Urg nodded. He grabbed the portable radio from the top of a duffle and stomped off.
“Make some noise if you find anything!” Scottie yelled after him.
Molly waited for Walter to get the last knot out before attaching one end of the hose to the cutting tank. The dial showed a quarter-full, more than enough. She couldn’t believe they had found a single survivor, much less the dozen or so cuts it would need to deplete the tank.
“I’m ready,” she told Scottie, jerking her head up at the wing above.
He stood directly under it and formed a basket with his hands. Molly draped the hose around her neck and reached up for his shoulders as she put her weight in his palms. She could feel the muscles around his neck harden as he lifted her up effortlessly, high over his head.
“Whoa!” Molly reached up and grabbed the lip, steadying herself as Scottie practically tossed her on top of the wing. She stayed on all fours and turned around. “Nice and easy, big guy.”
Scottie smiled sheepishly as Molly took the loop of hose from her neck and pulled the cutting torch up. Behind her, she could hear the faint sounds of someone knocking, the thump of a boot against thick carboglass.
It took several tries with the sparker before the torch lit, the flint inside worn nearly smooth after so many years of use. When it finally caught, there was a loud pop as the excess gas exploded, followed by the purposeful hiss and blue flame of pressurized fuel burning upon release.
Molly twisted the dial on the side and concentrated on the shape of the white teardrop in the middle of the blue flame. Once it looked perfect for cutting plasteel, she locked the valve and slapped the carboglass several times with her palm. She waited for the noise within to stop, the dark form pulling away from the hazed glass. The entire canopy was so finely cracked, she couldn’t see inside, even from a meter away.
She studied the shape of the cockpit for a moment, determining the best and safest place to cut. One entire lip of the canopy was twisted out of shape, preventing it from sliding back and trapping the person inside. Looking at the way the Firehawks around her were warped out of shape, she couldn’t believe a human being could survive whatever had happened. She bent down and worked the flame over the lip of the side porthole, squinting at the bright light of plasma as she gradually cut a circle out of the hull.
The entire section of frame fell inside the cockpit as the last of the cut was made. Molly killed the torch and bent down near the hole. “Keep back for a sec!” she yelled. She opened one of the water bottles and doused the edges of the plasteel, which popped and hissed violently but lost their red glow.
Two gloved hands emerged. They grabbed the jagged lip, and a helmet followed. Molly realized at once how the pilot had survived the crash: his lifesupport umbilical was still jacked in by his armpit, catching on the edge of cut steel. She reached down and popped it loose as the man fell out of the hole and onto the wing of the lower Firehawk. He kicked at the surface with his heels, scrambling backward and fumbling with his helmet.
“What’s going on up there?” Scottie yelled from below.
Molly ignored Scottie’s shouts. “Hold still,” she told the pilot. She grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him down before reaching for the clasps on his helmet. The dome popped off, revealing a young spaceman with sweat-matted hair and eyes wide with fear.
“It’s okay. Calm down.” Molly looked him over for signs of injury. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Higgins. Private Higgins,” he said. “Deck maintenance, third shift. I—” his eyes focused on something beyond Molly. “Where’re the others?” he asked.
“Keep calm.” Molly handed him a bottle of water from the medkit. “You were smart to get plugged in,” she told him.
Higgins took a long swig from the bottle, wiped his chin, then looked down at his flightsuit. “Jonesy,” he said, rubbing his fingers over the name patch. “He told me to do it. Gave me one of his extra flightsuits. I think he knew we were going down before we even got hit. He ran off for the Admiral, I think he was trying to save the old man—”
“Saunders?” Molly asked.
Higgins nodded. “Yeah.” He stopped and looked up at Molly. “Are you a part of some kinda rescue operation?”
“I— Not really. There might not be anyone else to rescue,” she said.
“Everything okay up there?”
Molly went to the edge of the wing and looked over. “A scared mechanic. He jacked into the life support. The anti-grav suit kept him alive. Gimme a sec with him so he’ll be okay to climb down—”
Loud banging echoed down the line of ships, cutting her off. Scottie and Cat turned and looked toward the sound; Molly followed their gazes. In the distance, she could see Urg waving his arms and pointing up to another Firehawk.
“Pants on fire,” Cat whispered. “I think we have more survivors.”
There were eight of them in all. Five pilots, two navigators, and Higgins. The two paired-up crew members had been on deck, ready for lift-off, when the grav panels failed. Everyone’s story was the same and equally awful: they had held tight in abject terror while the ships were flung from one side of the hangar to the other, everyone fearful their Firehawk would rattle out the open hangar doors, or they would lose life support.
Certainly, some others had.
None of the Gs suffered had been too much for the flightsuits, and everyone seemed fit, if dehydrated and terrified. Molly and her little rescue crew stayed so busy crawling across the wreckage, cutting people out and getting them food and water, that she hardly noticed the odd dynamic forming. Pilots—some of them twice her age—were looking to her and her friends as if they were in charge.
While Urg continued to search for anyone left alive in the tangled mess—refusing to give up even when it seemed unlikely there were any more—Molly and the others sat with the crewmen, trying to console them. They all had a defeated, dazed look, almost like animals after a near-drowning.
Molly peeled the wrapper off a protein bar and handed it to one of the pilots. His eyes were unblinking, wide and wet.
“It was the Drenards, wasn’t it?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “No. It’s something worse. Now listen, we need to figure out—”
“What’s worse than Drenards?” someone else asked.
“Is it the Tchung?”
“It’s not the Tchung,” Molly said.
“Gotta be the Dremards. I heard they were coming out of their arm of the Milky Way for the first time. They attacked Rigel!”
Molly held up her hands. “It’s not Drenards—”
“What then? Did you see them? What was it?”
“Listen,” she said. “The first thing we need to do is help the rest of the crew. See if any of the staff survived. Then we can—”
“Survived?” Higgins squeaked. “Nobody but us survived! How could they? There was almost ten thousand people on this ship, and now there’s eight!” He looked at his palms. “Darlene,” he said, then started sobbing, covering his face with his hands.
Molly rose and went to him. She wrapped her arm around his shoulders and looked to the others. “We’ll mourn when we can and for as long as they deserve, but right now we need to—”
“We need to get off this ship!” someone said.
“And we will,” Molly told them. “We will. But first, we need to see if anyone else survived. According to Higgins, here, one of the pilots went off to help the senior staff—”
“They’re dead!” one of the pilots said. “C’mon, the only safe place in this bucket was to be rattling around in one of our little tin cans.”
“That’s not true,” Molly said. “There’s one other place we need to check. Just in case.”
One of the pilots—Roberts, according to his name patch—met her with a solid look. His eyes were aware, vibrant, not as red as the others.
“Where’s that?” he asked.
“The simulator room,” Molly said.
They left the survivors behind with Urg, who insisted on continuing his search for life among the debris. Several of the pilots suggested they come along and help, but Molly stood firm, pretending to be looking out for their well-being. In reality, she didn’t want to get bogged down if they came across bodies of people they knew, forcing her to tend to their nerves instead of potential survivors. Also—and she hated to admit it—she didn’t want to get outnumbered if any of them found out who she was. According to the report she’d found in the Navy database, she and her ship were the highest of high-priority targets. And now they were back on the same damned Navy StarCarrier she had once escaped from.
She swiped one of the pilot’s badges through a door reader and let Walter go through first. He led the way with his computer, the schematics for the ship pulled up from his last hack of the place. Molly looked at the badge in her hand, the one that had opened the door, and wondered if the gesture had even been necessary.
They made haste down the hallway that led to the stairwells, not trusting the elevator shaft after a crash landing; it could easily be just as twisted as the Firehawks. They each carried biotubes from one of the pilot’s survival kits, and Cat had a flashlight, just in case.
Inside the landing of the stairwell, they came across their first bodies, barely recognizable as such. Not welded down like everything else aboard the ship, they had been flung all over the stairwell when the grav panels had temporarily failed. They left behind not much more than smears of red wetness on the walls and on the underside of the rising flight of steps. Flightsuits lay scattered in lumpy reminders of what the mess had originated from.
Molly tried to focus into the distance as she stepped gently through the slick, chunk-filled puddles. She gripped the railing to the side. When her hand went into something wet, she had to stifle her gag reflex and fight to remain in control of her senses. She led the way down the steps, two flights, both of which were covered with and reeking of human remains.
Behind her, Scottie coughed into his hand. Molly reached back and clutched Walter’s sleeve, helping steady both of them, physically and emotionally. She scanned open the door on the crew deck and waved them through, each of them pale and holding their breath. All except for Walter, who didn’t seem fazed; his attention was firmly locked onto his computer.
“This way,” he said calmly.
Scottie leaned against the bulkhead, his head bowed down. “We’re gonna have to find a different way back,” he said. “I’ve seen some flanked-up shit in my day, but nothing like that.”
“They were probably told to—” Molly fought hard to swallow, “—told to get in the stairwell. Like an emergency drill. Either that, or everyone thought of the suits in the hangar and got backed up trying to get there.” She grabbed Scottie’s arm and led him after Walter, who was waiting at the next turn.
“I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to be in there,” Cat said.
The words popped a visual in Molly’s mind: the tight confines, packed and rattling with dozens and dozens of Gs. It would’ve been awful.
“We’re not gonna find anybody down here,” Scottie complained. “I’m thinking we should head back.”
“It’s just around the corner,” Molly assured him. Walter had shown her schematics of the carrier; the sim room and the hangar were situated above and below the pilot’s quarters, as if to reduce their foot travel.
Walter ran ahead, leading the way to the simulator room. The smell of blood and oil seemed to permeate the lower decks as fluids leaked out of broken things. Molly fought to ignore the occasional body they went by. Even the sight of a bag of laundry, open and disgorging crumpled Navy blacks, filled her with sorrow. What was left of the person who had been rushing off to wash those? she wondered.
As they caught up to Walter and neared the simulator room, Molly realized Scottie had been right. They weren’t going to find anyone alive down there. If someone had survived in a simulator pod, they would surely be running up and down the decks by now, looking to rescue others or trying to flee the ship.
Expecting to find the room intact, the pods empty or full of more horror, Molly stepped inside with her hopes low—when she should’ve been concentrating on keeping her defenses up.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of crewmen had been packed in the simulator room—it was impossible to tell exactly how many. Their bodies formed a wall of gruesome death on the far side of the room, stacked up in a scene eerily reminiscent of the Firehawks piled high in the hangar. Jumbled up, mounded like a snowdrift, they formed a slope of tangled forms, their individual parts woven together and indistinguishable.
The marks their flying bodies had made spotted the room, dotting the pods, the floor, even the ceiling with bright marks of crimson. Molly caught herself on the doorjamb and tried to wave away the others be-fore they joined her. The sound of Scottie gagging behind her let her know she’d been too late.
“Flank me,” Cat said. “They were all thinkin’ the same thing.”
“Let’s go,” Molly told them. She pushed her way past her friends and back into the hallway, which suddenly seemed positively laden with fresh air. She tried not to think about what those people had gone through, what their last moments had been like. The crowded panic, the fearful silence, and then . . . the horrible rattling and crushing.
“Ssomethingss knocking,” Walter said from the room.
“I think that’s my knees,” Scottie said. “I don’t feel so good.”