Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

“Two semesters,” he said proudly.

“Aw, hell,” Arthur said. “Well, do me a favor and forget all that nonsense. Buckblades aren’t swords.”

“Buckblades? The invisible things?”

“That’s right.” Arthur stepped over and adjusted Cole’s grip on the handle. “Buckminster Fuller came up with the design hundreds of years ago. Well, sorta.” He ran his hand down the wooden approximation of a blade while he talked. “It’s a single matrix of carbon laced with iron, neodymium, and cobalt. Extremely ferromagnetic, okay? Super sharp. But the trick is in the blade’s handle, that’s where the electromagnetic field is created that spools the wire out and keeps it stiff. The blade’ll cut through damn near anything.”

“Even each other?”

“Sharp kid,” Arthur said, looking at Penny and jabbing a thumb his way. She shrugged and twirled her stick in a graceful pattern, so fast Cole could hear the air screaming in protest as it tried to move out of the way.

“No, not each other. Buckblades have orthogonal magnetic charges, otherwise they’d fly out of your hand and stick to something metal, get it?”

“Orthogonal?” Cole asked. “Is that positive or negative?”

“Neither. There’s two other kinds of magnetic fields, monopoles that can be harvested here in hyperspace. All Buckblades have the same charge, so it’s almost impossible to get them together, much less cut through one another.”

“They fly away from each other? Why not make some of them with the opposite charge, then?”

Cole tried to mimic the pattern Penny was making, which made her laugh.

“You just lost your clever points, son. Now I have to assume you got lucky before.”

“What do you think would happen?” Penny asked, taunting him.

“They’d stick together?”

“That’s putting it mildly, now pay attention. When someone swings at you, you can’t get hit. Not even a little, okay?”

“I think he’s learned that lesson,” Penny said. She darted forward and smacked the back of his right hand with her sword.

Cole dropped his weapon and shook his hand, glaring at her.

“Good point, Penny. Now, Cole, keep a firm grip on your sword.” Arthur bent down, picked it up, and handed it back to him. “Don’t crush the thing, but try not to drop it.”

“Why’d you make the thing feel pain?” Cole asked, rubbing his hand.

“Same reason God made the other one that way. So you’d take care of it. Now listen, you don’t want to get hit. Not once . And you can’t really block your opponent’s attacks, they’ll just repulse each other—”

“How does this work, then? He who swings first, wins?”

“The other way around, usually. See the slits on your sword?”

Cole inspected the wooden blade. There were deep cracks running down the length of the thing. He nodded.

“When you swing the practice swords at each other, internal sensors calculate where they would be repulsed to. Lights in the blade shine out and your suit picks them up—”

“Oh, so it’s like a game of billiards. It’s all about the bank shots.”

“Okay, another clever point for you. Now, most fights end with someone’s own sword coming back and hitting them. With the right block and a forceful enough stance, you can send most attacks back where they came from. Think of your sword more as a shield. It’s your opponent’s sword that’s your real weapon, and your sword is theirs. Get it? So learn to fear what you’re holding and figure out how to attack with what their wielding. Now, Penny will show you the basic attack angles—the safest ones. They aren’t what you’d think, so pay attention and unlearn your fencing.”

Cole nodded and tried to take the same stance as Penny: feet apart, shoulders square, pretty much the exact posture that would’ve gotten him a beating from Lieutenant Eckers, his old fencing instructor.

“The power is from side to side,” Penny told him. “It’s in your hips.” She moved hers back and forth while Cole watched.

“You’re supposed to try it too,” she said, reaching out and smacking his sword.

“Oh, yeah.” He moved his hips side to side, swinging the wooden stick just like she did.

“It’s a lot like a judo throw, or a good roundhouse. If you don’t get your whole body in on it, you won’t go far.”

“Gotcha,” Cole said, trying to ignore the way her suit hugged her body.

“Give me your best shot.”

Cole’s feet shuffled automatically, trying to get back into a proper fencing stance. Penny lashed out with her sword, which he instinctively blocked. Solidly. The wooden shafts smacked together with a satisfying crack.

Both thighs on his suit lit up, showing him where he would’ve lost them.

“You’ve got no power like that,” Penny said, tapping his hip with her sword. “This isn’t a contest where you score points and gab with your opponent about whose mother smells worse.” She rapped his sword with hers, then tapped him in the stomach. “There’s nothing noble or fun about this, okay? It’s one swing and you’re dead. There isn’t anything heroic about it, and nothing fun or pleasant, even for the winner.”

Cole nodded, resuming his square-on stance. “Have you been in real fights with these?”

“Do I sound like I’m reading from a textbook? Trust me, it isn’t pretty.”

“I’ve seen what they can do,” Cole told her.

“It’s different when you’re the one doing it. Now, there are three major angles you need to learn and two sub angles—they’re your safest attacks and the hardest to parry. Forget thrusts altogether, okay?”

Cole nodded as she began the first lesson; he tried his best to absorb it all. He also tried to watch her hips only when she told him to. Finally, he tried his damnedest to pretend that Arthur—standing to one side and offering suggestions—was Molly. Watching him. Reading his mind with a D-band. Forcing him to stifle his thoughts.

It helped him to imagine Penny was someone else. Anyone but the flaming girl from his strange dream. And finally, as they began to spar, their swords clashing while they discussed angles of deflection, he tried his damnedest to ignore her red hair. He pretended instead that Penny was a blonde.

The one who had taken his arm.

“Move swift, but stay calm,” Molly told everyone, as the survivors marched past in a black column of Navy flightsuits. They jogged, but refrained from pushing on one another. Their brains may have checked out, but the military training remained, coming back thanks to the hint of danger—the fear propelling them forward. Ahead, Scottie stood by the door to the stairwell, waving the crewmen through.

When a logjam forced everyone to a halt, Molly fought her way through to the stairwell where she found several people on the ground, sliding in the spilt blood and gore.

“Grab the rails!” she told them. “Help each other up! C’mon, let’s go!”

Back in the hallway, someone screamed, and it soon turned into a chorus of frightened shouts. Molly stuck her head back into the hallway and saw—in the distance—bodies dripping out the door of the simulator room.

The panels were failing in sequence.

Pure terror coursed up through Molly’s body. She expected, at any minute, the gravity holding her to the deck would simply vanish. She imagined the ship as she’d seen it from outside, its thrusters up in the clouds. The visual gave her vertigo. She realized, suddenly, that she was standing on the face of a cliff. The thought made her feel faint; people began pushing past her, scrambling up the slick steps, some of them on all-fours.

Molly found herself swimming amongst them, pulling herself ahead, racing up wet steps and over bodies alive and otherwise. The fear was gone, replaced with a keen awareness of what could happen next.