Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Land of Light

Cole double-checked the jump coordinates and glanced at the gravity indicators. Everything looked great. Zebra command was scattered in the distance; it appeared they’d be making a clean getaway. Even better, the red bands worked across vast distances, allowing he and Molly to travel without losing touch.

“I love you . ” Molly thought, interrupting his own thoughts with some of hers.

“Me, too . ” He told her. “See you soon.”

He lifted the carboglass shield and rested his finger on the red button. Beside him, he could hear Riggs grunting around the duct tape over his mouth, his helmet muffling his outrage.

Cole felt horrible for his old friend. He tried to think of something to say, but figured it could wait until they were out of danger. Pressing down on the button, he engaged the hyperdrive and watched the field of stars before him disappear, expecting them to shift slightly in place.

Instead, the blackness of space shot full with a blinding light, accompanied by a torrent of deafening sounds.

The filters in the carboglass clamped down automatically, minimizing the passage of photons, but even so, he couldn’t see a thing. His eyelids clinched tight of their own accord. He tried to crack them, but the light was too intense.

“What the hell?” he asked, as if Riggs could hear him over the noise. Unable to open his eyes, he attempted to make sense of the myriad warning beeps and alarms. It sounded as if all of them had been triggered at once.

Is someone there?

He tried to focus on what he could hear and feel, a wave of panic competing for control of his senses. There were too many sounds, too much stimuli, to distinguish any one.

Hello?

His hand went to the flight controls with habitual ease. He had to remember the simulators from the Academy, forgetting the past weeks on Parsona, where everything was laid out differently. He had hundreds of hours of flight time sitting in front of these Firehawk controls; he just needed to think about what to touch and allow his long-term muscle memory take over.

Pops, is that you?

As soon as he gave the flight controls a nudge, he felt his first problem: the stick gave him resistance. The haptic feedback system had kicked in, which meant they weren’t in space anymore—they were in atmosphere! As soon as he processed this, Cole recognized one of the layers of beeping sounds: the stall alert. They were in free fall. He needed lift.

He flipped the switch that extended the wings fully, then shoved forward on the main thrusters while nosing the ship down. There was a sickening sensation as he gave into the plummet in order to create enough speed to fight it. The lift warning went away. Cole could now make out a gravitational proximity alarm. They were near something huge . If the frequency could be believed, it was bigger than a planet. Bigger than most stars.

His stomach flipped in fear.

Penny, silence your thoughts for a second.

Cole tried to open his eyes long enough to check his altimeter, but his lids had mutinied. He could only open them a crack before they snapped back shut. Tears streamed back from both eyes. He couldn’t feel which way was up and couldn’t see the dash to find out. He reached forward with his left hand and fumbled for the gravity panels. He needed to turn them off and get his flightsuit neutralized so he could feel with his body which way to fly.

Who is this?

There was very little change as he turned off what he hoped were the grav panels. He fumbled for the life support controls so he could shut down the anti-G system in his suit. His fingers rested on the button when a silent alarm in his head rang out above the din in the cockpit:

Riggs .

He was about to subject both of them to unknown forces. Riggs was already bound and gagged; he must be confused as hyperspace. No point in torturing him before they crashed and burned.

Pulling his hand away from the controls, he seized the breathing hose and wires attached to his suit instead. He yanked the umbilical cord loose.

His body sank instantly into the back of his seat, his ribs nearly crushed from the pressure.

They were going fast .

Penny, are you getting any of this?

Cole tried to shake his head clear, strange thoughts seemed to be leaking in with the myriad sounds and the blinding lights.

The lift problem had obviously been taken care of—they had plenty of velocity. Cole’s arms felt heavy, maybe six to seven times their normal weight. The Firehawk had to be heading almost straight down to be pulling that many Gs—the amount of thrust he had given the ship couldn’t account for a fraction of that acceleration.

Yeah. A lot of fear. A pilot?

He tried not to be scared. He was a trained pilot, after all. Pulling the throttle all the way back, he gave the flight controls a tug. Despite the heaviness of his arm helping out—sucked back with the force of acceleration—the stick provided too much resistance. The haptic feedback system was letting him know air flowed across the flight surfaces at dangerously high rates of speed. That meant atmosphere, or some other type of fluid.

Cole put all his weight into the controls. He couldn’t remember the simulator ever getting this stiff, even when they practiced pulling out of full dives. He hoped that was a mechanical limitation of the simulator and not a testament to what he was up against.

Wearing a D-Band? That doesn’t make any—wait…

A new alarm joined the chorus: a soprano performing some mad aria. Cole tried to navigate the sounds with his eyes clenched tight, his arm straining for lift. He found one voice he knew and reached over, closing the glass cover shielding the hyperdrive switch. The gravity alert went away. He concentrated, then recognized the high-pitched tune. It was the proximity alarm. They were on a collision course with something.

Something big .

What is it?

Cole wondered what it was. He pulled back into full neutral, gliding down with gravity. It was impossible to tell how much the nose had risen, but instead of just being pressed back into the seat, he could now feel the pain of his spine being compressed. Some of the Firehawk’s directional energy was being deflected as the ship pulled up. The pain became a clue, sense becoming sensor. He just needed to increase this discomfort, or it’d be the last thing he ever felt.

I’m getting something…

He stopped fighting the urge to see now that he was getting something from his aching spine. It was clear his seared vision wasn’t going to come back in time. He gave into his lids, allowing them to clench as tight as they liked. More tears squeezed out, streaking back into his ears. With his left hand, Cole reached across his body and grabbed the docking controls. His torso screamed with the pain of holding himself against so many gravities. Still pulling back to lift the nose, Cole flipped the maneuvering thrusters on and used them to rotate the ship back. A continuous blast of waste air shot out of a nozzle in the nose of the Firehawk, attempting to spin the ship in space, assisting the flaps on the back of the wings.

Cole’s legs went numb from the pain in his spine, which he took as an indicator that the maneuver was working.

What is it, Dad?

The collision alarm moved down to a tenor. They were still going to hit, but not as soon and not as fast. Cole needed to focus on that one sound, but another beeping fought for his attention: the navigational alarm.