Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

The brief interaction put her in a somber mood as she thought about leaving those people to rush off to hyperspace. In the back of her mind, she toyed with crazy schemes for taking down the Bern. It was her favorite Academy pastime, dreaming an end to war. Suddenly, however, it seemed more real: the fighting and being in a position to do something about it. But what?

She expected her friends would be aboard the ship, getting some well-deserved rest. Instead, she found them around a small fire they’d built under Parsona’s starboard wing.

“Why aren’t you guys inside?” she asked. She crouched down by the fire and extended her hands toward it.

“Walter said we should stay out here tonight, just so everything feels fair.”

Molly shot him a look. His face was aglow, his metallic-looking skin reflecting the firelight.

“What’s gotten into you?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, shrugging.

His look didn’t inspire much confidence in Molly. “You had better not be up to anything,” she told him.

“I’m not! I sswear.”

Molly held his gaze a moment longer, her eyes narrowed for effect.

“Is the Admiral okay?” Cat asked.

“Huh? Oh, yeah. I think he just had a dizzy spell earlier.” Molly rubbed her hands together. “Now he’s putting a lot of pressure on me to stick around and help them fight the Bern.”

“It’s a lost cause,” Scottie said.

“How d’ya know it’s lost?” Cat asked.

“Besides the fact they knocked a StarCarrier out of orbit? How about the rumors the Drenards are invading the rest of the Milky Way?”

“Hogwash.” Cat said.

“He’s right about the Drenards,” Molly said. “Saunders confirmed it.” She looked at Walter. “That means Anlyn’s probably in trouble, or at the very least that her political efforts didn’t go very well.”

Walter shrugged. He poked at the fire with a stick, sending up a spiral of twirling sparks.

Molly turned to Scottie. “What about that fuel we discussed? I’m still willing to pay double.”

Scottie frowned. “I can get my hands on some, but I’d prefer to work out the use of your ship, just for a day or two—”

“We already discussed this.”

Scottie stared into the fire. “I’ll see what I can do. How much do you need?”

“A full tank.”

Scottie laughed. He stopped and looked around at the others, seemingly amazed that nobody had joined him. “You serious?”

Molly nodded.

“But you already have a quarter tank in her. And yeah, I looked. It’s what I do.”

“It’s Navy issue,” Cat told him.

“Oh.” He glanced over at Molly. “ Oh! You’re not looking to move something hot, you’re thinking hyperspace!”

“Keep your voice down,” Cat told him.

“You thinking that’s the safest place to be right now, or something? How’s that more important than getting my friends to safety?”

Molly shook her head. “I’ve got people there that need me.”

“You’ve got people here that need what you’ve got even more. Do you—” he turned to Cat. “Does she even know what that drive’ll do?”

Cat shrugged.

Scottie jabbed a thumb back at Parsona’s hull. “Do you know what you’ve got in there?”

“I’m starting to wonder,” Molly said.

Cat leaned back from the fire and rested on her elbows. She scanned the clearing for any Navy folk, then looked over to Scottie. “I can vouch for her,” she said. “Consider her a part of the Underground if you have to.”

Scottie stood up and walked around the fire and sat down beside Molly. He leaned his head over and reached his hands out toward the fire, animating with them while he talked. “Friend of mine built it,” he said. “Ronnie Ryke. We called him Doctor Ryke, even though he never even finished grade school. Still, smartest damn feller you ever knew. Built the thing in his garage, tinkering with the very laws of physics.”

“It was the fuel,” Cat inserted.

He held out a palm to quiet her, but nodded. “Right, see I was—well, skimming some fuel from my boss, trying to make some ends meet, and I owed Ronnie for some work. He had me pay him in fuze, doing test tube stuff with it. I thought he was growing his own critters, but he weren’t interested in the biology—”

“Critters?” Molly asked.

“Creatures. Little organisms.” Scottie scrunched up his face. “Didn’t your dad tell you what fuze is made of?”

“I was six years old, Scottie. Just tell me already!”

Cat laughed and Walter looked up from his storm of sparks, seemingly paying attention.

Scottie leaned uncomfortably close. “It’s like a colony of little cells, okay? And you know how a nadiwok sees in infrared? And how a cloud viper sees with ultrasound?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, fuze can see hyperspace. Or through hyperspace, anyway.” He looked over at Cat, who was leaning back, smiling. “Am I explaining it right?”

“You’re doing fine.”

“You’re telling me that fusion fuel is alive?” Molly asked.

“Well, yeah . And Ronnie got to messing with his own hyperdrives. He figured the fuze market was too competitive, but nobody was building and selling hyperdrives on the down-low, see? And he was smart about it. Figured out why nobody else could duplicate what the Navy built. He even had some ideas about who had actually built the first drives. The key had something to do with how the Navy treated their fuze. Their method shocks it into action, killing some in the process, which is why the needle goes down. But Ryke figured out how to build one that got around that. His drive coaxed the critters where he wanted them to go, rather than jolt them to death.”

“Yeah, but my drive runs empty just like any other.”

Scottie shook his head. “ Faster than any other. That’s the thing, it’s inefficient to do it Ronnie’s way. Setting the damn things free costs you more than killing ’em, which is probably why the Navy never looked into alternatives.”

“So he couldn’t sell the drives because it cost too much to fuel them?”

“Hell, no! The people that’d be buying these drives wouldn’t have cared about ten percent losses. They woulda snatched ’em up quicker’n he coulda built ’em! We had a mighty row over that. Nearly came to blows, Ronnie and me. Egghead redneck was sitting on a goldmine, but all he’d do was shake his head!”

“Volume,” Cat said, waving him down.

“Sorry,” he whispered. “See, Ronnie had what he called himself an ethical DIE-lemma. He did some tests with his first drive—”

“Only drive,” Cat said.

“Same damn thing!” He tapped Molly on the knee. “Sorry about that—”

“Let’s get to the point,” she said, as nicely as she could.

“I’m at it,” he said. “Ronnie did his first tests and found something weird. He could move objects across the room! Didn’t matter that there was a planet beneath his feet or one at arrival, he could thread objects to any place at all, gravity be damned. He could jump you from here to a barstool in Bekkie if you like! No more Lagrange points, no more worrying about how far away you’re going.”

Molly looked to the fire and rubbed a hand through her hair. Walter was gazing at her over the flames, his face practically alight.

“Darrin,” Molly whispered to herself.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“No, I do,” Molly met his gaze. “The ship— my ship—did something funny once. I never could figure it out. We jumped into the middle of an asteroid field with no deflection. I thought maybe the matter around us had canceled each other out, but I did some calculations later and it was impossible.”