by Hugh Howey
It didn’t seem to matter that the boys came from dozens of military academies scattered all over the planet, everyone in the bus knew how to snap to an adult’s demands. They knew how to march and they knew how to stand in perfect lines. They also knew how to communicate with the barest of looks and the most timely of whispers.
“My name’s Cole,” he said to the boy from his seat. The two of them had squeezed out of the bus together and now stood shoulder to shoulder in the back of a phalanx of nervous kids.
“Riggs,” the other boy hissed, his mouth parting on one side.
They nodded to each other and smiled, the two of them bound by chance proximity in this new world they’d entered. The boys ahead of them began marching off in a column four wide; Cole and Riggs fell in as directed, and the precise line of cadets wound its way through the yawning doors of the GN Academy, down the shiny tiled halls, and into a crowded gymnasium.
Once inside, the large groups were pared down to smaller ones. There were officers everywhere in their crisp uniforms, shouting advice and orders. Cole spotted what appeared to be a few upperclass cadets helping out, boys just a few years older than himself in uniforms of their own, already decorated with badges and medals.
“That’s the support classes over there.”
Cole turned to see where Riggs was pointing. Across the wide hall, he saw other groups of kids receiving their stacks of fatigues and falling into cliques that would soon learn engineering and other auxiliary roles. There was a much wider mix of cadets in those groups, a smattering of girls and even a few members of other races. Cole tried to take it all in, but his line was jostling forward and he had to pay attention to where he was going.
“Step forward!”
The two boys ahead of them shuffled to a line of tables arranged across the gymnasium floor. They gave their names, stuttering and nervous, and cadets riffled through cards in little boxes. Something was checked off the cards and stacks of clothing were handed out. Cole noticed with no shortage of excitement that flight helmets were placed on top of each pile of folded garments.
“Next!”
He and Riggs hurried forward and gave their names. Cole held out his arms and flashed back to similar scenes from his past. He remembered much skinnier arms trembling for a clean shirt and a new pair of blue shorts. He recalled the pleated pants from Lisboa’s Military School, much nicer than the lifetime of prison clothes the cops had threatened him with. He watched as a folded flightsuit, a black uniform, a pair of glistening boots, and then a flight helmet were loaded up in his now older and thicker arms. His dizziness and excitement were interrupted as the upperclassman behind the table shouted for him to move on.
Cole followed Riggs out of the gymnasium and down a hallway. The boys ahead of them were already chattering about their new gear and winning shouts from the older cadets directing traffic.
The long line of boys with their clothes and helmets filed into a smaller room full of simulator pods. A hushed awe fell over them as they shuffled into place along the room’s interior. Cole noted how much newer these simulators looked compared to Lisboa’s. He wondered if everything he’d learned at his last Academy would have to be re-learned. Maybe his above-average scores wouldn’t be reproducible here and they’d send him home as a failure. The first sensation of raw panic stirred in his guts as he imagined being kicked out of flight school. Riggs had to elbow him into place, he’d become so distracted.
The hopeful cadets stood shoulder to shoulder in a long line stretching down the room of simulator pods, waiting. Upperclassmen in flightsuits and aged officers strode up and down the line, taking stock of the newest class. Cole studied one of the older cadets, trying to imagine the boy having once been in his place. He tried to picture, years hence, being where that boy stood, seeing the fresh and frightened recruits lined up and trembling. He noticed one man seemed to command the respect of the rest of these older cadets, a fat soldier in a straining flightsuit. The officer lumbered up and down the line frowning, his jowls hanging down like a dog’s. Cole stiffened when the man walked by, then relaxed and resumed breathing once his back was turned.
“These must be the navigators,” Riggs whispered.
Cole followed his gaze to see another file of recruits shuffling in, their bundles clutched to their bellies, different-colored helmets wobbling precariously on top. They filed to the end of the simulator room and turned to face the string of hopeful pilots as the officers and cadets strolled casually up and down between the two lines.
Cole did a quick count of the boys to his side and saw that he was fifteenth from the end. It dawned on him that he was about to be paired up and not with Riggs, who had somehow become his friend over the course of a few whispers. He counted the other row as they wiggled into place. He searched faces partly obscured by the ridiculous loads they were each carrying. When he got to fifteen, he smiled at the boy across from him, who smiled back. His navigator looked vaguely European, with bushy brows and dark eyes. Cole started to nod his direction when the cadet beside him caught his attention.
Cole had to look twice to make sure he was seeing correctly. Riggs elbowed him repeatedly, which confirmed it. There was a girl in the line of navigators. Her hair was cropped short, but her cheeks and mouth, and especially her bright eyes, betrayed her. Cole was positive he’d heard flight school wasn’t open to girls.
“Cole—” Riggs whispered, his tone dire.
“Shhh,” Cole hissed. He watched the fat officer deliberately stroll up in front of the girl and turn his back toward her, as if to shun or purposefully ignore her. The older cadets seemed to be doing the same as they kept toward the other end of the room. As the last of the navigators filed into place, another officer entered the simulator room, an older man, supremely thin, with a plate of medals on his chest big enough to stop a torpedo.
“Pssst,” Riggs hissed.
Cole elbowed him back.
The older officer walked straight up to the heavyset one and whispered something. The larger man nodded, obviously the lower ranked of the two, and walked toward the end of the room, calling for all the cadets to listen up. As he began his orientation spiel in a booming voice, Cole watched the more local action across from him. He saw the thin man turn around, pausing ever so slightly to look at the girl navigator. Cole caught just the barest of smiles on her lips before she looked quickly away from the senior officer, and then the thin man strode off, a smile on his face as well.
“Cole.”
“What is it?” Cole hissed.
“Damnit man, do me a favor,” Riggs whispered.
Cole adjusted his pile of gear and turned to the side to see what Riggs wanted.
“What?”
Riggs bared his teeth, then hissed through them:
“Switch places with me.”
Part XIX – Hope
“Longing is the fuel for dissatisfaction.”
~The Bern Seer~
12 · Lok · The Present
Molly leaned forward in her seat as Gloria’s tail section rose into view. As the rest of the StarCarrier’s hull crept over the horizon, she saw that the downed Navy ship remained upright but was slightly tilted, her black thruster cones pointing obliquely up at the sky.
“It’s a shame we can’t just jump straight out to it,” she mused aloud. Her hand automatically drifted to the hyperdrive controls, feeling the switches that could move them anywhere in an instant, ignoring all things in between.
Cat, standing just behind the control console, laughed. “I think your friends in black would have a question or two about how we did that.” She pointed to the cargo cam where the Navy climbing team could be seen shrugging on harnesses and coiling ropes.
Molly pulled her hand away from the controls and rubbed the pads of her fingers together. “I know. It’s just hard to see how I’m supposed to have this power and not use it any time I want.”
“I ssay we jusst do it,” Walter said from the nav seat. He had his helmet on but with
the visor open. He leaned forward and fiddled with one of the dials on the dashboard radio. “Let’ss sshut the cockpit door and do it.” He jerked his head toward the cargo bay. “We’ll tell them we took a sshortcut,” he hissed.
Molly laughed—then realized Walter wasn’t joking.
“This is what gets you in trouble,” she told him. “You need to work on being more patient—”
“Are we there yet?” Scottie asked. Molly turned to see him squeezing into the cockpit beside Cat, who rolled her eyes at the coincidental interruption. She and Molly shared a smirk.
“She’s just coming into view,” Molly said. She turned back around and gestured toward Gloria’s tail cones. “Are our guests clear on the plan once we get there?”
“I think so,” Scottie said. “All they know is they’re climbing down to the armory for flightsuits and combat gear, the stuff they’ll need for the raid on Darrin.”
“Do they seem nervous at all?”
“About what? The ship falling over or something? I guess they figure if it ain’t toppled by now—”
“No, about going back in there,” Molly said. Images of the previous day’s horror flashed through her mind: the mounds of dead bodies, the stairwell draped in gore, people crushed from toppling Firehawks.
“I think they know what needs to be done, and they’re up for doing it,” Scottie said.
“Sounds about right,” said Cat.
Molly glanced over at Walter as he fiddled with the radio. “I’d really rather you didn’t play with that,” she said.
“I’m hearing sstuff,” Walter hissed.
“That’s what radios do,” she told him. “Now please leave it—”
“But I’m hearing weird sstuff. Ssomeone sstrange iss on here.” Walter’s hand remained frozen on one of the knobs, sensing he should stop but unable to pull away. “Anyway, I almosst decrypted it—”
“Decrypted—?” Molly leaned over and saw Walter’s computer in his lap, his arm partially obscuring its screen. She pushed his elbow up and saw wavy lines and moving bar graphs rippling across the display.
Mom!
She slapped his hand away from the dial, then felt along the back of his helmet and turned the internal speakers off.
“Hey—!”
Molly reached up and grabbed her own helmet from its shelf, sending her Wadi scrambling. She brought it down over her head, snapped the visor shut, and reached for the radio switch, dreading what she was about to discover from her mother—
“ɮɽʖ ʨʠ˨ ξζδϱ ϛϠ ϡϞѦҨ”
Molly froze, her hand poised above the radio dials. She looked over at Walter, who had torn his helmet off and had turned away from her. She could see him pouting in the reflection of his porthole. Molly lifted her visor and removed her helmet. She flicked the radio to the external speakers, allowing the strange language to fill the cockpit:
“ӁԆԏשמ؋خ ٲٷڱڷᴕ ᴗᶈᶙאָשּׁתּﮀ ﭣﮉﻧ ﻺ”
Walter glanced at the dash, obviously interested in the sounds.
From behind them, Cat cursed.
“What is this?” Molly asked Walter. “What did you do to the radio?”
“That’s the Bern talking,” Cat said, her voice a whisper. “It must be from the fleet.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding.” Molly grabbed Walter’s arm. “Walter, how did you—?”
He yanked his arm away, still pretending to be hurt. Molly realized the how wasn’t important. She spun in her seat to face Cat. “Do you understand any of this?”
Cat shook her head. “Not a lick. I heard it plenty in my day, though. Enough to know what it is.”
“Is there any way we can translate it?”
Cat frowned. “Everybody I know that speaks that language is… well, gone,” she said.
Scottie smiled. “I can give you a good guess. I bet they’re saying ‘Bern mother ship, this is Bern baby ship, over. Commence galactic domination on my mark—’”
Cat smacked him on the arm playfully, but the blow knocked him against the bulkhead. Scottie went to wincing and laughing at the same time.
“I wass decrypting the Englissh,” Walter grumbled. “Not thiss.”
“Wait,” Molly said. She held up a hand to silence Cat and Scottie’s jovial bickering. “What did you say?”
“The Englissh iss riding a carrier wave.” He pointed to his computer. “I wass decrypting it. For fun. Before you hit me.”
“Oh, gimme a break. I barely slapped your hand away. Now what’s this English? Can you play it?”
“It’ss sstill garbled,” Walter hissed. He wasn’t giving up the pouting without a fight.
Molly took over the flying from Parsona and decreased thrust. She wanted to hear more of the broadcast before they got inside the StarCarrier and the hull interfered with the signal. “Do what you were doing, but play it through the speakers,” she said.
Walter made a show of gazing out the porthole.
Molly took a deep breath. “Please, Walter, as your captain and friend, I’m asking you to do this for me.”
Walter fidgeted in his seat and brought his feet up underneath him. He brushed some nonexistent dust off his shoulder, then reached for the dash. He turned the volume down on the radio and did something to his computer, which began emitting garbled phrases, but clearly English.
“They’re not happy,” Walter said. “That’ss all I can tell.” He placed the computer on the control panel where its speakers could be better heard while he continued to adjust the virtual dials on its screen.
“—nothing we — do for —. Group — and — two — lost. Mo — or went down — Co —. Repeat, form — continue — planned.”
“Can’t you clean it up some more?” Molly glanced back and forth between his computer and the view beyond the carboglass. Parsona’s belly was literally sliding through the feathery heads of Lok’s tall grasses as she continued to pull back on the throttle and move into a hover.
“I already did clean it up,” Walter complained. “It doessn’t get any clearer.”
“— planet Lok. — can — confirm?”
Molly settled Parsona into a hover just a few kilometers from the StarCarrier. She keyed the cockpit door shut, and the four of them leaned over Walter’s computer. The small group fell silent, concentrating on every popping utterance and trying to surmise the missing gaps:
“Confirm. — am — speaking to?”
“Edi — on. I — member of Dre — — cil.”
“— the —”
“Confirm. — are — Exponent.”
“Did you hear that?” Molly whispered.
“Too much basss,” Walter hissed. He reached to adjust the dials.
Molly waved him off. “Don’t. Didn’t you hear—? Why can’t we get the rest?”
“Approxima — — ordinates —.”
“It’ss a carrier wave,” Walter said. “It jumpss frequencsiess oncse a ssecond. I’m jumping after it, but the sscanner tracse I wrote hass too much lag.”
He pulled the computer into his lap and fiddled with it. Molly looked up through the canopy at the steel cliff of StarCarrier looming ahead. Something about the garbled phrases kept tugging on her subconscious, begging her to understand. She heard Cat and Scottie whispering back and forth between themselves—and then someone banged on the cockpit door.
“Tell them we need a second,” Molly said, keying the door open.
While Cat and Scottie chatted with the climbers in the cargo bay, Molly turned to see how Walter was doing, then noticed her nav screen had gone blank. A single line across the top read:
LET ME HELP_
Molly leaned forward in her seat and reached for the keyboard.
HOW?_ she typed.
LET ME TALK TO HIM_
Molly hesitated. She turned and saw one of the Navy men by the door frowning at the unexpected delay. Scottie gestured and made excuses, and finally the man turned away.
“The boys in black wanna know what’s taking so long,” Cat
said.
Molly keyed the door shut. “They’re gonna have to wait.” She flicked the speakers on. “Go ahead,” she said to her mom. “Talk to him.”
Cat and Scottie gave her a funny look, then her mother’s voice came through the speakers:
“Walter,” Parsona said. “Do you remember me?”
Walter looked at the dash, then at Molly. “You’re Molly’ss friend, right?”
Molly wondered what he meant, then remembered her mom’s ruse the night Byrne nearly killed her. They had spoken before, but Parsona had pretended to be radioing in from another ship.
“That’s right,” Parsona said. “Do you remember helping me with the missiles?”
“Yeah,” Walter said. “About that, I didn’t mean to be ssso—”
“No, that’s fine. You did great. Now I want to help you.”
“With what?” Walter asked. He looked to Molly and shrugged.
“I want you to give me that program you’re using. I can do the frequency switching a lot faster than your computer.”
“Okay,” Walter said. “I guessss that’ss okay.” He turned to Molly. “Sshould we go and meet her?”
“She’s in the computer, Walter.” Molly pointed to his nav screen, which had gone black except for a blinking cursor. “She’s a part of the ship.”
Walter stared at the screen. He reached forward and poked one of the keys on the dash. The letter ‘W’ appeared, and the blinking cursor shifted to the right.
He glanced over at Molly, then bent forward, typing out the rest:
WALTER_
He hit enter.
HELLO WALTER_
He smiled at the screen, then turned to Molly, beaming. “I thought you were talking to yoursself all thosse timess!”
“Can you type in the program, or do you want to interface with my computer?” Parsona asked.
“I’ll type it,” Walter said, rather hurriedly. He bent to the task, referring to his small screen several times. Molly looked back and widened her eyes for Cat and Scottie. They both shrugged and remained silent. The Wadi flicked her tongue out into the air.
