Molly groaned and sat up, Byrne’s arm tugging at her scalp. She yanked a clump of her hair through its grip, and it finally came loose, taking some hair with it. Grimacing, she scooted back to the low wall, dragging Walter’s discarded helmet with her. Her entire body felt sore and on fire; she could still feel at least twenty fingers digging into various sensitive places.

She took a deep breath, rubbed her bruised neck, then worked the helmet in place before keying the mic on its side.

“Mom?”

“Mollie? Thank the stars! Where are you? Are you outside? The door’s stuck—”

“Mom, slow down.” She swallowed painfully and flipped up the visor. Walter’s silhouette stood out against the burning ship beyond the other wall, three arms waving.

Molly took a deep, painful breath, the putrid smell of death filling her lungs. “Byrne was here.”

“Was? Where is he? I thought with the blast that you’d—”

“I’m fine,” she whispered, her voice still hoarse. “And he’s gone wherever his hyperdrive took him. It . . . it zapped him and left his arms.”

“Oh, dear. He’ll be very upset without them.” Her mom paused. “I saw the device running, nothing’s happening there? Is there anything—”

“No—”

Molly coughed, her throat scratched and irritable. Tears welled up in her eyes from the pain, then real tears followed as the rest came back to her.

“Dad,” she sobbed. “He said Dad was here, but he locked him away—”

“Oh, Mollie . . . ”

She looked toward the burning ship, forced herself up and collapsed on the wall. She scanned the horizon.

“Cole . . . ” More tears. “Mom, where’s Cole? Something bad happened to him, I can feel it. It’s just like when dad left—” She brought her hands up to the helmet, supporting her weary mind. “He’s . . . Cole’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Mollie. Come back to the ship. You’ll have to climb up through the pod bay—”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to.” Lying back along the length of the wall, she looked up at the bright stars in the moonless sky. “I’d be better off joining him,” she said to herself.

Her mother was silent for a while.

“I might be able to help you,” she said.

“Help me what?”

Parsona hesitated.

“Join him,” she said.

Epilogue - The Land of Light

“Of all the incredible places in the universe,

none are so strange as what lies between.”

~The Bern Seer~

0

Cole double-checked the jump coordinates and glanced at the gravity indicators. Everything looked great. Zebra command was scattered in the distance; it appeared they’d be making a clean getaway. Even better, the red bands worked across vast distances, allowing he and Molly to travel without losing touch.

“I love you.” Molly thought, interrupting his own thoughts with some of hers.

“Me, too.” He told her. “See you soon.”

He lifted the carboglass shield and rested his finger on the red button. Beside him, he could hear Riggs grunting around the duct tape over his mouth, his helmet muffling his outrage.

Cole felt horrible for his old friend. He tried to think of something to say, but figured it could wait until they were out of danger. Pressing down on the button, he engaged the hyperdrive and watched the field of stars before him disappear, expecting them to shift slightly in place.

Instead, the blackness of space shot full with a blinding light, accompanied by a torrent of deafening sounds.

The filters in the carboglass clamped down automatically, minimizing the passage of photons, but even so, he couldn’t see a thing. His eyelids clinched tight of their own accord. He tried to crack them, but the light was too intense.

“What the hell?” he asked, as if Riggs could hear him over the noise. Unable to open his eyes, he attempted to make sense of the myriad warning beeps and alarms. It sounded as if all of them had been triggered at once.

Is someone there?

He tried to focus on what he could hear and feel, a wave of panic competing for control of his senses. There were too many sounds, too much stimuli, to distinguish any one.

Hello?

His hand went to the flight controls with habitual ease. He had to remember the simulators from the Academy, forgetting the past weeks on Parsona, where everything was laid out differently. He had hundreds of hours of flight time sitting in front of these Firehawk controls; he just needed to think about what to touch and allow his long-term muscle memory take over.

Pops, is that you?

As soon as he gave the flight controls a nudge, he felt his first problem: the stick gave him resistance. The haptic feedback system had kicked in, which meant they weren’t in space anymore—they were in atmosphere! As soon as he processed this, Cole recognized one of the layers of beeping sounds: the stall alert. They were in free fall. He needed lift.

He flipped the switch that extended the wings fully, then shoved forward on the main thrusters while nosing the ship down. There was a sickening sensation as he gave into the plummet in order to create enough speed to fight it. The lift warning went away. Cole could now make out a gravitational proximity alarm. They were near something huge. If the frequency could be believed, it was bigger than a planet. Bigger than most stars.

His stomach flipped in fear.

Penny, silence your thoughts for a second.

Cole tried to open his eyes long enough to check his altimeter, but his lids had mutinied. He could only open them a crack before they snapped back shut. Tears streamed back from both eyes. He couldn’t feel which way was up and couldn’t see the dash to find out. He reached forward with his left hand and fumbled for the gravity panels. He needed to turn them off and get his flightsuit neutralized so he could feel with his body which way to fly.

Who is this?

There was very little change as he turned off what he hoped were the grav panels. He fumbled for the life support controls so he could shut down the anti-G system in his suit. His fingers rested on the button when a silent alarm in his head rang out above the din in the cockpit:

Riggs.

He was about to subject both of them to unknown forces. Riggs was already bound and gagged; he must be confused as hyperspace. No point in torturing him before they crashed and burned.

Pulling his hand away from the controls, he seized the breathing hose and wires attached to his suit instead. He yanked the umbilical cord loose.

His body sank instantly into the back of his seat, his ribs nearly crushed from the pressure.

They were going fast.

Penny, are you getting any of this?

Cole tried to shake his head clear, strange thoughts seemed to be leaking in with the myriad sounds and the blinding lights.

The lift problem had obviously been taken care of—they had plenty of velocity. Cole’s arms felt heavy, maybe six to seven times their normal weight. The Firehawk had to be heading almost straight down to be pulling that many Gs—the amount of thrust he had given the ship couldn’t account for a fraction of that acceleration.

Yeah. A lot of fear. A pilot?

He tried not to be scared. He was a trained pilot, after all. Pulling the throttle all the way back, he gave the flight controls a tug. Despite the heaviness of his arm helping out—sucked back with the force of acceleration—the stick provided too much resistance. The haptic feedback system was letting him know air flowed across the flight surfaces at dangerously high rates of speed. That meant atmosphere, or some other type of fluid.

Cole put all his weight into the controls. He couldn’t remember the simulator ever getting this stiff, even when they practiced pulling out of full dives. He hoped that was a mechanical limitation of the simulator and not a testament to what he was up against.

Wearing a D-Band? That doesn’t make any—wait . . .

A new alarm joined the chorus: a soprano performing some mad aria. Cole tried to navigate the sounds with his eyes clenched tight, his arm straining for lift. He found one voice he knew and reached over, closing the glass cover shielding the hyperdrive switch. The gravity alert went away. He concentrated, then recognized the high-pitched tune. It was the proximity alarm. They were on a collision course with something.

Something big.

What is it?

Cole wondered what it was. He pulled back into full neutral, gliding down with gravity. It was impossible to tell how much the nose had risen, but instead of just being pressed back into the seat, he could now feel the pain of his spine being compressed. Some of the Firehawk’s directional energy was being deflected as the ship pulled up. The pain became a clue, sense becoming sensor. He just needed to increase this discomfort, or it’d be the last thing he ever felt.

I’m getting something . . .

He stopped fighting the urge to see now that he was getting something from his aching spine. It was clear his seared vision wasn’t going to come back in time. He gave into his lids, allowing them to clench as tight as they liked. More tears squeezed out, streaking back into his ears. With his left hand, Cole reached across his body and grabbed the docking controls. His torso screamed with the pain of holding himself against so many gravities. Still pulling back to lift the nose, Cole flipped the maneuvering thrusters on and used them to rotate the ship back. A continuous blast of waste air shot out of a nozzle in the nose of the Firehawk, attempting to spin the ship in space, assisting the flaps on the back of the wings.

Cole’s legs went numb from the pain in his spine, which he took as an indicator that the maneuver was working.

What is it, Dad?

The collision alarm moved down to a tenor. They were still going to hit, but not as soon and not as fast. Cole needed to focus on that one sound, but another beeping fought for his attention: the navigational alarm.

The star charts had no idea where they were. Too bright to triangulate star positions, Cole decided. He locked the maneuvering thruster in place and reached out to the nav screen. Running his gloved hand down one side, he counted buttons until he reached the power. He shut it off, killing yet another blaring alarm.

Cole?

There were only three sounds left in the cockpit now: the soprano singing about the imminent collision, the sound of atmosphere rushing along the cockpit canopy, and a muffled voice—Riggs yelling through his helmet? Had the tape worked loose?

I felt the same name. You recognize it?

He felt horrible for what Riggs must be going through. Not the best start to winning him over. He considered keying the mic to talk with him, but there wasn’t time. The warbling of the collision alarm was deepening, which meant the nose was actually rotating up. However, the rate at which it beeped had increased; whatever they were about to hit, it would happen soon. At least the majority of Cole’s pain was straight in his back, now. The Firehawk must be pretty level.

Penny, check with Joshua’s men, see if they’re moving.

Cole tried cracking his eyes, but the searing light was still coming from all directions. He was dying to know what they were about to hit. He could be about to crash into the surface of a star, or enter a black hole, for all he knew.

The location of the landing gear controls were fixed in his memory, but he knew better than to release them. In a crash landing, the smooth belly of a Firehawk was better than anything they could trip over. And if a sea of plasma awaited, it wouldn’t matter either way.

Yeah, they’re moving uphill. More jumpers?

He thought he heard Riggs shout something about jumping, but parachuting into the unknown would be foolish. Leaning back on the flight stick with both hands, he tried to imagine them pulling up in time, just like in the holos: they would dip precariously low, skim the surface of some deadly environment, and then fly away with pumping fists and a victory cry.

The thought forced a bit of a smile into his grimace. Then he remembered his flight suit was disconnected, that the Gs of impact would probably liquify him. He fumbled for the umbilical cord, strained against the force of acceleration, pressed the hose to his suit and spun it, trying to line it up blindly.

There was a click, so soft he couldn’t hear it.

Right about the time they made contact.

••••

The after portion of the belly hit first, the nose too high. The rear of the Firehawk bounced up, and the bow came down toward the ground. Only the maneuvering thrusters saved the ship from plowing in, catapulting into the air, or shattering into a billion pieces. For just an instant, the ship went level above the unknown surface, gliding in a sustained ground effect, a pocket of compressed air forming below the Firehawk’s underbelly across which it slid, as if on rails.

The rear of the ship came down again, touching something soft. Instead of bouncing with the force of the last impact, it ploughed deep. When the nose settled again, the ship’s speed was below a thousand kilometers an hour. If the wings had remained level as they made contact, it would have been a spectacular emergency landing.

Instead, it was a spectacle.

The leading edge of the starboard wing struck first. It was like digging a wide oar off one side of a canoe. Not only did it try to spin the Firehawk around, the change in momentum and the braking action of the wing sent the entire ship, all eighty thousand kilos of her, flipping upside down. The wrenching of Cole’s already-battered body on his flight harness forced the air out of his lungs. Both of his arms went flying—there was nothing controlling the ship other than gravity and friction, anyway.

The smooth belly faced the air as the bumpy top of the Firehawk forced into the surface of their mystery companion. The vertical flight surfaces sheared off, but not before they drove the nose of the ship violently downward. The sound of cracking carboglass could be clearly heard over all the other grinding and banging sounds.