36
Parsona’s nose dipped into the carrier’s flight bay, the glare of Lok’s sun replaced by the warm glow of artificial lights.
“Suns ’a britches,” Cat whispered. She cupped her hands around her face and pressed them against the porthole beside the nav chair. Molly hovered the ship just inside the cavernous hangar and looked out to port through her own circle of glass to see what Cat was reacting to.
“Flank me,” she whispered.
It was the Firehawks. Dozens of them. Hundreds, maybe. They were piled high along the upper wall like they’d been shoved out of the way and had somehow gotten stuck there. The StarCarrier’s hangar bay wasn’t empty at all, the ships just weren’t down around the bottom where they should’ve been—they were heaped up along the upper wall to either side of the open airlock.
Molly noted several ships had crashed back to the decking in front of the pile. They lay apart from the rest, forlorn, their wings crushed. The sight made her chest feel hollow, her stomach nauseous. Shapes she equated with power and grace looked like broken animals. Like dead things.
“Don’t make no sense,” Scottie said.
“It makes perfect sense,” Molly whispered. She kept her voice soft, almost as if in reverence of the shattered hulls. She flew deeper into the hangar, then spun the ship around to survey the scene. The pile of debris sat on the sloping deck, up at the top, seemingly in defiance of Lok’s gravity.
“The grav panels went out at some point,” Molly said. “Maybe on impact, maybe before. The ships must’ve rattled around in here, crashing against that side, and then the grav panels kicked back on. Now they’re holding the ships to the decking, which must feel like down for them.”
Scottie leaned over the control console to peer at the wreckage. “Watch your hands,” Molly said, nodding at the controls.
“Yeah, sorry.” He gripped the back of the flightseats and squinted out through the carboglass. “You don’t have any binoculars?” he asked.
Molly shook her head. “No. Just SADAR. Why do you ask?”
“Thought I saw something moving up there,” Scottie said, pointing.
“That’s not—”
“I see it too,” Cat said. She leaned forward and peered toward the line of busted ships. “I’ll be a Drenard’s uncle,” she said, “somebody’s alive in that cockpit!”
Molly was about to argue with them when she saw it as well. Some-thing definitely moved inside one of the shattered canopies. It was impossible to make out any detail—it was just a dark form shifting behind a spider web of fractured glass.
“I’m gonna test the panels,” Molly announced, almost out of habit, as if Cole were there and she needed someone to second the idea.
She lowered the landing gear and settled gently to the decking. As she reduced thrust, Molly waited for the ship to slide back, matching the lean of the StarCarrier, but Parsona didn’t budge. The solid deck-ing beneath them matched the evidence hanging above in all those Firehawks and their scattered debris: the StarCarrier’s grav panels were fully functioning.
“This feels freaky,” Scottie said.
“Forget about the planet,” Molly told them. “Just concentrate on the decking. The decking is down.” It was easy to say, but hard to sound convincing. White puffy clouds slid across the rectangle of blue at the end of the hangar bay. They were looking up a steep slope and trying to tell their bodies it was something else.
“Are we all gonna go out there?” Scottie asked.
“We might need the muscle,” Molly said, already formulating a plan and making a list in her head. She looked back through the cockpit. “We might even need Walter. Anybody know where he is?”
????
“I have to go,” Walter thought. He peeked out of his room and up the length of the ship.
“Everything okay?” he heard through the band.
“Yeah, jusst—”
“Why are you thinking about sshipss going down, Walter? Iss everything alright?”
Walter cursed himself. He was concentrating on not thinking about that!
“It’ss fine, I jusst need to go help Molly.”
“I undersstand. Hey Walter?”
“Yeah?” He glanced out again, then ran across and snuck into Molly’s room while his mysterious friend kept talking.
“When you come ssee me and bring me thosse armss, why don’t you bring Molly with you?”
Walter knelt by her bottom drawer, looking for the tell-tell hair. “Why?” he asked, dying to end the conversation and get out of there.
“I’d like to meet her. And bessidess, what good iss all that gold if you don’t have ssomeone to sspend it on?”
“I’ve gotta go,” Walter said, pulling off the band. He folded it up and stashed it away, then finally found the hair.
As he put the single follicle in place and snuck out of her room, he thought about a block of gold the size of a small moon. Barrel after barrel of solid gold so big you needed tugs to move them around.
And then he thought of how much Molly would really love a brand new starship. And he would buy her one. But first, he had to get her into orbit to meet this guy, which meant reprograming the crappy ship they were already in. How would he get his chance to do that? Molly wouldn’t trust him near the systems, and whatever she’d done to the cockpit door, it was enough that he couldn’t crack it. It was like the thing had a mind of its own. He had to find a way, somehow. His new friend—the voice behind the band—had said was that he was a very smart Palan and that he would figure something out.
And I will, Walter told himself.
He sure was glad to have met someone who knew he wasn’t stupid.
????
Molly parked several hundred meters from the pile of ships, just in case any of them shifted. It made for a long hike with all the heavy gear they were toting—and it gave her plenty of time to appreciate how large the hangar was without ships arranged throughout.
Scottie and Urg carried the fuel tank for the cutting torch between them; Molly had the handheld radio and the large medkit; Cat carried a duffle full of blankets, water, and clean rags. Walter had volunteered to carry the torch and its tubing, which had started off neatly slung over his narrow shoulders, but loops kept sliding off, knotting in coils that he had resorted to dragging across the deck.
Together, they approached the Firehawk in which they’d seen move-ment. It lay upside down, on top of another broken ship. Everyone set their gear down in a base camp of sorts, all acting professional and calm. Except for Walter, who hissed with annoyance as he began unknotting the hose for the cutting torch.
“I’ll go up,” said Molly, “since I’m familiar with the torch. Scottie, you and Urg can give me a boost to the wing; Cat, you play out the hose.” She pulled the basic medkit out of the larger duffel and slung it around her neck.
Urg raised his hand.
“What is it, big guy?”
“I wanna look for others,” the Callite said, frowning.
“That’s a good idea. Scottie can boost me himself. Take the radio with you in case anyone starts transmitting.”
Urg nodded. He grabbed the portable radio from the top of a duffle and stomped off.
“Make some noise if you find anything!” Scottie yelled after him.
Molly waited for Walter to get the last knot out before attaching one end of the hose to the cutting tank. The dial showed a quarter-full, more than enough. She couldn’t believe they had found a single survivor, much less the dozen or so cuts it would need to deplete the tank.
“I’m ready,” she told Scottie, jerking her head up at the wing above.
He stood directly under it and formed a basket with his hands. Molly draped the hose around her neck and reached up for his shoulders as she put her weight in his palms. She could feel the muscles around his neck harden as he lifted her up effortlessly, high over his head.
“Whoa!” Molly reached up and grabbed the lip, steadying herself as Scottie practically tossed her on top of the wing. She stayed on all fours and turned around. “Nice and easy, big guy.”
Scottie smiled sheepishly as Molly took the loop of hose from her neck and pulled the cutting torch up. Behind her, she could hear the faint sounds of someone knocking, the thump of a boot against thick carboglass.
It took several tries with the sparker before the torch lit, the flint inside worn nearly smooth after so many years of use. When it finally caught, there was a loud pop as the excess gas exploded, followed by the purposeful hiss and blue flame of pressurized fuel burning upon release.
Molly twisted the dial on the side and concentrated on the shape of the white teardrop in the middle of the blue flame. Once it looked perfect for cutting plasteel, she locked the valve and slapped the carboglass several times with her palm. She waited for the noise within to stop, the dark form pulling away from the hazed glass. The entire canopy was so finely cracked, she couldn’t see inside, even from a meter away.
She studied the shape of the cockpit for a moment, determining the best and safest place to cut. One entire lip of the canopy was twisted out of shape, preventing it from sliding back and trapping the person inside. Looking at the way the Firehawks around her were warped out of shape, she couldn’t believe a human being could survive whatever had happened. She bent down and worked the flame over the lip of the side porthole, squinting at the bright light of plasma as she gradually cut a circle out of the hull.
The entire section of frame fell inside the cockpit as the last of the cut was made. Molly killed the torch and bent down near the hole. “Keep back for a sec!” she yelled. She opened one of the water bottles and doused the edges of the plasteel, which popped and hissed violently but lost their red glow.
Two gloved hands emerged. They grabbed the jagged lip, and a helmet followed. Molly realized at once how the pilot had survived the crash: his lifesupport umbilical was still jacked in by his armpit, catching on the edge of cut steel. She reached down and popped it loose as the man fell out of the hole and onto the wing of the lower Firehawk. He kicked at the surface with his heels, scrambling backward and fumbling with his helmet.
“What’s going on up there?” Scottie yelled from below.
Molly ignored Scottie’s shouts. “Hold still,” she told the pilot. She grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him down before reaching for the clasps on his helmet. The dome popped off, revealing a young spaceman with sweat-matted hair and eyes wide with fear.
“It’s okay. Calm down.” Molly looked him over for signs of injury. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Higgins. Private Higgins,” he said. “Deck maintenance, third shift. I—” his eyes focused on something beyond Molly. “Where’re the others?” he asked.
“Keep calm.” Molly handed him a bottle of water from the medkit. “You were smart to get plugged in,” she told him.
Higgins took a long swig from the bottle, wiped his chin, then looked down at his flightsuit. “Jonesy,” he said, rubbing his fingers over the name patch. “He told me to do it. Gave me one of his extra flightsuits. I think he knew we were going down before we even got hit. He ran off for the Admiral, I think he was trying to save the old man—”
“Saunders?” Molly asked.
Higgins nodded. “Yeah.” He stopped and looked up at Molly. “Are you a part of some kinda rescue operation?”
“I— Not really. There might not be anyone else to rescue,” she said.
“Everything okay up there?”
Molly went to the edge of the wing and looked over. “A scared mechanic. He jacked into the life support. The anti-grav suit kept him alive. Gimme a sec with him so he’ll be okay to climb down—”
Loud banging echoed down the line of ships, cutting her off. Scottie and Cat turned and looked toward the sound; Molly followed their gazes. In the distance, she could see Urg waving his arms and pointing up to another Firehawk.
“Pants on fire,” Cat whispered. “I think we have more survivors.”
????
There were eight of them in all. Five pilots, two navigators, and Higgins. The two paired-up crew members had been on deck, ready for lift-off, when the grav panels failed. Everyone’s story was the same and equally awful: they had held tight in abject terror while the ships were flung from one side of the hangar to the other, everyone fearful their Firehawk would rattle out the open hangar doors, or they would lose life support.
Certainly, some others had.
None of the Gs suffered had been too much for the flightsuits, and everyone seemed fit, if dehydrated and terrified. Molly and her little rescue crew stayed so busy crawling across the wreckage, cutting people out and getting them food and water, that she hardly noticed the odd dynamic forming. Pilots—some of them twice her age—were looking to her and her friends as if they were in charge.
While Urg continued to search for anyone left alive in the tangled mess—refusing to give up even when it seemed unlikely there were any more—Molly and the others sat with the crewmen, trying to console them. They all had a defeated, dazed look, almost like animals after a near-drowning.
Molly peeled the wrapper off a protein bar and handed it to one of the pilots. His eyes were unblinking, wide and wet.
“It was the Drenards, wasn’t it?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “No. It’s something worse. Now listen, we need to figure out—”
“What’s worse than Drenards?” someone else asked.
“Is it the Tchung?”
“It’s not the Tchung,” Molly said.
“Gotta be the Dremards. I heard they were coming out of their arm of the Milky Way for the first time. They attacked Rigel!”
Molly held up her hands. “It’s not Drenards—”
“What then? Did you see them? What was it?”
“Listen,” she said. “The first thing we need to do is help the rest of the crew. See if any of the staff survived. Then we can—”
“Survived?” Higgins squeaked. “Nobody but us survived! How could they? There was almost ten thousand people on this ship, and now there’s eight!” He looked at his palms. “Darlene,” he said, then started sobbing, covering his face with his hands.
Molly rose and went to him. She wrapped her arm around his shoulders and looked to the others. “We’ll mourn when we can and for as long as they deserve, but right now we need to—”
“We need to get off this ship!” someone said.
“And we will,” Molly told them. “We will. But first, we need to see if anyone else survived. According to Higgins, here, one of the pilots went off to help the senior staff—”
“They’re dead!” one of the pilots said. “C’mon, the only safe place in this bucket was to be rattling around in one of our little tin cans.”
“That’s not true,” Molly said. “There’s one other place we need to check. Just in case.”
One of the pilots—Roberts, according to his name patch—met her with a solid look. His eyes were aware, vibrant, not as red as the others.
“Where’s that?” he asked.
“The simulator room,” Molly said.
????
They left the survivors behind with Urg, who insisted on continuing his search for life among the debris. Several of the pilots suggested they come along and help, but Molly stood firm, pretending to be looking out for their well-being. In reality, she didn’t want to get bogged down if they came across bodies of people they knew, forcing her to tend to their nerves instead of potential survivors. Also—and she hated to admit it—she didn’t want to get outnumbered if any of them found out who she was. According to the report she’d found in the Navy database, she and her ship were the highest of high-priority targets. And now they were back on the same damned Navy StarCarrier she had once escaped from.
She swiped one of the pilot’s badges through a door reader and let Walter go through first. He led the way with his computer, the schematics for the ship pulled up from his last hack of the place. Molly looked at the badge in her hand, the one that had opened the door, and wondered if the gesture had even been necessary.
They made haste down the hallway that led to the stairwells, not trusting the elevator shaft after a crash landing; it could easily be just as twisted as the Firehawks. They each carried biotubes from one of the pilot’s survival kits, and Cat had a flashlight, just in case.
Inside the landing of the stairwell, they came across their first bodies, barely recognizable as such. Not welded down like everything else aboard the ship, they had been flung all over the stairwell when the grav panels had temporarily failed. They left behind not much more than smears of red wetness on the walls and on the underside of the rising flight of steps. Flightsuits lay scattered in lumpy reminders of what the mess had originated from.
Molly tried to focus into the distance as she stepped gently through the slick, chunk-filled puddles. She gripped the railing to the side. When her hand went into something wet, she had to stifle her gag reflex and fight to remain in control of her senses. She led the way down the steps, two flights, both of which were covered with and reeking of human remains.
Behind her, Scottie coughed into his hand. Molly reached back and clutched Walter’s sleeve, helping steady both of them, physically and emotionally. She scanned open the door on the crew deck and waved them through, each of them pale and holding their breath. All except for Walter, who didn’t seem fazed; his attention was firmly locked onto his computer.
“This way,” he said calmly.
Scottie leaned against the bulkhead, his head bowed down. “We’re gonna have to find a different way back,” he said. “I’ve seen some flanked-up shit in my day, but nothing like that.”
“They were probably told to—” Molly fought hard to swallow, “—told to get in the stairwell. Like an emergency drill. Either that, or everyone thought of the suits in the hangar and got backed up trying to get there.” She grabbed Scottie’s arm and led him after Walter, who was waiting at the next turn.
“I can’t imagine what it must’ve been like to be in there,” Cat said.
The words popped a visual in Molly’s mind: the tight confines, packed and rattling with dozens and dozens of Gs. It would’ve been awful.
“We’re not gonna find anybody down here,” Scottie complained. “I’m thinking we should head back.”
“It’s just around the corner,” Molly assured him. Walter had shown her schematics of the carrier; the sim room and the hangar were situated above and below the pilot’s quarters, as if to reduce their foot travel.
Walter ran ahead, leading the way to the simulator room. The smell of blood and oil seemed to permeate the lower decks as fluids leaked out of broken things. Molly fought to ignore the occasional body they went by. Even the sight of a bag of laundry, open and disgorging crumpled Navy blacks, filled her with sorrow. What was left of the person who had been rushing off to wash those? she wondered.
As they caught up to Walter and neared the simulator room, Molly realized Scottie had been right. They weren’t going to find anyone alive down there. If someone had survived in a simulator pod, they would surely be running up and down the decks by now, looking to rescue others or trying to flee the ship.
Expecting to find the room intact, the pods empty or full of more horror, Molly stepped inside with her hopes low—when she should’ve been concentrating on keeping her defenses up.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of crewmen had been packed in the simulator room—it was impossible to tell exactly how many. Their bodies formed a wall of gruesome death on the far side of the room, stacked up in a scene eerily reminiscent of the Firehawks piled high in the hangar. Jumbled up, mounded like a snowdrift, they formed a slope of tangled forms, their individual parts woven together and indistinguishable.
The marks their flying bodies had made spotted the room, dotting the pods, the floor, even the ceiling with bright marks of crimson. Molly caught herself on the doorjamb and tried to wave away the others be-fore they joined her. The sound of Scottie gagging behind her let her know she’d been too late.
“Flank me,” Cat said. “They were all thinkin’ the same thing.”
“Let’s go,” Molly told them. She pushed her way past her friends and back into the hallway, which suddenly seemed positively laden with fresh air. She tried not to think about what those people had gone through, what their last moments had been like. The crowded panic, the fearful silence, and then . . . the horrible rattling and crushing.
“Ssomethingss knocking,” Walter said from the room.
“I think that’s my knees,” Scottie said. “I don’t feel so good.”
“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.
????
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~