Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

“What he means,” Mortimor said, placing a hand on Arthur’s shoulder, “is that there’s no place left to bounce to.”

Arthur laughed. “Yeah, that clears it up—”

“Wait.” Cole held up his hands. “One at a time,” he said.

“Okay,” Arthur said, beating Mortimor to it. “Let’s say you jump into one of their ships and you meet a bulkhead. Well, you’re gonna have a bulkhead bisecting your body when you’re done. We don’t even take a chance on our raids, even though we have a visual. We jump in a meter or two off the deck and roll. And you can feel a burn from every snowflake you absorb.”

“You have a visual?”

Mortimor waved Arthur off. “We have sources ,” Mortimor said.

“What about jumping bombs in?”

“You got any bombs? They’re rarer than fusion fuel since the war. Hell, we’ve tried jumping random things in where we thought the cockpits would be, but it’s like throwing darts in the dark. The only thing we could see we were doing was running low on fuel and getting no results. The stuff is precious, and the denser the object, the more you use. Jumping metal really eats the stuff up.”

“What about jumping cameras in and sending shots back and using that?”

Mortimor frowned and shook his head. Cole could tell he was getting annoyed, but he couldn’t stop thinking about what the Seer had said: that he would find a way out of hyperspace…

“There’s no way to transmit real-time coordinates,” Mortimor told him. “The best you could do is know a place that used to be safe, and even then, the only thing reliable out here seems to be longwave radio. Look, I appreciate your enthusiasm, but we’ve gone through all these ideas for years. We’ve wasted liters of precious fuel trying every trick in the book. If there was a way, we would’ve thought of it by—”

“I’ve got it!” said Cole.

Mortimor held up his hands, trying to calm him down.

But before he could, Cole launched into his idea, gesturing wildly with his arms, waving schematics in the air, pausing to slap Arthur on the back.

The two older men fell silent, listening. Then grinning. Then smiling at each other, nodding.

Parsona crouched down on her landing gear, her hatch already opening. Scottie had directed Molly to a small clearing in a wide forest a few hundred kilometers from Bekkie. While Parsona’s strained thrusters cooled, the cramped passengers exploded out into the fresh air where they took turns consoling and comforting each other; the sounds of their frustrated sobs wormed their way through the cargo bay and into the cockpit. Molly pulled on her helmet, shutting out the horrible reminders of what she’d just been through.

“Mom?”

“Sweetheart, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

Molly looked down at the stains across her chest, feeling anything but fine. “I’m sorry to keep you—”

“Nonsense. And no apologies. I—that was some amazing flying back there. How are those people holding up?”

“I’m not sure yet.” Molly looked over her shoulder at the thinning crowd in the bay. Cat was helping people climb out of the cargo pods recessed in the floor, and she could see Walter making his way forward, ushering several people ahead of himself. “I’m gonna go check on them. I’ll talk to you later—I just wanted to let you know I was okay.”

And I wanted to hear your voice, Molly added to herself.

“I love you,” her mom said.

Molly was too choked-up to respond. She pulled off her helmet and dropped it in the nav seat. The Wadi jumped after it, crawling through the open visor and curling up inside. Molly was about to get out of her seat when Walter entered the cockpit. She reached for him, pulled him over the control console and buried her head in his flightsuit. And she sobbed. She cried, as much in relief as in sadness. The dam of responsibility—that wall holding back her grief and horror—it ruptured, flooding her at once with all the tragedy of that day.

“It’sss okay,” Walter told her, holding her with one arm and patting her hair. Molly felt the Wadi return, crawling to her shoulder and wrapping itself around her neck.

“It’sss okay,” Walter said again.

It took a moment to get herself together. She felt embarrassed by the display and sat back in her chair, wiping her face. “I’m sorry,” she told Walter, looking at the wet patch of tears on his shoulder and the smear of red below.

“Don’t worry about it.” He looked back through the cargo bay. “I need to go. I want to keep an eye on them.”

Molly laughed. “If you’re worried about them looting—don’t.”

Walter looked back at her, his mouth firmly set and his eyes wide. “I need to make ssure they’re okay ,” he said.

He padded aft and ran back through the galley. Molly and the Wadi stared at one another, shocked into silence and disbelief.

The scene that awaited her outside was a mix of triage and refugee camp. The only serious wounds, of course, were psychological, but these were no less likely to make a victim prone than the physical variety. Molly moved among the survivors, a new flightsuit ridding her of the external stains, leaving only the other kind within her. As she looked for people to tend to, she was amazed at how many of the crewmen were already working to care for the rest, losing themselves in the ability to help another.

She approached Cat, who was spreading some of the blankets from Parsona’s crew bunks out across the forest floor. She touched her shoulder and Cat turned. The two women frowned at each other, eyes glazed over with tears. They hugged, the power in Cat’s arms squeezing out some of the painful stress in Molly’s back. The touch of another, even as the embrace with Walter had shown, gave her hope that she could get over the things she’d seen, could summit the awfulness and perhaps rappel safely down the other side.

“You did good, kiddo,” Cat whispered.

They separated and Molly looked away, rubbing at the bottom of her eyes.

“Where’s Scottie?” Molly asked. “Is he doing okay? Urg—I’m the one who told him to keep looking for—”

“Stop that.” Cat turned her around and held Molly’s shoulders. “Don’t do that. He was doing what he had to. There’s bad luck involved, you’ve gotta remember that.”

Molly nodded, but only to last thing Cat said. She bent over and grabbed two of the blanket’s corners and helped spread it out over the dried leaves and broken twigs. Several crewmen immediately helped others sit down, each of them cradling a cup, bottle, or a mug of water. One of the crewmen—an older woman Molly remembered from the simulator room—tugged on Molly’s elbow and pointed over to a cluster of seated figures.

“The Admiral wants to see you,” the lady said.

Molly turned to Cat. “Be loose with the water. I’ll make a run into Bekkie tonight and top up the tank and load up with food. Don’t let anyone set up camp too close to the thruster wash.”

Cat nodded and gave her arm a squeeze.

Molly took a deep breath and marched over to the small circle where Saunders seemed to be conferring with a group of higher-ups. They fell silent as she approached, their wrinkled eyes swiveling around to watch her. She felt ridiculous standing there, on display, so she sank down to the blanket, and everyone adjusted to make room.

“Admiral.” She gave him a somber look, which took little effort given how she felt.

Saunders glanced around at the others, almost as if on the verge of dismissing them. The gray gentleman—the one from the hallway of the StarCarrier—looked at her warmly, the corners of his mouth curling up.