up, mounded like a snowdrift, they formed a slope of tangled forms, their individual parts woven together and indistinguishable.

The marks their flying bodies had made spotted the room, dotting the pods, the floor, even the ceiling with bright marks of crimson. Molly caught herself on the doorjamb and tried to wave away the others before they joined her. The sound of Scottie gagging behind her let her know she’d been too late.

“Flank me,” Cat said. “They were all thinkin’ the same thing.”

“Let’s go,” Molly told them. She pushed her way past her friends and back into the hallway, which suddenly seemed positively laden with fresh air. She tried not to think about what those people had gone through, what their last moments had been like. The crowded panic, the fearful silence, and then… the horrible rattling and crushing.

“Ssomethingss knocking,” Walter said from the room.

“I think that’s my knees,” Scottie said. “I don’t feel so good.”

“Ssssshhhh,” Walter hissed.

Molly stepped back by the door but didn’t dare look inside. She listened around the corner for a sound, but could only hear her heartbeat in her ears. Scottie came out bent over and covering his mouth with the back of one hand.

“Damn, I think I heard it too,” Cat said.

“It’ss coming from the podss,” said Walter.

Molly steeled her nerves. Keeping her eyes low, she reentered the room. She stood there, perfectly still, holding her hands out to urge the others to be as quiet as possible.

There . A muffled pounding. Running to the nearest pod, she clanged up the steps and slapped on the egg-shaped compartment before pressing her ear to it.

“You hear anything?” Cat asked, climbing up the steps.

“Someone yelling, I think. But these things open from within, so I don’t get why they’d need help.”

Cat ran up the steps of another pod and rubbed her hands across the hatch. “Are they damaged?”

“Doesn’t look—”

The pod twitched, rotating in its base. Molly stepped back. Walter hissed at the pod closest to him, which seemed to have moved in unison.

“Of course!” Molly ran down the steps and toward the control room.

“Of course, what?” Cat called out after her.

“A simulation is still running. Somebody must’ve—”

She stopped when she entered the control room. The remains of that very somebody were smeared all over the small booth. Their body lay crumbled in a heap in one corner, the spaceman’s flightsuit so flat it appeared empty. Molly looked away, but the sight was seared on her retina, overlaid onto so many other horrific images. She thought about the sacrifice this person had made and silently honored him.

The keyboard and screen were a mess, but she had to do something about the pod controls. She pulled the medkit over her shoulder and around in front, then groped inside for a gauze pad. Using the medical fabric to remove a smear off the screen made it impossible to imagine the mess as anything other than blood. The pad soaked it up dutifully.

CONTROLLER - GERALD “JONESY” RICKSON

PROGRAM - ZERO G MAINTAIN

E.T.C. - 1:42

ENEMY TYPE - NONE

ENEMY COUNT - 0

POD LINK - ALL

CONTINGENCY - DISABLED

Molly glanced at the flight routine summary. The adjacent SADAR screen showed a cluster of virtual Firehawks drifting in space. The routine still had almost two hours to go, a gross overestimation for how long the crash would take. Then again, she probably would’ve done the same thing, taking no chances on an early exit.

Using the gauze to hold down the CTRL button, she jabbed the BREAK key with a knuckle, then ran back outside while the simulation wound down.

“Scottie, we’re gonna need you in here,” she called out the door. “Everyone, get ready to guide any survivors out. Keep their focus away from the back of the room. We’ll form up and meet in the hallway.” She turned to Cat. “Come with me,” Molly said.

She ran toward the far pods, the ones that would be closest to the tangle of bodies. It would be important to get any surviving occupants away as quickly as possible. Molly wasn’t sure how, but having something to work on—people to be responsible for—made crossing the room possible. She felt grateful for the temporary immunity and focused on the slim chance that the simulators had kept the Admiral safe.

She forgot, for just a moment, that she might not be safe if he was.

The hatches started popping open as soon as the simulation shutdown procedure completed. Cries of anguish and relief spilled out of the pods just before the people did. Men and women exited their simulators and shouted for one another. As they emerged, it proved impossible to keep them from seeing what lay at the far end of the room. Moans of agony and peals of disbelief rang out, along with a smattering of curses. Molly found herself yelling at grown men to head for the exit, the white hair and beards on many of them signifying rank their borrowed simulator suits belied.

Everyone seemed too stunned to care that they were being yelled at by a teenager, a Callite, a Palan, and a roughneck local. Their state of shock made them more like cattle, giving Molly and her friends easy verbal control of them. She felt a wave of confidence and surety wash over her—the hours they had already spent around the horror had put her group in a much better state than these survivors. The four of them had descended through the gore in stages, rather than hatching directly into the worst it had to offer.

Molly corralled a dozen survivors together and guided them, pushing and prodding, toward the hallway. They clung to one another like refugees, knees weakened by an emotional ordeal no less taxing than a physical one might be.

Cat lagged behind with another cluster, including a few women. In fact, ahead of Molly—clustered around Walter and Scottie—there seemed to be quite a few women among the survivors. Further ahead, an older gentleman leaned against the rear of a pod and threw up on the decking. Several other people seemed to have been physically sick. Molly swallowed hard and tried to focus on getting everyone out of there.