None of the Gs suffered had been too much for the flightsuits, and everyone seemed fit, if dehydrated and terrified. Molly and her little rescue crew stayed so busy crawling across the wreckage, cutting people out and getting them food and water, that she hardly noticed the odd dynamic forming. Pilots—some of them twice her age—were looking to her and her friends as if they were in charge.

While Urg continued to search for anyone left alive in the tangled mess—refusing to give up even when it seemed unlikely there were any more—Molly and the others sat with the crewmen, trying to console them. They all had a defeated, dazed look, almost like animals after a near-drowning.

Molly peeled the wrapper off a protein bar and handed it to one of the pilots. His eyes were unblinking, wide and wet.

“It was the Drenards, wasn’t it?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “No. It’s something worse. Now listen, we need to figure out—”

“What’s worse than Drenards?” someone else asked.

“Is it the Tchung?”

“It’s not the Tchung,” Molly said.

“Gotta be the Dremards. I heard they were coming out of their arm of the Milky Way for the first time. They attacked Rigel!”

Molly held up her hands. “It’s not Drenards—”

“What then? Did you see them? What was it?”

“Listen,” she said. “The first thing we need to do is help the rest of the crew. See if any of the staff survived. Then we can—”

“Survived?” Higgins squeaked. “Nobody but us survived! How could they? There was almost ten thousand people on this ship, and now there’s eight!” He looked at his palms. “Darlene,” he said, then started sobbing, covering his face with his hands.

Molly rose and went to him. She wrapped her arm around his shoulders and looked to the others. “We’ll mourn when we can and for as long as they deserve, but right now we need to—”

“We need to get off this ship!” someone said.

“And we will,” Molly told them. “We will. But first, we need to see if anyone else survived. According to Higgins, here, one of the pilots went off to help the senior staff—”

“They’re dead!” one of the pilots said. “C’mon, the only safe place in this bucket was to be rattling around in one of our little tin cans.”

“That’s not true,” Molly said. “There’s one other place we need to check. Just in case.”

One of the pilots—Roberts, according to his name patch—met her with a solid look. His eyes were aware, vibrant, not as red as the others.

“Where’s that?” he asked.

“The simulator room,” Molly said.

ѻѻѻѻ