The wing of a spinning Firehawk caught Parsona’s belly, shuddering the entire ship and sending out a deafening clank of metal on metal. One of the pilots squeezed up beside her and fumbled for the controls to close the cargo hatch. He then clutched the dashboard, knuckles white, as the danger passed beneath with a sickening shriek.
Even with the ship sealed shut, and dozens of people screaming in fear, Molly could hear the explosion of plasteel crashing against the wall of the hangar bay, the small fleet of ruined craft completing their plummet with a mix of squeals and bangs.
In the distance—at the other end of the cavernous space—a square of blue sky beckoned, urging them to safety.
Molly raced for it, eager to oblige.
39
Cole toweled off his face and nodded as Arthur gave him some final pointers. By the end of their two-hour session, he had finally scored some deflections on Penny, who seemed equal parts annoyed and impressed by the accomplishment. Arthur was setting up a time for practice the following day, when Mortimor entered the train-ing room.
“Might have to reschedule that,” he said, interrupting their discussion.
“More people to meet?” Cole asked.
“You could say that. Or you could call it a field exercise. We’re plan-ning another raid for tomorrow—”
Arthur shook his head. “No can do, buddy. We’ve got one batch of fuel growing—it’ll be a few days before it doubles.”
“We’re going to use most of it. We have no choice.”
“More than half? But then it’ll be a week before we get production back up.”
“We don’t have a week—”
“What are you guys talking about?” Cole asked.
The two men looked at each other. Arthur raised his eyebrows plead-ingly. Mortimor hesitated, then shrugged.
“You said earlier that you knew what fusion fuel was,” Arthur said.
“Yeah, a microorganism, right?” He tried to remember what Byrne had told him.
“Yeah, well, we breed them. Just like the Navy does, but our own variety.” Arthur frowned. “The problem is, it takes quite a bit of time—”
“Time we don’t have,” Mortimor said. “Quite a few ships from the Bern fleet have already jumped out, and something massive popped into hyperspace last night and went through the rift as well. The thing was the size of a small moonlet. Our informant says Byrne flew the coop along with the craft, which means it might already be too late.”
“Too late for what?” Cole asked.
Mortimor turned to Cole. “These Bern are invading the Milky Way. If we can’t stop them, or close that rift, they’ll extinguish every piece of sentient life they find there. Some of the people you see roaming these hallways are all that survived entire other galaxies. Unless we do something, we might be all that’s left of ours.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding.” Cole looked to Arthur, as if he would tell him it was all a joke.
Arthur shook his head. “The frustrating bit is that the rift is right there in that fleet somewhere, but we have no way of getting to it in order to close it.”
“Wouldn’t they just open another one, even if we did?”
Mortimor frowned. “Not from this side, they couldn’t. What kills me is that we are the ones who opened the rift.” He took a deep breath. “Over a decade ago, we opened a hole between Lok and hyperspace—”
“Well, not we, exactly,” Arthur said.
“Right.” Mortimor nodded. “The Drenard underground did, not too long before I became a member. They opened two rifts, both leading to hyperspace, one from our central part of the cone and another in the wide part, where the rain freezes.”
He frowned. “It was a backdoor plan, a way to pull what they hoped would be a final raid, ending the deadlock here. They moved an entire army through in a single day. I was there for that part. My wife and I were staying in a house not long after Molly was born. An entire battalion came through one wall and disappeared into another. And then—”
Mortimor fell silent; Arthur shook his head, as if in empathy.
“And then what?” Cole asked.
“It’s history,” Mortimor said. He waved his hand, as if to brush away some lingering and awful memory. “The point is, when we—when they, the Underground, realized their attack had failed, they sealed the rifts, thinking that would be the end of it.”
“Obviously not,” said Cole.
“Yeah, well Ryke furthered his research from here and he realized these holes could be reopened from the other side—and with a normal hyperdrive, no less. To put it mildly, we got worried. Especially when we realized my wife, Parsona, had overhead enough in her fevered state to maybe put everything together—”
“When I found out about her,” Arthur interrupted, “I explained how my memory retrieval system worked. There’s the potential for total recall, even if it’s implemented in a manner to simulate forgetfulness.”
“And that’s when we figured out how the Prophecy was going to take place,” Mortimor said. “It explained the significance of Lok, at least. What we needed was our rift opened, the one near our headquarters, but Joshua and his men somehow beat us to it.”
“So now what?” Cole asked. “They’re invading Lok as we speak? That’s what those black ships were? And that’s where Molly is right now?”
“Yes. To all but the last, which I can’t know. I hope she’s a long way from whatever’s going on out there.”
“Well, why don’t we just fly through the rift and close it from the other side? You guys have ships, right?”
“Not really. Most of them don’t survive coming here, not if they aren’t adequately equipped beforehand. The ones that do usually end up in the snow, carried back into the cold and distant past. Besides, we wouldn’t last a second against that fleet. They probably don’t even see us as a threat. We’re just a bunch of freedom fighters camped out in the rains.”
“And Joshua’s men? What do they have to do with this?”
“Well, they’ve been here a long time,” Arthur said, “but their numbers really swelled when the war in Darrin popped up. Everyone jumping into that system met the asteroid fields and ended up here. Most of those characters fell in with Joshua’s men, being a better match for their sick philosophy.”
“Yeah, but why are they doing this?” Cole asked. “Why help the Bern invade our galaxy?”
“They’ve turned their anti-tech fanaticism into racism, even to the point of self-loathing,” Arthur said.
“They see the Bern as perfect examples of themselves,” Mortimor added. “They think by helping them, they’ll expunge whatever it is that makes us different. They want whatever universe the Bern are concocting. Homogeneity is their goal. They’ve gone from hating everything humanity makes to hating humanity itself.”
“So the plan is to put on some snow camouflage and jump over there with our swords? Duke it out with these guys and try and close the rift?”
“Not you,” Arthur said. “We’re gonna teach you to drive a hyper-skimmer so you can help pick up raiders after the attack. Everyone’s getting shuffled around after our casualties from the last raid.”
Mortimor narrowed his eyes and fixed them on Cole. “You think you’ve got a better idea, don’t you? Listen, there’s a lot you don’t under-stand about this place. Navy tactics are useless, here. For one thing, we can’t see this rift unless we’re right on top of it. SADAR is pretty much blind with all the rain and snow. The best we can do is measure the overall size of their fleet and tell it’s shrinking. So, if you think you’ve got a better plan—”
“A better plan? Hell yeah I’ve got a better plan. Screw jumping back to that village of theirs, let’s jump on some of the Bern ships before they leave. We can close the rift from the other side, even without our own ships!”
Mortimor and Arthur looked at each other. Arthur started laughing first, Mortimor doing a better job of stifling it. “Just jump blind into a ship?” Arthur asked. “Son, what makes you think you’d hit open space? Look, this isn’t like jumping through hyperspace, we’re in it!”
“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.
40
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 wrap-ping 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.
ѻѻѻѻ
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.