Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

“We’ll be balled up, hugging our legs. Besides, we shouldn’t have more than one person in them at a time. Here’s how it works.” He slapped the solid walls standing vertically in the center of the box. “You’ve got two steel plates facing each other, right? At the moment, they’re just tacked in place with a few spot welds. There’s grav panels in each one, just like the panels in a ship’s decking.”

He reached up and traced the wires coming off the panels. “Everything’s wired in parallel and with three separate power sources, just in case the box jumps in the middle of something. But even if they do, a single cell from any of the battery banks should still have enough juice to drive the plates away from each other.”

“What if the grav plates jump in the middle of something?”

“It won’t matter,” Cole said. “That’s how they’re built in a ship’s decking, anyway.” He slapped the steel wall. “Besides, that’s the whole point of the design. We can’t jump inside a ship, because there might be something in the way. However, if these puppies become one with something else, they’ll drag all that material apart once the grav panels fire. It’ll create an empty box, no matter what it hits. And that’s what we’ll be jumping inside of a few seconds later.”

“I’m with you so far. The box jumps in, the grav panels engage, the plates fly apart and drag open a cube of empty space. You jump in a second later… so now you’re inside a box of solid steel. What next?”

Cole put his hands together and swished a perfect third angle attack. “We pop our swords, cut our way out, and take care of the crew.”

Penny ran her fingers back through her hair and surveyed the structure thoughtfully. She turned and looked Cole up and down. “You thought of this?”

“Don’t sound so surprised,” he said, grinning. “Though, I do think I had some help.”

“Yeah? Ryke, right? This is totally his sort of thing.”

“No, I think it was from the training.” Cole grabbed his imaginary sword and slashed at her with an angle- two. “Repulsion,” he said, smiling.

“More like attraction,” said Penny, stepping close. She reached around Cole, her face approaching his.

“I, uh—”

“This is wired wrong,” Penny whispered. She pursed her lips, then grinned at him coyly before stepping away.

Cole turned, blushing. He looked down at the wiring harness behind him. The leads from the grav panels were reversed, the polarity completely backward. The panels wouldn’t have flown apart—they would’ve been permanently locked together! He looked around for a screwdriver to loosen the terminals, then decided to bend down and check one of the other two battery feeds.

Same thing.

Cole glanced around the workshop to see if anyone was watching. As he contemplated the chances of wiring two panels backward, he felt a chill run up his spine, the hairs on the back of his neck tingling with danger. He turned to tell Penny, but the workshop’s double doors were already swaying back and forth from her departure. He looked around for Ryke, who had just been supervising another welder, when he saw the two workers in the neighboring cage peering up at him.

Cole looked away, then he realized what they were working on: another wiring harness.

“Hey—” Cole said, standing up.

The duo reacted as if shots had been fired. They took off, running toward the double doors leading out of the workshop. Cole crawled out of the cage and gave chase. One of the workers shoved open the doors as the other man turned, his arm a blur. Something glinted in the fluorescent lights, twinkling as it spun through the air. Cole felt the impact on his chin before any of it fully registered. A loud crack reverberated through his skull. He fell to the ground, dazed, as an adjustable power wrench clanged to the floor beside him.

Cole tasted blood in his mouth, could feel the laceration along the inside of his lip like a swollen ridge of tenderness. He shook his head clear, grabbed the wrench, and scampered to his feet. Stumbling forward a few steps—his legs still resistant to keeping the rest of him upright—he shouldered open the workshop doors, one of which slammed into someone on the other side.

“What in the hell?”

Doctor Ryke came into view as the door snapped shut. His annoyed expression moved from the men running down the hallway to settle on Cole.

“You boys need to—”

“Stop them!” Cole yelled to the handful of aliens milling through the hallway. He brushed past Ryke and gave chase as the two Humans disappeared around a corner. Cole ran as fast as his wobbly legs could take him. He skidded around the corner, caroming off a spinning Mortimor, who looked even more annoyed than Ryke.

“Watch where you’re—”

“Sabotage!” Cole yelled, pointing. He tried to think of the word for the people committing the act, but his head was even less clear than his legs were sturdy. He pushed away from Mortimor and continued to run awkwardly, his arms windmilling, his grasp furious on the power wrench. Two aliens came out of a doorway, and Cole nearly plowed them over; he brushed against the hallway wall and took the next corner too fast, bouncing off an open door. He pounded his feet as fast as he could as the men ahead slowed to round another corner.

“Stop them!” he yelled once more, but the motley group ahead just turned from one curiosity to the other, everyone frozen by the spectacle of the footrace. Cole weaved through them, pushing aliens twice his size out of his way as he turned the next corner.

There was no sign of the men in the next hallway, but a smattering of gawkers turned from a closing door to look at him. Cole traced their bemused glares back to the door. He ran to it, pushed through, and found himself in a stairwell, could hear the rapid slap of descending feet below. He hurried down after, swallowing more blood as he slipped and slid down the steps.

He was a flight down when he heard a door slam shut, leaving the stairwell ringing with just his footfalls. The next landing was the last. Cole jumped past the last few steps and shoved his way through the door, suddenly remembering having come that way the day before. When he staggered into the skimmer garage, he wasn’t surprised. His trip to the Seer had begun and ended there. Nor was he surprised to see the hatch pulling shut on one of the vehicles, its engine whining as it slid down the ramp and toward the door, which led to the open, wet world beyond.

Cole hurled his wrench as hard as he could, a seemingly futile expression of his anger. It flew like a missile, his very hand making a whirring sound as it parted the air before him in a blur of augmented elbow. The momentum of his own limb threw him off balance, causing him to stagger forward as the wrench exploded through the rear of the hyperskimmer. The impact made a deafening crack, and the skimmer swerved to the side, crunching against the wall of the ramp as it continued to trundle along.

Cole stumbled ahead, regaining his balance as he ran past the other parked skimmers. He prepared himself to race down the ramp after the fleeing saboteurs—that’s what they were called—to chase them down and jump on the canopy if he had to. He was nearly to the top of the ramp when an alarm rang out and red lights began to flash, almost as if warning him of how bad an idea he’d just had. With a panicked stutter, Cole remembered what the alarms signified and cursed himself.

He looked around quickly for a locker or a storage bin as the alarm continued to blare, signaling the garage door was about to open. He squeezed between two of the parked skimmers, then caught a glimpse of a pair of goggles resting on the dash of the nearest skimmer, inside the closed canopy.

With a loud groan, the garage door at the bottom of the ramp began to open. Its chain ratcheted up with a staccato noise, letting in a harsh stream of unrelenting, blinding, photons.

Cole grimaced in pain at the brief exposure. He shut his eyes and folded the crook of his arm over his face. He’d only caught a glimpse of the light, but it was enough to spot the darkness behind his lids. Reaching to the side, he groped for the fender of the nearby skimmer and found it, then patted along the hull until he reached the canopy. Cole fumbled for the release. He felt it and pulled the lever as the departing skimmer whined high and roared out into hyperspace.

Picturing the location of the goggles behind his shut eyelids, Cole leaned far over the edge of the open canopy and brushed his hand across the dash, feeling for them. He hit them with the side of his hand and knocked them off and onto the floorboard. Cursing again, Cole stretched out and fumbled for them across the skimmer’s