“Ssssshhhh,” Walter hissed.

Molly stepped back by the door but didn’t dare look inside. She listen-ed around the corner for a sound, but could only hear her heartbeat in her ears. Scottie came out bent over and covering his mouth with the back of one hand.

“Damn, I think I heard it too,” Cat said.

“It’ss coming from the podss,” said Walter.

Molly steeled her nerves. Keeping her eyes low, she reentered the room. She stood there, perfectly still, holding her hands out to urge the others to be as quiet as possible.

There. A muffled pounding. Running to the nearest pod, she clanged up the steps and slapped on the egg-shaped compartment before press-ing her ear to it.

“You hear anything?” Cat asked, climbing up the steps.

“Someone yelling, I think. But these things open from within, so I don’t get why they’d need help.”

Cat ran up the steps of another pod and rubbed her hands across the hatch. “Are they damaged?”

“Doesn’t look—”

The pod twitched, rotating in its base. Molly stepped back. Walter hissed at the pod closest to him, which seemed to have moved in unison.

“Of course!” Molly ran down the steps and toward the control room.

“Of course, what?” Cat called out after her.

“A simulation is still running. Somebody must’ve—”

She stopped when she entered the control room. The remains of that very somebody were smeared all over the small booth. Their body lay crumbled in a heap in one corner, the spaceman’s flightsuit so flat it appeared empty. Molly looked away, but the sight was seared on her retina, overlaid onto so many other horrific images. She thought about the sacrifice this person had made and silently honored him.

The keyboard and screen were a mess, but she had to do something about the pod controls. She pulled the medkit over her shoulder and around in front, then groped inside for a gauze pad. Using the medical fabric to remove a smear off the screen made it impossible to imagine the mess as anything other than blood. The pad soaked it up dutifully.

CONTROLLER - GERALD “JONESY” RICKSON

PROGRAM - ZERO G MAINTAIN

E.T.C. - 1:42

ENEMY TYPE - NONE

ENEMY COUNT - 0

POD LINK - ALL

CONTINGENCY - DISABLED

Molly glanced at the flight routine summary. The adjacent SADAR screen showed a cluster of virtual Firehawks drifting in space. The routine still had almost two hours to go, a gross overestimation for how long the crash would take. Then again, she probably would’ve done the same thing, taking no chances on an early exit.

Using the gauze to hold down the CTRL button, she jabbed the BREAK key with a knuckle, then ran back outside while the simulation wound down.

“Scottie, we’re gonna need you in here,” she called out the door. “Everyone, get ready to guide any survivors out. Keep their focus away from the back of the room. We’ll form up and meet in the hallway.” She turned to Cat. “Come with me,” Molly said.

She ran toward the far pods, the ones that would be closest to the tangle of bodies. It would be important to get any surviving occupants away as quickly as possible. Molly wasn’t sure how, but having some-thing to work on—people to be responsible for—made crossing the room possible. She felt grateful for the temporary immunity and focused on the slim chance that the simulators had kept the Admiral safe.

She forgot, for just a moment, that she might not be safe if he was.

ѻѻѻѻ

The hatches started popping open as soon as the simulation shutdown procedure completed. Cries of anguish and relief spilled out of the pods just before the people did. Men and women exited their simulators and shouted for one another. As they emerged, it proved impossible to keep them from seeing what lay at the far end of the room. Moans of agony and peals of disbelief rang out, along with a smattering of curses. Molly found herself yelling at grown men to head for the exit, the white hair and beards on many of them signifying rank their borrowed simulator suits belied.

Everyone seemed too stunned to care that they were being yelled at by a teenager, a Callite, a Palan, and a roughneck local. Their state of shock made them more like cattle, giving Molly and her friends easy verbal control of them. She felt a wave of confidence and surety wash over her—the hours they had already spent around the horror had put her group in a much better state than these survivors. The four of them had descended through the gore in stages, rather than hatching directly into the worst it had to offer.

Molly corralled a dozen survivors together and guided them, pushing and prodding, toward the hallway. They clung to one another like refugees, knees weakened by an emotional ordeal no less taxing than a physical one might be.

Cat lagged behind with another cluster, including a few women. In fact, ahead of Molly—clustered around Walter and Scottie—there seemed to be quite a few women among the survivors. Further ahead, an older gentleman leaned against the rear of a pod and threw up on the decking. Several other people seemed to have been physically sick. Molly swallowed hard and tried to focus on getting everyone out of there.

“Into the hallway,” she yelled.

Most of them didn’t need to be told. Many ran out, clutching their stomachs or sobbing into their hands, men and women alike.

As she guided her own group forward, Molly heard someone yelling from inside one of the simulators. She left Cat in charge of her survivors and stomped up the steps, only to find yet another level of disgust: someone hadn’t gotten their suit plugged in. Either that, or the grav link had failed. The other occupant, a young man, seemed unscathed but in a state of shock. He held the body in his lap, the arms of the deceased dangling to either side with the litheness of a hundred joints.

At least, thank the gods, the suit’s seals had remained intact.

“I need you to come with me,” Molly told him. She ducked into the pod and reached for the limp body in his lap. The survivor stared at her, visor open, mouth slack, a dull whine leaking out. It was the sound of distilled agony. Of confusion and regression.

Grabbing the limp figure, Molly shifted it to the other seat and near-ly threw up inside the simulator pod. The form inside the outfit felt pulverized. Chunked. She bit down on her tongue to divert her attention with some pain while she folded the suit and its contents out of the man’s lap.

“We need to go,” she told him. She unbuckled his harness and pulled him toward the open hatch. The man continued to make a strange moaning sound as she guided him out and down the steps.

They were the last two out into the hallway. As they approached the door, Molly felt the need to turn around, to make sure there weren’t more people to help. It was hard to do with the knowledge of what lay behind, but she looked anyway. Everyone that could be saved was out. The percentages—seeing how many didn’t stand a chance—it made her feel sick.

In the hallway, she found most of the survivors sitting along the wall, some of them prone. The medkit felt ridiculous across her back; nobody needed so much as an adhesive strip. What they should’ve brought down was more water and rations. Molly saw that the little nourishment they did have was already being passed around; she worked her way down the line of bedraggled spacemen, checking eyes for alertness—when she found him. Found herself face-to-face with Admiral Saunders.

Their eyes met—and his widened.

“You.”

Molly nearly burst out in tears to see someone she knew, someone from her seemingly long-ago past. Saunders represented a thread back to normalcy; she could see him and remember being young and only miserable in frivolous ways. She could remember, with longing, the simple pain of being yelled at, of being treated poorly. She approached, holding out a bottle of water, but he slapped it away.

“You need to drink,” she told him.

He looked to either side of himself, surveying those nearest him. Molly noticed the men and women clustered around him had the most gray in their hair and the least trauma in their eyes. They bore the haggard look of veterans, the creases made by years of worry had become permanent in expressive wrinkles.

“Arrest her,” Saunders said meekly, looking to his subordinates. “She’s the one—”

Molly knelt down and rested a hand on his shoulder. “We need to get everyone out of here,” she said, “and you need to drink some water. You can airlock me later, if you like.”

He frowned as she pushed the water into his hand. A thin man with wispy gray hair slid close and grabbed the bottom of the bottle, moving it to Saunders’s lips. The gray man met Molly’s eyes with his own; he nodded slowly to her as the Admiral slurped from the bottle.

Molly stood up and looked around herself. There had to be almost a hundred of them. With what few they had rescued above, it was but a sliver of a fraction of a percent of the total crew. The tragedy of this one act alone was mind-numbing. The thought of it happening throughout the galaxy was too terrible to even register. At least one cruiser had also gone down, then there were all the Firehawks and support craft—

Molly left Saunders in the care of the others and walked back down the center of the hallway. She wondered how they were going to get everyone through the stairwell and into the ship. And how many flights back and forth with Parsona would it take to keep everyone comfortable? And where would she take them? All the way back to Bekkie?

She was mulling this over, surveying the crowd, when she noticed Walter standing by the doorway of the simulator room, staring inside. His eyes were narrowed, his silvery, stubbly head leaning forward as he gazed in the direction of the far wall.

“Don’t look at it, Walter.” She walked up and put her hands on his narrow shoulders, trying to turn him away.

“Ssomething’ss wrong,” he hissed.

“I know, buddy, but we’ll get through it together, okay?”

“No.” He shrugged her hands off his shoulders. “Ssomething’ss really wrong. It moved.”

Molly forced herself to look at the pile of bodies in the distance. “Nothing moved in there, Walter. Your eyes are playing tricks on—”

One of the bodies on top of the steep pile fell away from the rest; it rolled sickeningly across the simulator room, joints folding in ways they shouldn’t. And then it came to a sudden halt. Several other bodies followed suit, all of them coming to a stop at the same place, their limbs tangled and supple.

Suddenly, a large chunk came loose—a crowd. The rest of the wall followed in a sudden avalanche of bodies. The corpses tumbled across the steel decking together, skidding to an eerie halt in a wide dune of the dead.

Walter pulled back from the room, hissing.

“What’s wrong?” Cat asked, walking over and steadying Walter. She peered past Molly. “What in the hell?”

“Get everyone together,” Molly whispered. “We need to get out of here.”

“What’s going on?”

Molly turned to Cat. “The grav panels are failing.”

Part XV – Coming Together

“What greater tragedy is there than two lovers,

racing for each other, desperate and longing,

only to pass, unbeknownst, in the darkness?”

~The Bern Seer~

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 non-sense. 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.