His foot caught on a bit of rubble. He nearly tripped and fell, but managed to catch himself. As he regained his footing and remembered the task at hand, the wire trailing behind him pulled taut. Ryke dropped the few loops that remained and saw they had just a few more meters of wire than they needed.
Scottie and Ryn left the console in a bare patch, right beside an old worklight someone had left lying on its side. Ryke pointed them to the exact spot in a now nonexistent wall, right over a gap in the foundation where the frame of the cellar door once stood. The boys paid no attention to him, knowing as well as anyone where the old rift lay. They approached the paper-thin opening to hyperspace edge-on to stay out of the harsh glare leaking out to either side. All around them swirled melting flurries of the strange and twinkling snowfall.
Ryke powered on the console and fanned his hands over the top of it, as if the drifting flakes would shoo away like bugs. As the other two arranged the cross at the rift’s base, he resisted the urge to look up at the massive hole in the sky above him, at the widening body of that great tear soaring thousands of meters overhead, taking a scale and shape he had known to be theoretically possible but had never imagined coming to life. He concentrated instead on the thin crack right in front of him, on the sliver of light and drifting ice no thicker than foil at that angle and yet the source of so much consternation.
Even though the rift was narrow near the planet’s surface, the escaping photons—energized and angry—were difficult to look at. As Ryke concentrated on his console, fiddling with its knobs, he could see a vertical green bar in his vision where his retinas had been seared from just the briefest of glances at the relatively tame leakage. Working as fast as he dared, he began repairing the rift, closing up the old opening for the second time in his life. But now, so many years later and with a ton more experience, it would be different.
“This time,” he said to himself, “you’ll stay closed.”
A rumble in the atmosphere disturbed the determined promise. Ryke looked up; he shielded his eyes from the rift, and saw the source of the sound. Three enemy ships were screaming through the atmosphere directly toward them. One seemed to be coming from the rift; the other two arced down as if from orbit.
“I guess there won’t be any this time,” Ryke said to himself, sadly.
Arthur Dakura staggered from the cockpit and into the smoke-filled cargo bay, shouting Mortimor’s name. Cole looked up and saw him, saw the older man’s face smeared with blood and grime.
“Over here!” Cole shouted.
Arthur turned, his body stiff and unsure of itself, reinforcing the likeness he shared with his robots. He stumbled stiffly over and sank to his knees by Mortimor’s side, groping his neck for a pulse.
Cole shook his head softly, unable to speak.
“Get him flat,” Arthur demanded, grabbing Mortimor by the armpits.
Cole and Penny helped, untangling themselves from their crash positions and doing most of the heavy lifting while Arthur cupped the back of Mortimor’s head with one hand, lowering it to the deck.
Penny crouched over the scene, her face intent, her eyes wet and wide. Cole settled back against the bulkhead, his ears ringing, both his body and mind weary and sore. He watched with a sort of wounded detachment as Arthur—a quadrillionaire famous for both his obsession with immortality and his lack of real human bonds—dealt horribly with the death of his closest friend.
Arthur locked his arms and began performing stiff thrusts to Mortimor’s chest. He stooped now and then to force air into the man’s lungs. But the textbook resuscitation methods soon slurred into textbook depression. Perfect form degenerated into pounding fists as denial slipped into rage.
It all took place in slow motion but seemed to happen so fast. Time toyed with them, as if its governing particles could reach through hyperspace with the melting snow and the perishing photons. It seemed to usher along the most wicked of events, then force them to linger at their worst.
A muffled haze filled all of Cole’s senses, like cotton balls forced in his ears, his mouth, even a wispy gauze of it over his vision. The coughs in the smoky hull came slow and quiet, the wails muffled to a background hum. Someone’s shouts became whispers. He heard it, over and over, someone saying his name, mere whispers—
“Cole!”
He finally heard the shouts when Penny shook him by the collar. She forced his chin up with her one hand, caught his eyes with hers, then pointed to the side.
“Cole!”
Larkin, the translator from his raid group, stood by the rear of the cockpit hallway. Cole realized the young man had been yelling his name for a long while.
“Larkin,” he croaked. He waved an arm to help him locate them in the haze. He felt himself rising from the floor, his back scooting up the bulkhead.
Larkin turned and peered through the smoke. His eyes widened; he ran over, glanced down for a moment at Arthur, who had taken to silently cradling Mortimor’s head.
“There are ships incoming,” Larken said. He pointed toward the cockpit. “The rest of our squad is gone.”
Why tell me? Cole thought to himself. He started to complain, then saw Larkin’s countenance: the wild, unblinking look in his eyes. He realized Larkin was in shock and looking for a chain of command to padlock his sanity to.
Cole felt like explaining the futility of it all. He wanted to say that he was no more in charge than anyone, but Larkin pulled him upright before he could complain and tugged him toward the cockpit.
“We’ve got to get these people out of here,” Larkin said. He shoved Cole forward, through an aisle of shattered and sparkling carboglass. At the end of that glittering path he saw Arthur’s seat, now vacated, but covered in smears of someone’s blood. In the other was the pilot from Cole’s group, slumped over the dash and obviously dead.
Larkin leaned over the empty seat and pointed up through the hole in the carboglass. Cole squeezed against the dead pilot and numbly obeyed the gesture.
Sure enough: Bern ships. Three of them, roaring down through the atmosphere. Cole nodded, confirming Larkin’s assessment of the situation and resigned to have it play out to its end.
“We need to get these people out of here!” Larkin yelled, shaking him.
Cole knew he was right. He knew the translator was trying to coax some sense into him, trying to stir Cole’s spirit to action. And from the hollow pit of the cave into which Cole had crawled, he wished his crewmate the very best of luck.
46 · Lights Out
A light by the elevator doors lit up just before the lift slid open. There was even a quiet ding, as if to announce Cat’s arrival. Wherever her knob-turning and card-swiping had taken her, she was glad to be there.
She emerged from the long ride whole—almost fully healed—but still pale and covered in her own blood. With the new flesh of her legs and the sticky mess all over, she felt like a fresh babe delivered into the world. A babe made new and not broken as she’d been the first time she was born.
The birth analogy was made perfect by the room that awaited her: Scattered with men in clean uniforms and chock-full of machines freckled with purposeful lights, it looked like the sort of place wealthy people gave birth.
The machines were everywhere and expensive-looking, Cat noted. Very expensive-looking. And they all seemed to be manned by equally important-looking people.
There was no sign or scent of Molly, however, which filled Cat with a powerful sadness. The ship they were in was far too big for some chance encounter. She had taken a wrong turn and would likely never see the girl again. For all Cat knew, Molly could be at the opposite end of the structure. She frowned at her failure and stepped out of the elevator—a bloody, alien samurai strolling into the scene of some science fiction vid.