by Hugh Howey
It wasn’t tight enough, however, and the direction they’d chosen to offset proved unfortunate. Both of Cat’s feet and the entire length of one shin immediately occupied the same space as a solid metal wall. Molecules jiggled as their electrons made room for these incoming strangers, and the two elements fused into a new one—a living alloy of steel, a dying wound of flesh, or something of both.
Cat cried out in shock. It was the shock of pure raw pain. It was the rape of neurons.
Her body fell back, limp, bending at the waist.
She pivoted around the stuck bits of herself, her back slamming against the steel, her skull cracking against it just a moment later. Cat hung there, upside down, gasping for air. The pull of her weight against the invaded flesh heightened the experience. Through the haze of it all, she could see transparent walls surrounding her, like a cell, but with no sign of Molly or Walter. She could’ve jumped right on top of the trace coordinates and been perfectly safe.
But then, she would’ve missed out on experiencing all that glorious pain.
More of it lanced out of her foot, as neurons too shocked at first to respond finally kicked into gear. Cat ground her teeth as she hung upside down. Her lips quivered somewhere between a grim sneer and an ecstatic smile. She flexed her stomach muscles and hoisted herself up, levering off her trapped shinbone back into a semblance of the ball in which she’d arrived. Glancing down by her waist, she saw her radio had fused with the wall as well. Thankfully, the buckblade swung free from her belt. She pulled the weapon loose and powered it on, careful to keep it pointed away from herself. Working slowly, concentrating on not puncturing the steel wall in case the vacuum of space existed beyond, she moved the blade down across the surface of the steel with the invisible thread parallel to it. She slid the molecule-wide cutter through the top of her knee, hacking her shinbone in two. She watched the flesh part under the weight of her body, the blue insides revealing themselves as her flesh magically unzipped. She continued to cut, upset at having to do it, at having the painless blade move through her gloriously injured nerves, parting their connections to her brain. She would have preferred to hang there, enjoying the agonizing sensation a little longer, but Molly needed her.
So Cat cut herself free, slicing down to her ankle where both feet were taken off just before the heels. With over an inch of meat still to go, her weight did the rest and ripped what remained, tearing the flesh in two. She fell and slammed into the steel decking below, sending out a spray of blue Callite blood tinged with purple.
Cat lay perfectly still, groping in her mind for the throbbing ache, the sensation of hurt. She pawed at it with mental fingers even as she felt the roar begin to fade and slip through her numbed grasp. Lying in a pile of her own blood, chunks of her former body hanging above and dripping her vitality down the wall, Cat the Callite groaned with dismay at the end of the experience, the end of the welcomed and foreign pain, and the beginning of the cursed healing.
41 · Lok
Parsona flew herself low and fast, the buffeting wind of her approach flattening the grasses ahead and the flame of her thrusters leaving them smoldering behind. Over the horizon, the glow of dawn signaled an end to their short preparation time and the looming return of the fleet from Darrin.
Doctor Ryke rode alone in the cockpit, watching the instruments arrayed across the dash as the mighty ship piloted itself. In the cargo bay, Scottie and Ryn coiled hyperdrive wires, their climbing harnesses already on, carabineers and ascenders jangling as they worked.
“Are you sure you can duplicate what that Palan boy did with the missiles?” Ryke asked Parsona.
“I have total recall, Sam. I’m looking at Walter’s individual keystrokes right now. It’s a pretty clever hack.”
“That means you can arm them remotely, right?”
“I can, I’m just not sure yet if I’ll be able to, if that makes any sense.”
Ryke mulled that over. He wondered if he would be capable of doing what they were asking of Parsona. Would he be able to send those missiles through hyperspace? Could he kill his only child in order to save a galaxy? What about a universe—did that finally tip the scales? It was so easy to expect it from another when looking at the equation from without, but then… he didn’t know what it meant to have a child, or to be in a position to make that level of sacrifice.
“It is a large ship,” he reminded Parsona. “It’s the size of a moon. We won’t send any of the missiles near Molly’s coordinates.”
“You know that would just be symbolic, Sam. We aim to kill her and Cat both, or all the ships returning from Darrin will go down as sure and fast as Zebra, and all the fleets of all the Milky Way’s worlds will soon follow.”
“You can’t be sure. Let’s not think like that—”
“I wish you hadn’t let Cat talk you into jumping her up there,” Parsona said.
“You coulda stopped her just as well. It’s your drive and all.”
Parsona seemed to hesitate.
“No,” she finally said quietly. “You’re right. And I’m sorry. Besides, there’s no stopping her once she gets like that. I—Life is full of hard choices, I guess. Even when you can crunch all the probable outcomes in a blink.”
“Yeah,” Ryke said, nodding and completely understanding. He looked up through the carboglass as the dark silhouette of the upright StarCarrier came into view. Another few minutes and they’d be there.
“I have to be honest with you, Sam. If it weren’t for Anlyn, I’d refuse to do this. It wouldn’t even be a question to ponder. The Bern could take the whole flanking galaxy for all I care, just for the chance they’d keep Molly alive afterwards.”
“Anlyn? The Drenard? I didn’t know you guys were that close.”
“It’s not so much that. Well, that’s not true, we are close. She made a huge sacrifice to make this all possible. But the reason I have to save her is because it’s what Molly would do if she were here. It’s what she would want me to do. I don’t think she’d forgive me if I chose any other way. Yeah, she might survive if I don’t agree to arm the missiles, but she’d be miserable the rest of her life. She’d hate me and loathe her own existence if saving her meant Anlyn came back to an ambush. I couldn’t force her to live with that kind of guilt, you know?”
Ryke nodded sadly, understanding the last bit, if nothing else.
“I guess that’s it then,” Parsona said. “It’s one thing to calculate it all, another to voice the decision and feel like you’ve really made it.” She paused. “The hyperdrive is completely cycled by the way, and we have nineteen point—”
Parsona’s voice clipped off mid-word, like a mechanical trap snapping down over her thoughts.
“Parsona?” Ryke asked.
Without warning, the ship banked hard to port, the thrusters roaring up into the red curve of the gauge. Ryke grunted as he was thrown to the side. A frightening clatter rang out from the cargo bay as piles of gear slammed into one wall followed by hollered complaints and a bout of startled cursing.
“What in the—?” Ryke began, but the radio cut him off. It came on blaring, with the background hiss of the Drenard Underground’s carrier frequency:
“—mayday, mayday, group two is going down. Repeat: we have Mortimor, but we are under attack and going down. Group two is through the rift and going down—”
••••
The Bern guards drug a furious Walter and a stunned Molly down a long corridor of transparent walls. Molly was dimly aware that a heated conversation was taking place ahead of her, but her mind felt too unraveled to participate. She lost herself in the sight of the endless glass cells, thousands and thousands of them converging in the unseen distance. The cleanliness and orderliness of the passageway filled her with a hollow dread. No, she realized, it wasn’t the neatness—it was the emptiness. It was the horrible sense of what must loom ahead, of what that ship had been designed for.
Molly wondered, if their plan on Lok failed, how long it would take for t
he corridor and hundreds more like it to be filled to the rim with screaming and crying refugees and prisoners of war. Looking at the empty rooms was like looking at a loaded gun, at chambers of awful potential. It made it somehow easier for Molly to see what things would look like once they failed, once the barrel was smoking and spent, once a thousand worlds had succumbed to that invading fleet, and once all those rooms were full of the people she had let down.
Her imagination tortured her with such thoughts until the guards pulled them inside a lift. Molly was actually thankful to find herself within its confines. The sliding doors pinched shut on all those waiting and empty rooms.
And that’s when Molly realized how tired she was. She tried to remember when last she’d slept. The previous night had been spent planning what now must be falling apart. The night before, she had been dealing with the Callites. The night before that, she had been strapped down and unwillingly giving blood. And now, she could feel her sense of where she was and what she was supposed to be doing slipping away from her. Through her numbed senses, her environment took on a dreamlike quality. One of the only things she was aware of was the Wadi trembling against her thigh.
She also heard Walter, his hissing dulled by the fog in her mind. She heard him vaguely arguing about mountains of gold and promises broken. The flanking Palan hadn’t shut up since their arrival. Then she remembered where she was and why. As she watched Walter beg and plead—his promises and lies mashed together in a pathetic blabber—some inner, resigned, shameful part of her hoped they were both being marched to their deaths.
At least that would make it impossible for her to ever make the mistake of trusting him again.
••••
The Wadi’s scent tongue flicked out of the soft cave, tasting the air. Trails of emotion—bright columns of drifting feelings like chords of raw communication—flashed in the creature’s head.
Something was wrong.
The good person’s scent was as black as she’d known it, and the bad one’s was as guilt-ridden and empathetic as it had ever been. The two constants in her environment, the bright smells that were always there like the twin lights of her home, seemed to be converging. Would they shift, taking each other’s place just like the rays that soaked her canyons often did? It wasn’t time yet for that change, she thought. This must be something different. Something new.
And there were other smells. Some were similar to the good one, the same type of animal or very close. Their emotions were easy to read: Ingrained duty, blind faith, the stubbornness and self-righteousness of male Wadi. If her constant companions had her confused, these others did not. They were the enemy. They were big and strong and doing harm they could justify. They were doing it without flinching. Just as the male Wadi had done to her so many cycles ago.
••••
Cat didn’t wait for her toes to fully form—she didn’t know if she had the time. Standing on her crippled feet, slipping in her own blue blood, she reactivated her buckblade and hobbled toward the glass wall between her and the corridor outside.
Her reflection greeted her in the glare of the clear material. She saw dried blood coating her legs from the knees down, the white of half-formed bone still visible through her stitching flesh. The rest of her was pale with so much blood loss. Her brown, webbed skin looked almost tan and human-like from the drain. Cat felt a surge of dizziness from the sight of it all. She flicked her wrist, and a rough circle of the cell wall fell away, taking the reflection of her with it. The clear slab landed on the metal decking outside with the chime and heft of solid diamond.
Cat sniffed the air, searching for the scent of the Palan or the Wadi, two quite distinguishable odors. She turned left, following a weak trail of fear. Behind her, she left her own sign of passing as the decking of the hallway became marked with smears of blue blood, dotted between them with wavy traces of splattered drippings.
Most of it was residue, the actual bleeding nearly stopped and the front edge of her shins regenerating with the practiced ease of a good brawl. Her pace evened out as she moved. The pads of her feet and then the stumps of her toes began to emerge anew as genetic code, junk DNA, holdovers from swerves in her evolutionary lineage, did their thing. A past adaptation from a distant, tree-dwelling ancestor had been unlocked by too much Lokian water, too many of the little life-loving critters inside that couldn’t leave well enough alone.
Cat healed as she hurried, healed even as she snuck up on the first guard station. It quickly became a mess. Not so much because of the two corpses she left behind, splurting crimson in arterial arcs, but because she’d nearly let one of them reach out and activate an alarm. The blood loss had her fighting sloppy, unable to concentrate. Cat took a deep breath and tried to steady her nerves. She searched both guards and came away with swipe badges and a radio, the latter useless with her rusty Bern. What weapons they had on them paled compared to what she wielded, so she left them behind and danced away from the spreading pools of red blood, running down the corridor, resolved that the next guard station would go smoother. Or less messy, in a way.
••••
The lift shuddered with a sense of great speed, taking them on what felt to be a very long ride. Molly endured it in silence, her thoughts racing as well. After a minute or more, the lights beside the lift doors lit up, and they opened to reveal a long ship-docking port.
Molly immediately recognized the layout as the guards drug her from the lift. She would have known what it was even without the revealing glimpses through the large portholes to either side.
Ahead of her, a long corridor stretched out with airlock hatches staggered in a classic docking bay pattern, allowing each ship’s wings to occupy the void created on the opposite side. Through the wide portholes, Molly could see various hulls locked to each hatch. Judging by the distance between hatches, and the length of their elevator ride, she felt certain they were in the biggest Bern ship, but she still didn’t understand why Walter had brought them there. She sensed that he thought, on some twisted level, that he and Byrne were on the same side, or that there was some sort of reward for bringing her along.
As the group of men drug her forward, Molly caught a glimpse of Lok far below, its bright film of blue atmosphere wrapped around the prairie brown. It looked like a Drenard’s translucent skin encasing bone. The view was just a flash, the sight gone as quickly as it came, blocked by the wing of a hanging ship. Losing the sight made Molly struggle against her captors for the first time; she pushed back against the guard, itching for one more peek of her old home before it and everything else was gone forever.
The guard shoved her forward, denying her a second look. But Molly felt, in that brief struggle, the strength of muscle and tendon in him and not the iron clutch she’d once felt with Byrne. Unless they were being gentle on purpose, these other men were different. More Human. She filed this away as the guards stopped by one of the airlock doors. It was keyed open, and Byrne stepped inside, his armless form at once powerful and confident, yet totally reliant on his helpers.
Molly and Walter were pushed after him, the guards guiding them through the airlock and into the wide bay of a sleek and smaller craft.
Once inside, the inner hatch was closed and sealed. Byrne said something in a foreign language, then bent forward while one of the guards adjusted a red band around his head. They all stood there for a moment while Byrne’s face contorted in a grimace of concentration, as if communicating with someone. After a while, he said something more to the guard, and they continued forward toward the cockpit.
“Where are you taking us?” Molly asked.
Byrne did not respond.
Jump seats were folded out of the cockpit wall by one of the guards, and Walter and Molly were strapped in. Safety webbing was fed through their restraints and the seat’s flight straps, making it impossible for them to reach the release handles on the buckles. One of the guards helped Byrne into a seat just forward of them, then took up position in the pilot�
�s chair. The other two guards made their way back through the ship, busying themselves noisily with mechanical checks and other signs of departure in the cargo bay.
“Why are we leaving?” Molly asked, not really expecting an answer.
“We’re not,” Byrne said, startling her with a response. “The fleet is leaving soon. We’re staying in orbit where I belong. There’s trouble down by the rift that I’d like to oversee. And of course, there’s an invasion to conduct.” He turned and smiled at her, then nodded to the pilot.
The ship shuddered, and a loud mechanical clank reverberated through the hull. The grav plates kept Molly’s stomach from traveling up into her throat, but she knew with a pilot’s innate sense that they were away, falling from the great metallic orb above them and toward the much larger and earthy one below.
42 · Lok
Ryke glanced at the cargo cam to see how his friends were faring in the cockpit. Parsona was pulling several Gs as she responded to the mayday call from the Underground ship, but neither he, Scottie, nor Ryn had on proper flightsuits to cope with the acceleration.
“Parsona, you can’t do this,” Ryke said, his voice strained as his back sank into the pilot’s seat.
“I’m sorry,” Parsona said.
“We help everyone the most by downing that big ship up there. We need to get to the Carrier.”
“Those equations already had a great deal going against them,” Parsona said. “A few more minutes of thrust like this, and I’ll let up and fall back to one point five Gs. You’ll need to get the console ready, and you might want to lengthen those wires—”
