by Hugh Howey
44 · Revelations
“You can go crazy reading into prophecies, you know.”
Molly stopped struggling with her restraints and looked up. Byrne had turned in his seat to peer back at her, a wide smile on his face. Beyond him, she could see through the cockpit that the pilot had brought them into formation with a cluster of warships. The surface of Lok hung below, impossibly far away.
“Is this the time of fulfillment?” Byrne asked. He frowned at Molly. “Or did we narrowly miss that just a few weeks ago? Are you the one? Is Cole? Does it matter?”
Molly felt herself flush at the mention of Cole’s name. She bit her lip and looked down at her lap to see the Wadi’s tongue spiraling out of her pocket. She adjusted her elbow to keep the animal covered and felt a wall of resistance building, a shield of silence to keep from giving Byrne whatever satisfaction he was looking for.
“Don’t want to talk, huh?” Byrne wiggled around in his seat even further to gaze at her. In Molly’s peripheral, the armless maneuver made him look like an angry snake poising for a strike.
“How about you, my silvery friend? You’ve gone awfully quiet all of a sudden.”
Walter sniffed. “I don’t trusst you,” he hissed softly.
“And why not?” Byrne asked. “Because I don’t reek of lies? There’s two reasons for that, my pirate friend. My builders left out such glands when they made me, and I never once lied to you.”
The cracks in Molly’s new wall spread out in a spiderweb of curiosity.
“Then where’ss my gold?” Walter asked.
“Many jumps from here, I’m afraid. But we’ll take you to it once this galaxy is secured. A few months, at the most.” Byrne looked past their jump seats to the cargo bay beyond. The other guards could be heard working on the ship, securing items and putting away cargo. They had been at it since the small craft pulled away from the massive orb-shaped ship above. “As soon as your… rooms are ready, I’ll let you make yourself comfortable while the invasion progresses.” Byrne nodded to Molly. “You, however, might want to stay up here and see it for yourself.”
Molly turned away and looked back toward the cargo bay. She thought about what she could do if not for the restraints. Perhaps dash back, jam the door behind her, take her chances with the guards in the bay. Maybe she could find an escape pod and risk that they wouldn’t blast her out of the sky. She wondered if the pilot or any of the other guards were like Byrne, or if they were flesh and blood like her. She twisted her wrists against her restraints while she ran through the slim options, hating them all.
“There’s nothing you’d like to discuss? Strange, because your boyfriend was so chatty in hyperspace.” Byrne nodded to the pilot, who leaned forward and adjusted something on the dash. “Perhaps you’d like to listen to some radio?”
The pilot dialed up the volume, filling the cockpit with a crackling static, and then a voice: “Mayday, mayday, mayday. Group two is going down. We have Mortimor, but we are going down—”
Byrne dipped his head and the pilot flicked the volume off.
“It was a horrible crash,” Byrne said.
The fractures in her wall widened.
“I’d be surprised if anyone survived it.”
The cracks spread all the way around Molly’s shell until they met on the other side.
“Just in case, though, I’ve dispatched a ship to finish them off and another to wipe out your friends attempting to close my rift.”
Molly fought to contain the anger welling up. Shouts and screams were bubbling within, ready to explode through the fissures. She kept her eyes on her lap. She could feel her Wadi vibrating against her thigh, almost as if it were absorbing and containing her rage.
“If only Lucin were here to see how you’d failed him.”
The words stunned Molly. Rather than provide that final spark, sending her anger bursting through her wall of silence, they somehow defused it all, draping her with confusion. She felt her urge to scream deflate, even as the shell that had been holding it back crumbled all around her.
“Lucin was a traitor,” she said, the words lingering as a whisper. She pressed her chin down against her sternum and fought back the urge to cry.
“That he was,” Byrne said. He leaned down to the side, his head looming in Molly’s blurred vision. “He was a traitor to his own people.”
Molly shook her head. “He was one of you,” she hissed.
“Was,” Byrne said. “He was one of us. And if he’d been stronger, this would’ve been his prophecy to fulfill. But they sent flesh and blood to do a machine’s job.”
Molly peered up at Byrne. His mouth was spread out in a rapturous smile. He continued:
“The pathetic irony, of course, is that my superiors never wanted to trust machines like me in command positions. The hubris of meat-filled skulls makes them think the things they make can’t replace them. But the weakness is in the fleshy heart, not the robotic mind.”
The mention of Lucin’s heart brought back horrible memories: Images of Cole’s bullets tearing through Lucin’s back. Rich, dark blood pooling up through the wounds. Earlier memories, like of him in the principal’s office weeks before, preparing to give her the news of Parsona’s discovery—
“A machine never falls in love with the enemy,” Byrne said. “We never lose sight of our objectives, of what needs to be done. Emotion can’t get in the way.”
“Lucin was the enemy,” Molly said. Again, it was almost a whisper to herself. She forgot where she was, forgot about Walter to the other side of her, forgot about the noises from the cargo bay, forgot about the Wadi frozen in the folds of her pocket. All she could think about was Lucin, and Byrne’s confusing talk.
“We’re pretty sure he turned his back on us sometime during the Dire War, maybe even at Eckers. Something happened to make him never file another report with us. He retreated to the Human Academy, hiding from his superiors, shirking his duties—”
Molly shook her head. “He was working for you.”
“Not me. I was sent here to replace him. Lucin failed us all. And if what you said weeks ago is true, you did us a favor by killing him.”
“No.” Molly crushed her teeth together and pinned her chin to her chest. She pulled against her restraints, not because she thought it would snap them, but because her muscles needed something to do, some way to burn.
“He was working for you to the last,” she said through clenched teeth. “He was trying to steal my ship. He said he was going to use it to end all wars. He was trying to wipe us out, just like you are now.”
She repeated the words in her mind, silently, to herself. She had to remind herself that Lucin was a traitor. She needed him to be a traitor. Otherwise, what had she done?
Byrne laughed. “The only war Lucin was working to end was the one between the Humans and Drenards,” he said.
Molly shook her head.
“Oh, yes. We know exactly what he was trying to do. Our agents in your Navy, the ones keeping the flames of war stoked high, had no end of trouble dealing with the waves of tolerant cadets he sent their way, all of them spouting a desire to cease hostilities one day, to find some kind of peace.”
“You’re wrong,” Molly whimpered.
“Am I?” Byrne bent even lower in the corner of her vision. “Or are you just trying to justify what you did?”
He sat back up in his seat. Molly couldn’t help it: she turned to follow his movement.
“Is it better for you to remember him as a traitor, rightly slaughtered, than as a hero to your people wrongly killed?” Byrne smiled, his face blurred in the coating of tears Molly could neither blink away, nor wipe with her bound hands.
“Maybe that was your true role in all of this,” Byrne mused aloud. “How delicious if your great contribution to our victory was to have murdered our biggest threat and your sole ally!”
The tears flowed freely as Molly’s head drooped toward her lap. In the muffled distance, past the thrumming pulse in h
er ears, she could hear Byrne and the pilot laughing. She could hear Walter hissing in confused annoyance to her side. She licked the salty wetness out of the corners of her mouth and felt more tears course down her cheeks. She could see and feel them splatter on her thighs. Molly tried blinking the blurriness away. She tried to focus on what was real and true, on what was false and a lie.
Why had the discovery of Lucin’s betrayal back at the Academy stunned her in a way Byrne’s words now could not? Why did finding out he was a Bern make her reel, while discovering he may have been a traitor to them seem to resonate?
It was because he had loved her.
She knew that. The hugs and solace, the advice and long talks, the risks he took to help her achieve a life worth living, the sacrifices he had made to win her admission to his school—none of it made sense if he was her enemy, but it all made perfect sense if he was working against them.
It explained why he had no family other than Molly and his wife. She even understood why he would need to keep it a secret, why he couldn’t tell her about the ship, about her mom, about the hyperdrive, about anything. He wasn’t being sinister—Lucin had been afraid.
More tears fell, and Molly ground her teeth in frustration. Byrne and the pilot were talking, but she couldn’t bother to listen. Walter hissed something to her, but his words were a poison to avoid swallowing. She cried to herself, chewing on horrible truths, grinding her teeth together, losing her awareness of all that was going on around her, unaware even of her hungry Wadi, who was crying as well, grinding her own lizard teeth, and chewing her way through Molly’s restraints.
45 · Three Ships
Cole came to in a cloud of smoke and a noisy din, the confusion and fog of a mighty crash swirling around him. He heard people coughing and groaning, heard wails erupting from the gravely injured, heard and smelled electrical fires pop and hiss and the sickening peals of stressed metal as wings and broken fuselage sagged under their own weight.
Looking down at himself to see if he’d been injured, Cole saw Penny looking back up at him, her eyes wide and unblinking against the smoke. He saw that she had punched her remaining hand through the bulkhead of the Bern ship, anchoring them in place. What was left of her other arm was wrapped around Mortimor, all three of them having braced together prior to impact.
Cole let go with his own mechanical hand and saw that his fingers had pierced the hull plating as well, leaving behind five black holes in the dull steel. He met Penny’s eyes again. They both eventually broke the shocked stare to look down at Mortimor, who lay between them, unmoving.
Cole groped for a pulse with his non-mechanical hand. He wanted to shout to the dying to shut up, to end their racket, to give him a chance to feel.
Penny’s hand went to Mortimor’s forehead. She brushed his dark hair back over his head and stroked his cheek with one of her thumbs. Cole looked to Penny as he fumbled for a sign of life. Her wild red hair hung around her face, almost seeming like the source of the smoke fogging in all around them. Beyond, the coughing and hacking from the survivors seemed to morph into the crackle of flame. Soot and dirt had lightly covered her face everywhere except for the thin tracks shoveled aside by falling tears.
In his peripheral, surviving aliens moved dimly through the dust, tending to others and pushing heavy equipment off bodies. Someone worked one of the hatches open, letting in a shaft of light that seemed to multiply the smoke. The entire scene wrapped itself around Cole, holding him there, nothing in his awareness truly real other than Penny and Mortimor—an enigmatic and mostly metallic woman revealing to him the first signs of real life, and a man he’d sworn to protect and rescue slowly giving up the last of his.
••••
Parsona banked herself wide to approach the rift from the edge. The expanded tear between Lok’s atmosphere and hyperspace had the shape of a weather balloon pressed flat: tall and thin, rounded at the top, and tapering to a pinprick at the bottom, right in the foundation of Ryke’s old house. The rift was difficult to look at directly, both with eyes and with sensors. The harsh photons escaping from the cone-shaped land had much of their primal fury intact. They faded, however, as they slammed into the different set of physical laws governing the universe to which Lok belonged. Those hyperspace particles quickly wilted as they arrived, melting in the atmosphere along with the sideways-drifting snow.
The strange combination of light and glistening flakes seemed out of place as they billowed over a notoriously dry and dark frontier planet. They seemed, at least at a distance, anything but awful. The entire rift appeared more like some visiting angel from a race of blob-giants, the creature’s surface boiling with light and throwing off dying sparks like little fairies.
Suddenly, though, a black lozenge protruded from the angel’s rounded head. It looked like a small, deadened tongue by scale, but it was just another Bern ship pulling through the rift high off the ground, continuing the long line of crafts filing out over the planet for weeks.
However, instead of increasing thrust to pull up to orbit, instead of falling into formation with the others, this black shape nosed down, no longer a tongue, but now something deadly spit from the angel’s mouth. This new arrival continued its chase of group two’s ship, arcing toward the downed craft and toward Parsona…
“Contact on SADAR,” Ryke said.
“I see it, but I don’t think it’s coming for us.” Parsona banked a few degrees more to the side, stiffening her angle to swing wider around the rift. The Bern ship stayed on course, heading out over the ruins of the old village and several kilometers beyond.
“They’re heading for Mortimor’s ship,” Ryke whispered.
“You should get back with the others. Make sure everything’s ready.”
“They’re heading for Mortimor’s ship,” he said again. “They’re gonna finish the job.”
“Ryke, see to the console. We don’t have much time.”
Two more contact alarms flashed on SADAR, pressing home the point. Only these two were swooping down from orbit rather than coming through the rift. And their vectors had them heading straight for Ryke’s house: the locus of the great tear in space. It seemed the orbiting fleet had finally become aware of the local threat to their rift.
Parsona quickly calculated that she would beat them there, but only by minutes. And the procedure to seal the rift, according to Ryke, would take half an hour, give or take. Fighting the urge to increase thrust, Parsona swooped low over the prairies, constrained by the forces she could inflict on Ryke and the others. For an AI routine trapped in a life of so many eternal seconds, she suddenly felt a level of impatience and desperate anxiety that recalled a more Human existence, and not in a good way.
••••
Lady Liberty popped out of hyperspace in a high orbit over Lok, Anlyn and Edison taking point in the raid from Darrin. The single jump maneuver had worked perfectly, even if the hyperdrive would never operate again. With the press of a button, their ship had moved from one quadrant of the galaxy to another, with no care for what lie in between or how much gravity was encountered upon arrival. Anlyn felt as amazed and grateful as she had during hers and Edison’s previous experimental jump—the one to the center of that alien star so many sleeps ago, leading them to hyperspace.
Her thankfulness, however, didn’t last. They had a problem. It showed up on SADAR the size of a small moon.
Anlyn didn’t even need her instruments to know it was there. Glancing up through the carboglass, she could spot the massive vessel with her naked eye, its steel hull reflecting Lok’s sun with the brightness of an unnatural albedo. It was shining, not smoking. It was perfectly intact.
The rest of Anlyn’s wing began popping into orbit around her, each a few seconds apart.
There’s no way to warn the others before they arrive, she thought grimly.
Her SADAR flashed with a targeting alarm, and then a gravity alert.
With little other warning, Lady Liberty went dead, just like the N
avy pilots had said their StarCarrier had. The ship began falling toward Lok in a flat, lazy spin, the pull of some bizarre artificial gravity dragging it out of orbit and toward a very real death.
Anlyn’s wing of ships followed, spiraling down after her. So too did every other craft jumping in from Darrin, wing after wing materializing in Lok’s orbit, then beginning their long plummet down. They were like a flock of canaries appearing in the vacuum of space only to realize they couldn’t breathe there—and that there was nothing for their mighty wings to flap against.
••••
Parsona’s cargo ramp slammed to the grass in the commons, and Scottie and Ryn shuffled sideways through the door, lugging the heavy control console between them. Resting on top was the makeshift cross Ryke had cobbled together. The anxious engineer followed along behind, playing out coils of wire. He dropped the loops to the grass as the three men shuffled toward the foundation of his old home.
As he went, Ryke tried to concentrate on the simple task before him, worrying over the trivial threat of a snag yanking them to a halt. It was better to focus on such things than to fret over the massive ships roaring down to destroy them. Better to note the squeak from one of Parsona’s struts as the ship’s cooling thrusters lowered the rest of her bulk to the commons than dwell on the massive rift he had too little time to close.
“That strut needs greasing,” Ryke mumbled to himself.
He wondered if he would die worried about such a minor thing.
Ahead of him, Scottie and Ryn weaved through a gap in the crumbling, rocky perimeter of his old home, carrying the console between them. Ryke followed, dropping his coils of wire where his front porch once stood. His mind warped back to promised dreams he’d had while living in hyperspace, dreams of making it back to Lok and rebuilding his old home from scratch. Dreams of getting his workshop back together and tinkering with hybrid combustion electric engines, or something equally boring.
