High above the small village, another Bern ship tore through Lok’s atmosphere, its passage marked with a loud rumble. Molly fought the urge to look up, to see which direction it was heading. Like the other ships, it no doubt came from her father’s old place, leaving the rift she had failed to close. Whatever Byrne had done, it had been enough. Or, if her mother’s guess was right, it wasn’t the old rift they were coming through at all, but rather the new one Byrne’s body had made when it was zapped out of existence. Molly wasn’t sure which scenario made her feel more guilty. Either she’d failed to stop him from opening the old rift, or her life had been saved by the same act that now threatened the rest of the galaxy. Either way, a door to a very bad place was currently open, and Byrne’s fleets were pouring through. Her feeble, bumbling efforts to stop him had come too late and proved too little.

Molly walked faster as the ship roared up into orbit, her cheeks burning with the memory of her failure. She concentrated on looking straight ahead, ignoring the complaints from the other market-goers. Even though none of them could possibly know of her involvement, the presence of the ships filled her with a paranoid dread, as if the annoyed crowds might suddenly realize the fault was hers and descend on her in the form of an angry mob.

“The Liberty party has the best plan for dealing with those things,” a lady walking behind her said. A male voice agreed, but a Callite walking the other direction didn’t. Molly quickened her pace even more as an argument broke out, the din of political discourse competing with the roar of thrusters vaporizing air.

If there was one thing she had learned and learned well regarding Lokian elections, it was that the process spilled copious amounts of blood. For votes and otherwise. And frankly, she was growing sick of the sight of the stuff.

As she left the squabble in her wake, she felt ever more impatient to do the same for the entire village. Her entire planet, even. All she wanted was to get to hyperspace, to find Cole, to be in his arms, and to see her father. Hopefully, the next stop would be their last. The problem was, Cat the Callite’s trail seemed to be taking them toward Bekkie, Lok’s capital city.

The absolute last place she wanted to be with elections looming.

4

Cole worked the manual crank to open the landing gear hatches and heard the distant hiss of air leaking inside the ship. He grabbed his helmet from the ground and snapped it on, even though his suit could only retain an hour or so of air. Riggs left his helmet off as he worked the last bolt out of the panel behind the seats. He pulled the sheet of flimsy steel free.

“Drenards, it’s freezing out there!” Riggs said. He turned to Cole and smiled at his closed visor. “The air’s fine, man. Frigid, but breathable.”

Cole lifted his visor and felt the draft of cool air on his face. It didn’t match the bright, searing light he’d seen during their rapid descent. “I wanna go first,” he told Riggs.

“Be my guest. I’d rather keep you in sight, anyway.”

Cole bit his tongue and grabbed one of the survival kits before duck-ing under the back of the hanging nav seat. He squeezed past Riggs and pushed the kit into the maintenance tunnel, then crawled head-first after it.

Cole held his biostick aloft as he worked his way across a series of jutting pipes and bundled wires. Above him, a smooth track ran into the distance, a mechanic’s car hanging from its rails just a few meters ahead. Inverted and useless, the track and car taunted Cole as he moved across a rough terrain of mechanical systems, trying not to cut his flightsuit open on any of the sharp hose clamps.

The air he crawled into became more frigid by the meter. Cole snapped his head forward, locking his visor down against the biting cold. He could see light coming in from an opening ahead, which reminded him of a little problem: the blinding light they’d encountered during the crash landing was still out there. Without the canopy filters, they’d be blinded in an instant.

“What’s taking you?” Riggs asked from behind.

Cole leaned on one elbow, his chest resting uncomfortably on a pump housing. He flicked his visor up and yelled back through the cold air: “That blinding light is still out there. It’s gonna be hard to see a thing.”

“Follow the grease-monkey track,” Riggs yelled up to him. “There’s a tool locker past the belly panel. Might be some welding plates in there.”

Cole nodded and continued forward, heading toward the bright shaft of light. It came down through the nose gear bay, just five meters or so behind the cockpit. The harsh rays filtered past the landing pads and the hydraulic gear. Soon, more spots danced in Cole’s vision. He thought his sight was getting worse until one of the spots flew through his open visor and hit him in the face.

It was snow. A flurry of dancing flakes streamed down through the open hatch.

Cole didn’t dare look up as he passed beneath the shaft. He kept his head down and stowed the emergency kit off to the side before heading deeper into the belly of the Firehawk.

“Damn, it’s snowing,” he heard Riggs say. “Doesn’t burn the tongue, either, so we’re good on water.”

Cole felt relieved to hear Riggs thinking like that. It gave him hope that they could work together to survive the mess they were in. He crawled over a piece of ductwork and felt the red band push into his ribs. It reminded him of the voices he’d heard during their crash landing. He wondered if they’d been real, or if he was just losing his mind. Maybe he had been hearing things amid all the alarms. Was he really in hyperspace? What did that even mean? Had he hallucinated the entire conversation?

He felt himself leaning toward the latter. They were probably on a planet, somewhere near the polar caps. Any time now, the Navy would trace their hyperspace signature and come to rescue them.

Well, rescue Riggs, anyway. They would want to imprison him.

He continued to crawl forward, not sure what to believe. Or even hope for.

“Should be right there,” Riggs hollered.

Looking back, Cole could see Riggs just past the pool of light and the descending snow. He had retrieved and donned his helmet, and his open visor already held a dusting of the white flakes. Riggs pointed to one side of the tunnel; Cole followed the gesture and recognized a handle on the hatch beside him. He rolled over to one side and flicked the compartment open. The door was just as upside-down as everything else, so he had to hold it up against gravity while he set the biostick inside. Grunting—his ribs resting on something hard and sharp—he tried to find a more comfortable position while he peered inside.

Most of the tools were still strapped in place, but several of the boxes had come loose in the crash. The gear had been stowed with a ton of combat Gs in mind, which meant the crash had been rougher than it felt. Cole thought about how he’d barely gotten his grav suit connected in time and shivered with delayed fear.

The compartment contained a lot of useful stuff. He grabbed a utility blade and leaned back on his shoulder, still holding the heavy door up. He stuffed the knife into one of the pockets on the front of his flightsuit.

“Did you find them?” Riggs asked.

Cole grunted and forced himself back on his side. “Not yet,” he hollered. He saw a large wrench strapped to one wall of the compart-ment and worked it loose, then propped it under the heavy hatch, holding it up. Letting go of the lid, Cole worked his head into the bin and started rummaging around by the soft, blue light of the biostick.

“Got ’em,” he said, his voice echoing in the metal compartment. He came out with three welding plates held together with a rubber band. Each of them should snap into the inside of their visors, hopefully providing protection from the light outside. One of them was marred with scratches and small blisters where bits of glowing metal had landed on it. Someone must’ve been welding as they held the plate in their hand, pretty much ruining the thing. Cole rolled over and slid the curved piece of plasteel into his hip pocket and looked for anything else useful. Satisfied with what he had, he turned around in the tight crawlspace, banging his helmet on some pipes as he wiggled back toward the shaft of light.

“One for each?” Riggs asked, looking at the dark plates of plasteel in Cole’s hand.

“Yup. And a third that’s in pretty bad shape. Here.”

They had to pop their helmets off to snap the plates to the insides of their visors. Every movement brought grunts of exertion as they tried to position themselves on mechanical systems that should’ve been above them, easy to access from the sliding mechanic’s cart.

Cole got his helmet back on and snapped the visor down. It made everything pitch-black, so he lifted it back up. He hadn’t done much welding, not since making it into flight school, but he could remember how you had to move the wand into place by feel, not able to see anything until the plasma arced out to whatever you were working on.

“I’m going first this time,” Riggs said. He had his helmet back in place, his visor open.

Cole nodded. He left his own visor cracked just enough to see where he was putting his hands and knees; the angle of the plasteel blocked off the blinding light from above.

Riggs worked both survival kits between the mechanic’s rails and up into the landing gear housing, a square column of hydraulic pistons, wires, and cables. He slowly wormed his way out of sight, his feet ascending up into the falling flakes of snow. Cole pushed behind and prepared to make the climb out as well.

“It’s cold as Pluto up here,” Riggs said, his voice muffled by his helmet. “I can’t see anything.”

Cole made his way up the struts of the extended landing gear, his head level with Riggs’s knees. He looked away and raised his visor a little more so he wouldn’t have to yell.

“Can’t see because it’s too bright?” Cole asked.

Riggs crouched down in the landing gear well, his boots perched on the retracting struts by Cole’s hands. He cracked his visor. “No, the plates work great, there’s just snow in every direction. The drifts look like they’re up to the ship’s belly on one side. A few more hours and we’ll be buried.”

Cole looked at the two survival kits lodged by the hydraulic reservoir. With heavy rationing, they contained enough food and supplies for a week at the very most. He thought about what they should salvage out of the ship. “Can we build a lean-to on the sheltered side of the hull?”

“I don’t know, man. The snow is coming in sideways, and there’s lots of it. Probably gonna cover the entire ship. Looks like you really screwed us big-time.”

Cole couldn’t look up to read Riggs’s face because of the light stream-ing down around him, but he could hear some of the raw malice return-ing to his old friend’s voice.

“I swear we jumped to open space,” was all he said in defense.

Riggs snorted. “Obviously.”

Cole grabbed the extended struts and swung himself around to the other side of the gear. He flipped his visor shut and climbed up the opp-osite side of the hydraulic pistons Riggs clung to.

“I’m gonna have a look,” he shouted.

“Be my guest.”

The smooth hydraulic arms were slick with oil and snow, causing Cole’s boots to slide around as he searched for a good perch. The welding plate made the world so dark he could barely see, even with the bright light beginning to filter in. Above, the sides of the landing gear well were lined with the open hatches that normally protected the skids when they were stowed. The flat plates of steel pointed up into the sky, creating two high walls Cole couldn’t get to the top of. He reached instead for the rear portion of the well, wrapping his gloves around the thick plating that formed the underbelly of the Firehawk’s fuselage. Hoisting himself into the bright light, Cole found the darkness replaced with a featureless landscape of snow and ice. The flakes in the air were huge, thick, and moving sideways. Moreso than the light wind seemed to warrant.

If fact, there didn’t seem to be much wind at all, not enough to explain snow moving horizontal to the ground. Suddenly, the incongruent mix of sight and sense induced vertigo, and Cole felt as though he were peering out through a window in a cliff face. He cracked his visor a little to see if perhaps the helmet was blocking out the wind.

Nothing.

He snapped the visor back in place, banishing the sliver of bright light that had attempted to work its way inside. Looking beyond the belly of the Firehawk, Cole noted the visibility would probably have been pretty good without all the driving snow—the visor seemed to filter the light perfectly.

Which means, Cole realized suddenly, the ambient air in this place is as bright as a cutting torch!

He checked out the side of the hull catching the drifting snow. Like Riggs had said, the level had already ramped up even with the massive bulk of the upturned ship. He lowered himself back down below the lip of the open hatch and cracked his visor; Riggs knelt across from him, clutching the other side of the landing struts.

“Give me one of the kits,” he told Riggs.

Riggs passed it up, and Cole worked the long strap over his helmet. He then pulled the utility knife out of his flightsuit and held it out to his former friend.

“What? I get to kill you know?” Through the crack in his visor, Cole could see a thin smile on Riggs’s lips.

“Maybe, but not directly. I want you to follow these wires from the landing gear down into the maintenance tunnel and cut them back as long as you can.”

“You gonna rappel down with them?”

“I want to see if the snow is packed enough to walk on. If not, we’re gonna be trapped here while we get buried alive.”

Riggs took the knife. “Joy,” he said. He worked his way down the well, tracing the wires and cutting them free of their zip-ties as he went.