Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

Molly nodded.

“And they look like us?”

“A lot.”

“I—” Saunders looked around the cargo bay. “There’s nobody else aboard, is there?”

Molly couldn’t help but glance at the cargo cam.

“Just us,” she said.

“We’ve been getting some weird orders lately. And there’s been a ton of sealed communiqués between interfleet staff, stuff I can’t even access. Then Alpha fleet was called out of Earth orbit and sent to— Flank! They’re defenseless. Earth—I how could I be so stupid? We need to get to a long-range radio. We need to—”

“And call who? ” Molly asked. “Don’t you see the problem? Call a Bern, and you’ll get yourself killed. Call a human, and you’ll start a panic and get everyone killed. Trust me, I was in the same place as you not that long ago. Hell, you’re coming around faster than I did.”

“Your parents knew this, didn’t they?”

Molly nodded. They know this, she thought, but kept that secret to herself.

“I feel so idiotic. It never occurred to me that orders could be questioned. You obey, right? How many kids did I teach to obey? Oh, gods, the Academy. I—”

Saunders fell silent; his face went white, his fat, rosy cheeks turning to ash. Molly reached out for him as he stumbled forward, his eyes becoming unfocused. She grunted with effort, catching him under his arms and guiding him gently to the ground.

“Admiral? Saunders, are you okay?”

He didn’t respond. She reached up and grabbed the towel from the counter, placing it under his head, then ran for some water. The ship’s collection of assorted cups and mugs were completely gone, so she held a clean rag under the faucet, then twisted most of the moisture out of it. She ran back to Saunders and draped it across his forehead.

“Sir, are you okay?”

He blinked several times before his eyes gradually came together, focusing on Molly’s face. He looked up at her in shock, his pupils twitching back and forth between hers.

“Lucin—”

“I’m sorry?” Molly leaned closer and dabbed the cloth across his forehead.

“Lucin,” he said, his face contorting into something between nausea and fear.

“What about him?” Molly asked, but the answer started coming as Saunders whispered his name again.

“Lucin—”

It was all he could say.

“Lucin…”

Over and over.

Cole whipped his head forward, snapping the welding mask in place and causing the world around him to fall black as blindness. He pulled the torch’s trigger and a blast of plasma illuminated his workspace in an eerie, greenish glow. Popping a few dollops of steel at a time, he worked along the joint and tacked the sheet of metal into place. Once it held, he ran back the length of the seam with a steady burn of the flame, concentrating on making a good, strong connection. Behind the torch’s passing, he left a long bead of beautiful, red, puddling steel.

The weld complete, he shut down the torch, lifted his visor, and watched the molten alloy cool—the rivulets of lava turning gray and then a dull silver. Cole stood up. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and surveyed the nearly completed box. On the opposite side of the cage, two other workers finished the wiring as they secured the last connection between the grav panels and the three separate power supplies. Cole nodded to one of the men who kept glancing up to survey his work, then moved to the next joint that needed welding. He was just about to flip his visor back down when a voice like dripping honey interrupted him:

“I hear you came up with this.”

Cole turned. Penny stood behind him, her hair as bright as liquid steel.

“Yeah,” Cole said, beaming. “Ryke said I get lifetime clever points for this.”

Penny pouted. “ If it works.” She appraised the box skeptically, one hand perched on her hip, the other reaching out to touch a vertical strut. “You actually think anyone’s gonna risk their lives in one of these things?”

“Are you kidding?” Cole smiled at her. “It’s flawless. C’mere, step inside.” He ducked under one strut and stepped over another, entering the cage of steel. Penny followed. She even accepted Cole’s proffered hand and allowed him to steady her as she crawled through. When they stood up, they found themselves in a box just two meters on a side, divided in half by two solid walls of steel, pressed up together. Cole’s head had just enough clearance to stand upright.

“A little tight to jump inside of,” Penny said.

“We’ll be balled up, hugging our legs. Besides, we shouldn’t have more than one person in them at a time. Here’s how it works.” He slapped the solid walls standing vertically in the center of the box. “You’ve got two steel plates facing each other, right? At the moment, they’re just tacked in place with a few spot welds. There’s grav panels in each one, just like the panels in a ship’s decking.”

He reached up and traced the wires coming off the panels. “Everything’s wired in parallel and with three separate power sources, just in case the box jumps in the middle of something. But even if they do, a single cell from any of the battery banks should still have enough juice to drive the plates away from each other.”

“What if the grav plates jump in the middle of something?”

“It won’t matter,” Cole said. “That’s how they’re built in a ship’s decking, anyway.” He slapped the steel wall. “Besides, that’s the whole point of the design. We can’t jump inside a ship, because there might be something in the way. However, if these puppies become one with something else, they’ll drag all that material apart once the grav panels fire. It’ll create an empty box, no matter what it hits. And that’s what we’ll be jumping inside of a few seconds later.”

“I’m with you so far. The box jumps in, the grav panels engage, the plates fly apart and drag open a cube of empty space. You jump in a second later… so now you’re inside a box of solid steel. What next?”

Cole put his hands together and swished a perfect third angle attack. “We pop our swords, cut our way out, and take care of the crew.”

Penny ran her fingers back through her hair and surveyed the structure thoughtfully. She turned and looked Cole up and down. “You thought of this?”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” he said, grinning. “Though, I do think I had some help.”

“Yeah? Ryke, right? This is totally his sort of thing.”

“No, I think it was from the training.” Cole grabbed his imaginary sword and slashed at her with an angle-two. “Repulsion,” he said, smiling.

“More like attraction ,” said Penny, stepping close. She reached around Cole, her face approaching his.

“I, uh—”

“This is wired wrong,” Penny whispered. She pursed her lips, then grinned at him coyly before stepping away.

Cole turned, blushing. He looked down at the wiring harness behind him. The leads from the grav panels were reversed, the polarity completely backward. The panels wouldn’t have flown apart—they would’ve been permanently locked together! He looked around for a screwdriver to loosen the terminals, then decided to bend down and check one of the other two battery feeds.

Same thing.

Cole glanced around the workshop to see if anyone was watching. As he contemplated the chances of wiring two panels backward, he felt a chill run up his spine, the hairs on the back of his neck tingling with danger. He turned to tell Penny, but the workshop’s double doors were already swaying back and forth from her departure. He looked around for Ryke, who had just been supervising another welder, when he saw the two workers in the neighboring cage peering up at him.