by Hugh Howey
Both of them crashed to the ground, slipping in the guts on the decking. Penny pushed herself up as the next guy came storming in. She turned, sliding, and scampered toward the others as an invisible blade whisked back and forth behind her, eager to cut her in two.
Cole let go of the jagged canopy and ripped the grenade from his suit. He tossed it over Penny’s head and yelled: “Jump!”
One of Cole’s arms held Mortimor with an iron grip—the other reached out for her.
Penny came through the hole in the canopy, crashing into both men. They all clutched at one another, falling backwards onto the icy nose of the great Bern ship. Cole fumbled along the side of the grav chute, struggling to find the damned power button and trying not to lose his grip on the others as they slid across the slick steel.
He was still fumbling for the switch when they reached the edge of the gracefully curved nose, and then all three went tumbling over and out into the great quiet and snow-filled air.
5 · Luddite Camp
Just as the three of them slid off the nose of the Bern craft, Cole heard a satisfying thump from the grenade he’d left behind. The trio tumbled into the air, the snow below and all around them brightening for a moment as the flash of the explosion reflected off a million flecks of floating ice.
Cole didn’t have time to enjoy the effects of the blast. They plummeted through nothingness, spiraling down toward the metal decking far below, while someone screamed in his ear—
It was the gravchute, Cole realized.
He held Mortimor—his new arm clinched tight around the man’s waist—and Penny latched onto him with an iron grip of her own. The chute trilled with a dying might, pushing up with every ounce of engineering left in it. Still, they hit the deck like they’d fallen from a story up, all three of them flying away from each other with grunts and sickening thuds.
The gravchute felt fit to explode, the heat of the thing scorching Cole’s back through his combat suit. He sat up and cut it loose, watching as it shot up from the deck before falling silent and crashing back down a stone’s throw away.
Mortimor seemed slow to get up, one of his arms pressed tight to his stomach. Cole stood to help him, then felt a jolt of electricity in his ankle, tendons crying out for him to go prone and remain there. He ignored them and limped to Mortimor, hoping it was just a sprain.
Helping the older man up, Cole noticed the deep gash in his outfit, right across his abdomen; Mortimor’s white suit was splattered with streams of red, his arm cut as well.
Mortimor must’ve seen the look on Cole’s face.
“It’s not that bad,” he said, grunting as he got to his feet. “What’s bad is you jumping down here to die with us.”
“I’ve got a plan,” Cole said, grimacing. Penny limped over, her buckblade already out as she looked to the sky for pursuers. Cole saw for the first time that one of her hands was missing, almost up to the elbow. He nearly gagged at the sight of fluid leaking out of the stump, until he realized it wasn’t blood.
“You okay?” Mortimor asked her.
She held up her arm. Her eyes narrowed as she peered at it through the snow. “The problem might be my leg,” she said, indicating a deep gash in her thigh. “Actuator cable got severed.”
Cole wanted to ask just how much of her was Human, but the look on her face reminded him that they were out of the pan, and now they needed to escape the fire. He unzipped another pocket and fumbled for his radio, looking around the wreckage as he did so to get his bearings.
“We’ve got to get away from the ship,” he said, nodding forward and toward the village’s mast. “Can everyone move?”
Mortimor and Penny both nodded and scampered uneasily toward the camp’s bow. Cole took one step and collapsed to his knees, the pain in his ankle overpowering his adrenaline.
Penny saw him go down and limped back to him. She put her blade away and wrapped her arm around his back.
“Guess you just answered your own question,” she said.
Cole grunted, adjusted his goggles, and let her carry the weight from his bad foot. The three of them labored forward into the snow, leaving a trail of blood and hydraulic fluid behind.
“What’s this about a plan?” Penny asked. “Is it better than your last one?”
Cole grimaced and nodded. He pointed with the radio’s antenna, gesturing to an alley through the line of buildings ahead, the same ones he’d used to leapfrog up to the cockpit.
“There’s a small clearing through there. We need to get to it as quick as we can.” He squeezed the transmit button on the radio as Mortimor led them through the flurries. “Thrower, this is Relay,” he said. “Limber up for the toss.”
He and Penny ducked into the alley after Mortimor. Cole looked over his shoulder and checked for signs of pursuit.
“I don’t like the sound of your code,” Penny said.
Cole ignored her and flicked on the radio’s locator. They exited the crack between the two buildings and found Mortimor standing over two halves of a man, his buckblade out, his wounded arm leaking a steady stream of blood. Cole reached for his own blade and looked around for signs of danger, but there was nothing through the thick veil of snow that he could see. He hobbled past Mortimor, toward the center of the clearing, and was amazed to see how quickly the drifts were forming around the bases of the buildings. Then he recalled how swiftly Riggs’s Firehawk had been buried. He spoke into the radio again, wincing as he did so at the thought of his dead friend.
“Thrower, Relay here. Toss away. Miss to any side by a few meters.”
“What’s going on?” Mortimor asked. He tucked his blade away and clutched his arm to slow the bleeding. His neat, brown beard was covered in flecks of melting snow, giving him the look of a mountaineer. The blood splattered all across his white suit, however, made him appear more like an emergency room surgeon.
“Huddle together,” Cole said. He pulled Mortimor close, realizing suddenly how much he had come to like the old man. It was almost impossible to imagine surviving this, actually being someplace safe and warm where nobody was bleeding, but he still felt an overpowering urge to get there, that mystical sanctuary, and to do his best to impress this man who felt more like a father than anyone ever had.
He pulled Penny closer and fumbled for the other grenade. He clipped it to his suit as a loud popping sound preceded the nearby clang of metal on metal.
Cole glanced around and spotted the jump platform that had popped out of thin air, sent by one of the larger cage platforms at HQ. It was a big sacrifice, slowing the evacuation. The fact that they sent it at all reminded Cole how much others must also feel for the old man. He let go of Mortimor and limped over toward it.
“Is that what I think it is?” Penny asked.
Cole nodded and pushed the control console off the platform’s base. He used his strong arm to drag the battery Arthur had wired up, tucking it in the lee of the console to keep the snow off the contacts.
“What’s to stop them from following us?” Mortimor asked.
Cole pulled out his radio; he turned and patted the grenade on his chest. With a smile, he squeezed the transmit button. “Catcher, this is Relay. Feed the numbers.”
“Oh, flank!” said Penny. She pointed over his shoulder.
Cole turned as the first dark form exited the narrow alley and charged through the snow toward them.
“You first!” Cole shouted to Mortimor. He shoved the older man toward the small platform and drew his blade. Mortimor seemed on the verge of arguing, then glanced down at his blood-soaked uniform. He nodded weakly and took a step back. Cole turned as Penny sliced through the first attacker, her handless arm swinging for counterbalance and sending out a gray stream of fluids among the white flakes.
Yet another surge of adrenaline coursed through Cole’s body, numbing the pain in his ankle and staving off exhaustion. He thanked his overworked gland, wondering if the last month had somehow tripled its reserve, and shuffled through the slick film
of snow to pull Penny back. Behind him, half a shout from Mortimor was cut short by a pop of air. Cole didn’t turn to make sure he was gone—he just urged Penny to get in place as two more men came forward, the snow swirling around them and coating their fur. The cluster of Luddites approached slowly now, wary like a pack of beasts stalking a wounded prey.
Penny moved to flank them, but Cole yanked her back and shoved her toward the platform. He kept his eyes on the men as he shouted over his shoulder: “Go! Before more come.”
One of the men lunged, his arms spinning with a powerful attack. Cole raised his blade, trying to visualize the angles of deflection, when Penny’s arm flashed beside him, throwing something.
The man went down in a heap, the front of his fur wrappings split open, a buckblade hilt lodged in his sternum.
The other men took a step back, moving their blades to a defensive position as they watched their friend writhe on the ground. Cole heard another statement half-said, this time by Penny, followed by a pop of air. He backed up slowly and glanced down at the grenade dangling from his chest. Several more men entered the clearing. Cole was alone, but preparing to jump out after the others.
“He’s mine!” someone roared.
A figure stepped forward from the rest, pulling the other beasts away by their shoulders. Cole felt the edge of the platform behind him with one boot. He reached up and wrapped his hand around the grenade, preparing to drop it near the pedestal, to count to three, and then to jump out. His wild plan was coming off without a hitch.
He looked up as the approaching figure began unwrapping his face, revealing blond hair so bright it made the snow seem dingy and gray.
Too late, thought Cole, as he began to tug the grenade loose. He looked down to make sure the pin was going to come free, then caught sight of a different glint of metal: a scratch in his new hand, the pink flesh peeled back to reveal a small hydraulic rod lined up with one of his knuckles.
Cole loosened his iron grip on the grenade and watched as the piston responded. He remembered how he had come to possess the hand. He remembered what the Luddites had done to Riggs. He remembered what he had done to Riggs.
Cole let go of the grenade completely, dropping his arm away from his chest. He reached instead for his buckblade, metal wrapping around metal. He peered up at Joshua, the man who had taken his arm, and forgot for a moment the need for his own escape…
••••
Penny fell out of the air with a thud. The second half of her scream, a warning to Cole, remained caught in her throat, cut short by her skip across hyperspace. Several pairs of hands clasped her, dragging her out of the way before they began searching her for damage.
“Send the numbers!” someone yelled.
Penny looked toward the voice. It was Arthur, who stood at the inner edge of a circle formed around the spot she had just fallen through. A group of aliens stood there, waiting for another arrival.
A bright flash of a welding torch blossomed in Penny’s peripheral. She noted the stench of burning metal as some mechanic worked to staunch her loss of fluids.
“Not now,” she told him. She pushed the various worried hands away, the amount of stimuli buzzing on all sides driving her over the brink. She looked around for Mortimor, only to find his legs sticking out from a clustered mob of soldiers pretending to be medics. Scanning the sparse assemblage, Penny realized she wasn’t on a lifeboat full of hope. Whatever group had received them, it wasn’t the basket getting all the best eggs from HQ.
She grabbed the sleeve of one of the men inspecting her various gashes. “Where is everyone?” she asked.
“Three groups are through the rift,” the man said. “We got a bum slot in the queue.”
The man started to say more, but Penny’s mind was already elsewhere. It felt like it had been an hour since she’d vanished from the Luddite village and spilled out across the deck. Surely it had been long enough for the platform to recharge. Where was Cole?
She looked back to the center of the empty circle, her gaze joining dozens of others as they waited for another pop of air.
“Where the hell are you?” Penny asked no one.
••••
Cole could see in his peripheral that he was being surrounded. He could also tell that Joshua would strike down any of his own men who dared attack him first. He put the crowd out of mind, which had him forgetting the potential danger inherent in the jump platform—the ease with which Ryke’s magical device could be used against the ongoing raid above.
He forgot these things and instead took a step forward, raising his sword and trying his best to not limp on his busted ankle. Cole remembered what Penny had told him during their first buckblade lesson: There was nothing heroic about these fights. There were no speeches. It was one slash and then it was over.
Keeping his feet in an orthodox fencer’s stance, he swung his blade through the air like a traditional sword, which elicited chuckles from the tightening circle and forced a smile across Joshua’s face.
The Luddite leader moved fast, darting into range and swinging one of the power angles Cole had hoped for, one designed to cut his torso in half. Cole locked up his new wrist, his elbow, and his shoulder, making his arm a solid extension of the rest of him. He transferred his weight to the ball of his good foot, bringing his blade around to block the attack.
The rebound should have ended him. The like magnetic fields should have thrown his own blade into his knees, taking off both limbs in a gory recreation of his first sparring mistake. Instead, with his stance soft and with all his weight on the ball of one boot, perched perilously atop the icy decking, the force of the magnetic repulsion spun him completely around, his elbow, wrist, and shoulder locked solid.
Cole went full-circle, twirling like a child’s top. He raised his blade as he went. For a brief moment, he was blind to his own attack, facing away from Joshua and his men, watching his hand as it steered the invisible blade through the air in a great circle.
When he completed the pirouette, expecting to slice Joshua in half, Cole felt with disbelief as his buckblade rebounded off Joshua’s sword once again—blocked.
But the rebound was milder the second time.
As the spinning world fell back into focus, Cole saw why: His sword had passed through Joshua’s waist to meet the man’s still-frozen attack on the other side of his body, bounced off, then slid back through the man’s chest once more.
Cole threw both arms out and regained his balance as Joshua fell in pieces.
The wide arc of fur-clad warriors lit up with furious shouts, screams of disbelief and outrage. Cole took a step toward the platform, counting. Several of the men ran forward, their full-throated fury befitting their animalistic garb, their arms high with attacks meant to kill.
When Cole got to “three,” he took a last step back, activating the platform with his weight and dropping a small metal pin before he went.
He left the howling men with a gentle pop of air.
Followed by a very loud bang.
••••
Cole fell out of the air and slammed into the metal decking of the Bern ship. A scattering of snowflakes—caught up in the platform’s energistic bubble—drifted down around him. An alien rushed to his side and began probing for wounds. Beyond, a cacophony of shouts and worried conversations merged into a nervous, indecipherable patter.
The Underground member tending to him said something in a foreign tongue. Cole shook his head. He looked around for Penny and Mortimor as the leg of his combat suit was cut back to expose his injured ankle. In a cluster of confused, trembling bodies to one side, Cole saw Penny’s bright, red mane. She was in the same pose in which he’d first seen her: Leaning over a patient, splattered with blood, a mask of rigid worry on her face.
“Penny!”
She looked up, and Cole read the news in her set jaw. One of Mortimor’s hands clutched the folds of her combat suit just below her shoulder. Cole tried to swallow the lump in his throat; he at
tempted to stand, but the alien medic forced him back down. The figure held Cole in place while a needle went into his ankle, deep as the bone. Cole clenched his teeth at the pinch and metallic sting. A surge of icy numbness spread through his foot. The alien stood back, still chattering in a foreign tongue.
Cole rose and hobbled over to Penny and Mortimor, practically hopping on one foot. A corner of the hijacked Bern ship’s cargo bay had been transformed into a disorganized operating room. A Pheron knelt on the other side of Mortimor and was just finishing sewing up a wound on his exposed abdomen. The skin all around it was smeared pink from being wiped free of blood.
Cole collapsed by Penny. “What’re we waiting on?” he asked. He glanced toward the cockpit. “We need to get him help. We need to get back to HQ—”
“There’s nothing there,” Penny said, shaking her head. “These are the last of the technicians. Everyone’s out.”
“We need to get through the rift, then.”
Penny nodded toward one of the crewmen. “They say we’ve got about a day of waiting.”
Cole looked around. Most of the gathered figures were peering back. They were looking to Mortimor, who lay perfectly still, his head in Penny’s lap.
One more glance at the man’s wounds, and Cole saw quite clearly that they might have a day of waiting ahead of them, but Mortimor’s body didn’t have a day of life left in it. The old man’s eyes fluttered. He looked up at Penny as she stroked his brown hair, streaked with gray.
Mortimor coughed. A shaking hand came up to cover his mouth much too late. Cole reached for a pad of gauze in the medical kit and dabbed at the fresh blood on Mortimor’s beard, unable to stand the sight of it there.
Mortimor closed his eyes.
“I need you to stay with us,” Cole demanded.
“A little rest,” Mortimor whispered, his voice a quiet rasp. “A little rest, and I’ll be just fine.”
“No,” Penny said, gently shaking his shoulders. “You need to stay awake. I need you to keep talking.”
