“No, not each other. Buckblades have orthogonal magnetic charges, otherwise they’d fly out of your hand and stick to something metal, get it?”
“Orthogonal?” Cole asked. “Is that positive or negative?”
“Neither. There’s two other kinds of magnetic fields, monopoles that can be harvested here in hyperspace. All Buckblades have the same charge, so it’s almost impossible to get them together, much less cut through one another.”
“They fly away from each other? Why not make some of them with the opposite charge, then?”
Cole tried to mimic the pattern Penny was making, which made her laugh.
“You just lost your clever points, son. Now I have to assume you got lucky before.”
“What do you think would happen?” Penny asked, taunting him.
“They’d stick together?”
“That’s putting it mildly, now pay attention. When someone swings at you, you can’t get hit. Not even a little, okay?”
“I think he’s learned that lesson,” Penny said. She darted forward and smacked the back of his right hand with her sword.
Cole dropped his weapon and shook his hand, glaring at her.
“Good point, Penny. Now, Cole, keep a firm grip on your sword.” Arthur bent down, picked it up, and handed it back to him. “Don’t crush the thing, but try not to drop it.”
“Why’d you make the thing feel pain?” Cole asked, rubbing his hand.
“Same reason God made the other one that way. So you’d take care of it. Now listen, you don’t want to get hit. Not once. And you can’t really block your opponent’s attacks, they’ll just repulse each other—”
“How does this work, then? He who swings first, wins?”
“The other way around, usually. See the slits on your sword?”
Cole inspected the wooden blade. There were deep cracks running down the length of the thing. He nodded.
“When you swing the practice swords at each other, internal sensors calculate where they would be repulsed to. Lights in the blade shine out and your suit picks them up—”
“Oh, so it’s like a game of billiards. It’s all about the bank shots.”
“Okay, another clever point for you. Now, most fights end with someone’s own sword coming back and hitting them. With the right block and a forceful enough stance, you can send most attacks back where they came from. Think of your sword more as a shield. It’s your opponent’s sword that’s your real weapon, and your sword is theirs. Get it? So learn to fear what you’re holding and figure out how to attack with what their wielding. Now, Penny will show you the basic attack angles—the safest ones. They aren’t what you’d think, so pay attention and unlearn your fencing.”
Cole nodded and tried to take the same stance as Penny: feet apart, shoulders square, pretty much the exact posture that would’ve gotten him a beating from Lieutenant Eckers, his old fencing instructor.
“The power is from side to side,” Penny told him. “It’s in your hips.” She moved hers back and forth while Cole watched.
“You’re supposed to try it too,” she said, reaching out and smacking his sword.
“Oh, yeah.” He moved his hips side to side, swinging the wooden stick just like she did.
“It’s a lot like a judo throw, or a good roundhouse. If you don’t get your whole body in on it, you won’t go far.”
“Gotcha,” Cole said, trying to ignore the way her suit hugged her body.
“Give me your best shot.”
Cole’s feet shuffled automatically, trying to get back into a proper fencing stance. Penny lashed out with her sword, which he instinctively blocked. Solidly. The wooden shafts smacked together with a satisfying crack.
Both thighs on his suit lit up, showing him where he would’ve lost them.
“You’ve got no power like that,” Penny said, tapping his hip with her sword. “This isn’t a contest where you score points and gab with your opponent about whose mother smells worse.” She rapped his sword with hers, then tapped him in the stomach. “There’s nothing noble or fun about this, okay? It’s one swing and you’re dead. There isn’t anything heroic about it, and nothing fun or pleasant, even for the winner.”
Cole nodded, resuming his square-on stance. “Have you been in real fights with these?”
“Do I sound like I’m reading from a textbook? Trust me, it isn’t pretty.”
“I’ve seen what they can do,” Cole told her.
“It’s different when you’re the one doing it. Now, there are three major angles you need to learn and two sub angles—they’re your safest attacks and the hardest to parry. Forget thrusts altogether, okay?”
Cole nodded as she began the first lesson; he tried his best to absorb it all. He also tried to watch her hips only when she told him to. Finally, he tried his damnedest to pretend that Arthur—standing to one side and offering suggestions—was Molly. Watching him. Reading his mind with a D-band. Forcing him to stifle his thoughts.
It helped him to imagine Penny was someone else. Anyone but the flaming girl from his strange dream. And finally, as they began to spar, their swords clashing while they discussed angles of deflection, he tried his damnedest to ignore her red hair. He pretended instead that Penny was a blonde.
The one who had taken his arm.
38
“Move swift, but stay calm,” Molly told everyone, as the sur-vivors marched past in a black column of Navy flightsuits. They jogged, but refrained from pushing on one another. Their brains may have checked out, but the military training remained, coming back thanks to the hint of danger—the fear propelling them forward. Ahead, Scottie stood by the door to the stairwell, waving the crewmen through.
When a logjam forced everyone to a halt, Molly fought her way through to the stairwell where she found several people on the ground, sliding in the spilt blood and gore.
“Grab the rails!” she told them. “Help each other up! C’mon, let’s go!”
Back in the hallway, someone screamed, and it soon turned into a chorus of frightened shouts. Molly stuck her head back into the hallway and saw—in the distance—bodies dripping out the door of the simulator room.
The panels were failing in sequence.
Pure terror coursed up through Molly’s body. She expected, at any minute, the gravity holding her to the deck would simply vanish. She imagined the ship as she’d seen it from outside, its thrusters up in the clouds. The visual gave her vertigo. She realized, suddenly, that she was standing on the face of a cliff. The thought made her feel faint; people began pushing past her, scrambling up the slick steps, some of them on all-fours.
Molly found herself swimming amongst them, pulling herself ahead, racing up wet steps and over bodies alive and otherwise. The fear was gone, replaced with a keen awareness of what could happen next.
She needed to get to Parsona, and fast.
At the top of the stairs, she came across Cat, who was helping people up and through the door. The entire front of her was smeared with blood; Molly looked down and realized she was covered in it as well.
“I have to get to the ship. Get everyone to me as fast as you can!”
“Will do!” Cat yelled as she helped another person up. The two of them locked eyes, and Molly saw none of her own panic and fear in the Callite’s eyes. If anything, they sparkled with life.
Molly turned away and bolted through the door. She ran at a full sprint down the hallway, urging the stumbling survivors on as she passed them. She yelled for them to get to the hangar bay and into her ship. As she ran ahead, she tried to picture the layout of the StarCarrier to figure out which direction the panels were failing. She wondered whether she was heading toward the problem panels or away from them.
Away, she finally decided. Otherwise she would probably have al-ready met them.
She skidded through the open door halfway down the hall and burst into the hangar; she slipped, fell, then scrambled back to her feet. “Get to the ship!” she yelled to Urg, who was still ranging up and down the line of Firehawks in the distance, looking for survivors. She didn’t see the other pilots at first, but saw movement inside Parsona. She pictured the number of upright people she could cram in its hull as she sprinted toward her ship and past the staggering survivors who had reached the hangar ahead of her.
“What in hyperspace?” one of the pilots asked as she stomped into the cargo bay. Molly imagined how she must look to them, all covered in blood. She thought about what they were in store for.
“Get ready to help,” she told them. She flipped the thrusters on and looked through the carboglass at the line of survivors spilling out the door. “There’re bottles of water in the cabinet above the fridge. We’re gonna need to pack people into every corner of the ship, even the lazarrette and cargo holds. Get them open. And grab that med kit over the sink, just in case.”
Several of the pilots went to work, their focus galvanized by her tone. Higgins leaned over the control console. “What can I do?” he asked, jumping back as the Wadi took its place on Molly’s shoulders.
“Help the others,” she said. “Actually, get out there and yell at Urg to get a move on.” She looked up. “There’s no time to find any more—”
She stopped and sucked in her breath. Urg was sliding across the steel decking, toward Parsona, followed by a wall of tumbling, ruined starships.
He came to a sudden stop before reaching the door the survivors were streaming through. Molly held her breath; she watched him glance over his shoulder at the pile of plasteel and carboglass heading his way. The long queue of surviving crewmen filing out of the hallway door ducked and turned at the sound of it all; some of them covered their heads with their arms. Molly could see Walter among them, tugging on someone in black, urging them toward the ship.
She looked back toward Urg, but he had disappeared under the line of sliding debris. Gone. The end of his life missed behind her blinking eyelids. The entire tangle of ships had come to rest in a long line, sig-nifying the temporary boundary between failed panel and good.
Several more survivors staggered through the door in the distance as the first of the crewmembers stomped into Parsona. Molly could hear some of the pilots directing them aft and urging them to take water. She saw Cat in the distance, helping someone along who seemed to be limping, their front solid red.
The dune of debris behind them shifted once again. One of the Fire-hawks flipped over on its side. Cat and the crewman left their feet, slid-ing ahead of the ships and across the deck, everything falling toward Parsona.
Cat popped to her feet as soon as she came to a halt at the next line of functioning grav plates. Molly saw her look back over her shoulder at the man she’d been escorting, but she seemed to know better than to struggle with him. She dove forward as the rolling crush of taxpayer dollars ground to a halt right behind her, smashing the crewmember flat.
Molly silently begged Cat forward as she feathered the thrusters. They were warm enough for lift, but not much more. She aligned the ducts ahead of time and looked over her shoulder to see how things were going in the cargo bay.
The staterooms must’ve already been packed—the hallway had filled up, and people were crammed together up to the galley. The last large crush of survivors could be heard working their way inside—only Cat and a few stragglers remained.
That’s when the struggling grav system gave up the ghost—the last of the panels giving away completely. Molly felt it shudder through Parsona before she saw the effects outside. She could hear the screeching of the ship’s landing pads as they scraped across the deck, could see the walls outside shift forward as Parsona slid back along the hangar floor. Beyond the wall of tangled Navy ships, she could see through the top of the StarCarrier’s airlock door to the bright, blue Lokian sky beyond.
The view disappeared as the jumbled mess of Firehawks ground forward, chasing after Parsona. Between the two, Cat and a few other crewmen slid on their backs, their screams deadened by the roar of all else. Everything was in free-fall, like all the players had been tossed over a cliff.
Molly pulled Parsona up to stop her slide backward. She retracted the landing gear to get it out of the way, but left the cargo hatch open. Behind her, passengers were screaming. She glanced at the chase cam and saw several forms falling away behind, people that had not quite made it to the loading ramp.
There was nothing she could do for them. She wasn’t even sure she could save the rest. The thrusters were still warming up, barely managing the vast weight onboard, the turbines wailing in complaint. Molly fought to hold the ship steady; she watched as Cat and the others slid across the deck ahead of the tumbling crush of ships.
“Get ready back there!” she yelled over her shoulder. Feathering the thrust a little more, she turned the ship sideways, watching everything through the nav porthole. She held the lip of the cargo ramp to the deck as she backed up—lining it up with the crewmen sliding ahead of Cat. Behind them, the rolling mass of Firehawks seemed to be gaining.
The crewmen disappeared from sight as they got close. Molly could hear grunts and yells behind her, along with the satisfying thud of heavy objects impacting the lowered ramp, all sounds that hinted at Cat and the other crewmen having been scooped up. Someone shouted for her to go—but she already was. She fired the thrusters up and back as she fell away from the onrush of twisted, roaring steel, doing everything she could to lift the struggling ship above it.
A collision warning sounded out as she approached the solid wall at the back of the hangar—at the bottom of the hangar now that Lok’s gravity was in charge. Molly adjusted the thruster vents and punched the accelerator to full, shooting Parsona above the lowest section of the mound of moving debris.
