She shook her head and blinked her eyes several times. It didn’t stop a tear from leaking out. “But that’s just it. I…I don’t want to go. I don’t want to see that…” She glanced aside at Mouse and shuddered. “Blood, like that. I don’t remember what happened when you and Mother saved me from Arctis Tor. But I don’t want to see more of that. I don’t want it to happen to me. I don’t want to hurt anyone.” I let out a low, noncommittal sound. “Then why are you here?” “B-because,” she said, searching for words. “Because I need to do it. I know that what you’re doing is necessary. And it’s right. And I know that you’re doing it because you’re the only one who can. And I want to help.” “You think you’re strong enough to help?” I asked her. She bit her lip again and met my eyes for just a second. “I think…I think it doesn’t matter how strong my magic is. I know I don’t…I don’t know how to do these things like you do. The guns and the battles and…” She lifted her chin and seemed to gather herself a little. “But I know more than most.” “You know some,” I admitted. “But you got to understand, kid. That won’t mean much once things get nasty. There’s no time for thinking or second chances.” She nodded. “All I can promise you is that I won’t leave you when you need me. I’ll do whatever you think I can. I’ll stay here and man the phone. I’ll drive the car. I’ll walk at the back and hold the flashlight. Whatever you want.” She met my eyes and her own hardened. “But I can’t sit at home being safe. I need to be a part of this. I need to help.” There was a sudden, sharp sound as the leather strand of her bracelet snapped of its own volition. Black beads flew upward with so much force that they rattled off the ceiling and went bouncing around the apartment for a good ten seconds. Mister, still batting playfully at his gift sack of catnip, paused to watch them, ears flicking, eyes alertly tracking their movement. I went up to the girl, who was staring at them, mystified. “It was the vampire, wasn’t it,” I said. “Seeing him die.” She blinked at me. Then at the scattered beads. “I…I didn’t just see it, Harry. I felt it. I can’t explain it any better than that. Inside my head. I felt it, the same way I felt that poor girl. But this was horrible.” “Yeah,” I said. “You’re a sensitive. It’s a tremendous talent, but it has some drawbacks to it. In this case, though, I’m glad you have it.” “Why?” she whispered. I gestured at the scattered beads. “Congratulations, kid,” I told her quietly. “You’re ready.” She blinked at me, her head tilted. “What?” I took the now-empty leather strand and held it up between two fingers. “It wasn’t about power, Molly. It was never about power. You’ve got plenty of that.” She shook her head. “But…all those times…” “The beads weren’t ever going to go up. Like I said, power had nothing to do with it. You didn’t need that. You needed brains.” I thumped a forefinger over one of her eyebrows. “You needed to open your eyes. You needed to be truly aware of how dangerous things are. You needed to understand your limitations. And you needed to know why you should set out on something like this.” “But…all I said was that I was scared.” “After what you got to experience? That’s smart, kid,” I said. “I’m scared, too. Every time something like this happens, it scares me. But being strong doesn’t get you through. Being smart does. I’ve beaten people and things who were stronger than I was, because they didn’t use their heads, or because I used what I had better than they did. It isn’t about muscle, kiddo, magical or otherwise. It’s about your attitude. About your mind.” She nodded slowly and said, “About doing things for the right reasons.” “You don’t throw down like this just because you’re strong enough to do it,” I said. “You do it because you don’t have much choice. You do it because it’s unacceptable to walk away, and still live with yourself later.” She stared at me for a second, and then her eyes widened. “Otherwise, you’re using power for the sake of using power.” I nodded. “And power tends to corrupt. It isn’t hard to love using it, Molly. You’ve got to go in with the right attitude or…” “Or the power starts using you,” she said. She’d heard the argument before, but this was the first time she said the words slowly, thoughtfully, as if she’d actually understood them, instead of just parroting them back to me. Then she looked up. “That’s why you do it. Why you help people. You’re using the power for someone other than yourself.” “That’s part of it,” I said. “Yeah.” “I feel…sort of stupid.” “There’s a difference in knowing something”—I poked her head again—“and knowing it.” I touched the middle of her sternum. “See?” She nodded slowly. Then she took the strand back from me and put it back on her wrist. There was just enough left to let her tie it again. She held it up so that I could see and said, “So that I’ll remember.”
Butcher, Jim (2008-02-05). White Night (The Dresden Files, Book 9) (pp. 321-322). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.
There was a ruined city all around me. The sky above boiled with storm clouds, moving and roiling too quickly to be real, filled with contrasting colors of lightning. Rain hammered down. I heard screams and shouted imprecations all around me, overlapping one another, coming from thousands of sources, blending into a riotous roar—and every single voice was either Molly’s or the Corpsetaker’s.
As I watched, some great beast somewhere between a serpent and a whale smashed its way through a brick building—a fortress, I realized—maybe fifty yards away, thrashing about as it fell and grinding it to powder. A small trio of dots of bright red light appeared on the vast thing’s rubble-dusted flanks, just like the targeting of the Predator’s shoulder cannon in the movies of the same name, and then multiple streaks of blue-white light flashed in from somewhere and blew a series of holes the size of train tunnels right through the creature. Around me, I saw groups of soldiers, many of them in sinister black uniforms, others looking like idealized versions of United States infantry, laying into one another with weapons of every sort imaginable, from swords to rocket launchers.
A line of tracer fire went streaking right through me, having no more effect than a stiff breeze. I breathed a faint sigh of relief. I was inside Molly’s mindscape, but her conflict was not with me, and neither was the Corpsetaker’s. I was just as much a ghost here at the moment as I had been back in the real world.
The city around me, I saw, was a vast grid of fortified buildings, and I realized that the kid had changed her usual tactics. She wasn’t trying to obscure the location of her mental fortress with the usual tricks of darkness and fog. She had instead chosen a different method of obfuscation, building a sprawl of decoys, hiding the true core of her mind somewhere among them.
Corpsetaker had countered her, it would seem, by the simple if difficult expedient of deciding to crush them all, even if it had to be done one at a time. That vast beast construct had been something more massive than I had ever attempted in my own imagination, though Molly had tossed some of those at me once or twice. It wasn’t simply a matter of thinking big—there was an energy investment in creating something with that kind of mental mass, and Molly generally felt such huge, unsubtle thrusts weren’t worth the effort they took—especially since someone with the right attitude and imagination would take them down with only moderately more difficulty than small constructs.
Corpsetaker, though, evidently didn’t agree. She was a lot older than Molly or me, and she would have deeper reserves of strength to call upon, greater discipline, and the confidence of long experience. The kid had managed to take on the Corpsetaker on Molly’s most familiar ground, and to play her hand in her strongest suit—but my apprentice’s strength didn’t look like it was holding up well against the necromancer’s experience and expertise.
I stopped paying attention to everything happening—all the artillery strikes and cavalry charges and shambling hordes of zombies and storms of knives that just came whirling out of the sky. The form of any given construct wasn’t as important as the fact of its existence. A flying arrow that could pierce the heart, for example, was potentially just as dangerous as an animate shadow reaching out with smothering black talons. As long as one could imagine an appropriate construct to counter the threat, and do so in time to stop it, any construct could be defeated. It was a simple thing at its most basic level, and it sounded easy. But once you’re throwing out dozens or hundreds—or thousands—of offensive and defensive constructs at a time . . . Believe me—it takes your full attention.
It’s also all you can do to deal with one opponent, which explained why I hadn’t been assaulted by the Corpsetaker instantly, if she had even taken note of my presence at all. She and Molly were locked together tight. The soulgaze had probably played a part in that. Neither was letting go until her opponent was dead. Both combatants were throwing enormous amounts of offensive constructs at each other, even though Molly was demolishing her own defenses almost as rapidly as the Corpsetaker was. As tactics go, that one had two edges. Molly was hurting herself, but by doing so, she was preventing the Corpsetaker from pressing too closely, lest she be caught up in the vast bursts of destruction being exchanged. A mistake could easily destroy anyone’s mind in that vista of havoc, centuries-old necromancer or not. On the other hand, if she spotted where Molly was fighting from, it looked like she’d have the power to drive in and crush my apprentice. But if she closed in on the wrong target, she’d leave herself wide-open to a surprise attack from the real Molly. Corpsetaker had to know that, just as she had to know that if she simply kept on the pressure, the whole place would eventually be ground down and Molly would be destroyed anyway.
My apprentice had come with a good plan, but she had miscalculated. The Corpsetaker was a hell of a lot stronger than she had expected. Molly was playing the most aggressive defensive plan I’d ever seen, and hoping that she could pressure the Corpsetaker into making a mistake. It wasn’t a good plan, but it was all she had.
Butcher, Jim (2011-07-26). Ghost Story: A Novel of the Dresden Files (Kindle Locations 7029-7034). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.
I flew low, snaking through the streets, and only after I’d crossed my own trail five or six times without spotting anything shadowing me did I finally soar in to the tree house.
It looked like a miniature home, with a door and siding and trim and windows and everything. A rope ladder allowed one to climb up to the porch, but it had been pulled up. I floated up to the door on the flying carpet and knocked politely.
“I have you now,” I said, as much like James Earl Jones as I could. I do a better Yul Brynner.
Molly’s strained face appeared at the window and she blinked. “Harry?”
“What’s with the come-hither, grasshopper?” I asked. “You practically vacuumed me in with the Corpsetaker.”
Molly narrowed her eyes and said, “What was I wearing the first time we met?”
I blinked at her, opened my mouth, closed it, thought about it, and then said, “Oh, come on, Moll. I have no idea. Clothes? You were, like, eight years old and your mom tried to shut the door in my face and I was there to see your dad.”
She nodded once, as if that was the answer she’d been looking for, and opened the door. “Come on.”
I went into the tree house with her. The inside was bigger than the outside. You can do that sort of thing in your imagination. It’s kind of fun. I’ve got one closet of my castle that looks like a giant disco roller rink. The roller skaters come after you like juggernaut, the music makes heads explode, and the mirror ball distributes a killer laser beam.
Molly’s headquarters looked like the bridge of, I kid you not, the U.S.S. Enterprise. The old one. The one that was full of dials that obviously didn’t do anything and that had a high-pitched, echoing cricket chirp going off every five or six seconds.
There was an upside to that setting, though: Molly was wearing one of the old sixties miniskirt uniforms.
Look, I’m not interested in a relationship with the kid. I do love her tremendously. But that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t look fantastic. Anyone with eyes can see that, and I’ve always been the kind of person who can appreciate gorgeous scenery without feeling a need to go camping in it.
Actually, glancing around, there were about half a dozen Mollys, all of them wearing old sixties miniskirt uniforms, each of them manning a different station. The one who had opened the door had jet-black hair in a neat, almost mathematical, gamine-style cut and slightly pointed ears.
“Star Trek?” I asked her. “Really?”
“What?” she demanded, bending unnaturally black eyebrows together.
“There are two kinds of people in the universe, Molly,” I said. “Star Trek fans and Star Wars fans. This is shocking.”
She sniffed. “This is the post-nerd-closet world, Harry. It’s okay to like both.”
“Blasphemy and lies,” I said.
She arched an eyebrow at me with Nimoysian perfection and went back to her station.
Communications Officer Molly, in a red uniform with a curly black fro and a silver object the size of a toaster in her ear, said, “Quadrant four is below five percent, and the extra pressure is being directed at quadrant three.”
Captain Molly, in her gold outfit, with her hair in a precise Jacqueline Onassis do, spun the bridge chair toward Communications Molly and said, “Pull out everything and shift it to quadrant three ahead of them.” The chair spun back toward Science Officer Molly. “Set off the nukes in four.”
Science Molly arched an eyebrow, askance.
“Oh, hush. I’m the captain, you’re the first officer, and that’s that,” snapped Captain Molly. “We’re fighting a war here. So set off the nukes. Hi, Harry.”
“Molly,” I said. “Nukes?”
“I was saving them as a surprise,” she said.
There was a big TV screen at the front of the room—not a flat-screen. A big, slightly curved old CRT. It went bright white all of a sudden.
“Ensign,” Captain Molly said.
Ensign Molly, dressed in a red uniform, wearing braces on her teeth, and maybe ten years younger than Captain Molly, twiddled some of the dials that didn’t do anything, and the bright white light dimmed down.
From outside, there was a long scream. An enormous one. Like, Godzilla-sized, or maybe bigger.
Everyone on the bridge froze. A brass section from nowhere played an ominous sting: bahm-pahhhhhhhhhhm. “
You’re kidding,” I said, looking around. “A sound track?”
“I don’t mean to,” Ensign Molly said in a strained, teenager tone. She had a Russian accent that sounded exactly like Sanya. “I watched show too much when I was kid, okay?”
“Your brain is a very strange place,” I said. I meant it as a compliment, and it showed in my voice. Ensign Molly gave me a glowing grin and turned back to her station.
-
Butcher, Jim (2011-07-26). Ghost Story: A Novel of the Dresden Files (p. 432). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Powers
Mental Defenses/Consequences of Mind Magic
Sensitive
Soulgaze
Veils
One-Woman Rave
Known Spells
Assorted Skills
Circle Magic
Focus Items/Evocation
Potions
Wards
Headcanon
Skills
Habits
Attitudes | History | Random Opinions
Stories Behind Tattoos
Family
Items
Canon
Battle Coat and Existence of "Various Focus Items"
Wands
Bracelet
Luceti/Headcanon
Crucifix, First Communion
Lightning Jacks
World Building
Magic and Types of Magic
The Seven Laws of Magic
The Swords of the Cross
Vampire Courts
Mouse
Not sure where to put this yet, but I want the reference
I let out a low, noncommittal sound. “Then why are you here?”
“B-because,” she said, searching for words. “Because I need to do it. I know that what you’re doing is necessary. And it’s right. And I know that you’re doing it because you’re the only one who can. And I want to help.”
“You think you’re strong enough to help?” I asked her.
She bit her lip again and met my eyes for just a second. “I think…I think it doesn’t matter how strong my magic is. I know I don’t…I don’t know how to do these things like you do. The guns and the battles and…” She lifted her chin and seemed to gather herself a little. “But I know more than most.”
“You know some,” I admitted. “But you got to understand, kid. That won’t mean much once things get nasty. There’s no time for thinking or second chances.”
She nodded. “All I can promise you is that I won’t leave you when you need me. I’ll do whatever you think I can. I’ll stay here and man the phone. I’ll drive the car. I’ll walk at the back and hold the flashlight. Whatever you want.”
She met my eyes and her own hardened. “But I can’t sit at home being safe. I need to be a part of this. I need to help.”
There was a sudden, sharp sound as the leather strand of her bracelet snapped of its own volition. Black beads flew upward with so much force that they rattled off the ceiling and went bouncing around the apartment for a good ten seconds. Mister, still batting playfully at his gift sack of catnip, paused to watch them, ears flicking, eyes alertly tracking their movement.
I went up to the girl, who was staring at them, mystified. “It was the vampire, wasn’t it,” I said. “Seeing him die.”
She blinked at me. Then at the scattered beads. “I…I didn’t just see it, Harry. I felt it. I can’t explain it any better than that. Inside my head. I felt it, the same way I felt that poor girl. But this was horrible.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re a sensitive. It’s a tremendous talent, but it has some drawbacks to it. In this case, though, I’m glad you have it.”
“Why?” she whispered. I gestured at the scattered beads.
“Congratulations, kid,” I told her quietly. “You’re ready.”
She blinked at me, her head tilted. “What?”
I took the now-empty leather strand and held it up between two fingers. “It wasn’t about power, Molly. It was never about power. You’ve got plenty of that.”
She shook her head. “But…all those times…”
“The beads weren’t ever going to go up. Like I said, power had nothing to do with it. You didn’t need that. You needed brains.” I thumped a forefinger over one of her eyebrows. “You needed to open your eyes. You needed to be truly aware of how dangerous things are. You needed to understand your limitations. And you needed to know why you should set out on something like this.”
“But…all I said was that I was scared.”
“After what you got to experience? That’s smart, kid,” I said. “I’m scared, too. Every time something like this happens, it scares me. But being strong doesn’t get you through. Being smart does. I’ve beaten people and things who were stronger than I was, because they didn’t use their heads, or because I used what I had better than they did. It isn’t about muscle, kiddo, magical or otherwise. It’s about your attitude. About your mind.”
She nodded slowly and said, “About doing things for the right reasons.”
“You don’t throw down like this just because you’re strong enough to do it,” I said. “You do it because you don’t have much choice. You do it because it’s unacceptable to walk away, and still live with yourself later.”
She stared at me for a second, and then her eyes widened. “Otherwise, you’re using power for the sake of using power.”
I nodded. “And power tends to corrupt. It isn’t hard to love using it, Molly. You’ve got to go in with the right attitude or…”
“Or the power starts using you,” she said. She’d heard the argument before, but this was the first time she said the words slowly, thoughtfully, as if she’d actually understood them, instead of just parroting them back to me. Then she looked up. “That’s why you do it. Why you help people. You’re using the power for someone other than yourself.”
“That’s part of it,” I said. “Yeah.”
“I feel…sort of stupid.”
“There’s a difference in knowing something”—I poked her head again—“and knowing it.” I touched the middle of her sternum. “See?”
She nodded slowly. Then she took the strand back from me and put it back on her wrist. There was just enough left to let her tie it again. She held it up so that I could see and said, “So that I’ll remember.”
Butcher, Jim (2008-02-05). White Night (The Dresden Files, Book 9) (pp. 321-322). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.
Molly's mindscape - a battle for possession
There was a ruined city all around me. The sky above boiled with storm clouds, moving and roiling too quickly to be real, filled with contrasting colors of lightning. Rain hammered down. I heard screams and shouted imprecations all around me, overlapping one another, coming from thousands of sources, blending into a riotous roar—and every single voice was either Molly’s or the Corpsetaker’s.
As I watched, some great beast somewhere between a serpent and a whale smashed its way through a brick building—a fortress, I realized—maybe fifty yards away, thrashing about as it fell and grinding it to powder. A small trio of dots of bright red light appeared on the vast thing’s rubble-dusted flanks, just like the targeting of the Predator’s shoulder cannon in the movies of the same name, and then multiple streaks of blue-white light flashed in from somewhere and blew a series of holes the size of train tunnels right through the creature. Around me, I saw groups of soldiers, many of them in sinister black uniforms, others looking like idealized versions of United States infantry, laying into one another with weapons of every sort imaginable, from swords to rocket launchers.
A line of tracer fire went streaking right through me, having no more effect than a stiff breeze. I breathed a faint sigh of relief. I was inside Molly’s mindscape, but her conflict was not with me, and neither was the Corpsetaker’s. I was just as much a ghost here at the moment as I had been back in the real world.
The city around me, I saw, was a vast grid of fortified buildings, and I realized that the kid had changed her usual tactics. She wasn’t trying to obscure the location of her mental fortress with the usual tricks of darkness and fog. She had instead chosen a different method of obfuscation, building a sprawl of decoys, hiding the true core of her mind somewhere among them.
Corpsetaker had countered her, it would seem, by the simple if difficult expedient of deciding to crush them all, even if it had to be done one at a time. That vast beast construct had been something more massive than I had ever attempted in my own imagination, though Molly had tossed some of those at me once or twice. It wasn’t simply a matter of thinking big—there was an energy investment in creating something with that kind of mental mass, and Molly generally felt such huge, unsubtle thrusts weren’t worth the effort they took—especially since someone with the right attitude and imagination would take them down with only moderately more difficulty than small constructs.
Corpsetaker, though, evidently didn’t agree. She was a lot older than Molly or me, and she would have deeper reserves of strength to call upon, greater discipline, and the confidence of long experience. The kid had managed to take on the Corpsetaker on Molly’s most familiar ground, and to play her hand in her strongest suit—but my apprentice’s strength didn’t look like it was holding up well against the necromancer’s experience and expertise.
I stopped paying attention to everything happening—all the artillery strikes and cavalry charges and shambling hordes of zombies and storms of knives that just came whirling out of the sky. The form of any given construct wasn’t as important as the fact of its existence. A flying arrow that could pierce the heart, for example, was potentially just as dangerous as an animate shadow reaching out with smothering black talons. As long as one could imagine an appropriate construct to counter the threat, and do so in time to stop it, any construct could be defeated. It was a simple thing at its most basic level, and it sounded easy. But once you’re throwing out dozens or hundreds—or thousands—of offensive and defensive constructs at a time . . . Believe me—it takes your full attention.
It’s also all you can do to deal with one opponent, which explained why I hadn’t been assaulted by the Corpsetaker instantly, if she had even taken note of my presence at all. She and Molly were locked together tight. The soulgaze had probably played a part in that. Neither was letting go until her opponent was dead. Both combatants were throwing enormous amounts of offensive constructs at each other, even though Molly was demolishing her own defenses almost as rapidly as the Corpsetaker was. As tactics go, that one had two edges. Molly was hurting herself, but by doing so, she was preventing the Corpsetaker from pressing too closely, lest she be caught up in the vast bursts of destruction being exchanged. A mistake could easily destroy anyone’s mind in that vista of havoc, centuries-old necromancer or not. On the other hand, if she spotted where Molly was fighting from, it looked like she’d have the power to drive in and crush my apprentice. But if she closed in on the wrong target, she’d leave herself wide-open to a surprise attack from the real Molly. Corpsetaker had to know that, just as she had to know that if she simply kept on the pressure, the whole place would eventually be ground down and Molly would be destroyed anyway.
My apprentice had come with a good plan, but she had miscalculated. The Corpsetaker was a hell of a lot stronger than she had expected. Molly was playing the most aggressive defensive plan I’d ever seen, and hoping that she could pressure the Corpsetaker into making a mistake. It wasn’t a good plan, but it was all she had.
Butcher, Jim (2011-07-26). Ghost Story: A Novel of the Dresden Files (Kindle Locations 7029-7034). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.
Molly the Star Trek Fangirl
It looked like a miniature home, with a door and siding and trim and windows and everything. A rope ladder allowed one to climb up to the porch, but it had been pulled up. I floated up to the door on the flying carpet and knocked politely.
“I have you now,” I said, as much like James Earl Jones as I could. I do a better Yul Brynner.
Molly’s strained face appeared at the window and she blinked. “Harry?”
“What’s with the come-hither, grasshopper?” I asked. “You practically vacuumed me in with the Corpsetaker.”
Molly narrowed her eyes and said, “What was I wearing the first time we met?”
I blinked at her, opened my mouth, closed it, thought about it, and then said, “Oh, come on, Moll. I have no idea. Clothes? You were, like, eight years old and your mom tried to shut the door in my face and I was there to see your dad.”
She nodded once, as if that was the answer she’d been looking for, and opened the door. “Come on.”
I went into the tree house with her. The inside was bigger than the outside. You can do that sort of thing in your imagination. It’s kind of fun. I’ve got one closet of my castle that looks like a giant disco roller rink. The roller skaters come after you like juggernaut, the music makes heads explode, and the mirror ball distributes a killer laser beam.
Molly’s headquarters looked like the bridge of, I kid you not, the U.S.S. Enterprise. The old one. The one that was full of dials that obviously didn’t do anything and that had a high-pitched, echoing cricket chirp going off every five or six seconds.
There was an upside to that setting, though: Molly was wearing one of the old sixties miniskirt uniforms.
Look, I’m not interested in a relationship with the kid. I do love her tremendously. But that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t look fantastic. Anyone with eyes can see that, and I’ve always been the kind of person who can appreciate gorgeous scenery without feeling a need to go camping in it.
Actually, glancing around, there were about half a dozen Mollys, all of them wearing old sixties miniskirt uniforms, each of them manning a different station. The one who had opened the door had jet-black hair in a neat, almost mathematical, gamine-style cut and slightly pointed ears.
“Star Trek?” I asked her. “Really?”
“What?” she demanded, bending unnaturally black eyebrows together.
“There are two kinds of people in the universe, Molly,” I said. “Star Trek fans and Star Wars fans. This is shocking.”
She sniffed. “This is the post-nerd-closet world, Harry. It’s okay to like both.”
“Blasphemy and lies,” I said.
She arched an eyebrow at me with Nimoysian perfection and went back to her station.
Communications Officer Molly, in a red uniform with a curly black fro and a silver object the size of a toaster in her ear, said, “Quadrant four is below five percent, and the extra pressure is being directed at quadrant three.”
Captain Molly, in her gold outfit, with her hair in a precise Jacqueline Onassis do, spun the bridge chair toward Communications Molly and said, “Pull out everything and shift it to quadrant three ahead of them.” The chair spun back toward Science Officer Molly. “Set off the nukes in four.”
Science Molly arched an eyebrow, askance.
“Oh, hush. I’m the captain, you’re the first officer, and that’s that,” snapped Captain Molly. “We’re fighting a war here. So set off the nukes. Hi, Harry.”
“Molly,” I said. “Nukes?”
“I was saving them as a surprise,” she said.
There was a big TV screen at the front of the room—not a flat-screen. A big, slightly curved old CRT. It went bright white all of a sudden.
“Ensign,” Captain Molly said.
Ensign Molly, dressed in a red uniform, wearing braces on her teeth, and maybe ten years younger than Captain Molly, twiddled some of the dials that didn’t do anything, and the bright white light dimmed down.
From outside, there was a long scream. An enormous one. Like, Godzilla-sized, or maybe bigger.
Everyone on the bridge froze. A brass section from nowhere played an ominous sting: bahm-pahhhhhhhhhhm. “
You’re kidding,” I said, looking around. “A sound track?”
“I don’t mean to,” Ensign Molly said in a strained, teenager tone. She had a Russian accent that sounded exactly like Sanya. “I watched show too much when I was kid, okay?”
“Your brain is a very strange place,” I said. I meant it as a compliment, and it showed in my voice. Ensign Molly gave me a glowing grin and turned back to her station.
-
Butcher, Jim (2011-07-26). Ghost Story: A Novel of the Dresden Files (p. 432). Penguin Group. Kindle Edition.