Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue (The Bern Saga #1) by Hugh Howey
Part I – The Tchung Affair
“It started with a nightmare.
And the nightmare became a dream.
Then the dream became real.?.?.”
~The Bern Seer~
1
Molly floated in the vacuum of space with no helmet on—with no protection at all. In the distance, a starship slowly drifted away. It was her parents’ ship, and they were leaving her behind.
She swam in the nothingness, trying to keep them in view, but as always she spun around and faced the wrong direction. It was the only torment the old nightmare had left. After years of waking up—screaming, crying, soaked in her own sweat—she had whittled it down to this.
She gave up fighting for one last glimpse and tried to relax, to find some breath of peace. They were out there, even if she couldn’t see them. And as long as she stayed asleep, suffocating and alone, her parents remained among the stars. Alive.
“Molly.”
A voice pierced the dream. Molly cracked her eyes and blinked at her surroundings. Beyond the carboglass cockpit loomed a scene similar to her nightmare, but filled with a fleet of Navy ships. The fire of their thrusters blended with the stars beyond, little twinkles of plasma across the stark black.
“Gimme a sec,” she mumbled, rubbing her eyelids before snapping her visor shut. She scanned the constellation of lights and readouts across the dashboard and over her head. She could see at a glance that everything was in order. This spread of twinkling indicators and glowing dials were as familiar to her as any starchart, as recognizable as a loved one’s face.
“Take your time. Your shift’s not up for another ten.”
She turned in her nav seat to face Cole Mendon?a, her pilot for the last two years. Molly sat to his right in the Firehawk’s “girlie” seat, a term meant to motivate the boys from flunking out of flight school and ending up as lowly navigators. All the insult did for Molly was infuriate her—she’d never even been given the chance to fail.
“Another ten? Drenards, Cole, then why’d you wake me?”
“I wanted you to see something. I just sent it over. Check the first tab.”
Molly frowned at her pilot and pulled the reader out of its pouch. She resented not being able to fly, but she had a hard time taking it out on Cole. Partly because he had earned his position, but mostly because she considered him a friend. And in the male-dominated galaxy in which she lived and operated, those were as rare as habitable worlds.
She yawned and tried to stretch as much as the flight harness would allow. If only civilians knew how boring space flight truly was. All they ever saw were the buzzing battles on the Military Channel, the great swarms of spacecraft darting through torrents of laser fire. In reality, flying for the Navy mostly meant dull chores: astronavigation and chart plotting, taking turns on flight shifts while your partner grabbed precious few winks, and digital paperwork. Lots of digital paperwork.
“What exactly am I looking at?” she asked. She assumed Cole was going to have her perform some more clerical heroics.
“It’s our system update log. Read it.”
She turned to Cole, her fears confirmed. “You woke me up for an update log?”
“Read it,” he insisted, facing her. With his mirrored visor down, only his lips were visible, pursed with worry. Molly heard the AC unit in her flightsuit whir to life, whisking away her excess body heat. She glanced up at the reflection in his visor. Both helmets repeated themselves over and over in a series of infinite regressions. She tried to follow herself as she receded into the indiscernibly diminutive.
“Firehawk GN-KPX to Molly Fyde, come in,” Cole said mockingly. “Can you read me? Over.”
Molly pulled her gaze away from the familiar illusion of reflections and focused on the reader.
“Well?” he asked.
“Gimme a sec, would you?”
She skimmed the report, not sure what to look for. It was standard stuff from the IT department: a software upload to their ship four days ago by Specialist Second Class Mitchell and signed off by Commander Hearst. A few bugs fixed, some navigational data updated. None of it warranted the worry in Cole’s voice.
“I don’t see the problem,” she said.
“That’s because I haven’t shown it to you yet. I just wanted you to see that before I presented this.” With an unnecessary flourish, Cole pulled up the Firehawk’s diagnostic information on the main screen of the dash.
It took a second for Molly to see it. She gaped at him in disbelief and annoyance. “Are you serious? You’re worked up over this?” She jabbed a finger at the time of their computer’s most recent update. It said the 14th. Yesterday. Two days later than the maintenance report suggested. She groaned. “I’m sure it’s just an input error, Cole.” She flipped the tab shut on her reader and stuffed it away. “And I was having such a good dream, too.”
“First of all, you don’t have good dreams. I know because you mumble in your sleep. Secondly, the reason I tracked down the report was ’cause I was already suspicious. I saw someone tampering with our Firehawk this morning. You’re looking at the confirmation, not the clue.”
“And why would someone tamper with our ship?”
“Now that’s the mystery,” he agreed. “Hopefully just someone messing with us. Jakobs, maybe. Whoever it was had his build. Man, I should’ve suspected something and taken a closer look. Still, what in the galaxy would someone be doing updating our ship’s programming? Who even knows how to do that outside of IT?”
Cole’s voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. He was enjoying this entirely too much. “And what if it isn’t a practical joke?” he asked. “What if it’s something . . . worse?”
Molly nearly burst out laughing. Once Cole’s brain concocted a good conspiracy theory, there was no stopping him. She’d seen it play out dozens of times, him always jumping to conclusions with the barest of facts. It used to bother her, but then she figured out that this habit of his—playing connect-the-dots without bothering to read the numbers—was better than any game of Drenards or Dare. When Cole drew what he wanted to see, rather than what was actually there, that’s when Molly learned the most about him.
“Hey, it’s my shift,” she said, too tired to egg him on or argue. “Why don’t you take a nap and try dreaming in your sleep for a change.”
Cole opened his mouth to launch a witty comeback—but he never got the chance. Because that’s when the long tedium of astronavigating from point A to point B came to an abrupt end.
And the part people see on the Military Channel finally began.
????
Intelligence reports had projected an enemy force of a dozen, tops. The fleet had subsequently planned for two dozen, just to be safe. What winked out of hyperspace was several times this. So many that Molly didn’t have time to count them visually. Even her SADAR unit had difficulty teasing the clusters into individual targets. Fifty fighters? Half a dozen heavy bombers?
Cole slammed the Firehawk to full throttle, and Molly felt her chest constrict as the flightsuit struggled to compensate. Millions of tiny pockets pushed anti-grav fluid wherever it was needed, offsetting the shift in acceleration. With the suits and their conditioning, Molly and Cole could tolerate forces that would normally tear the human body apart. Which was precisely how it felt at times.
“We have three fighters breaking off for a flanking maneuver,” she noted. Keeping her gaze locked on the targets, her gloved hand pressed buttons by her thigh. The representations of all three enemy ships blossomed with an orange glow for Cole to consider.
“I see ’em,” he said, peeling off to intercept.
Riggs—their wingman in the neighboring Firehawk—locked in as well. The two ships coursed across the formation to head off the threat, even as the acting fleet commander barked orders for all craft to engage in a full-frontal attack.
Molly watched as Riggs’s Firehawk wavered on SADAR, their wingman torn between two duties, two disparate layers of command. Cole’s hand never twitched on the flight controls. He ignored the fleet commander in favor of Molly’s threat assessment, and the two Firehawks continued to barrel after the trio of enemy fighters.
“We’re gonna come in pretty hot,” he warned, his voice calm and soothing considering what they were up against. Riggs answered back on their private channel, his choice made. Meanwhile, along the front line, streaks of plasma jolted across the gap between the two fleets. Fired by the jittery and eager, these premature tendrils lanced out with no chance of inflicting damage, not at such a vast range.
The three targets Molly had chosen were trying to get around the fleet. The combination of superior numbers and crossfire would end the fight before it ever truly began. Glancing at her SADAR, she saw two other enemy groups pulling the same maneuver on opposite sides of the fleet. None of the other Firehawks were responding. She broadcast a warning on the emergency channel, more concerned with the threat than she was with violating rank and protocol. A chorus of male voices shouted her down, all of them insisting the main fleet body remain in formation, some of them telling her to shut the hell up.
Molly ignored the insults. The threat of encirclement was there. It had to be taken seriously, even if this meant thinning the formation before the first casualties were suffered.
Cole and Riggs seemed to agree. They closed in on their targets, still out of effective laser and missile range, but the gap was rapidly decreasing. Thanks to the quick response, they had a great angle on their enemies’ trajectory. They would easily cut them off.
The trio of enemy pilots realized this as well. The craft nearest them altered course, whirling around with incredible speed and precision. It darted for Cole and Riggs, one ship bearing down on two in a suicidal gambit designed to buy his partners some time.
“Lock missiles.” Cole’s voice hinted at the first sign of strain.
Molly’s fingers danced across the targeting console; the orange triangle around the attacker turned red. “Firing,” she said, pulling the trigger.
Nothing happened. Confused and flushed with heat, Molly looked at her controls and checked the safety overrides. Everything was green. It took a moment for her brain to go through the reasonable explanations. When it ran out of them, it considered Cole’s silly conspiracy theory—and how it didn’t seem quite so silly anymore.
“We’ve got a problem!” she yelled.
The first volley of enemy laser lashed out at Riggs on their starboard side. At this distance, it was easy to avoid. Cole rolled away to give his wingman more room, his foul language suggesting a similar problem with the lasers that Molly was having with the missiles. Without weapons, they’d be useless out there. Defanged. Flying nothing more than a scout ship in the biggest naval engagement of their young lives. Molly tried in vain to comprehend the nightmare they were in.
And then it got worse.
The fighter bearing down on them spun away from Riggs and launched a volley at Cole, and he was too distracted with the malfunctioning lasers to respond. Molly nearly got out a warning before the glancing blow struck the nose of their ship.
The cockpit flashed for a moment, then went dark. The Firehawk fell into a flat, lifeless spin—its nose slowly pointing back to the fleet. All three thrusters were knocked out and off-line. And as the entire dash descended into darkness, the other lights around them became vivid and bright. The stars and pink nebulae beyond the fighting glowed with intense beauty, the laser blasts directed at their wingman blooming far more sinister.
The next volley flashed by their cockpit, illuminating the interior with a red pall of death, before slamming into Riggs’s Firehawk head-on. His ship blossomed silently into the glowing cloud of debris and flaming ash that Molly had come to associate with a Navy death.
So quick.
The enemy craft flew past the carnage it had created, whipping the fine particles in its thruster’s wake. It seemed impossible, but Molly swore she could hear the ship screaming across the vacuum of space as it circled around—preparing for a run on her lifeless and useless ship.
????
“Cole!” Molly shook his arm, but there was no response. She leaned forward and initiated a cold boot of every system, hoping some of their defenses would come back on-line. Anything.
To Molly’s astonishment, the entire dash lit up. The laser blasts had locked up the computers and knocked out Cole, but the ship was coming back to life. Even the thruster control indicators winked from red to amber. In ten minutes she’d have propulsion again—if she could just hold out that long.
She took a deep breath and wrapped her left hand around the flight controls. Situated between her and Cole, the controls catered to the 82 percent of pilots who favored their right hand. Incredibly and unfortunately, this was one area in which Molly could be considered “normal.” Despite hours of practice from the nav seat, she would never fly as well from that side of the cockpit as she could with her dominant hand.
The large propulsion thrusters at the rear of her Firehawk were still warming up, but she had control of the maneuvering jets. Molly used them to swing the Firehawk around, squeezing the trigger as she did so, hoping the reboot had fixed the weapons glitch.
Nothing. And now she knew this was no accident. Cole’s conspiracy theory had grown legs—they kicked her for not listening.
Ahead, the enemy craft completed its victory lap around the dispersing nebula left by Riggs’s Firehawk. The first bolts of red laser winked from the sleek fighter and raced her way. Molly used the maneuvering jets to shift sideways. Her right hand flinching as her left hand worked, the dominant side of her squirming to help, to take over for its feeble partner. Molly screamed Cole’s name once more, hoping to rouse him, but he didn’t respond.
The approaching ship released another burst from its cannon as it raced toward her on a vector straight as a taut string. Molly maneuvered the Firehawk to the side, dodging the attacks. The bolts of plasma slid by her canopy, missing her by a handful of meters. She glanced at them with envy. She was being toyed with. Chewed on and released like a wounded animal.
The oncoming ship released one last round of laser fire from close range; Molly barely had time to react. She spiraled the Firehawk in place, the violence of the maneuver yanking her against her flight harness, her head snapping around with the weight of her helmet. When she came to a rest, her attacker flew by so close she could see the glint of his visor through the windshield. She wanted to throw something, anything, at him.
The ship circled wide for another run while Molly rotated her Firehawk to follow. If she could survive one more pass, she’d have the main thrusters back. But she couldn’t rely on her enemy’s ineptitude; she needed to act.
The next round of enemy fire approached. Molly resumed the dangerous dance, stepping side to side as beams of potential death raced by. It made her feel like one of Cole’s Portuguese cavaleiros trying to survive multiple passes by an enraged bull. The only difference: Molly was all cape and no sword.
The metaphor gave her an idea. She pulled up the service modules and flight deck routines—they all seemed to be working. She might not be able to arm her missiles, but at the speed the other ship was flying by, she wouldn’t need to. Another round of deadly red ribbons reached out to her. She slipped expertly to one side. With her other hand, she brought up the docking interface and lowered her landing gear.
Molly performed some dirty calculations in her head, unable to use the nav computer and pilot the ship at the same time. It helped that the craft bearing down on her flew with such precision along a fixed vector. She roughly determined where the ship would be when it passed her and spiraled around yet more laser fire.
When the landing gear extended fully, the deck routines changed from grayed-out to a selectable yellow. With the twist of a dial, Molly highlighted the missile unload commands. As far as the ship knew, they were in a hangar bay preparing to unload munitions—not moments away from being mauled by a raging bull.
Her enemy was a few thousand meters away, closing at a high but steady velocity. The laser fire became more intense, reaching out in a rapid volley. Molly twisted the Firehawk in space, trying to fit it inside the pattern of deadly plasma. One of the wings took a hit, a minor burn, but a reminder that her time was running out. The bull prepared to roar past her.
Just before it did, Molly darted across its path and thumbed a switch, releasing a single missile from the Firehawk’s belly. She may have been a harmless cape swishing in space, but behind her, an unarmed and inert hunk of metal like a gleaming sword was left in the bull’s path. A sword to impale itself on.
The enemy never saw what hit him. The missile impacted the cockpit right where the glint of visor had been. Molly had hoped to disable the craft, but she did much more. The kinetic energy of the oncoming ship forced the missile down its center, rupturing the rear of the vessel and sending out large chunks of debris. The destruction occurred so close to her Firehawk that her tail was forced to one side. The violence slammed her into her harness, and Molly fought with the flight controls to keep out of a spin.
After a tense moment, she regained full control of the ship.
Her ship.
Molly elbowed Cole, whooping with delight, but the life support readouts showed her the awful truth: She was alone.
The thruster indicators went from amber to green.
Molly gave them a test, feeling the acceleration add more weight to an already heavy chest. Out of immediate danger, she took a moment to survey the flow of battle on SADAR. The blue and green dots were no longer approaching one another in separate spheres. They intermingled, swirling in pairs until one of them disappeared.
Her side fought nobly, but the three sets of flanking craft were closing in for what would soon be a massacre. And there wasn’t much Molly could do to help.
Then she thought of how many times she’d toyed with these scenarios in her bunk at night. Here she was, at the helm, hopelessly outgunned, with nothing in the Navy manuals to suggest her next course of action.
She should run. Her wingman was gone, her pilot dead. She would score points with the higher-ups simply for surviving—for saving Navy hardware. But something gnawed at her. She couldn’t help but wonder if there was something she could do for the fleet, something that would win her the accolades she felt she deserved. Would an act of creative heroism prove what she already knew? That she more than belonged out here with the boys?
The choice seemed simple: fight or flee, but Molly’s hand came off the throttle. She wouldn’t be thrusting in either direction. Instead, she started spinning up the Firehawk’s hyperdrive.
She wondered what “the boys” would make of this next idea.
They’d probably tell her she’d lost her mind. By every standard of common sense, jumping through hyperspace during a battle was the height of folly. Hyperspace was useful for crossing vast distances instantaneously, but only if you were careful. There were two dangers—Molly was about to flirt with them both.
The first danger was the sensitive mathematics involved. To travel through hyperspace safely, you had to account for every object on both sides of the jump. Even a small gravitational disturbance could deflect you off course, or worse, suck you in. It was likened to tossing one magnet at another; if the same poles were facing, you’d end up repulsed and thrown someplace at random. If the opposite poles were lined up, you’d be forced together violently. Violently, that is, for one of the objects.
And that was the second danger Molly was about to face: Objects in “real” space have dibs—they can’t be dislodged by something else. Try and occupy the same coordinates as even a tiny object, like the millions of chunks of debris surrounding a space battle, and no one would even notice your attempt. You’d just vanish. To where, nobody knew.
Were this not the case, modern warfare would have descended into the hopelessly brutal. An arms race with no deterrent effect would ensue as attackers wiped out any target with known coordinates. All they’d have to do is hyperspace a bomb and enjoy the fireworks. The results would be instantaneous and anonymous.
This was widely considered to be a viable terror tactic until 2138. That’s when a video recording from “The Luddites” was discovered in an abandoned apartment. It seems the anti-technology organization had launched a massive suicide-bombing campaign across planet Earth. All for naught. The entire group had vanished in a puff of unexplained physics, leaving behind a taped rationalization for an action that never took place, just a group of crazies that up and disappeared.
These were the dangers. Navy instructors only had to go over them once. After that, everyone just knew not to try what she was contemplating. It was a basic, simple rule, one of the first they were taught.
But her fleet faced certain destruction, pops of orange violence bursting in the distance as her wing mates succumbed to superior numbers. Cole and Riggs were gone. There was no one there to talk sense into her. And by the moment, she was growing convinced her Firehawk had been sabotaged, tampered with. She was living on borrowed time, which made suicidal risks suddenly worth calculating.
Checking her SADAR, Molly saw a pocket of space between the two remaining enemy craft flanking her fleet. Treating the combined mass of every ship on one side of this point as a single object, she simplified the math and made an approximate calculation. Crossing one set of fingers, Molly punched in the hyperspace commands with the other. It was her second game of chicken in less than a minute.
Once again, she didn’t hesitate.
????
The stress of entering hyperspace was topped only by the pain of leaving it. The nausea and panic attacks engendered by a successful jump were likened to a bombardment of loud bass sounds. Many pilots never developed an immunity to the discomfort, and Molly was one of them. She often fought to hide the severity of her reaction. This time, however, she reveled in it.
The pain meant she was alive.
But a glance at her surroundings didn’t inspire much hope for remaining this way. She stood between the fleet and the two flanking ships, and they were closing in fast. Their lasers lanced out greetings at her unexpected arrival. Molly flinched, shoving the ship sideways and away from the attack. She powered up the glorious thrusters and raced parallel to her fleet, presenting a target that moved side to side.
The cape and sword gambit would never work with these guys. There were two sets of crossing laser fire to avoid. And surely they were aware of their fallen comrade by now, which meant she couldn’t rely on them underestimating her. This last assessment was confirmed as each enemy craft spat out a missile keyed to her ship’s signature.
Molly took the gesture as a compliment.
She keyed up her defense menus and scrolled to the missile chaff.
Four pods were stowed in the rear of her Firehawk, each capable of emulating her ship’s signature. Dropping one at a time should negate this new threat, but the delay would prevent her from protecting the fleet. Precisely what her enemy intended.
When the chaff menu came up, Molly appreciated the sophistication with which their Firehawk had been sabotaged. This was a high-level hack. “Drop” was selectable from the chaff menu, but not the “arm” command. It meant they were as useless as her missiles. Dead weight. And trying to place one of the dud canisters in the path of a homing missile would be like flipping a coin in front of a passing laser bolt.
Molly cursed and pulled on the flight stick, sending her Firehawk back on an arc toward the two ships. Their incoming missiles altered course slightly to hone in on her. There was no way she could out-maneuver them; the missiles could pull as many Gs as it took to track her down. She was limited by biology and her flightsuit.
Dwelling on her own constraints gave Molly another crazy idea. She recognized the old Tchung ship designs they were up against. If the missiles were Tchung as well, they had a design flaw she could exploit: their homing software was slightly more advanced than their thrusters. They could think faster than they could turn. Normally, this wasn’t a problem, as it required extreme velocities before the limitation became a factor. Besides, most targets are wise enough to move away from missiles, so the flaw rarely revealed itself. But it was there.
Molly came about as sharply as she could, forcing out puffs of air against the Gs. She pushed forward on the accelerator. Once again, she was prepared to stand in doom’s path in an attempt to escape it. Cole’s stillness made it easier—she was only gambling with her own life.
Molly shook her head and focused outside the cockpit’s carboglass. Beyond the two incoming missiles, she watched her prey speed toward her fleet. They weren’t wasting time following up the missiles with laser-fire. She was a minor annoyance compared to their primary objective: reaching the Navy’s unguarded rear. They had batted at her as if she were a fly while they stalked a heftier foe.
She wished she had time to appreciate the skill behind the tactics, but the missiles and her ship were closing on each other too fast for her to get distracted. Molly just hoped it was fast enough. She did more dirty math. Her suit could take around 40 Gs; her body could probably withstand a dozen more. She looked at her current rate of acceleration and came up with twenty degrees—that was as much as she could alter direction at these speeds without crushing her brain against the inside of her skull. It wasn’t a large vector change; she’d have to wait until the very last second, fraction of a second, even.
That sort of timing required as much luck as skill. The window was so small, the delay between thinking and doing could get her killed. She’d have to take this into account, somehow. Her left hand twitched slightly in awkward anticipation. Molly wished Cole was the one trying this.
The missiles were nearly upon her, or she was almost on them. Her danger-sense warned her prematurely—screaming at Molly to alter course now. She fought the urge, waiting until it felt too late. Only then did she issue the command to her left hand, feeling it move a millisecond later.
The nose of the Firehawk deflected up the programmed twenty degrees. The missiles vanished from view past the carboglass of her cockpit. Her body was pummeled by the radical shift in gravities.
Molly tensed up, partly to protect herself from the violent force of dozens of Gs, and partly in anticipation of a sudden death.
The corners of her vision turned black. The blood in her brain forced itself into her chest. The ring of darkness tightened until she was peering through a straw.
Molly Fyde passed out.