Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

37

Cole held the wooden sword with his right hand and twirled it in the air. It made a satisfying, swooshing sound. Arthur frowned at him.

“More wrist,” he said. “You don’t have a new shoulder, so the power has to come from your elbow and wrist.”

“Why not just give me a new shoulder?” Cole asked, smiling.

“Because it’s expensive and parts are hard to come by. But more importantly, where would you want me to stop? Replace everything from the neck down? At what point would you quit feeling like you?”

“Maybe everything from the neck up would be better,” someone said.

Cole turned to the voice—

It was the girl with the red hair. She had on one of the same training suits he’d been given, her bright locks up in a tight bun and a wooden sword in her hand.

“Have you two officially met?” Arthur asked.

“That’s a good question,” Cole said. He stepped forward and extended his hand. “Have we?”

“Penny,” the girl said, grabbing his hand and squeezing it. Hard.

Cole tried to pull away, but she had an iron grip.

“I don’t think we have,” she said, smiling. “Not officially.”

Arthur clapped his hands together. “Okay, you two square off. Just the basics today. Bear with me, Penny, and go easy on the lad.”

“I will,” she said, winking at Cole and freeing his hand.

He looked down at it and flexed his artificial fingers, marveling at the pain interface.

Arthur turned to Cole. “Any fencing at the Academy?”

“Two semesters,” he said proudly.

“Aw, hell,” Arthur said. “Well, do me a favor and forget all that nonsense. Buckblades aren’t swords.”

“Buckblades? The invisible things?”

“That’s right.” Arthur stepped over and adjusted Cole’s grip on the handle. “Buckminster Fuller came up with the design hundreds of years ago. Well, sorta.” He ran his hand down the wooden approximation of a blade while he talked. “It’s a single matrix of carbon laced with iron, neodymium, and cobalt. Extremely ferromagnetic, okay? Super sharp. But the trick is in the blade’s handle, that’s where the electromagnetic field is created that spools the wire out and keeps it stiff. The blade’ll cut through damn near anything.”

“Even each other?”

“Sharp kid,” Arthur said, looking at Penny and jabbing a thumb his way. She shrugged and twirled her stick in a graceful pattern, so fast Cole could hear the air screaming in protest as it tried to move out of the way.

“No, not each other. Buckblades have orthogonal magnetic charges, otherwise they’d fly out of your hand and stick to something metal, get it?”

“Orthogonal?” Cole asked. “Is that positive or negative?”

“Neither. There’s two other kinds of magnetic fields, monopoles that can be harvested here in hyperspace. All Buckblades have the same charge, so it’s almost impossible to get them together, much less cut through one another.”

“They fly away from each other? Why not make some of them with the opposite charge, then?”

Cole tried to mimic the pattern Penny was making, which made her laugh.

“You just lost your clever points, son. Now I have to assume you got lucky before.”

“What do you think would happen?” Penny asked, taunting him.

“They’d stick together?”

“That’s putting it mildly, now pay attention. When someone swings at you, you can’t get hit. Not even a little, okay?”

“I think he’s learned that lesson,” Penny said. She darted forward and smacked the back of his right hand with her sword.

Cole dropped his weapon and shook his hand, glaring at her.

“Good point, Penny. Now, Cole, keep a firm grip on your sword.” Arthur bent down, picked it up, and handed it back to him. “Don’t crush the thing, but try not to drop it.”

“Why’d you make the thing feel pain?” Cole asked, rubbing his hand.

“Same reason God made the other one that way. So you’d take care of it. Now listen, you don’t want to get hit. Not once. And you can’t really block your opponent’s attacks, they’ll just repulse each other—”

“How does this work, then? He who swings first, wins?”

“The other way around, usually. See the slits on your sword?”

Cole inspected the wooden blade. There were deep cracks running down the length of the thing. He nodded.

“When you swing the practice swords at each other, internal sensors calculate where they would be repulsed to. Lights in the blade shine out and your suit picks them up—”

“Oh, so it’s like a game of billiards. It’s all about the bank shots.”

“Okay, another clever point for you. Now, most fights end with someone’s own sword coming back and hitting them. With the right block and a forceful enough stance, you can send most attacks back where they came from. Think of your sword more as a shield. It’s your opponent’s sword that’s your real weapon, and your sword is theirs. Get it? So learn to fear what you’re holding and figure out how to attack with what their wielding. Now, Penny will show you the basic attack angles—the safest ones. They aren’t what you’d think, so pay attention and unlearn your fencing.”

Cole nodded and tried to take the same stance as Penny: feet apart, shoulders square, pretty much the exact posture that would’ve gotten him a beating from Lieutenant Eckers, his old fencing instructor.

“The power is from side to side,” Penny told him. “It’s in your hips.” She moved hers back and forth while Cole watched.

“You’re supposed to try it too,” she said, reaching out and smacking his sword.

“Oh, yeah.” He moved his hips side to side, swinging the wooden stick just like she did.

“It’s a lot like a judo throw, or a good roundhouse. If you don’t get your whole body in on it, you won’t go far.”

“Gotcha,” Cole said, trying to ignore the way her suit hugged her body.

“Give me your best shot.”

Cole’s feet shuffled automatically, trying to get back into a proper fencing stance. Penny lashed out with her sword, which he instinctively blocked. Solidly. The wooden shafts smacked together with a satisfying crack.

Both thighs on his suit lit up, showing him where he would’ve lost them.

“You’ve got no power like that,” Penny said, tapping his hip with her sword. “This isn’t a contest where you score points and gab with your opponent about whose mother smells worse.” She rapped his sword with hers, then tapped him in the stomach. “There’s nothing noble or fun about this, okay? It’s one swing and you’re dead. There isn’t anything heroic about it, and nothing fun or pleasant, even for the winner.”

Cole nodded, resuming his square-on stance. “Have you been in real fights with these?”

“Do I sound like I’m reading from a textbook? Trust me, it isn’t pretty.”

“I’ve seen what they can do,” Cole told her.

“It’s different when you’re the one doing it. Now, there are three major angles you need to learn and two sub angles—they’re your safest attacks and the hardest to parry. Forget thrusts altogether, okay?”

Cole nodded as she began the first lesson; he tried his best to absorb it all. He also tried to watch her hips only when she told him to. Finally, he tried his damnedest to pretend that Arthur—standing to one side and offering suggestions—was Molly. Watching him. Reading his mind with a D-band. Forcing him to stifle his thoughts.

It helped him to imagine Penny was someone else. Anyone but the flaming girl from his strange dream. And finally, as they began to spar, their swords clashing while they discussed angles of deflection, he tried his damnedest to ignore her red hair. He pretended instead that Penny was a blonde.

The one who had taken his arm.

38

“Move swift, but stay calm,” Molly told everyone, as the survivors marched past in a black column of Navy flightsuits. They jogged, but refrained from pushing on one another. Their brains may have checked out, but the military training remained, coming back thanks to the hint of danger—the fear propelling them forward. Ahead, Scottie stood by the door to the stairwell, waving the crewmen through.

When a logjam forced everyone to a halt, Molly fought her way through to the stairwell where she found several people on the ground, sliding in the spilt blood and gore.

“Grab the rails!” she told them. “Help each other up! C’mon, let’s go!”

Back in the hallway, someone screamed, and it soon turned into a chorus of frightened shouts. Molly stuck her head back into the hallway and saw—in the distance—bodies dripping out the door of the simulator room.

The panels were failing in sequence.

Pure terror coursed up through Molly’s body. She expected, at any minute, the gravity holding her to the deck would simply vanish. She imagined the ship as she’d seen it from outside, its thrusters up in the clouds. The visual gave her vertigo. She realized, suddenly, that she was standing on the face of a cliff. The thought made her feel faint; people began pushing past her, scrambling up the slick steps, some of them on all-fours.

Molly found herself swimming amongst them, pulling herself ahead, racing up wet steps and over bodies alive and otherwise. The fear was gone, replaced with a keen awareness of what could happen next.

She needed to get to Parsona, and fast.

At the top of the stairs, she came across Cat, who was helping people up and through the door. The entire front of her was smeared with blood; Molly looked down and realized she was covered in it as well.

“I have to get to the ship. Get everyone to me as fast as you can!”

“Will do!” Cat yelled as she helped another person up. The two of them locked eyes, and Molly saw none of her own panic and fear in the Callite’s eyes. If anything, they sparkled with life.

Molly turned away and bolted through the door. She ran at a full sprint down the hallway, urging the stumbling survivors on as she passed them. She yelled for them to get to the hangar bay and into her ship. As she ran ahead, she tried to picture the layout of the StarCarrier to figure out which direction the panels were failing. She wondered whether she was heading toward the problem panels or away from them.

Away, she finally decided. Otherwise she would probably have already met them.

She skidded through the open door halfway down the hall and burst into the hangar; she slipped, fell, then scrambled back to her feet. “Get to the ship!” she yelled to Urg, who was still ranging up and down the line of Firehawks in the distance, looking for survivors. She didn’t see the other pilots at first, but saw movement inside Parsona. She pictured the number of upright people she could cram in its hull as she sprinted toward her ship and past the staggering survivors who had reached the hangar ahead of her.

“What in hyperspace?” one of the pilots asked as she stomped into the cargo bay. Molly imagined how she must look to them, all covered in blood. She thought about what they were in store for.

“Get ready to help,” she told them. She flipped the thrusters on and looked through the carboglass at the line of survivors spilling out the door. “There’re bottles of water in the cabinet above the fridge. We’re gonna need to pack people into every corner of the ship, even the lazarrette and cargo holds. Get them open. And grab that med kit over the sink, just in case.”

Several of the pilots went to work, their focus galvanized by her tone. Higgins leaned over the control console. “What can I do?” he asked, jumping back as the Wadi took its place on Molly’s shoulders.

“Help the others,” she said. “Actually, get out there and yell at Urg to get a move on.” She looked up. “There’s no time to find any more—”

She stopped and sucked in her breath. Urg was sliding across the steel decking, toward Parsona, followed by a wall of tumbling, ruined starships.

He came to a sudden stop before reaching the door the survivors were streaming through. Molly held her breath; she watched him glance over his shoulder at the pile of plasteel and carboglass heading his way. The long queue of surviving crewmen filing out of the hallway door ducked and turned at the sound of it all; some of them covered their heads with their arms. Molly could see Walter among them, tugging on someone in black, urging them toward the ship.

She looked back toward Urg, but he had disappeared under the line of sliding debris. Gone. The end of his life missed behind her blinking eyelids. The entire tangle of ships had come to rest in a long line, signifying the temporary boundary between failed panel and good.

Several more survivors staggered through the door in the distance as the first of the crewmembers stomped into Parsona. Molly could hear some of the pilots directing them aft and urging them to take water. She saw Cat in the distance, helping someone along who seemed to be limping, their front solid red.

The dune of debris behind them shifted once again. One of the Fire-hawks flipped over on its side. Cat and the crewman left their feet, sliding ahead of the ships and across the deck, everything falling toward Parsona.

Cat popped to her feet as soon as she came to a halt at the next line of functioning grav plates. Molly saw her look back over her shoulder at the man she’d been escorting, but she seemed to know better than to struggle with him. She dove forward as the rolling crush of taxpayer dollars ground to a halt right behind her, smashing the crewmember flat.

Molly silently begged Cat forward as she feathered the thrusters. They were warm enough for lift, but not much more. She aligned the ducts ahead of time and looked over her shoulder to see how things were going in the cargo bay.

The staterooms must’ve already been packed—the hallway had filled up, and people were crammed together up to the galley. The last large crush of survivors could be heard working their way inside—only Cat and a few stragglers remained.

That’s when the struggling grav system gave up the ghost—the last of the panels giving away completely. Molly felt it shudder through Parsona before she saw the effects outside. She could hear the screeching of the ship’s landing pads as they scraped across the deck, could see the walls outside shift forward as Parsona slid back along the hangar floor. Beyond the wall of tangled Navy ships, she could see through the top of the StarCarrier’s airlock door to the bright, blue Lokian sky beyond.

The view disappeared as the jumbled mess of Firehawks ground forward, chasing after Parsona. Between the two, Cat and a few other crewmen slid on their backs, their screams deadened by the roar of all else. Everything was in free-fall, like all the players had been tossed over a cliff.

Molly pulled Parsona up to stop her slide backward. She retracted the landing gear to get it out of the way, but left the cargo hatch open. Behind her, passengers were screaming. She glanced at the chase cam and saw several forms falling away behind, people that had not quite made it to the loading ramp.

There was nothing she could do for them. She wasn’t even sure she could save the rest. The thrusters were still warming up, barely managing the vast weight onboard, the turbines wailing in complaint. Molly fought to hold the ship steady; she watched as Cat and the others slid across the deck ahead of the tumbling crush of ships.

“Get ready back there!” she yelled over her shoulder. Feathering the thrust a little more, she turned the ship sideways, watching everything through the nav porthole. She held the lip of the cargo ramp to the deck as she backed up—lining it up with the crewmen sliding ahead of Cat. Behind them, the rolling mass of Firehawks seemed to be gaining.

The crewmen disappeared from sight as they got close. Molly could hear grunts and yells behind her, along with the satisfying thud of heavy objects impacting the lowered ramp, all sounds that hinted at Cat and the other crewmen having been scooped up. Someone shouted for her to go—but she already was. She fired the thrusters up and back as she fell away from the onrush of twisted, roaring steel, doing everything she could to lift the struggling ship above it.

A collision warning sounded out as she approached the solid wall at the back of the hangar—at the bottom of the hangar now that Lok’s gravity was in charge. Molly adjusted the thruster vents and punched the accelerator to full, shooting Parsona above the lowest section of the mound of moving debris.

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 training 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 planning 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 pleadingly. 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 understand 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 wrapping 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.

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.

She approached Cat, who was spreading some of the blankets from Parsona’s crew bunks out across the forest floor. She touched her shoulder and Cat turned. The two women frowned at each other, eyes glazed over with tears. They hugged, the power in Cat’s arms squeezing out some of the painful stress in Molly’s back. The touch of another, even as the embrace with Walter had shown, gave her hope that she could get over the things she’d seen, could summit the awfulness and perhaps rappel safely down the other side.

“You did good, kiddo,” Cat whispered.

They separated and Molly looked away, rubbing at the bottom of her eyes.

“Where’s Scottie?” Molly asked. “Is he doing okay? Urg—I’m the one who told him to keep looking for—”

“Stop that.” Cat turned her around and held Molly’s shoulders. “Don’t do that. He was doing what he had to. There’s bad luck involved, you’ve gotta remember that.”

Molly nodded, but only to last thing Cat said. She bent over and grabbed two of the blanket’s corners and helped spread it out over the dried leaves and broken twigs. Several crewmen immediately helped others sit down, each of them cradling a cup, bottle, or a mug of water. One of the crewmen—an older woman Molly remembered from the simulator room—tugged on Molly’s elbow and pointed over to a cluster of seated figures.

“The Admiral wants to see you,” the lady said.

Molly turned to Cat. “Be loose with the water. I’ll make a run into Bekkie tonight and top up the tank and load up with food. Don’t let anyone set up camp too close to the thruster wash.”

Cat nodded and gave her arm a squeeze.

Molly took a deep breath and marched over to the small circle where Saunders seemed to be conferring with a group of higher-ups. They fell silent as she approached, their wrinkled eyes swiveling around to watch her. She felt ridiculous standing there, on display, so she sank down to the blanket, and everyone adjusted to make room.

“Admiral.” She gave him a somber look, which took little effort given how she felt.

Saunders glanced around at the others, almost as if on the verge of dismissing them. The gray gentleman—the one from the hallway of the StarCarrier—looked at her warmly, the corners of his mouth curling up.

After an uncomfortable moment, Saunders extended his hand to Molly. She gave it a long look, then grasped it with her own.

“This isn’t a pardon, not by any stretch. It’s just a thanks. We’ll deal with the rest after—”

“There won’t be an after,” she interrupted.

The small gathering tensed up at the breach of protocol, several of them moving to say something. Molly spread her hands, gesturing to the pathetic encampment forming throughout the clearing. “This is the after,” she said.

“Nonsense,” one of the staff members interjected. “We’ve knocked the Drenards back before, we’ll do it again!”

“These aren’t the Drenards.” Molly turned to take them all in.

“Not the Drenards?” Someone asked. “Do you have any idea what—?”

Saunders held up his hands. He looked past the group and toward the rest of the survivors. “Let’s stay calm,” he told everyone.

Molly followed his gaze. She saw dozens of faces pointing their direction from the blankets scattered across the forest floor. They were shocked faces, scared faces, watching and waiting. Her sense of being on display heightened even further.

“The Drenards began pushing out of their spiral arm a week ago,” Saunders said.

Molly turned back and saw he was addressing her.

“They’ve only hit frontier planets so far. Regan, Osis, a few others. As I told you before, and as you can now see, your parents chose unwisely to side with them.”

“Unwisely?” someone asked, winning a glare from the gray man beside Saunders.

Molly let out a sigh. She turned to take them all in. “Admiral. Everyone. These are not Drenards. I know for a fact. I—”

“How could you know?” one of the younger officers asked. “And why should we believe her anyway,” he asked the others. “You do know we came here to find you, right? None of this would’ve happened if it weren’t for you!”

Molly gaped at the young officer; his eyes flared with rage.

“Carlton, you’re dismissed.”

The young man turned to Saunders. “Sir, I’m sorry, it’s just that—”

“I said you’re dismissed, son. Go tend to the others.”

“Yes, sir.”

As soon as he’d gone, Molly turned to the Admiral. “Is that true? You came here because—it’s my fault that you—?”

Saunders waved her off. “Of course not. I mean—that this is your fault. The fleet’s defeat was mine. And don’t flatter yourself too much. One of the fleets had to check in on Lok. We hadn’t heard from them for over two weeks. I volunteered Zebra so we could pull double-duty, just in case you’d come home. We were expecting Drenard hostilities when we jumped in, just nothing like…”

He fell silent, and Molly shook her head.

“If they aren’t Drenards, what are they?” one of the officers asked. “Don’t tell me the Tchung are back from wherever they—”

“They’re called the Bern,” she whispered. “They’re coming from another galaxy—”

“Hogwash!”

“Silence,” Saunders told the group. “Go on,” he said to Molly.

She cleared her throat and glanced at the cup of water the gray man clutched in his thin fingers. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all.” He handed her the cup. “Captain Robinson, by the way.”

“Thank you,” Molly said, taking a gulp. She handed the cup back to him. “They call themselves the Bern, and they come from another galaxy. There’s a rift here on Lok. It’s what my parents uncovered. I think. Anyway, I know they were working to prevent this. The Drenards—”

Molly glanced over at Robinson, whose brow seemed knitted with worry.

“And the Drenards?” Saunders asked.

“The uh… the Drenards…”

“More water?” Robinson asked, extending the cup to her.

“Uh…” Molly looked to Saunders. She glanced once more at all the faces turned her way. “Sir? Can I have a word with you in private?”

Saunders leaned against Parsona’s workbench. He had his arms folded over and resting atop his belly while Molly fumbled around in one of the cabinets. She finally brought out a bundle wrapped in a towel.

“What’s going on?” Saunders asked her. “Anything you want to tell me, you can say in front of my staff.”

“That’s the thing,” Molly said. She stood up and placed the bundle on the workbench. “I don’t think I can. Hear me out, and I mean really hear me out, just let it sink in before you react. I think these people that attacked you—I think they’ve been trying to get here for a long time. There’s a rift on Lok they’re coming through, and another one somewhere in the Drenard arm. I’m pretty sure the Drenards have been guarding that rift, preventing anything from coming out of it.”

“A rift?”

“Yeah. I mean, I don’t know what to call it, I’m not a scientist, but I do know what they look like. I saw the first ships come out of the one here on Lok. Walter and I were hiding in the woods nearby, making sure the escape pod was secure, when—”

Saunders pointed up. “You saw these ships come out of a rift?”

“Yeah.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone? Didn’t contact the Navy?”

“Are you kidding? Everyone on Lok saw them. They’ve been flying overhead for weeks and gathering in orbit. It hasn’t been a secret. And then the big one came through, and everyone thought that one—”

“Wait, go back to the Drenards. Why the bloodshed if they’re supposedly protecting us?”

“I didn’t say they were protecting us, they’re protecting the entire galaxy. That’s why they never push the war past their arm. Why they just defend their territory.”

Saunders rubbed his face. “That’s nonsense. Why wouldn’t they just tell us? And your little theory falls apart now that they are pushing out and attacking our planets.”

Molly thought about that. “Maybe it’s because the Bern are attacking here,” she said. “Maybe they’re looking for the other rift, or something.”

It sounded horrible, even to her own ears, like Cole trying to rationalize one of his theories by fitting the data to his bias.

“The timing sure is strange,” Saunders admitted. “Unless this is just a two-pronged attack—”

“Look at this,” Molly said, picking up the bundle and unwrapping it. “And don’t be freaked out, it’s not human.”

He stepped back, despite the warning. Byrne’s arm looked extremely lifelike; the flesh hadn’t even discolored. Saunders took it and immediately looked at the interior, which was neatly cut and seemingly made of some alloy with a few bits of detail, like metal piping and wires.

“What is this?”

“It’s the arm of a Bern, but my—I know someone who thinks they might not all be like this, that most of them are flesh and blood, just like you and me.” She grabbed the towel from him, then looked around. “Where’s the other one?”

“You have two of these?”

“Somewhere. I—well, the rest of the guy is in hyperspace for all I know. And this is why I don’t feel comfortable telling your staff about everything, and also why the Drenards couldn’t tell us about the rift. The Bern look just like us. They’ve probably infiltrated our Navy, even our government. I mean, this might be the only reason that we keep attacking the Drenards.”

“Flank me.” Saunders set the arm on the workbench and staggered to the center of the cargo bay. He looked outside before turning back to Molly. His jowls were sagging, his mouth open. “It makes perfect sense.”

“It does?”

He pointed at the arm, crossed back over and picked it up. “You’ve seen one of them?”

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.

41

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.

Cole looked away, then he realized what they were working on: another wiring harness.

“Hey—” Cole said, standing up.

The duo reacted as if shots had been fired. They took off, running toward the double doors leading out of the workshop. Cole crawled out of the cage and gave chase. One of the workers shoved open the doors as the other man turned, his arm a blur. Something glinted in the fluorescent lights, twinkling as it spun through the air. Cole felt the impact on his chin before any of it fully registered. A loud crack reverberated through his skull. He fell to the ground, dazed, as an adjustable power wrench clanged to the floor beside him.

Cole tasted blood in his mouth, could feel the laceration along the inside of his lip like a swollen ridge of tenderness. He shook his head clear, grabbed the wrench, and scampered to his feet. Stumbling forward a few steps—his legs still resistant to keeping the rest of him upright—he shouldered open the workshop doors, one of which slammed into someone on the other side.

“What in the hell?”

Doctor Ryke came into view as the door snapped shut. His annoyed expression moved from the men running down the hallway to settle on Cole.

“You boys need to—”

“Stop them!” Cole yelled to the handful of aliens milling through the hallway. He brushed past Ryke and gave chase as the two Humans disappeared around a corner. Cole ran as fast as his wobbly legs could take him. He skidded around the corner, caroming off a spinning Mortimor, who looked even more annoyed than Ryke.

“Watch where you’re—”

“Sabotage!” Cole yelled, pointing. He tried to think of the word for the people committing the act, but his head was even less clear than his legs were sturdy. He pushed away from Mortimor and continued to run awkwardly, his arms windmilling, his grasp furious on the power wrench. Two aliens came out of a doorway, and Cole nearly plowed them over; he brushed against the hallway wall and took the next corner too fast, bouncing off an open door. He pounded his feet as fast as he could as the men ahead slowed to round another corner.

“Stop them!” he yelled once more, but the motley group ahead just turned from one curiosity to the other, everyone frozen by the spectacle of the footrace. Cole weaved through them, pushing aliens twice his size out of his way as he turned the next corner.

There was no sign of the men in the next hallway, but a smattering of gawkers turned from a closing door to look at him. Cole traced their bemused glares back to the door. He ran to it, pushed through, and found himself in a stairwell, could hear the rapid slap of descending feet below. He hurried down after, swallowing more blood as he slipped and slid down the steps.

He was a flight down when he heard a door slam shut, leaving the stairwell ringing with just his footfalls. The next landing was the last. Cole jumped past the last few steps and shoved his way through the door, suddenly remembering having come that way the day before. When he staggered into the skimmer garage, he wasn’t surprised. His trip to the Seer had begun and ended there. Nor was he surprised to see the hatch pulling shut on one of the vehicles, its engine whining as it slid down the ramp and toward the door, which led to the open, wet world beyond.

Cole hurled his wrench as hard as he could, a seemingly futile expression of his anger. It flew like a missile, his very hand making a whirring sound as it parted the air before him in a blur of augmented elbow. The momentum of his own limb threw him off balance, causing him to stagger forward as the wrench exploded through the rear of the hyperskimmer. The impact made a deafening crack, and the skimmer swerved to the side, crunching against the wall of the ramp as it continued to trundle along.

Cole stumbled ahead, regaining his balance as he ran past the other parked skimmers. He prepared himself to race down the ramp after the fleeing saboteurs—that’s what they were called—to chase them down and jump on the canopy if he had to. He was nearly to the top of the ramp when an alarm rang out and red lights began to flash, almost as if warning him of how bad an idea he’d just had. With a panicked stutter, Cole remembered what the alarms signified and cursed himself.

He looked around quickly for a locker or a storage bin as the alarm continued to blare, signaling the garage door was about to open. He squeezed between two of the parked skimmers, then caught a glimpse of a pair of goggles resting on the dash of the nearest skimmer, inside the closed canopy.

With a loud groan, the garage door at the bottom of the ramp began to open. Its chain ratcheted up with a staccato noise, letting in a harsh stream of unrelenting, blinding, photons.

Cole grimaced in pain at the brief exposure. He shut his eyes and folded the crook of his arm over his face. He’d only caught a glimpse of the light, but it was enough to spot the darkness behind his lids. Reaching to the side, he groped for the fender of the nearby skimmer and found it, then patted along the hull until he reached the canopy. Cole fumbled for the release. He felt it and pulled the lever as the departing skimmer whined high and roared out into hyperspace.

Picturing the location of the goggles behind his shut eyelids, Cole leaned far over the edge of the open canopy and brushed his hand across the dash, feeling for them. He hit them with the side of his hand and knocked them off and onto the floorboard. Cursing again, Cole stretched out and fumbled for them across the skimmer’s floor. Suddenly, his feet slipped off the deck and he went head-first into the passenger seat, landing awkwardly.

Cole kept his eyes squeezed tight as he untangled himself. He reached down by his feet and patted for the goggles. Finally, he found them. He brought the cups to his eyes as he righted himself in the skimmer’s seat. Working the rubber strap into place, Cole peered ahead for his quarry, but the other skimmer was gone. He looked to the door, wondering why someone wasn’t coming along to help, to give chase. Then he saw the pale glow of a red light flashing above the door. A door that would remain locked for safety reasons until the garage was shut tight against the photons.

“Damnit!” Cole looked to the skimmer dash, trying to recall which switch opened and closed the garage door. He traced his finger over the canopy release, remembered which one had operated the docking claws at the Seer’s cabin, saw the wiper knob, then came to the ignition switch.

Cole’s brain spun with more bad ideas, his poor judgment clicking along in defiance of the alarms and flashing lights. He thought about the time it would take to close and open the garage door, how long to explain what was going on, how much longer to organize pursuit. The idiotic plan hadn’t even made a full circuit through his boyish glands before his finger depressed the ignition switch, powering the grav cells in the rear of the skimmer. Cole keyed the canopy shut and adjusted himself in the seat, familiarizing himself with the control stick and taking the time to finally locate the garage door controls.

As soon as the canopy clicked into place, Cole pushed forward on the stick, jolting the sleek vehicle toward the ramp. The sudden burst of speed nearly made the back end of the skimmer whip around. Rather than let up and correct, he gave it even more juice and rocketed forward, the craft briefly leaving the deck as it raced over the edge of the ramp and down. Cole yelped. He dug one hand into the dash as he piloted with the other. He only barely remembered to hit the garage door controls as he raced out into the wet world and driving rain.

Sliding across the film of water outside, Cole’s skimmer kicked up low walls of spray as he scanned the horizon for his prey. Behind him, the metal door to the lumbering headquarters slammed shut, sealing out the light. Inside, alarms would be falling silent, the light above the door ceasing its steady flashes. Cole could imagine the stairwell door bursting open, an annoyed and confused group of freedom fighters stumbling through and wondering what in hyperspace was going on.

He tried not to think of that. It was too late to go back. He peered ahead at the spray from the other skimmer, standing out on the featureless landscape. It rose in a watery bloom and shivered against the ash-white sky, easy to pick out. Cole pushed forward on the control stick and raced off after it, two walls of water forming on either side of him as he gained speed.

As his craft moved up to the surface of the muddy water, the back end of his skimmer swayed side to side. Cole fought to keep it under control. The steering was much more sensitive to overcorrection than a Firehawk’s. The vehicle’s foils seemed to carve through the water like skis: biting, sliding, and weaving. Each movement begged for a countering one, and it took several moments before he figured out the timing, how to go with the flow rather than fight it. He found large, smooth motions worked better than the fast-twitch variety suited for spacecraft. As he gained some semblance of control, Cole looked up and saw he’d fallen off course. He veered to the side, lining up with the speeding skimmer in the distance. With the accelerator pinned, he chased off after it, steadily gaining.

As he got closer, he saw why he was able to catch up: trailing off the fleeing craft was a tight plume of gray smoke, his furious wrench toss obviously having hit something important. Cole activated the windshield wipers. Even though he traveled the same direction as the rain, his skimmer was going much faster, so the sideways droplets smacked the canopy as surely as if they were falling straight down.

Cole hardly breathed as he powered down the smooth wake created by the other skimmer. He pulled within a dozen meters, and still the wounded craft ahead maintained its unwavering course. Cole glanced over his shoulder at his own limited visibility. A wall of kicked-up water loomed to either side and a haze of spray occluded what little glass lay behind him. The vehicles were fast, but driven in near blindness. Only a narrow chute of visibility lay ahead, and even that was filled with nonstop rain.

Cole looked to the dash. An array of sensors, chart plotters, and readouts reminded him of the hyperskimmer’s primary function: to find body heat and pull people out of the snow. For all he knew, the things drove like a dream on the ice-covered portions of hyperspace for which they’d been designed. He matched the speed of the craft ahead and scanned the dash once more, wondering if there was anything he could use to stop them—perhaps a radio to alert HQ—but none of the controls were labeled, and he’d only seen a few used during his trip to see the Seer.

The Seer!

Cole looked over the switches again, finding the one he recognized. He focused on the tail of the other skimmer and powered his own craft forward, deep into the plume of gray smoke and the shower of watery spray. Piloting with one hand, Cole kept his other one poised on the switch while he visualized the maneuver. He took a few deep breaths before pulling to within a mere meter of the racing craft, the world outside disappearing in a wall of kicked-up and solid white foam. He had a brief moment of terror that the pilot ahead might suddenly slow down, but shook such thoughts aside.

Cole whipped out of the craft’s wake, moving into clear air and uncut water. He gave the skimmer everything it had, his shoulders pressing back into his chair as he jolted forward. Pulling up beside the other craft, Cole looked to the side, but saw nothing through the wall of water kicked up from the forward foil. He swerved that direction anyway, his finger on the switch tense with anticipation. As soon as he heard the crunch of metal-on-metal, he hit the button, sending the docking arms out through the wall of water. He heard another crunch as the grippers found something solid to bite into.

Cole pulled back on his throttle, powering his own skimmer down and hoping to bring the other craft to a halt. The locked ships veered to one side as the other craft, clearly wounded, tried to keep running. Cole corrected for the drag as the neighboring engine whined loudly in complaint. He could practically feel the vibrations as the other pilot attempted to flee, but the weight and power of his craft were far too much for it.

As their speed fell, the two ships sank deeper into the water, and the wall of spray between them fell like a dropped sheet. Cole peered through his canopy, expecting to see a shocked expression on the passenger’s face—a look of resigned defeat.

What he found instead, as the hydrofoils ceased kicking up so much spray, was an open canopy next to his own. One of the saboteurs knelt in his seat, leaning out over the side of his skimmer toward Cole. He had his hands up, as if holding something, but they looked perfectly empty.

It wasn’t until the man swung his arms down in a perfect angle two that Cole realized what he was holding.

42

After Molly helped Saunders recover from his collapse in the cargo bay, she watched him return to his inner circle to think about what she had divulged. She spent her time likewise, resting in her cabin and dwelling on the possibility that Lucin had been more than just a turncoat to her. Had he been a Bern as well? If so, what did that explain? When he said he meant to end the war, had he ever stated what side he imagined as the victor? Or even which war he meant?

She listened to the washer in the bathroom thud rhythmically as it attempted to get the blood out of a dozen flightsuits. It sounded like her ship had grown a pulse. It even had the double beat of one: thud-thud. Thud-thud.

If Lucin had been a traitor to them all, what a wonderful post for him to have infiltrated. He always said the Naval Academies on either side were the true front lines for any war, lines the enemy could never attack. But what didn’t make sense was how effective he was at producing capable fighters. Or how he never tried to stoke up anti-Drenard rage the way Saunders had. More disguises, perhaps?

Molly tried to put a stop to the cycle of her thoughts. The questions went round and round, tormenting her, never making any sense. She forced herself to sit up, fearing her attempt at rest was simply winding her up more tightly. Instead, she went outside to find Saunders, to see if he was doing any better than she at coming to grips with these slippery issues.

She found him by one of the many small campfires flickering beyond the tangle of wiry, Lokian trees. His group seemed to be in the middle of an animated conversation as she approached, but they quickly fell silent as she stepped into the fire’s wavering pool of light. Saunders rose from the blanket to meet her. He squeezed her shoulder and pulled her away from the cluster of staff members.

“How’re you feeling?” she whispered.

Saunders shook his head. “I’m dancing a fine line, I think. It’s… just too much all at once.” He stopped and patted his flightsuit. Another of the survivors had given him a rare clean one, but it didn’t quite fit. The zipper remained open almost to his waist, revealing a sweat-stained undershirt beneath. “Before I forget—” Saunders pulled out a credit chip and passed it to Molly. “It draws from a Navy account. Use it for the supplies tomorrow and put a deposit on some place for us to stay.”

Molly took the chip and slid it into a pocket, zipping it up afterwards. “You sure you don’t want to come with us?” she asked. “It would be nice to have you there to throw your weight around.”

Saunders looked down at himself, then peered up at Molly, the barest of smirks visible in the wan light of the campfires.

“I totally didn’t mean it like that,” she said.

Saunders laughed, or tried to. The strain and tiredness in him were more evident as he fought to hide them. “Sure you didn’t,” he said. “And I don’t think you need my help to pick up some food and water. You’ve got plenty of capable hands. I’d rather be with my crew.”

“How about one of your staff?” Molly asked. “It’d be nice to have a badge to wave around in order to secure some rooms. Bekkie is packed, what with the elections.”

“Damn. I forgot about the elections. They’re still gonna be held with all this going on?”

“Are you kidding?” Molly nodded up at the sky. “They absolutely love the chaos those ships are creating. It gives them something to promise they can fix. I guarantee you your fleet is a plank in a platform right now. The Liberty party is probably saying the Freedom party shot down the Firehawks on purpose, making their war platform more enticing.”

Saunders shook his head. “I wish I could accuse you of exaggerating, but politics back at the GN haven’t been much better. As for taking one of my staff with you, who do you trust?”

Molly glanced back to his group by the fire. The problem of who to trust seemed intractable—it haunted her at every turn. “Alright, I see your point. I’ll try and find whatever lodging I can, and I’ll pick up some more comfortable clothes. Hopefully we can shuttle you guys to town later in the day, even if it takes a few shifts.”

“Sounds good. We were just discussing amongst ourselves the best course of action—”

“Wait. You didn’t tell them—?”

“No.” Saunders shook his head. “I just said we can be sure it isn’t Drenards, but that we know little else about them. A few officers want to call in reinforcements, but the rest of us point out how futile a defense our fleet had put up. Whatever they hit us with, it controlled local gravity, and we were powerless to overcome it. So the general consensus is that our position and numbers have turned us into an intelligence gathering force, not a fighting one. We’ll set up something permanent here on Lok—”

“Permanent?” Molly looked around at the spread of blankets and huddling groups of survivors. “No offense, but you don’t really think this is a force of any kind, do you? These people are refugees. A crew without a fleet. I think you guys should hunker down until whatever happens blows over, maybe try and contact their families—”

“Families? Refugees? These people are still serving in the Navy, Molly. And Cristine—Lieutenant Daniels—her family was on Osis, which has already been ravaged. Hell, we might be at ground zero for what’s to come. We need to make a plan—” Saunders pulled her further into the woods and lowered his voice. “You might be the only person I can trust right now.”

“Yeah, but—”

“It’ll eventually be up to us, you and me, to decide if we risk calling this in.” Saunders looked back toward the campfire. “I’m using a ton of doublespeak with my staff. Hell, you’ve got me so paranoid, every cough and whisper from them has me doubting who I can trust.”

“I’m sorry. And you’re right. The thing is, I can’t stick around and help. I was kinda working on something when—well, before you showed up.” She only barely stopped herself from saying crashed the party, thereby sticking her foot in her mouth a second time.

“I’m sorry, but whatever it was, it’ll have to wait. We need your ship until we can secure some of our own.”

Molly took a step back. “I can’t do that.” She shook her head.

Saunders held up both hands. “Hey, I’m not going to force you. We called a truce, remember?”

“So don’t tell me it’ll have to wait.”

Saunders glanced up at the straggly canopy overhead. He spread his arms to indicate the hasty encampment. “What could possibly be more important than this?”

“It’s… personal,” Molly said.

“Well, maybe I can help. Once this blows over, of course.”

“I don’t think so. Besides, I’m gonna have to do some illegal stuff to get it done.”

“What kind of illegal stuff?” Saunders asked stiffly.

“Wouldn’t you rather not know?”

“No, I’d rather you not do it. Now, what is it?”

“Out the airlock,” Molly said.

“Absolutely.”

She took a step closer and glanced around before she spoke. “My dad might be alive.”

“Mortimor?”

Molly took another step closer, shushing him.

“Mortimor Fyde?” Saunders hissed.

“Yeah. He’s… well, trapped in hyperspace. That’s where his ship—this ship—has been all these years. I’ve been trying to track some people down for a few weeks, and as soon as I found them, you guys showed up. I need to get back on track, if they’ll help me after what happened to Urg.”

“Urg. That’s the guy the pilots were talking about? The one that helped find and rescue them?”

“Yeah. He’s—he’s with a group of illicit fusion fuelers. They have a blend that supposedly can get me to hyperspace and back. The drive in my ship isn’t normal, it seems. That’s what my parents were working on.”

Saunders rubbed his chin. “That fits with your parents’ file. They were sent here to track down a source of fuel, and then supposedly uncovered the Drenard Underground. Once they learned what you’ve told me about the rift, not to mention the real nature of the war, they must’ve thrown in with them.”

“Boy, I’d like to see that file,” Molly said.

“I’d like to take another look at it myself. I bet everything in there reads completely different to me, now.” Saunders looked at her for a moment, frowning. “So when were you planning on taking this jaunt to hyperspace? And what does that even entail? What would this place be like? A vacuum, or something?”

“No. It’s not like that. It’s more like a planet, only weirder. My mo— a friend tried to explain it to me, but I can’t make sense of it.”

“You’re going soon?”

“I don’t know. I have to get some of this fuel first, and it sounds like there’s not much to go around. To everyone else, it’s just workable fusion that you guys don’t control. I need to really sit down and speak with Scottie about it.”

“I’d like to speak to him as well,” Saunders said, his eyes narrowing.

“You said you’d take this out the airlock!”

“Okay. Fine. But no leaving until we get these people supplied and settled—”

“Of course. I’ll handle that in the morning. And if I have my way, I’ll be jumping out of here around this time tomorrow night.”

Saunders scratched his chin. “I don’t suppose I can demand any more than that. Just so you know, though, I think the Bern threat is more important than your haste to find your father. If we could get rid of them, it would also put an end to the attacks from the Drenards. The entire pretense for their offensive, their drive to stop the Bern attack, it would no longer make any sense. Billions of lives would be saved.”

“I agree with the tactical assessment, but I don’t see how my staying is much help. I don’t see how any of us can stop this.”

“You might be right, but I feel compelled to try something. And perhaps I’m wrong to see you and your ship as two of our greatest assets.” Saunders looked past her at the scattered campfires. “All I need to do now is figure out how to destroy a fleet that made mincemeat out of mine and do it with a hundred staff members that are closer to retirement than their last active combat duty.”

Molly laughed. “Now you’re talking crazy.”

“Hell, isn’t this the kind of crap you lived for in the simulators?”

“I guess so,” Molly said. “But none of that was real.”

“Yeah?” Saunders’s face drooped, sadness and fatigue pulling down on it as his false humor rested for a moment. “Well, nothing about this situation feels real, either.”

Molly walked Saunders back to his group, then wandered toward Parsona, stopping along the way to help a group string a tarp between some trees. She recognized the faded blue plastic—it had been folded up in a corner of the engine room as long ago as Palan. The string was also hers, and the small group of survivors were quick to thank her for everything she’d done. She nodded politely in response to their effusive gratitude and made her way toward the ship.

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.”

“Yeah, she’s a special ship, what with Ronnie’s drive in there. I figured you knew. I was wondering why you didn’t jump us out of the Carrier this morning. Thought maybe you were scared to show your hand, or something, what with the blackcoats on board.”

Molly shook her head. “No, I would have, had I known. I would have—” She rested her face in her palms as the long-gone potential to avert so many catastrophes swirled together in her mind. “I would have done a lot of things different!” she said, her voice muffled by her hands, her body on the verge of crying.

Scottie put his arm around her; she felt Cat scoot to her other side.

“Don’t do that,” Cat said. “Don’t relive the past.”

“This was Ryke’s ethical thingy,” Scottie told her. “Boy broke down with all he could do. Good and bad. Bombs and what-not.”

Molly looked up into the fire, the full implications of such a drive sinking in. The possibilities seemed endless. She thought about the ability to move bombs wherever you wanted them, a fantasy of so many radical groups. She thought about being able to move people—assassins and thieves—with complete reliability. It finally dawned on her what Scottie and the Callites wanted to use the drive for: interplanetary border crossings, getting a people to safety. She could imagine how many groups would kill for such a device, or trade a planet for one.

The dread of having such a thing in her ship made her stomach sink. More of her selfish horrors hit her again. They could’ve jumped straight out of Glemot, no need for the ruse that ended an entire people. They could’ve jumped straight back to Earth at any time during their journey home! They could’ve jumped anywhere. Maybe Lucin had known about the hyperdrive. Was that possible? Could her mom have not been the thing he was looking for?

“You okay?” Cat asked.

“How did he do it?” Molly asked. “How did this Ryke guy live with such knowledge?”

“Not well, let me tell you.” Scottie shook his head. “He had a breakdown. Then, when he pulled himself together, he started drawing up these schemes to end the war. Galactic peace stuff. Without asking my advice, he started sending stuff to Drenard. Notes and messages. Straight-ticket. Plopped ’em down on the planet, like letters asking them to stop shooting.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Hell, no. Wish I were. He invited all sorts of trouble out here. Now this was a dozen years ago or so, back when the planet was quiet.”

Cat laughed. “It’s still pretty quiet, Scottie.”

He shot her a look. “You know what I mean.”

“What happened next?” Molly asked. Bringing the Drenards into the story had her eager to hear more. She leaned close to the fire, wrapping her arms around her knees. She noticed Walter doing the same on the other side of the fire; the stick he was using to scatter embers had fallen still, and he seemed to have become very interested in the discussion.

“First thing the Drenards did was start tracing the jump signatures back here, and they realized they had a problem. Military dudes must’ve gone ballistic. Can you imagine? I bet they were expecting nukes at any minute. Messages were popping out of hyperspace that said, ‘Stop shooting.’ Hell, I would’ve read the ‘or else,’ too!”

Scottie blew in his hands and rubbed them together. “That’s when they sent their envoy. All the way to cosmopolitan Lok. And that’s how the Drenard Underground formed.”

“Just like that?”

“You want the long version?”

She did, but other things seemed more important. She leaned back and looked at the underside of Parsona’s wing. There was a black smudge of soot above her where the smoke was bouncing off and trailing around the sides. She pictured the fleet in orbit beyond the wing, like a constellation of stars, twinkling.

“I’m impressed your friend could make the decisions he made,” Molly said.

Scottie grunted. “Flankin’ goldmine,” he said.

A hush fell over the campfire. Walter threw his stick into the fire and excused himself; he padded up the ramp and into Parsona to use the bathroom.

After a moment of silence, Scottie began explaining more. He went over the general idea of rifts, how Ryke had wrangled with Drenardian politicians for permission to permanently close all connections with the rest of the universe. He even hinted at the battle that had stranded much of the Underground in hyperspace, which pretty much caught Molly up to the present.

But she was only half listening. Her thoughts kept flickering like an open flame, jumping and popping and sparking with possibilities. She thought about all the schemes she might bounce off Cole if he were there with her. And most of all, she thought about how close she was to going off in search of him, how that void in her chest might soon be filled. She gazed into the fire—that lambent dance of orange and white plasma—and dreamed of his arms around her one more time.

It would be worth anything for that, she decided. She knew it was selfish, but the longing was too great to overcome. And as insane as it sounded, even to herself, she knew it would be worth it to hold him and be held by him, even if it was just one final time. Even if it was the very last thing she would ever do.

To feel whole again, for a brief moment, was all she wanted.

Even if the galaxy was crumbling to pieces around her.

43

The man in the hyperskimmer brought his arms down in a wide arc, slashing toward Cole with his invisible blade. Inside the cockpit, Cole flinched away from the blow, but as soon as the figure completed the motion, he realized it hadn’t been meant for him. His skimmer lurched to the side as the other craft pulled away, both docking arms neatly parted in one perfect swipe.

Cole cursed and grabbed the control stick. He gave the accelerator a shove and looked to the side. The man with the buckblade grinned through the rain as he slumped back in his seat, the canopy closing around him.

Without thinking it through too clearly, Cole thumbed his own canopy open. He ground his teeth together, consumed with the primal rage any pilot feels after their craft has been dealt a blow. The glass came back, and the horizontal rain pelted him as it invaded the interior of his craft. Cole didn’t care. Pulling his feet up under himself, he steered with the control stick and raced over toward the other skimmer as it tried to peel away.

Cole grimaced through the stinging rain. He watched the bemused smugness fade from the passenger’s face as he approached at ramming speed. The look was transformed into one of shock as the two skimmers collided, sending Cole through the air and onto the deck just forward of their canopy.

Were it not for the nonskid on the deck, Cole probably would’ve bounced and slid right across the craft and off the other side. Instead, he managed to spread himself out and hold on. He waited for the skimmer to begin swerving in an attempt to buck him off, but it never happened. Instead, the canopy started peeling back once more, and the passenger leaned forward, that dangerous cylinder reappearing in his hands.

Cole scrambled toward the front of the skimmer, away from the cockpit. The two saboteurs yelled back and forth inside the craft. The driver jabbed a finger toward Cole, then pointed to himself. The passenger waved him off and crawled out of the cockpit and onto the flat deck. They seemed to be arguing over who got the privilege of killing him.

The wounded skimmer got back up to speed just as Cole began to run out of room at the pointed end of the triangular craft. As they accelerated, solid walls of spray rose up to either side of him from the forward foil. Cole scooted back until he could glance down at the watery land racing by under the nose of the ship. He returned his focus to the man with the buckblade, who was inching ever closer, one hand on the deck to steady himself, the other one probing the air ahead with the invisible sword.

Cole crept back even further to stay away from the deadly blade. As he ran out of decking, he reached out and grasped one of the stabilizing arms bracing the hydrofoil, his grip on the tubular metal slick with spitting water.

His quarry moved closer, waving his monofilament weapon back and forth as if trying to gauge the distance, hoping to kill or chase off Cole without putting himself at risk. Cole thought about jumping, about throwing himself through the wall of water to the side and bracing for a rough landing. Someone from HQ would find him as surely as they had through several feet of snow. But then, the skimmer would make it to the Luddite camp with detailed knowledge of the upcoming raid. His raid. And Cole couldn’t allow that.

The sword swished through the air closer and closer with each swipe, near enough now to hear it over the pounding rain. It made a wisping noise, almost as if slicing the airborne drops of water in two. Cole looked past the waving arm and saw the mad, determined sneer below the man’s goggles. He gripped the hydrofoil even tighter and leaned back, out over the nose of the ship, his head just inches from the wall of shooting spray. And suddenly—he felt the metal in his hand giving way like a squeezed sponge.

His hand!

Glancing back at his furious grip on the foil’s support strut, Cole saw he’d dented and warped the metal where he’d been grasping it. His hand looked so real, it was easy to forget what it could do. The magnetic blade once again swiped through the air close enough to hear. Death’s nearness steeled Cole’s resolve. He tightened his grip on the strut and released his arm’s full fury.

There was a groan, and then a harsh, ringing crack as solid steel bent and parted. The starboard strut snapped off, and the forward foil lurched sideways, folding back on the remaining strut and digging into the watery surface. As soon as it did, the flat, smooth ride turned into an airborne disaster. The nose of the skimmer dove into the water, caught on something below the surface, and the entire craft kicked up, bucking like an injured beast. In a mere instant, Cole and his attacker were launched into the air, tumbling high over the glimmering, wet land. The skimmer summersaulted below them, the pilot trapped as it smacked and crumbled and skipped across the endless brown lake below.

Cole had but a few glimpses of the destruction, and just a single, stretched-out moment of soaring through the sky. He flew the same direction as the sideways rain, so all of it hung in space around him, seemingly motionless. The bizarre illusion of suspended droplets extended that solitary second into an eternity of gliding and falling. But the never-ending plummet was an illusion, one that was about to be shattered by the placid wall of solid water rushing up to greet him.

Just before he hit, Cole thought to secure his goggles. He clamped his real hand over his eyes and threw up his new one to absorb the impact. He hit at such a high speed, it felt more like solid land than forgiving fluid. Cole bounced across the surface, his other arm and both legs flying out in a tangle of cartwheeling, plowing limbs. The rolling and spinning seemed to go on even longer than the flight through the air, and as Cole’s head was repeatedly dunked, he worried as much about running out of breath as sustaining any injury.

Finally, though, he slowed to a halt—his body sore but intact. His legs sank below the surface. He started treading water with his arms, when his boots and knees felt solid ground beneath him. Solid, but trembling, almost as if moving. Cole swam with his hands to regain his balance and stood up, finding the water to be a little more than a meter deep. He peered around for the wreckage of the skimmer and the man with the sword.

Both were less than a dozen meters away, and both were in pieces. Cole waded toward the ruined hyperskimmer as several chunks of human remains floated his direction amid a slick of red. A severed leg drifted past, powered along by an arterial jet. Cole thought about what must’ve happened: the active buckblade tangling up in the man’s body as he careened across the water’s surface. An arm approached, detached at the collarbone. The hand remained clenched in a fist, the water sizzling around an invisible thread of humming power. Cole stepped to the side, careful of the sharp nothingness, and grabbed the arm by the wrist, as wary as if seizing a cobra. He twisted the fist to the side, keeping the buckblade pointed away from himself, and slowly worked the stiff fingers off the handle. It wasn’t until he powered the blade down that he felt able to breathe easily around the device. Penny and Arthur had warned him how dangerous they were, but being in the presence of one felt like standing on a ticking bomb. Cole held the cylinder away from himself and dropped the arm in disgust. He turned to survey the twisted wreckage of the hyperskimmer.

It was hard to believe how lucky he’d been. One twist of the skimmer’s hydrofoil, and he’d chunked the swordsman and crushed the driver. All for a tweaked knee and a sore back. He made his way toward the heap of metal, figuring it was the only dry place to await rescue while he slightly embellished his story.

Then—his story started embellishing itself. Out of the canopy burst a fist, the metal around it peeling back as if from an unnatural blow. Cole stopped in his tracks. Beneath his boots, he could feel the surface of hyperspace trembling with movement, rippling now and then as something slid below the surface like a thing alive.

The hand ripped a large section of plasteel off as if it were made of paper, and out of the gnarled mass of machinery, the thin driver emerged, his face contorted into a mask of fury. Cole took a step back and fumbled with the buckblade, trying to remember which way was up with the thing. He held it away from his body with his new hand—just in case—and powered it on. When he looked up, he saw the man peeling more metal out of his way, his thighs kicking through the twisted decking as if it were no more viscous than water.

Cole looked at his hand, then back to the unnatural figure thrashing his way toward him.

He realized at once that he had his foe outmanned.

And that it wasn’t necessarily a good thing.