Molly nearly burst out in tears to see someone she knew, someone from her seemingly long-ago past. Saunders represented a thread back to normalcy; she could see him and remember being young and only miserable in frivolous ways. She could remember, with longing, the simple pain of being yelled at, of being treated poorly. She approached, holding out a bottle of water, but he slapped it away.

“You need to drink,” she told him.

He looked to either side of himself, surveying those nearest him. Molly noticed the men and women clustered around him had the most gray in their hair and the least trauma in their eyes. They bore the haggard look of veterans, the creases made by years of worry had become permanent in expressive wrinkles.

“Arrest her,” Saunders said meekly, looking to his subordinates. “She’s the one—”

Molly knelt down and rested a hand on his shoulder. “We need to get everyone out of here,” she said, “and you need to drink some water. You can airlock me later, if you like.”

He frowned as she pushed the water into his hand. A thin man with wispy gray hair slid close and grabbed the bottom of the bottle, moving it to Saunders’s lips. The gray man met Molly’s eyes with his own; he nodded slowly to her as the Admiral slurped from the bottle.

Molly stood up and looked around herself. There had to be almost a hundred of them. With what few they had rescued above, it was but a sliver of a fraction of a percent of the total crew. The tragedy of this one act alone was mind-numbing. The thought of it happening throughout the galaxy was too terrible to even register. At least one cruiser had also gone down, then there were all the Firehawks and support craft—

Molly left Saunders in the care of the others and walked back down the center of the hallway. She wondered how they were going to get everyone through the stairwell and into the ship. And how many flights back and forth with Parsona would it take to keep everyone comfortable? And where would she take them? All the way back to Bekkie?

She was mulling this over, surveying the crowd, when she noticed Walter standing by the doorway of the simulator room, staring inside. His eyes were narrowed, his silvery, stubbly head leaning forward as he gazed in the direction of the far wall.

“Don’t look at it, Walter.” She walked up and put her hands on his narrow shoulders, trying to turn him away.

“Ssomething’ss wrong,” he hissed.

“I know, buddy, but we’ll get through it together, okay?”

“No.” He shrugged her hands off his shoulders. “Ssomething’ss really wrong. It moved.”

Molly forced herself to look at the pile of bodies in the distance. “Nothing moved in there, Walter. Your eyes are playing tricks on—”