The screaming from Stella and Gregury fell silent. Penny thought about putting them out of their misery with her blade, but they were already dead before she could steel herself. Jym, the group’s pilot and therefore responsible for cutting an exit out of the box, cursed and kicked his dead buckblade in disgust.
Mortimor scanned the tight confines of the box and seemed to take it all in. He reached down and picked up one of the dropped swords from the two dead squadmates. “Jym, you go forward alone and clear the cockpit.” He handed him the retrieved sword. “Penny, you take Starboard. I’ll clear Port. Go!”
Penny nodded. Translator and navigator had instantly become swordsmen, she and Mortimor reverting to older, more comfortable roles. She finished her cut in the wall and kicked the center of the crude circle. The heavy steel fell away, exposing the Bern ship’s decking half a meter above the floor of the box. Two sets of legs stood there—Bern crewmen studying the strange cube that had appeared inside their starship. Penny swiped through all four limbs with a wave of her hand. She jumped out to the deck and silenced the screaming forms before they hit the ground.
It was a messy start, blood slicking the deck around the box, but Penny didn’t pause to help the others. She ran aft along the port side, thinking of the look on Stella’s face before Gregury had jumped in, and how different she had looked just moments later with her wide, lifeless eyes. The horrific sight—the suddenness of the switch from life to death—gave Penny fuel for moving swiftly through the craft, slicing down all the bewildered Bern who stood in her way.
The windshield of the impounded Bern craft was dusted in a never ending torrent of snowflakes. The flurries impacted right in front of her and slid to the side, gathering in miniature drifts. The sight of the stuff, coupled with the harsh whiteness beyond, made it easier to fly by the instruments than stare into the mesmerizing sameness.
And so Anlyn Hooo—Drenard Princess, member of the Great Circle— kept her head down as she piloted the Bern craft through hyperspace. It had been two weeks to the day. Two weeks of exhausting one-hour shifts, causing her to develop a powerful antipathy to the sight of the relentless snow outside. She preferred to rest her chin on her chest and monitor beneath drooping eyelids their ship’s position within the vast invasion fleet, following everything from the instrument readouts.
Edison snored beside her in his gruff and intermittent way. The massive Glemot, her co-pilot and fiancé, was fast asleep with the radio mic clutched in his paws. Anlyn checked the ship’s clock, dreading the answer to her weary and eternal question: How much time left on my shift?
Forty minutes.
It filled Anlyn with guilt and dread. Dread for the perceived hours and days it would take for those forty minutes to tick down and guilt for knowing that Edison would have to take over for her once they did.
Another ship passed through the open rift ahead, and the fleet adjusted accordingly. Anlyn felt a rush of adrenaline as she leaned forward, gripped the control stick, and matched the precise movements of the Bern. It took every ounce of her will to fly like a fresh pilot, alert and ready, rather than the half-dead thing she had become. A thousand times over the past weeks, Anlyn had foreseen the end to hers and Edison’s endurance: There would be a wobble and a gradual falling out of formation. Barked orders full of suspicion would follow, and Edison’s sleep-deprived lies would not wash them away. The final stage would be missiles and plasma bolts to end their fitful ruse—
A loud bang in the rear of their ship interrupted Anlyn’s thoughts. Edison bolted upright, the radio coming to his mouth in reflex. He scanned the dash before looking to Anlyn in confusion.
“Diagnose!” he said in his native English.
Anlyn shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. She tried to force the cobwebs aside and think clearly. “It sounded mechanical, but none of the gauges have so much as twitched.” She looked to the SADAR, but it was nearly useless in the driving snow. “The fleet is moving again. Maybe it was a collision?”
Edison began to rise from his seat to go inspect the cause of the noise, but Anlyn placed a hand on his chest and attempted to push him back.
“I can’t speak Bern,” she reminded him. She glanced at the mic in his hand. “Stay here in case the fleet calls. I’ll go see what it was.”
She unbuckled her harness while Edison yawned—his long furry arms running out of room for a decent stretch. She ducked under his elbow and padded out of the cockpit on wobbly legs, heading aft. In her sleepy pilot brain, she went over all the possible causes for the loud, metallic sound. A ceiling panel could’ve fallen loose and slammed into the decking. A storage cabinet could’ve vibrated off its rivets. One of the generators could’ve thrown a rod.
But then she heard something else, something easier to recognize. It was a thumping sound, rhythmic, just like the footfalls of someone running.
And it was getting louder.
Cole finished his second sweep of the port side, seeing nothing more than the messes he had left behind the first time. He reached the cockpit after Marx and helped the large Callite drag Bern bodies out of the way. It looked like the pilot and co-pilot had cut down several Bern in taking over control of the ship.
Despite the design of his Underground boots, made to grip through blood and ice, Cole found himself slipping and sliding as he drug a Bern’s torso out of the cockpit’s narrow hallway. There was a gruesome normalcy to the task, like arranging furniture, that nearly made Cole gag. He forced himself to not look the dead man in the eye as he added him to a pile Marx had already started. The Callite threw a plastic tarp over the figures while Cole looked for something to mop up the blood. There was no way they could work with such a thick pool of it right in the cockpit. He pulled a jacket off one of the Bern crewmen, looking away from the Human-like face as he did so. He threw the jacket down into the spilled gore and pushed it around with his boot, trying to mop a path through the mess.
“Ryke was right about the windshields,” Cole heard the navigator say. “They’re already darkened, so we won’t be needing our goggles.”
“Keep em around your necks anyway,” someone else in the cockpit barked.
A third voice burst out in a strange language, causing Cole to pause from his dirty work and scramble for his buckblade. The cadence and inflection of the words sounded similar to what several Bern crewmen had been shouting before Cole had cut them down.
“Shhh!” somebody hissed. “Complete silence!”
Cole left the soiled jacket wadded up against the bulkhead and stuck his head in the cockpit. He watched as Larken, the squad translator, leaned forward from one of the seats and spoke foreign words—the same type of words—into the mic. Everyone froze, anxious and tense.
When he stopped speaking, a voice came through the radio again. Larken held his eyes closed and turned to face the pilot. He nodded now and then as the rapid Bern continued.
“What was that about?” the pilot asked as soon as the voice fell silent.
“They want us to check for any problems. One of the other ships called something in, and now they won’t respond.”
“You want me to go check?” the navigator asked, jabbing a thumb over his shoulder.
“Moron,” the pilot said. “We’re the problem.”
“One of the other squads must be in trouble,” Cole said.