Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue

14

Nothing rose in the atmosphere to challenge their flight. Molly wasn’t sure if it was the recent changing of the guard or the general disorganization below. She didn’t care. Physically and emotionally, Palan was proving to be an easy planet to run from.

She wanted to rush back and tend to Cole, but he made his own way into the cockpit. She could see his reflection in the carboglass, one hand pressed to his ribs, the other one reaching forward to tousle her hair.

“Miss me?”

Molly wanted desperately to turn and reach out to him, to verify he was safe. But just the feeling of his cold hand on her scalp made flying difficult. She had too many emotions racing through her, mixing with the adrenaline. She pulled her head away and reached for the radio, dialing it to full scan mode. Her hand shook visibly; she left Cole’s question unanswered.

He stood beside her, peering at the vid screen. She glanced at it as well and saw Walter glaring toward the cockpit.

“I guess not,” he said. “So. You’ve been out making friends while they tried beating me to death, is that it?”

Molly tried to laugh, but thanks to her nerves, it came out more like a cough. “You’re welcome,” she managed, her voice quaking.

Cole slid his hand down the back of Molly’s neck, supporting himself on her shoulder as he leaned over the flight console. He peered through the windshield then scanned the dash, checking out its SADAR unit and nav charts. “She’s a beaut,” he said.

Molly nodded. Cole’s hand no longer felt cold. Or maybe it was just her neck flushing with heat. The adrenaline shakes went away in an instant, replaced with a feeling of paralysis. She didn’t want to move and hoped Cole wouldn’t either.

But he did.

Leaning down, Cole kissed her, briefly, on the top of her head. He patted her on the shoulder. “Thank you,” he whispered.

As he pulled away and stumbled back into the cargo bay, Molly’s face and ears burned. She could hear Cole and Walter introducing themselves over the pounding of her pulse, but just barely. She tried to imagine how the two of them were going to get along on the flight to Earth, and it made her feel as though she should be remembering something important, something she needed to tell Walter or ask him. Did it have to do with the food cart, or a key? Her stomach interrupted her, the thought of Palan prison food making it erupt in protest. She gathered her voice and threw a request over her shoulder, “When you guys get done talking sports, could you bring me something to eat?”

On the vid screen, she saw Walter bolt into action, hopefully rustling up better fare than he’d served yesterday. Meanwhile, she busied herself with the systems checks she should’ve performed before takeoff—the routine tasks that seem to get in the way of prison breaks. She checked the astral charts first, and the news there wasn’t good. Drummond was supposed to have updated them, but the charts were almost as old as she was. At least a hundred planets had been discovered since these things were made and a few stars were no longer around. Dozens of safe jump zones had moved and better ones located.

Jump zones. Drenards! Molly looked at the small fusion fuel readout and felt sick. It showed 20% and falling! She’d forgotten the aluminum rig and the wires, assuming she could just turn off the drive and it’d be safe.

“Cole?” she yelled over her shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“I need you to take the stick for a minute.”

Molly turned as he entered the cockpit, chewing on something. He slurped on a small bag of juice. “Some of Drummond’s stuff,” he explained, his mouth full. “Walter’s bringing you some.”

“In a minute,” she said, taking in Cole’s appearance. His face was bruised and blood was caked below his nostrils. Molly felt an urge to tend to him, but she needed to worry about the hyperdrive first. “Keep us heading away from Palan, and don’t turn on the hyperdrive.”

Cole worked himself into the pilot’s seat. “You don’t want to jump out of here?” he called after her. But Molly was already crossing the cargo bay, heading toward the engine room.

Passing the workbench, she grabbed a welding glove and a scrap of aluminum pipe left over from her “craft time.” She tugged the glove on and clutched the pipe as she entered the engine room—where she discovered what she’d feared she might. The hyperdrive indicator was flashing green; the thing was running, even though the cockpit controls were locked off!

Molly surveyed the main hyperdrive housing. The device was as big as a refrigerator laying on its side. Most of the interior was a firing chamber for the fusion fuel. There wasn’t much else to the device: its principles of operation were closely-guarded secrets. Hyperdrive Mechanics had been a weekend Lab tacked onto their semester of Advanced Thruster Repair. All cadets had to know was how to ensure coordinates were fed properly from the nav computer and to make sure the four drive wires were grounded to the ship’s chassis.

It was the drive wires that Molly had re-routed in order to spring Cole. And all four of the posts she had soldered them to were sparking slightly. They hadn’t been before.

There must be a short somewhere, she thought, probably in the cargo door. Luckily it had happened after Cole’s crazy stunt, or else he wouldn’t be here anymore. He would’ve moved thirty meters up, bumped into the rock in his way, and winked out of existence.

Molly stepped forward, raising the pipe with one arm. She swung it as hard as she could at the nearest post, hoping to break the wire off. Time slowed to a crawl. She flashed back to the day before, to the brutality of hitting that Navy man in the head. At the time, she thought she’d killed him…

Molly was jarred back to the present as she struck the post and knocked the wire free. The hyperdrive light went red. And most of the aluminum pipe disappeared right out of her hand!

Only a few inches of the metal tube were left, the rest probably warped thirty meters straight up. The cleanly severed tip stuck out of her gloved fist, the polished metal interior gleaming in a way that no mechanical cut ever could. Molly loosened her grip on the bit that remained and wondered what would’ve happened if the hyperdrive had been turned up a little more. Would she be looking inside her wrist? And what did she think the welding glove would have protected her against?

She left the piece of pipe in the engine room and decided, right there, that this little episode would never leave the engine room.

Returning the glove to the workbench, she accepted the rations Walter held out to her. He seemed extremely pleased with himself and with all the goodies he had strewn around the cargo bay. Molly took a sip of juice and squeezed his arm. “Thanks for getting us out of there,” she told him.

“My pleassure,” he said.

“There are four cabins past the engine room. You can have either one on the Starboard side, okay?” She gestured back toward the rear of the ship. “Right side,” she added, pointing for emphasis.

Walter nodded.

“And since you seem to be good with merchandise and gear, I would love to have you as my Cargo Officer. At least until we get to Earth.”

Walter beamed; it was nothing like his sneer at all. He rubbed the shoulder Molly had squeezed. “Officser,” he repeated.

“Yeah, Cargo Officer.” Molly opened a few drawers and cabinets, looking for the ship manifest. Every compartment appeared to have been rummaged through, not at all like her father normally kept things. She eventually found the clipboard under a stack of manuals for the ship’s mechanical and electrical systems.

“This is a manifest,” she told Walter. “You keep up with everything on a ship with this. How much, what it is, what you paid for it, what you hope to sell it for, who owns it, where you got it, where it’s stored…” She ran her finger along the top row, reading the header and wondering if the Palan was able to follow along.

Walter watched, mesmerized. The way most Palan’s did things was much different. Nothing stayed in one place long enough to bother writing anything down. This was more like the way he did things. The way he would lay out team duties for his band of junior pirates when they went on market raids, or the way he’d organized his food cart after his uncle punished him with prison duty after that last heist.

His uncle. Walter figured his uncle would have a bounty out on his head by now. Stealing a spaceship and two prisoners in a single morning probably meant he could never go home again. The thought didn’t make him sad. Not at all. It made him think of the differences between him and his uncle, and of all his great ideas the old bastard had waved away.

“You can read and write, can’t you?” Molly asked him.

The insinuation hurt. He nodded vigorously then followed Molly’s gaze as she glanced around at the messy cargo bay. Nothing had been stowed properly before they took off; boxes of supplies had toppled, their contents strewn across the cargo bay.

“Until we get the Navy to reward you for helping me, I can’t offer anything more than room and board. Understand?”

“Of coursse,” he said. “It iss enough. I took a few thingss from my uncle anyway. Iss no problem.”

Molly shook her head as if she didn’t want to know. “All you have to do is keep up with all the items in the ship, put them in sensible places and write it down so we can find them. So, have fun with it or go get some rest. I need to tend to Cole and do some pilot stuff.” She smiled at him and turned to the cockpit.

He watched her go. Forlorn, like a puppy tied to a park bench studying its departing master.

“Hey, pal. You’re in my chair.”

Cole looked over his shoulder at her. He had some of the meal bar on his chin, ruining Molly’s mock anger. She laughed and pointed to her own face. He wiped it off, stepping dutifully over the control console and into the nav chair.

“This is going to take some getting used to,” he said, adjusting the harness on the back of the seat. “Where’d you rush off to?”

“Bathroom,” Molly lied. “Nothing on SADAR?”

“A little glitch a few minutes ago, some hyperdrive discharge and a very small contact. Probably just ice peeling off or a problem with the SADAR. Other than that, geez, it’s too quiet up here. This orbit is completely dead.”

Molly agreed. “Especially for a pirate haven,” she said. “The only thing I can think is they’re fighting over some spoils somewhere. Or the recent shift in power has everyone locking down their hatches.” She looked at Cole, studied his furrowed brow. “You aren’t going to add this to your conspiracy theory, are you? You think our escape is being allowed, don’t you? ’Cause I can tell you, buddy, it’s been some damn hard work.”

Cole held up both hands in mock surrender. “Easy, I’m not saying that at all. You just keep on pointing out the obvious, and I’ll look for the difficult clues, okay?”

Oooh. She wanted to punch Cole in the arm, but he was smiling at her. And the bruises on his face made her want to hug him rather than hit him.

“You look terrible,” she said.

His smile widened. Molly would never understand why boys were so proud of their scrapes and scars. Whatever their heroics proved, the pride they had in their nicks undid it.

Cole turned back to the nav screen in front of him. The large square monitor displayed their astral charts—currently centered on Palan and her three moons. Another planet was also in view, circling the same star on a tighter orbit. “Where to, Captain?” he asked her.

“Earth, if we could, but our hyperdrive’s low; it’s gonna have to be someplace closer. Do you think the Orbital Station here is safe?”

Cole looked at her like she was crazy. “Are you crazy?” he asked, confirming the look. “The last time we went to the Navy we nearly got ourselves killed. Twice.”

“Okay, fine. So we need to go someplace with very little Naval presence that also has fusion fuel. How do you propose we pull that off?”

Cole looked at the charts again. “Here’s one that fits. And I hear Palan is nice after the rains.”

“Funny.” Molly sipped from her juice pouch. It tasted like nectar after that prison muck. “I say, for now, we just pick a safe entry zone for a small jump. We get showered and changed and get some sleep. I’m not thinking clearly enough to make a rational decision.”

Cole nodded his agreement. She watched him scroll to a spot in the vacuum of space perpendicular to Earth’s vector, a place nobody would think to follow. She could’ve done the calculations in her head, but she watched him hammer them out on the nav computer. He wielded the equations in his own way and she bit her tongue; there were probably a dozen things he’d be doing differently if he was sitting over here. They were both going to have to be patient with each other as they learned their new roles.

“Locked in and confirmed,” he told her.

Molly checked the numbers. The hyperdrive was turned back to its normal settings, locked for the ship’s current mass via the SADAR unit. She raised the glass shield over the jump button and thumbed it.

The stars shifted.

15

The next two days were spent in the middle of nowhere and full of bliss. Molly had been so busy using Parsona to flee Palan, she missed her chance to fully appreciate the reunion. As they drifted out along the edge of the Milky Way’s Frontier Arm, she finally had an opportunity to look over the ship.

Her ship.

A lot of the tools she remembered watching her father use were still here. Some of them looked worse for wear: the fuel cell in every power tool was bone dry; a few manual screwdrivers were missing; one of the large hammers she’d barely been able to lift as a child had a large spot of strange rust on it that needed to be filed off. Despite the abuse, most of it was still there—including her father’s old ratchet set, the sight of which flooded Molly with nostalgia.

It was the closest thing to a toy box she’d ever had. She would spend hours playing with the shiny cylinders, stacking them like blocks, building precarious things that quaked as her father stomped by. She used to hold her open hands to either side of her little metal castles as they threatened to fall, holding them upright by the force of her will alone.

That came to an end after she spilled the entire set in the engine room and had to spend the rest of the day digging greasy bits out of the bilge, cleaning them and re-sorting them. It was the last time she’d opened the large metal box.

Molly ran her fingers across its silver hasps; she flipped them up, paused a moment, then hinged back the lid. Every piece was still there, each one in its proper place. She grazed a row of metrics and picked one at random, held it up close, then put it back. That was what she loved about the ratchet set. Everything had a slot that it went into. Everything fit. You could mess it up, but it would go back together again, just like it was.

She wished it was a metaphor for life, but it wasn’t. She knew.

It seemed odd that an old set of tools would stir such emotions, when the staterooms elicited hardly a response. Her own room had been rummaged through; nothing remained from her last time aboard. And the captain’s quarters, which she entered hesitantly, no longer smelled like her father.

Molly recalled sneaking into his room whenever the strange noises in the ship gave her bad dreams. He would sit up and hold her, softly explaining which pump or motor was turning on and what it was doing to create each sound. The next morning, she would wake up in her own bed.

Moving into his room, rather than sleep in her old one, may have appeared to the others a natural result of her rank, but Molly knew it was something different. It was a scared child once again looking for respite from her bad dreams. And it worked. The nightmare that’d been haunting her for ten years didn’t make its customary appearance that first night. Nor the next one. No longer terrified of being left behind, Molly had become a part of what she’d been chasing.

Another wonderful discovery was the ship’s original logs. They went all the way back to Parsona’s maiden voyage. Molly pulled up the waypoints her parents must’ve used on their first flight to Lok. She traced her finger across the nav screen, thinking about the planet where she’d been born, imagining her mother alive and happy, her parents in love.

She read the log entries that went with the routes, knowing they would’ve been typed in by her mother or father. The words glowed phosphorous green on the readout—her parents talking to her across time and beyond the grave. As a pilot now, in charge of their old ship, she felt connected to them both in a way she never had before. Eighteen years ago, her father had left the Navy and moved with his new bride to a frontier planet. They would’ve been crossing the galaxy just like Molly was about to, trying to start a new life.

While she spent her time reminiscing, Cole launched into a whirlwind of productivity. Nobody appreciated the hot shower as much as he did. The swelling on his face and the purple around his ribs faded with rest, medical cream, and clean bandages. And surprisingly—to Molly at least—it was Cole that busied about the utility room, washing the mildew out of the sheets, trying to salvage their Palan clothes, and organizing their supply of soaps and cleaners. Molly couldn’t remember him being this fastidious at the Academy; then again, the only way to recognize an overly neat person in the military was to note the few people who weren’t complaining about mandatory hygiene and strict dress codes.

Walter also kept himself busy. He took his new duties as “Cargo Officer” more seriously than Molly had expected. It turned out the kid could do more than just read and write, he was a whiz with computers. Probably from a childhood of hacking into banks or stealing holovids—Molly didn’t dare ask. He wasted no time retiring the manifest sheets and writing his own inventory program into a small computer. Molly had no idea where it had come from, but it seemed suspiciously newer than anything else on the ship. He carried the device with him at all times, hissing with delight when he found something new in a hidden cubby.

Between Cole’s cleaning and Walter’s organizing, the wreck of Parsona’s interior quickly transformed into a model of perplexing orderliness. This is not what living with two males should be like. Especially when one of them was a citizen of Palan, having seen what passes muster on that planet. Then again, perhaps this was the way Walter had chosen to rebel. Or maybe it was his attempt to impose order on the universe. It was no longer a mystery to Molly that her offer to get the boy off-planet had succeeded where other deals had fallen short. He must’ve been miserable there.

The only bad news, besides the hyperdrive reading eighteen percent, was the lack of some common spares for the thrusters and the state of a few mechanical systems. Numerous lights were out and needed replacing, the air conditioning unit in one of the crew rooms was broken, some paint needed to be chipped off and re-applied, and various other tasks started filling the to-do tab in the ship’s computer.

The only deal-breaker, though, was the hyperdrive. They had no way of charging it up themselves.

In fact, filling up the hyperdrive and avoiding the Navy were going to be difficult to do at the same time. Supposedly, only a few people in the entire Galactic Union knew how hyperdrive engines worked. Fusion coil technology was a closely guarded secret, and refills were overseen at Orbital Stations under the watchful eyes of Navy personnel.

There were dozens of rumors about who actually discovered the technology and owned the rights. Conspiracy theorists maintained an alien race sold the technology to Humans ages ago, but Molly didn’t buy it. Every race Humans encountered in the galaxy had received hyperdrive technology from them, not the other way around. The only exception was the Drenards, who had made the same technological breakthrough at some point, and the only technology they seemed eager to give humans were missiles. Lots of them. Pointy ends first.

Filling up with enough fuel to reach Earth, and the safety of the Academy seemed an intractable problem. One Molly struggled to solve while everyone cleaned and recharged their spirits.

But it was Cole who came up with an idea. It happened as he was poring over the astral charts in Parsona’s nav computer, logging in potential jump routes to Earth.

“This makes no sense,” Cole said, his voice tinny and subdued by the bilge. Molly had her head under a floor panel in the cockpit, tightening some hydraulic lines. It made communicating difficult, so naturally Cole was being unusually chatty. “Hey, Molly, you ever heard of Glemots?”

“Glemots,” she repeated. “Why does that sound familiar?” She raised her head to hear him better and banged it on a floor truss. She nearly dropped her wrench.

“Be careful,” Cole cautioned. “And Glemots aren’t a that, they’re a them. Remember the race that left the Galactic Union all those years ago? They completely shut out the rest of the universe. You can’t even get near their home planet.”

Rubbing her head, Molly pulled herself out of the bilge. She could see grease on her own cheeks, black smudges in the edge of her peripheral. She had her hair tied back under a triangle of white cloth and figured Cole had already seen her at her worst after the Palan rains. “Are they the ones Unity Now tried to help out after a supernova irradiated their corner of the galaxy?”

“Bingo. The UN sent a few supply and refugee ships, and not a one of them was ever heard from again.”

“And what makes you want to go and say ‘hello’? Was that dinner you cooked last night some attempt to fatten me up for the savages?”

“They aren’t savages. Or weren’t, anyway. Look, there’s a log in the nav computer about them. The Navy first encountered these guys back in the frontier expansion, so it must’ve been over two hundred years ago. Smart race, roughly humanoid—”

“That is such an offensive term, Cole. You’re supposed to say bilaterally symmetric quadruped.” Molly sang the term with the cadence of something memorized but not completely understood.

“Gimme a break, I’m just skimming what it says here.” Cole gestured to the nav screen. “As I was saying, let’s see here… oh, so the Glemots had no technology when the Navy found them, so they put the Meln Imperative in place.”

“Watch, but don’t interfere,” Molly recited. She felt like they were back in classes at the Academy.

“Right. But get this, the Glemots were flying ships out of orbit just four years later.”

“So the Navy had it wrong. They had technology.”

“Not according to this. Supposedly they worked out the principles of space flight from their limited contact with the Navy.”

“From nothing?” Molly got up from the floor and gaped in disbelief over Cole’s shoulder. “That’s impossible. Someone made a mistake, or the Navy broke the Meln Imperative or something.”

Walter poked his head into the cockpit. “What are you guyss getting sso loud about? Can I look?”

“Pilot stuff.” Cole and Molly said in unison. They smirked at each other.

“Well, I’m going to go do more Officser sstuff,” Walter said haughtily. “The sstorage lockerss in the bilge are almosst done,” he added with pride.

While she waited for Walter to pad away, Molly noticed how close her face was to Cole’s. The nav screens were hard to see clearly from an angle. She could’ve pulled up the display on her own computer, but she’d just leaned over to read his. She hadn’t noted their proximity to one another while they were talking, but now, in silence, she could feel the heat from his cheek radiating out to hers. The warmth made her want to pull away sharply, or douse it with a kiss.

She did neither.

Instead, she reached over him and pointed to the monitor, trying to focus on something else. “An observation satellite?”

Cole nodded. “That’s the theory the Navy settled on. They lost a planetary probe during the reconnaissance phase. A faulty thruster sent it crashing to the surface. They probably decided a recovery would risk direct contact. Must’ve figured nothing useful could survive atmospheric entry and an impact like that.”

Molly moved to the Captain’s chair and pulled up the same star chart on her screen. She just couldn’t concentrate while hovering so close to him. It felt like flying next to a canyon wall in a stiff breeze.

Cole continued talking, seemingly unaware of Molly’s struggles. “And once the cat was out of the bag,” he said, “the Meln Imperative no longer applied. In fact, according to this, the Glemots made first contact themselves. And they had a rough grasp of English… oh, wait. You are so not going to believe this.”

“What is it?” she asked, trying to scan down the report to find it for herself.

“This is how the Navy figured out the satellite may have caused the sudden spike in technology. The English spoken by the first Glemot astronauts was heavy in engineering jargon. They had pulled their vocabulary straight from the satellite computers.”

“You’re right,” Molly agreed. “I don’t believe it. For once I’m thinking one of your conspiracy theories would make more sense. And what’s the point of this lesson?”

Cole glared at her. “The reason this star system matters to us is that the Navy built a small Orbital Station there before the Glemots kicked them out. The station’s still there. If the Navy left in a hurry, there might be some stuff we could use. Maybe some fusion fuel or a Bell radio that still works.”

Molly shook her head. Bell radios were the key to instantaneous communication across long distances, but they wouldn’t find one operational. The devices employed Bell’s Theorem, a bizarre 20th century discovery in quantum mechanics. The theorem hypothesized the ability to entangle two particles so a change on one resulted in a change in the other, no matter how far apart they were. Molly knew her quantum mechanics. Entangled particles are kept in magnetic storage units; they’d decay without anyone around to keep them up.

But the fusion fuel? That was a real possibility. Worth checking out. “It is close by,” Molly noted. She traced a finger across her pilot screen. “Twenty thousand light years, and in the right direction. Let’s call it six percent from the hyperdrive. We would still have enough for another small jump or two if nothing panned out. We could make the Navy station at Cephus as a bailout.”

Cole agreed. “I can’t think of anything else to try. Unless you want to go turn ourselves in to the Navy straight away. Hope the Palan office was an anomaly.”

“What do you think?”

“I think the behavior there was part of a larger pattern. The simulator sabotage, the early graduations, the way you were run out of the school. Nothing makes sense to me right now except the Navy acting screwy—”

“More screwy,” Molly corrected him.

“Yeah, more screwy.” Cole laughed. “Or screwier. Anyway, I’d feel safer with you and some backwoods savages than I would with the authorities right now.”

“Okay, but if we’re gonna do this, it has to be stealth-like. Jump in behind this moon, here, and use the thrusters to head to the Orbital Station. No spooking the natives.”

“I don’t think they’ll be a problem. The reason they left the GU is because they started to distrust technology just a few years after they mastered it. After they incapacitated the Navy, they got rid of or stored away everything they’d built. Several groups thought this made the system safe again, Navy included. But nobody has visited them since and returned to talk about it. Nothing but a few system scans by the Bel Tra, from the looks of things.”

Molly felt wistful at the mention of the Bel Tra, the best cartographers in the galaxy. “I wish we had their latest charts instead of these old things,” she said.

“Hey, if we’re quiet, they won’t even know we’re there.”

“Like the UN ships?” she countered.

“That’s different; they were going down to the planet. Probably trying to hand out potatoes in a hail-storm of arrows and rocks.”

“Yeah, probably so,” she said, hoping he was right.

Walter bounced excitedly into the cockpit’s short hallway. “The cargo bilge iss ssorted!” he announced. Molly turned to see him fiddling with his little inventory computer before looking up at her.

She smiled at him and pointed up at Parsona’s ceiling. “Have you looked in the overhead bins yet?”

His eyes lit up, his cheeks pulling back into a sneer. “Overhead binsss?!” he hissed.

The three crew members spent another full day doing prep-work and checking over the ship and its gear. Walter uncovered four space suits in the airlock room, complete with helmets. One was in questionable shape, but the other three would keep any of them alive if they needed to work outside the ship or if the hull lost structural integrity.

Just as important was the collection of flightsuits he’d gathered from the crew quarters. These thinner outfits would be crucial if they needed to do any strenuous maneuvering on their way back to Earth. The anti-gravity modules in them were much simpler (and weaker) than the Navy’s suits, but they provided at least a modicum of protection against heavy Gs.

Cole proved himself quite handy with a needle. He made adjustments to the flightsuits to make sure they fit snugly, augmenting the effect of the anti-G fluid. Each suit also had name patches above the left breast reading “Parsona” or “Mortimor.” Cole told Molly he felt uncomfortable wearing an outfit with her father’s name on it, but she insisted he leave it.

She also asked him to take a patch off an extra suit of her father’s and add it to her own. Molly tried on the outfit after another round of alterations. Standing in front of the mirror, both of her parent’s names emblazoned across her chest, she felt a mixture of nostalgia, sadness, and joy that made her feel hollow inside. Not depressed—just empty. And kinda cold.

Walter shared none of Molly and Cole’s uneasiness with the suits. He was absolutely ecstatic to have one of his own. When he found out they had no way of embroidering a patch with his name on it, he just printed it with a black marker, as neatly as he could. He took to wearing the thing all the time, even as Molly kept reminding him it was only useful when they were accelerating.

The helmets that locked into these flightsuits were looser than the Navy variety, but Molly and Cole were both growing out their hair, which should eventually pad the space. For Walter’s close-cropped pate, there was nothing to be done, but he didn’t seem to mind. He would shake his head vigorously and fill the helmet with muffled laughter as it continued to bobble around.

Overall, the condition of their safety gear was in far better shape than it deserved to be. If the Orbital Station didn’t have any atmosphere—which they fully expected after hundreds of years of disuse—they would be able to carry their own in with them.

As the plan solidified in Molly’s mind, she started forming various lists of the things she wanted to salvage, ranked by likelihood. A long-range communicator was on top on her Implausible List. Even without entangled particles, it would be nice to grab one. An operating fusion coil full of fuel headed up her Dream List, along with a functioning manual pump to move the precious stuff to Parsona. On her Necessities List was all the food and spares they could get their flight gloves on. Even if they didn’t need the stuff, they could sell or barter it down the road. Salvage laws applied to Navy property after fifty years of abandonment. If nothing else, grabbing as much as they could would keep Walter occupied; they had enough room in the cargo bunkers to keep him out of their hair for the rest of their passage to Earth.

As she compiled these lists and contemplated the wealth of supplies that likely awaited them, Molly became more and more confident with the plan. Almost as much as Walter, who had gone bonkers when he learned what they were preparing for. He ran around the cargo bay in tight circles, hissing excitedly. “Loot a GU Orbital Station?!” He practically tackled Molly, throwing his arms around her and thanking her endlessly.

They’d eventually settled him down and explained the mission, how they needed to go about this very quietly. Not a hiss. Walter nodded violently while his helmet, visor open, stood perfectly still. “I undersstand,” he said. “An eassy ‘in and out’ job.”

He got half of it right.

Parsona winked out of hyperspace in the middle of an L2, the Lagrange point on the other side of Glemot’s largest moon. “Largest” being a relative term; the rock was small enough to keep its odd shape rather than crush into a rough sphere with the force of its own gravity. Still, a few hundred kilometers wide, it was more than enough to conceal their arrival. It wasn’t like a primitive race was going to be scanning the sky with telescopes, but Naval training was strong in two thirds of the crew. And the remaining third consisted of a born and bred sneaky bastard.

They swept the far side of the potato-shaped moon with SADAR, revealing the Orbital Station just beyond. Everything was still out of sight as they crept up behind their lumpy, cratered shield. Cole scanned for any electrical or mechanical activity from the station, but they were on the extreme edge of their sensor’s range for those functions. Meanwhile, the Glemot planet dominated the SADAR display with its quiet bulk.

“All clear?” Molly thumbed through the post-jump systems checks. Seeing the hyperdrive down to twelve percent made her stomach knot up.

“All clear,” Cole confirmed.

Molly checked the cargo cam. Four crew chairs with life-support hookups were arranged across the bulkhead outside the cockpit. They faced backwards, two to either side. Walter had been strapped into one of them after much cajoling and a bit of force, unable to contain his anticipation of the heist ahead. His head was bent forward as he toyed with something in his lap, probably working on the game he’d begun programming into his computer. He’d been trying to show it to her for the past two days, but Molly never really had the time.

Satisfied that they were prepared for pretty much anything, Molly pushed Parsona’s nose around the small moon. The first glimpse of the Glemot planet rose over its dark surface like a green sun. It was a spectacular contrast to the sight of the last planet they’d left. Where Palan was almost entirely blue, with just a single high continent of eroded brown rock, Glemot was the vibrant hue of photosynthesizing life, a verdant color that triggered something emotional in the primitive parts of Molly’s and Cole’s brains.

They both gasped at the sight of the large planet as it rose into view, almost as if their lungs could suck in all that oxygen from across the vacuum of space. No clouds obscured the land, an oddity neither of them noticed at first. Instead of vast oceans: thousands, possibly millions of tiny lakes dotted the orb. It was one thing to read the dry Naval reports during the planning of this operation—something else entirely to see it with their own eyes.

This was why at least one poet should be assigned to every survey vessel, Molly thought, just to do images like this justice.

“So pretty,” she said aloud.

“Stay focused,” Cole told her, but it sounded like it could’ve been a reminder to himself. He couldn’t keep his eyes off of the green world, either, or the thin halo of pale-blue atmosphere clinging to it.

A red indicator popped up on one of Cole’s readouts, breaking the spell.

“Mechanical activity on the Orbital Station. Looks like thruster signatures.”

Molly pulled it up as well.

“It’s just maintaining its orbit. That’s not a good Lagrange point. Moon’s too small, so it’s gonna have to boost itself periodically.”

“After all these years?” he shook his head. “Something’s not right. I’ve never known the Navy to build anything that didn’t need a weekly greasing. Wait. Thruster’s off now. Okay, maybe you’re right. That orbit can’t be stable, anyway. Too much mass in the OS and not enough in the moon. And yet, all these years later it’s orbiting the planet in lockstep—”

“And at a lower orbit,” Molly added.

“You think this is good news or bad news, Cap?”

“I’d say good. There’s no ship activity in the area. The thing’s probably just functioning on its own. That means we have a good chance of fueling up the hyperdrive.” Molly looked over at Cole and noted his furrowed brow. “You thinking we should pull back?”

“No. You’re probably right. But can you get us around the moonlet and behind the station? That planet is so pretty I might ask you to take us down for a look.”

“Absolutely,” Molly said, gripping the flight controls and nudging them forward.

But she wasn’t the only one trying to control the ship.

16

The first sign of trouble was the flickering of the nav screen. Cole rapped the top of the dash with his fist in the primitive problem-solving reflex common to males. The screen returned to normal.

“Better,” he said.

Molly rolled her eyes at the unfortunate result this would have at strengthening a silly habit. She didn’t think any more of the glitch as they approached the station.

When they closed to within a thousand meters, Molly prepped for docking maneuvers. The universal coupling on the outside of Parsona’s hull needed to be lined up with the one on the Orbital Station’s maintenance bay. The airlock on the GN-290 was high up the starboard side to prevent the wings from getting in the way, so Molly rolled Parsona over and began her approach. Hopefully, they’d be able to open the hangar doors manually from inside the station to make loading salvaged goods even easier.

Molly focused the external camera on the Orbital Station. Distances were displayed on a nearby readout, but she felt uncomfortable doing this for the first time without a spotter.

“Would you mind going to the airlock and calling out distances?” she asked Cole.

He nodded and moved to unbuckle himself from the nav seat—but the ship lurched forward, pressing him back into his chair. “Hey!” he complained.

“I’m not doing that!” Molly hammered the emergency stop, attempting to kill the thrusters. “Uh, we might have a problem here.” She watched the main thrusters ramp up to full RPMs, while the accelerator between the flight chairs remained in neutral.

Parsona was going haywire.

“I’m going to the engine room,” she said. “You take over here.”

Cole nodded as she unbuckled herself. Only then did she realize how tricky this was going to be. Parsona’s forward thrust was pushing her toward the back of the ship. That was where she wanted to go, but not quite so fast. She glanced at the hand-holds recessed into the ceiling and floor. They were too small, meant for emergencies that resulted in zero gravity, not excess gravity.

The longer she hesitated, the worse it would get. Molly turned sideways in her chair, her right shoulder pressing back into the seat. She glanced at Cole and then around to the rear of the ship. No way could she survive a fall that far. Her flightsuit would protect her up to a few dozen Gs as long as it was plugged in, but as soon as she left—she’d be on her own. And what would she do even if she made it to the engine room? If the secondary emergency stop didn’t respond, could she shut down the fuel lines running back to the thrusters?

Molly placed one hand on the control pedestal and started pressing herself out of the chair. A glance at the controls sparked an old memory. The remote docking panel. Her father had rarely used it around her—they lived on a frontier planet where starships just landed in fields—but she could remember one tricky locking maneuver where he’d stood by the airlock, using the panel as he guided the ship in visually. She looked around to see if she could even recognize it.

One of the rectangular panels next to her seat had a small set of maneuvering controls with two metal handles curving out on either side. Molly pulled on them and the entire unit popped out of its housing. Just to be sure, she tried thumbing its own emergency kill switch. Nothing happened.

She wrestled the panel, already heavy from the excess Gs, across her body. A thick trunk of electrical and hydraulic lines spooled out after. The device was frowned upon by veteran pilots as a psychological crutch, but Molly hoped it could serve her as a literal lifeline to the engine room far below.

She tried to let the unit fall back through the cargo bay slowly, but her gloves didn’t have enough grip. The trunk slid through her hands; she squeezed as hard as she could. Walter made a loud hissing noise as the object flew by his chair, matching the sound of the rubber zipping through her flight gloves.

When it reached the end, the cord lashed harshly across Molly’s chest, pinning her back into the chair. That was dumb, she thought, wriggling out from underneath the taut cable. She popped off her flight gloves and flexed her hands a bit.

“What are you doing?!” asked Cole.

Molly didn’t have time to explain. “Keep trying the kill switch while I’m gone. Radio me if something changes.” She crouched on the back of her seat. “Down” was toward the rear of the ship, the floor a vertical wall. She teetered, perched on a cushioned ledge, and peered over the thirty-meter drop. At the end of that fall the closed metal door leading to the lazarette looked tiny, yet menacing. This was starting to feel like a very bad idea.

Molly swung her feet out and gripped the bundled cords. She had to act now. The longer she waited, the heavier she’d get.

Wrapping her knees around the trunk of lines, she estimated they were pulling around three Gs already. Her body felt as if it weighed over 150 kilos. Her muscles, unfortunately, were the same ones acclimated to working out in a single gravity. She was asking a lot of them.

She slid down the first meter before locking in a solid grip. When she looked up to secure her hands better, she saw Cole gaping at her from above. Beyond him she could see the green planet dappled with blue spots. It was getting bigger.

Molly turned away from the sight and began working her way down, out of the cockpit and into the cargo bay below. When she became level with Walter, the boy let out another hiss of alarm. It looked like he was trying to say something, but Molly’s visor was down and her head throbbed from the effort. Her arms screamed as well, already quivering and she’d only gone a fraction of the distance.

Her knees were doing very little work, their grip on the trunk of cables too feeble. Molly let one of them go, pressing the toe of her boot into the series of zero-G hand-holds on the floor.

Much better.

She twisted her right arm around the cable, already growing more taut under the extra gravities, and found a toe hold with her other foot. Now she was rappelling down a pock-marked cliff instead of trying to slide down a slick rope. Molly locked her legs into the weight of her torso and let her boots do a lot of the work.

She could do this.

By the time she reached the bottom of the cargo bay, Parsona had to be doing 5 Gs. The engine room was another six meters away, and her ankles felt like they might snap under the strain. She balanced swiftness and safety—for every second she delayed, the task became that much more brutal. Looking up to secure her arm a bit better, Molly could see up the shaft of the ship, through the cockpit, and out to the green planet beyond. It completely filled the windshield.

She needed to focus.

Working her way down a few more steps, she entered the hallway leading back to the engine room and crew quarters. She was about two meters from the end of the cable when one of her boots slipped out of its hold. The arm she had wrapped around the cable was wrenched violently before coming loose. Her other hand remained around the cord, sliding painfully as she crashed into the remote docking panel.

She landed with a grunt, straddling the device like a rope swing. Catching her breath, her heart racing, she clutched the cables with both hands and pressed her head to the wire. That could’ve been bad, she thought. But she was level with the engine room door, at least.

Struggling to her feet, Molly felt as if she had a hundred kilos of extra weight strapped to her body. She wasn’t sure how much the cord could take; she peered down at the twelve meters of space between her and the metal door below.

Not wasting time, Molly kicked off from the airlock door beside her to see how much play there was left in the cable. It barely moved. She kicked harder and swung slightly toward the engine room. Catching the jamb and stepping off, she pulled herself into the thick doorway and was immediately pressed back against it. The forces on her body were incredible, but at least she was on her back, standing sideways in the engine room passage.

Her arms and feet felt numb; she wasn’t sure if she’d be able to reach the fuel lines. There were more objects to grasp in the engine room, but much of it was scalding hot. She wasn’t even sure she had the strength to leave the door jamb. She contemplated her next move, and then saw that it wouldn’t matter. Nothing would. The thruster relays across the mechanical room were firing. On and off. Just as they would be if someone were piloting the ship.

Parsona wasn’t out of control or in a runaway state.

Activating the helmet’s radio, Molly shouted for Cole.

“Molly? Are you okay? Where are you? We’re pulling seven Gs right now. You need to get that flight suit plugged in!”

“I’m by the engine room. You’re not touching the controls, are you?” She took some deep breaths, her chest feeling like three men stood on it.

“No, I’m trying to shut down all subsystems from here. Now get that suit plugged in, we’re gonna hit atmosphere in a few minutes!”

Oh, no. If the ship went into turns at this speed, she’d be thrown all over the place. Then she thought of something and would’ve kicked herself if her leg didn’t weigh a ton. She thumbed the mic again. “Do you have life support controls?”

There was a pause. “Yeah. I think I do.”

“Route everything you can to the grav panels forward of the engine room and turn off the panels aft of here.”

“Doing it now. But we’re closing in on eight Gs. I don’t know if the panels will take away half that. You need to get your suit plugged in!”

Across the hall from Molly, the door to the airlock slid open. She grimaced a smile at Cole’s thoughtfulness.

Grunting, she pulled herself up as the effects of the grav systems kicked in. She hoped Cole’s and Walter’s flightsuits were absorbing the extra weight; it was unpleasant to think of them suffering just to give her a little boost, and not even one that made her feel stronger—just less weak. She didn’t have much time before the Gs crept back up or they hit atmosphere. She looked to the hallway; the panel was still swinging slightly. The strain on the cable made it more like a steel cable under tension and less like a dangling rope.

Unable to reach it, Molly took a chance by kicking a foot at the hanging remote panel. It struck, but the weight of her leg out in the void nearly sent her over the edge and down to the lazarette, twelve meters below. She pulled herself back into the jamb, her knuckles white, and watched the panel swing away from her on a slow arc. She would only have one shot at this.

The panel was little more than half a meter square, its hydraulic cables never meant for such stress. It swung toward Molly—she crouched in the intense pull of acceleration, her muscles tense. It was impossible to know how hard to jump. Her vision told her body to exert a certain amount of effort, but under these gravities, it would’ve barely gotten her feet off the door jamb. She decided to give it everything, even though the distance would be less than a meter.

Just before the panel got as close as it would, Molly leapt, her legs uncoiling like springs. Heavy arms came up and scrambled for the cord. One foot landed on the small target. But she had jumped too far, her weight carrying past the small platform as it began swinging toward the airlock. She was over a meter from the door when she lost her grip. Her hands came free, one foot still on the slow swing. She pushed off, hoping the momentum would get her to the thick jamb of the airlock door.

Again: too much. Molly grabbed for the doorway as she sailed through, her feet tripping over the edge as she hurtled through the passage and crashed into the rear wall of the airlock. Reflexively, she brought her right arm up to protect her body, and heard it snap. Heard it before she even felt the pain, like the sound of a thick branch being popped into two pieces. Her torso crunched down on top of it, grinding the fragmented bones together.

Molly gargled with pain and nearly blacked out.

Pressing down with her left hand, she forced her body up and over to her back. She was lying on the wall beside two of the space suits—her arm at her side, her wrist at a funny angle. Molly felt sick seeing it like that. The limb must belong to someone else. Her brain couldn’t process this new shape—it made her stomach churn.

Lifting her head, she could see the airlock life support panel not far away. She used her feet and good arm to kick and drag herself across the wall, every centimeter a minor victory.

Pulling the panel open, she grabbed the cord inside and plugged it into the receptacle near her armpit. The relief was immediate. Pockets of anti-grav fluid raced around the chambers of her flight suit, countering the Gs as if she were still buckled into her seat.

Molly fumbled with the mounting straps on one of the spacesuits and dragged it out of the way. She buckled herself in its place, wrapping the webbing across her chest and thighs while she fought back the waves of pain emanating from her useless arm. She wasn’t satisfied with her one-handed knots, but she couldn’t take any more.

She lay her head back on the wall, her helmet forming a cushion for her skull, and smiled, reflecting on how odd she must look strapped between two empty suits, her arm twisted like one of their folded sleeves.

Parsona shuddered, probably entering the green planet’s atmosphere. Molly gasped as the vibrations sent shivers of agony though her arm. It jounced into a new shape and blackness pressed in around her vision, a sensation she was beginning to recognize. Molly summoned the last of her energy, using it to scold herself for passing out in moments of crisis.

Just in time to do it once more.

17

Molly flinched, startled from a bad dream as something large blotted out the pale light filtering through her eyelids. She lifted her head and blinked in confusion as the form came into focus. The sight sent her head crashing back down onto the hard surface beneath her; a massive bear-like creature hovered close, its face a row of hungry teeth. Molly thrashed against the restraints across her body, the pain in her arm nearly knocking her out again.

The bear lurched out of her vision and made a growling noise. The ground shook as the creature moved. Molly’s brain struggled to make sense of where she was. She was tied to a rock ledge. Palan? No. What was the last thing she remembered? She’d taken a shower and gotten in bed—no, something past that. They’d made the jump, the potato moon, the Orbital Station…

Her arm crushing in the airlock.

Molly tried to move her right arm beneath the restraints, the pain confirming her hazy memories and driving back the grogginess with needles. They were on the green planet.

Her pulse quickened, her breath trapped in her throat. It was a Glemot that woke her. Had to be. She wondered if Cole and Walter were still alive and okay, then she realized: whatever happened to the UN volunteers was now happening to them. An alien race capable of running off the Navy had her strapped to some hard surface—and possessed the ability to control her ship!

Parsona. Had they crashed? How hard had it been? What would be left of her?

Molly felt a soft breeze and heard the whispering of fabric. She raised her head as far as she could to scan the room. The walls and ceiling were both made of cloth, some kind of tent. Basic first aid material lay scattered on one table: gauze, bowls of leaves, and some kind of paste.

She lowered her head back to the hard surface and tried to focus on her breathing exercises, calming her mind and body. She almost had her pulse back to normal when small tremors and padded thuds signaled the return of her captor. This time, two bear heads leaned into view. One of them opened its mouth—wide teeth flashed like a row of blades. From this angle, seen across the edge, they appeared sharp and menacing.

The Glemot threatened her in a deep growl. “Minimal movement should be attained,” it said, the words rumbling like distant thunder. Molly could barely hear the first half of “movement,” it was grumbled in such a low register. Its hands went to her chest and did something to her restraints.

Molly ignored the advice and lifted her head to scream for help, then saw that the large paws were untying her restraints. They came free and she tried to sit up, but couldn’t find the strength. Another paw, as wide as her back, helped her. The Glemot that had spoken produced a sling made of tightly-woven grasses.

It all felt like a waking dream. The fear receded; she wasn’t going to be eaten. Still leaning against the large, soft paw behind her, she studied the other Glemot. The wide teeth looked square and friendly viewed straight-on. The massive face, three times the size of a human’s, divided itself with a mammoth smile.

“My reference label is Watt,” the Glemot said. “Uttering that sound will guide my attention to the speaker.”

“Molly,” she muttered, watching the other Glemot secure the sling to her shoulder. Her arm was swollen and multi-colored. Two smooth sticks were tied alongside her lower bones, secured with braided straw-like threads. There was some kind of paste on her skin—she touched it with her other hand, expecting it to come away sticky, but the stuff was stiff and dry. She looked down her body at the long white robe, the same material as the tent, and the twined grass that secured it around her.

Cole.

“My friends—” she blurted out.

“A unit of your companions is ambulating within five hundred meters of your location. Do you desire for this range of proximity to decrease?”

Molly had to repeat the sentence in her head several times. She felt like a drunk being taught quantum mechanics. She shook her head to clear it, then realized this gesture may be taken for an answer.

“Yes,” she said. “Absolutely. Increase proximity, or decrease the range. I’m sorry, can I just see them? Does that make any sense?”

“Extreme accuracy, low precision. Come.”

The Glemot behind Molly helped her down from what she saw now to be a chiseled stone table in the center of the tent. This Glemot was smaller than the other.

“Whitney,” it said, holding its hand to its furry chest. Its voice wasn’t quite as low and Molly automatically thought of Whitney as a female, but she wouldn’t be surprised if it proved to be the other way around.

“Molly,” she repeated as she accepted the help down. It was a good two-meter drop. She looked back and found her head level with Whitney’s abdomen. Molly felt like a child. The surface of the stone table was higher than her head. The restraints hanging from the rock surface took on a positively humane aspect from this perspective, meant to keep her from falling.

Whitney moved to a slit in the fabric. She held back one side, creating a wedge of bright light, and waved Molly through. She complied and stepped, blinking, into a vista that made it difficult to breathe.

The tent stood on the crest of a gradual rise. Several varieties of green grasses covered the hill in a lush carpet sweeping down to the forest below. Molly could see a thin blue ribbon of water sparkling in the sunlight. It curved around the base of the hill and fed into a calm lake. She scanned its shore, thick with trees, all of the same species: tall, straight, and thrusting proudly into the blue sky.

Dotted across the green were little spots of color from wildflowers. Molly could see small creatures bobbing on the breeze, diving in and out of the grasses. The sunlight shimmered everywhere, reflecting off the lake in a plane of sparks—it even flashed off the waxy grass.

It was quite simply the most beautiful setting she’d ever seen. The haze in her head vanished, replaced with an overwhelming but pleasurable sensation. Every one of her senses popped from the overload. Fighting her awed lack of breath, Molly sucked in a huge lungful of fresh air, a gift from an atmosphere filtered thousands of times a day. The extra oxygen sent pinpricks of light dancing in her vision, filling her weary bones with a powerful energy.

On either side of her, similar tents spread out along the rise. Dozens of Glemots bounded about on powerful legs the size of small trees. Two smaller ones wrestled, rolling down the hill in a furry ball. Pots hung over cooking fires, the smoke wafting up into the cloudless blue. Molly, her cheeks sore from smiling so wide, turned to Whitney. The Glemot nodded back, seeming to understand what she was thinking. Somehow, these incredible beings were not completely inured to the gift that surrounded them daily.

Shielding his eyes with one paw, Watt peered up at them from further down the hill. He waved, beckoning them along. Whitney set off and Molly followed eagerly, all hints of danger dissolving. She had to skip and bound and let gravity suck her along to match the pace of the two casually-strolling giants. Nearly tripping on her white robe, she hitched it above her knees with her good arm and labored to keep up. She felt like a pixie from a children’s book, frolicking in a land where everything was too big.

Near the stream below, Molly saw a clump of Glemots huddled together. It took her a moment to spot Cole, lost as he was among their larger forms.

“Cole!”

He turned and smiled. She rushed down the hill as he leapt to his feet and ran up to meet her.

They were both out of breath as he swept her up in a tight embrace.

Molly leaned into him, her cheek on his chest as tears welled up in her eyes. She fought them back and squeezed him as hard as she could with her good arm, ignoring the pain in the other as it was pressed between their bodies.

Cole kissed the top of her head. She thought she could get used to this feeling. Broken arm and all.

When they pulled out of the hug, Cole grasped Molly’s shoulders and gave her a stern glare. “Now stop trying to impress me, doofus. Every time you do something brave you just end up passing out like a sissy.”

Molly slapped one of his arms away with her free hand as choice insults piled on top of questions. She longed to know what had happened, what she’d missed, but Whitney and Watt were continuing down to the stream, and Cole pulled her after them.

“We’re interrupting a Council meeting,” he whispered. “They’ve been letting me hang out and listen in.”

“Where’s Parsona?” Molly asked.

“There’s good news and bad news, I’m afraid. We’ll talk about it later. For now I want to hear what they’re going to do about the Leef Tribe.”

“The what?” But they were almost on top of the group now, and Molly had to file the question away for later.

One of the largest Glemots continued to talk as she settled herself on the grass. Parts of his brown fur were turning black in wide ridges along his arms and legs. The language was English, but the jargon was so technical and obtuse, she could hardly follow. It sounded like politics and planning, so her brain turned off and she soaked in her surroundings instead.

Beside her, Cole leaned forward and seemed to hang on every word. Molly rested on her good elbow, her hand idly stroking the long, wide blades of grass. Insects the size of her thumb flitted about in the lush carpet, an unseen world going about its day right beneath her.

The two wrestling youths tumbled down to the stream and splashed one another. At one point a Council member grunted something in their direction and they chased each other away. Molly thought one of them had been studying her and Cole with some degree of curiosity.

She looked around for signs of Walter, wondering where he and Parsona were. Not knowing was torturous, but she could tell from Cole’s posture that he couldn’t be interrupted. He was rapt. Molly tried listening in again and could only catch a few words here and there.

Then, something flashed in her peripheral, breaking the surface of the lake. Molly turned just in time to see a giant splash, a plume of white shooting up from the rippling water. She didn’t see what it was, but it must have been big.

She left her gaze on the sparkling water. Searching the shore, she could easily imagine building a little fort up in those straight trees with a long dock reaching out into the water. She and Cole would live and play here for the rest of their lives.

Molly laid back on the soft grass and looked up into the cloudless blue sky, dreaming.

Her imaginings were interrupted by the quaking ground. The meeting was over. Molly sat up and saw worry on Cole’s face as he stared at the grass, dragging a stick through the blades as if tracing various possibilities.

The large Glemot with the black fur approached them; Molly scrambled to her feet, but it hardly made a difference. The friendly-looking creature sank to his knees in front of her, which helped.

“Fair union, Molly Fyde. My designation is Franklin.” Molly could feel the words in her sternum. This guy could give her a back massage just by talking about it.

“Greetings.” Molly felt pressure to watch her vocabulary around these guys. After hearing some of the Council-talk, she knew they were already dumbing it down for her. Unfortunately, the middle-ground with these guys was still a stretch.

“The Campton Tribe of the Glemots accepts you both. Integration complete. The mechanical advantage of your positioning will be determined, and you will facilitate the engineering of Campton Tribe as it incorporates all of Glemot via rapid expansion and population controls. We highly anticipate determining your optimal positioning as a cog, which will gain purchase for the whole.”

He looked solemnly at her wounded arm. “Unfortunate. It will decrease your worth significantly in the short run, but the Council will recalculate as operation of that limb approaches normalcy. The pleasure achieved from this communication has been extreme from the perspective of this speaker. Between mastications we will resume in three point two Earth hours. Joyous afternoon, Molly Fyde.”

Franklin rumbled off after the rest, his back almost completely covered with ebony fur that seemed shiny to the point of wetness. She looked at Cole, expecting to find him laughing at the ridiculousness of the setting and speech.

But he just looked extremely upset, his eyes locked on something beyond the horizon.

“What’s wrong with you? Isn’t this wonderful?” she asked.

Cole shook his head, his eyes focusing back on her face. “This is some crazy stuff, Molly.” He glanced at her sling. “It’s a damn good thing you didn’t break both your arms.”

“Well, no nebula! It’s even better that I didn’t break both of my legs and have my head lopped off. Thanks for putting things into a cheery perspective.”

Cole didn’t laugh.

Molly knew all of his looks just from the shape of his lips. She’d spent hundreds of hours with him in the simulator as they went through every set of emotional states humanly possible. But she’d never seen this one. The closest she could remember was when she’d looked at him during the start of the Tchung Affair and they both realized, with absolute certainty, that they were about to die.

She asked him, her voice flat and full of trepidation, “Why am I lucky I didn’t break my other arm, Cole?”

The lips broke from a frozen purse. “Because they would’ve killed you.”

Molly suppressed a laugh. “These guys? They seem perfectly gentle! My gods, look at this place! It’s too fantastic for nonsense like that.”

“Keep your voice down.” He scanned their surroundings. “Let’s walk along the stream and talk. I’ve picked up quite a bit and filled in most of the blanks between. We’ve a little over three hours until we won’t have another chance to talk like this.”

Molly looked over her shoulder at the giant mounds of fur loping effortlessly up the hill. Activity was spreading out among the tents, the smoke from the cooking of various foods rising—solid white pillars holding up a windless sky. She was having a hard time feeling afraid.

“Walter may already be dead.” Cole said.

“What?!”

“Keep walking. I’m sorry to be abrupt, but I understand your euphoria; I felt it yesterday. Gods, I felt it as soon as I found you alive in the airlock. So I’m sorry to shatter your expectations, but I need to do it fast.”

“How’d he die?”

“I said he’s probably dead. It’s been determined by the council that he’s ‘without proper function.’ Also, the ship’s being dismantled as we speak. You already wouldn’t recognize it. These guys are big, but their claws are prehensile, it’s like each of them has a complete tool rig in both paws.”

“Without proper function?”

“Listen, this beautiful land is at war. Constant war. They have formulas for how to preserve the natural state of this planet, but tribes keep breaking off and establishing new ones as they argue over which formula is right and which is wrong. I can barely understand most of it, but they have genetics reduced to mathematics. They can tell what the average age in each population should be, and they maintain it.”

“Maintain it how?”

Cole steered her away from the edge of the woods, more in the open. “How do you think?” he whispered. “If the average gets too high, they kill a few of the elders. If it jumps up too fast, they kill their own young. There’s no hesitation, either. What they consider to be the ‘natural’ order must be maintained. That pursuit is so much higher than all else—it makes lesser ethical problems vanish in their eyes.”

“I don’t understand. I think I’m missing something or you skipped a step.” She reached down to pick up a stone, then tossed it into the stream in frustration.

“Okay. Quick history lesson. And keep in mind, some of this is from them and some is from the Navy reports we read, no telling how much I’m missing or getting wrong.” He cleared his throat and glanced around before beginning. “The Glemots were a race of warring tribes for thousands and thousands of years. Evolution, of course, rewarded some of the same nasty traits in their genome that we find everywhere else. But, instead of civilizing and overcoming these traits, they created a culture around them.

“Despite intellects that—well I’ll just say that what they did to control Parsona doesn’t amaze me in the least anymore. Despite this, they never got into technology. Not because their brains weren’t capable of seizing it, but because their lives were too brutal to invest in it. There was no foundation there. It was like us prior to organized agriculture, before some of us got bored and started tinkering.”

“And then the satellite,” Molly offered.

“Exactly. The satellite. The problem was, the Glemots thought they found another natural discovery. They saw this tech as something handed down from the gods. Or maybe something bubbling up from within the planet, who knows? So the tribe that found it, the Leefs, they went from smelting ore to seven-dimensional calculus in less than a year.”

“No way.”

“Way. I’m serious, the intellect here is off the freakin’ charts. And they age more slowly than we do, so the amount they retain over an average lifetime is just crazy.”

She opened her mouth to ask a question, but Cole headed her off. “Don’t interrupt, I’m getting to the important part. So, they had incredibly advanced tech within three years. The Leefs gained an advantage—and they guarded it closely. Nearby tribes were nearly hunted to extinction with their new weapons. I imagine the tribes on the other side of Glemot still have legends about what happened over here.

“Of course, they didn’t just build weapons. They also built the first complex devices common to all tech-savvy races. Radios, micro/telescopes, the sensors that augment our senses. That’s when they spot the ‘gods’ in the sky.”

“The Navy.”

“Right, the Navy. So they try and communicate with them using means that were actually beyond our ability, or maybe we weren’t listening. Either way, the legend is that they tried everything to hail our boys in black, but no response. So guess what they did—they built their first ship and flew up to say hello! Needless to say, they were pretty disappointed. They learned about the GU and the GN, and they came back and had a Council meeting, a famous one. They still talk about it all the time.”

“What was it about?”

“What to do next. There were two main lines of thought. The leaders of the original Leef Tribe, a tribe that now lives in the forests beyond here, they wanted to expand out and exterminate what they saw as a danger to the natural order. Namely, our entire race.”

Molly’s eyes widened at this.

“Yeah, I had the same reaction. Luckily for us, one of the Glemots, another male named Campton, saw the Leef response as the ultimate disruption of the natural order. His thinking was that whatever aliens did with their creations was also part of the natural way of things.”

“What, like beehives and anthills?”

“Exactly. Which was heresy to those that hated the new technology, especially once they learned about its ‘impure source.’ These guys wanted to use some technology to destroy all technology. The Glemots following Campton wanted to use as little technology as possible to restore the balance they had before.”

“So the tribe that just ‘accepted’ me, they’re the good guys?”

“There aren’t any good guys here. Not in my view. Granted, I’m glad the Campton Tribe formed and kicked some Leef butt or the war with the Drenards would look like a cake-walk in comparison. Look at what they did with our ship, what they must have done with the UN ships. The fact the Navy was ousted from the OS and never won it back must be a mere hint of what they can do. Now imagine ground warfare with those things.”

Cole’s voice trailed off as a Glemot thundered by, rushing from the woods and back up the hill. Molly’s gaze followed the lumbering beast. She tried her hardest to imagine a brutal side to these creatures. She couldn’t. But mainly because she was still resisting the idea that they could do harm. “But this place is paradise,” she complained.

“Paradise at a cost. I was talking to one of the younger Glemots last night, a kid named Edison—”

“What’s up with the names?” she interrupted.

“Hah. I picked up on it, too, and one of the adults confirmed it. The Camptons name themselves after famous human engineers. The ones they think did more good than harm. They know all about our history, more than you and I combined. They got all kinds of data files from the Orbital Station, but getting back to the point—I was talking to Edison last night and he’s a cool kid. Well, I say kid, but the guy is smarter than any human I’ve ever met, even though he’s still considered a pup. I have no idea how old he is in Earth years, but he comes across as a complete prodigy when he talks.

“Anyway, Edison was talking about today’s Council and comparing it to one several years ago. The Camptons—the tribe you and I belong to—found out the tribes on the other side of the planet were reproducing too quickly. They were warring less and finding new resources for food. This was deemed so serious that a truce was called between the Leefs and the Camptons. They came together and devised a solution.”

“Which was?”

“A new disease. Genetically targeting a specific strain common to two of the largest tribes on the other side of the planet. Like I said, the Camptons won the civil war and they have the tech they need to keep things in balance. So they released this disease and killed the tribes.”

“All of them?” Molly looked horrified.

“Millions of them.” Cole stopped walking and looked out over the lake.

Molly felt her stomach churn. They stood in silence for awhile. Finally, Molly said, “But it’s so beautiful here.”

“Depends on where you look.”

They had wandered close to the forest again and turned to follow the stream back toward the tents. Molly wasn’t sure what to say, or even what she believed at the moment.

“We have a name for what the Glemots live by, you know.”

“Crazy?” Molly suggested, even though she grudgingly admired the results of their actions.

“No, Molly, these guys aren’t crazy, they’re just driven by an extreme form of something you and I fall for all the time.”

“What?”

“The naturalistic fallacy. It’s when our aesthetic sense of beauty in nature confuses us into thinking that if it exists there, it must be good. Or maybe ‘right’ is a better word than good.”

“I’m not following you. It’s obvious to me that if I think that lake is beautiful then it is beautiful; that’s all our emotions are.” She really didn’t want to get into a philosophical discussion. She barely passed that class and hated every subjective minute of it.

“No, deeper than that. It’s when we think that whatever state we happen to find our world in when we become philosophically aware must be the state we keep it in. Even though the world changed naturally leading up to this understanding, we think we shouldn’t allow it to progress any further.”

“I really don’t want to talk about this, Cole.”

“It’s important if we’re going to get out of here.”

“Why leave?” She threw her one good arm up. “Where could we go that’s better than this? Let’s say I clear things up with the Navy, run a shuttle or courier service for the next forty years. You know what I’d want to do with the money I saved? I’d want to come build a house right over there and live the rest of my days strolling through these forests and swimming in that lake and collecting bugs.”

Cole frowned at her; she’d never seen him look so sad. “That sounds great. Really, it does. But they wouldn’t let you build that house ’cause it’d destroy the look of the shore. They wouldn’t let you walk the same path every day because you’d trample the soil. And if you deviated from whatever they calculated the ‘norm’ was, they’d kill you with a vote. I’m sorry, and trust me, I’ve gone through the same emotions over the last day, and I hate that you have to do it with less time, but we need to finish this conversation.”

Molly shook her head. “This talk is worse and more confusing than being in prison on Palan was.”

“That’s an exaggeration.”

“Yeah, a little,” she admitted, but not smiling. “Okay, forget the philosophy stuff. Even if we assume that our survival depends on getting away from this paradise, how do we fly away from them if my ship is being dismantled and they can control it from orbit anyway?”

“Simple,” said Cole. “We start a war.”

“We do what?!”

“Hear me out: not every Glemot agrees on what balance to fight for. Hell, not every Campton agrees with one another. Just like with humans, it takes a strong leader to keep order here. Franklin is getting old, even by their standards, I think, and the Leefs have been making some progress with getting their technology going again.”

“How did they ever lose their technology in the first place?”

“Campton’s rebels. They created all kinds of anti-tech technology. EMPs that fry electronics. Little micro-bots that eat away specific metals. But their guiding principles meant every victory against the Leef technology required them to ratchet down their own. They try to control the spread of tech using the simplest tools required. As long as they stay one step ahead, they can remain there. They’ve almost progressed back to the stone age from a starting point that was beyond our own technology. That’s why you woke up in a tent with a balm on your arm instead of a high-rise hospital full of beeping things.”

“It’s hard to argue with the result,” Molly said, sweeping her arm at the vista around them.

“Now you’re the one bringing up the ‘philosophy crap’ you hate so much. Yes, this is beautiful. We have parks on Earth that look like this. But we also have Mozart and Dali and Spengle and T’chuyn and even the Drenard sculptor Tadi Rooo. We can admire the cosmos and the atom. We have a diversity of beauty that’s just as natural as this.” He also waved his hand at the scenery.” He paused. “I’m sorry to be so strident here. I honestly hope we can discuss this in detail one day, and we can both see neither extreme is tenable. Right now, though, I want to devise a plan that wins us that day.”

Molly nodded. She turned her head away from the beauty of the lake and looked up the hill. But there was no escaping the sensual pleasure of being here.

She listened as Cole got into the meat of his plan. Molly felt detached from it all but was able to point out some tactical flaws. She agreed it would work as long as the dozen or so various “ifs” they foresaw were the only ones that existed. And of course, a lot depended on the Glemots.

Maybe too much.

Molly had hoped she’d be able to chew on the tragedy of this place over dinner, but the event turned out to be too much of a distraction. Without exaggeration, the meal she had that night was one of the highlights of her life thus far.

Most of the food varieties on Glemot were the common forms of energy storage found all over the universe, the biological shortcuts nature was fond of taking. But each example was full of a rich vitality that knew no Earth equal. There were analogies to familiar foods, but no comparing the quality.

The main course, a species of large fish, had been roasting all day over a low fire. Encrusted with a thick layer of spices, it made Molly think of cinnamon, sage, and some sort of tangy pepper. The powerful combination was offset by a sweet cream slathered over top, much like Earth honey. Small shapes of cut fruit were arranged to the side and little berries dotted the plate. The berries looked hard, but they dissolved in her mouth, bursting with a fresh sweetness so unusual, it tasted like a primary color. Molly couldn’t believe her taste buds could be tickled in such an alien way.

Also on the side were large vegetables boiled creamy-soft and infused with something woody and citrus, like hickory and lime, only different. The combination, strange and intoxicating, delighted her. She followed these nibbles with bites from a large salad, each of its dozen constituent parts a unique meal on their own. A bowl of nuts passed by; the Glemots picked through these choosily, hunting for their favorites.

The Glemot distaste for furniture meant Molly and Cole were not uncomfortable around the dinner “table.” The entire tribe gathered around dozens of cloth mats, the pups getting up and rushing about to serve the adults each course in turn.

Every murmur of delight from Molly brought appreciative smiles from the Glemots, especially those who had helped prepare the meal. Then she noticed the look on Cole’s face and realized her joy just made this harder on him. She tried to contain herself. This became easier when a female across from Cole, out of nowhere and with a calm voice, let him know that Walter would be “naturalized” in the morning. She watched him fight any change in his behavior. He continued to smile and converse and chew his food thoughtfully, but she had felt it since their walk: Cole was wearing a thin veneer of compliance over a core of rage.

Thinking about Walter soured the meal for Molly as well. She picked at her food distractedly, still ended up eating too much, and retired as soon as the first Glemot from their mat rose. She and Cole carried their stone plates down to a brook to rinse them off.

“Cole?”

He looked around to see if any of the Glemots could hear them. Several were heading their way and would be within earshot in moments. “Yeah?”

“What if we went to the other side of the planet? Just got away from the war between these two tribes?”

Cole gave her a sad look, one he’d successfully concealed for most of the day. But Molly could see it vividly—even in the pale starlight.

“They’re all at war,” he said. He looked out over the lake, its calm surface reflecting the stars perfectly. It was like a hole in the planet through which the cosmos could be seen. “War is natural,” he added, with disgust.

Then he turned and walked past the approaching Glemots, back to the tent they’d assigned him to. Molly wanted to rush up to him and hold him tight and make him happy. But right now she couldn’t even make herself happy. Even in this place, she couldn’t be the perfect thing she wanted to be.

Sitting alone by the bubbling brook, she sniffed quietly while nearby Glemots debated death.

18

The chirping of morning creatures pierced Molly’s tent, rescuing her from the return of bad dreams. One of the Glemot youth sat up beside her, rubbing his eyes.

“Edison?”

The pup turned to Molly, blinking. “You have me confused for my approximation.” He yawned, stretching his arms wide and flashing a dangerous mouth. “Pardon my reflexive inhalation. My designation is Orville.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted. Do you desire assisting in relocating the temporary structure?”

“We do what?” Molly shook her head. These guys were exhausting—especially first thing in the morning.

“Relocate the temporary structure. Our daily hibernation flattens grasses, occludes the sunlight from their photoreceptors. We relocate temporary structures every Glemot rotation to preserve the natural.”

“What’s natural about a tent?” Molly asked.

Orville frowned. “That statement reflects my approximation’s thoughts.” He rose, gathered his blanket, and stormed out without another word.

Molly sighed and adjusted her garment around her. It was a lovely way to dress if only it would stay put. Every movement shifted the fabric and threatened to bare her to the world. She wondered what Cole thought of her dressed up like this. He looked like a Roman statue in his, of course, but he treated the get-up like an annoying necessity, an “undercover prop,” as he would have put it.

Outside, Molly saw the tents being shifted in a carefully orchestrated pattern. She was the last sleeper out, which seemed to create a sense of relief from some of the adult Glemots. They hurried over and started carefully extracting stakes from the ground.

Molly tried to stay out of the way, peering around for some sign of Cole, but his tent was no longer where it had been the night before.

“Molly.” It was Watt, her doctor. He approached bearing a leaf slathered with his medicinal cream. Molly shrugged the sling off her head and presented her arm. He removed the splint first, carefully scrapped the old salve off, then reassembled his handiwork. Molly flexed her wrist a little, amazed at the reduction in pain. She wondered if perhaps she had just fractured the bone, and then remembered the odd angle it had been in before she passed out.

“Thank you very much.” She patted his arm as he tied up the sling.

“It is my function. I recommend minimal exertion for two rotations.” He smiled down at her and scratched her head with an uncanny gentleness. Molly smiled back and tried to picture Watt killing children in order to restore a sense of “balance.” Even with her brain bent into odd shapes, it still couldn’t wrap around the idea. She watched him lumber off and felt overwhelmed with how complex life was. If she and her friends got off Glemot alive, something new would be carried with her. She would never think on right and wrong, good and evil, beautiful and ugly the same way ever again.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Cole’s voice leaking out of the woods behind the camp. She turned as he and the other Glemot youth emerged, the latter standing a good meter taller. Molly learned last night, as she noted who served the food, that a lot of the Glemots here were considered youths. Orville and Edison were mere babies as far as the adults were concerned. In thirty years, a short time for Glemots, Edison would be as big as the others. And then it would be time for a proper female to be selected for him, if he was designated a “procreator.”

Molly walked over to meet them. Cole nodded at her as she approached, as if to say, “all systems were go.”

“Greetings for the third occurrence, Molly.”

“Hello, Edison. You boys been busy this morning?”

“Delightfully disturbing the balance all evening,” Edison said, his voice sonorous and soothing.

Cole put a hand on her shoulder. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

Edison nodded to both Humans and bounded off to help move a tent.

Molly walked with Cole to the woods, then let him take the lead. She was worried about the dark circles under his eyes. His shoulders also sagged with fatigue. He looked a lot like he’d been acting lately. Glum.

But even beat down and exhausted, she couldn’t help but admire the shape of his body. His Portuguese ancestry had blessed him with a bronze complexion that required no sunlight for upkeep. His back was a broad ‘V’ tapering down to a thin waist. Wide shoulders, even stooped as they were, rounded down into well-defined arms. She watched them swing easily in the revealing robe as they walked along in silence. He possessed a rare combination of strength and litheness that comforted her when they were in danger—but made her worry for her sanity when they were alone together.

Cole slowed so she could catch up, prematurely ending her anatomical inventory and making her blush as if she had been caught thinking aloud.

“We’re going to see the Parsona, I just want you to be prepared.”

Molly bit her lip and nodded. “How’s Walter?” she asked.

“Edison and I broke him out just in time.” Cole smiled at her. “‘Even sssteven,’ he told me.”

Molly managed a chuckle at Cole’s impersonation. Another cultural awareness lesson was probably in order, but it comforted her to see his mood lifting.

“Our very own Campton tribe has sent out a search party to look for their missing prisoner.” Cole pointed through the woods off to their right. “The warrior village and training grounds are just through there. Edison left behind a patch of his fur, so the Leefs will be suspected for nabbing Walter.”

Molly nodded. Little could go wrong with the first parts of their plan. Many “ifs” were to follow, though.

“Have you found the EMP yet?”

“No, but Edison thinks his twin brother Orville knows where it is. Orville’s tutor for the Council is the head of the Technology Prevention Subcommittee.”

“I can’t believe there is such a thing,” Molly mused aloud.

“Are you kidding? There’re several of them on every planet. Earth included. They usually go by something else, of course. I just wish we could get Orville in on this, but I don’t think he’s quite as open to change as his brother.”

“Don’t be greedy. I’m shocked you found a Glemot who would turn on his own tribe. I feel guilty using him this way.”

“Who’s using whom? Did you know that when your America was being overrun by my European ancestors, the natives thought they were using these pale men in their schemes to wipe out neighboring tribes?”

Molly shook her head. “That’s not what I learned.”

“Trust me. This planet’s history is a detail of groups splintering apart. Hell, I’m not sure if I talked him into this plan, or if he talked me into it. The kid—gods, the guy is bigger than me, smarter than me, and older than me, and I refer to him as ‘the kid’—he’s been jockeying for something like this for a long time. I think he sees us as a sign or something.”

“Okay, I get it. Now I feel used instead of guilty.”

“Funny. Now listen, the timing on this will be intense. We’re about to meet with members of the Leef council, and we need to have our story straight.”

“I know my part,” Molly insisted. After a pause, “But let’s go over it one more time.”

They conferred as they walked. A few minutes later the couple ascended a rise, the trees thinned, and they could see Parsona below. Molly fell silent, save for a pained intake of air. Her good hand came up to her chin, resting her fingers there, trying to prevent her jaw from dropping any further.

The ship stood alone in the clearing below, its profile recognizable, but just barely. Molly and Cole could see straight through the once-mighty machine in many places. Parts, panels, equipment, gear—it was all spread out across the grass. A checkerboard of dirt scratches marked off a grid of some sort. Cole explained that every piece was set for repurposing in the Campton’s anti-tech cause or designated for complete destruction.

Behind the ship, Molly could see patches of grass charred black from the landing. The thrusters above the dark spots were in a state of mid-disassembly. She was sure the ship would never fly again. She had owned it for less than a week.

Cole put an arm across Molly’s shoulders, pulling her close and trying to console her. “Hey, keep in mind that a small group took this apart in just a day. They’ve been pulled off for the battle, but a large group of Glemots just as skilled can put her back together in no time.” Cole paused. “At least Edison seems to think so.”

“She’s dead.” It was all Molly could say.

Cole kept his arm around her, guiding her back through woods and on to their meeting spot. “She’s close to dead. You and I have been there. Look at us now.”

Molly did. She noted the light bruises on Cole’s face from his beating by the Palan guards. She glanced down at her shattered arm. She didn’t answer at first. Instead, she walked along, her head tilted into Cole’s chest as she sought a rhythm to match his—something to keep their wounds from smarting.

“Yeah,” she eventually said. “Look at us now.”

They walked in silence to their meeting spot with the Leefs. At one point they crouched down to sneak along quietly as the sounds of the Camptons drilling for war thundered nearby. Eventually, they reached the clearing where Cole said they’d handed a freed Walter over to the Leefs. They stepped into a pool of daylight and three Glemots left the concealment of the trees and greeted them.

“Your presence is recognized, humans,” the largest one said, his fur just starting to show the faintest signs of black. Molly was beginning to associate the coloring with age, or rank, but she still didn’t have a clue how old these people were.

“Detail the coordinates of the tactical fusion warhead—” blurted a smaller Glemot standing to one side. The middle figure held up his paw, cutting the words off.

Tension formed; Cole prodded it. “First, we’ll tell you where our ship is. When it’s fully repaired, you guys receive the nuke. It needs to be no later than tomorrow morning, before the battle.”

“Extreme confidence for a diminutive one,” the smaller Glemot joked. All three Leefs chuckled—it sounded like semi-flat tires rolling on pavement.

The larger Glemot spoke again. “Our accomplishments will be swift and precise while your limitations are apparent. The fusion device will be transferred prior to the local horizon’s occlusion of the nearest star by the rotation of Glemot.”

Molly and Cole looked to one another. “Before nightfall?” she suggested.

There were nods and grunts of assent from the aliens.

“Fine,” Cole said. “We’ll meet here with the nuke. Oh, and just so you know, there’s some Camptons drilling nearby—”

The large Glemot waved him off. “Previously known.” They turned to go.

“Wait,” Molly said. They stopped and turned. “How’s Walter?” she asked.

The darkest Glemot shifted uncomfortably. “The metal one is… adequately secured,” he said. With that, they thundered into the trees.

Molly and Cole were left in the clearing with their troubled thoughts. Molly felt awful for Walter but glad that he was alive. Her stomach knotted with worry. And guilt. She had betrayed the people who patched her arm, housed her, and fed her. She tried to focus on the millions of Glemots the Camptons had killed, but weighing impersonal facts—a million souls extinguished—against her own experiences produced sickening results. Shouldn’t the former outweigh the latter?

In silence they walked back to the camp, their thoughts out of character. Molly philosophized, dwelling on the nature of relative harms, while Cole focused on the practical and pressing matter: how were they going to find their “nuke” in time?

****

Something felt different as soon as they emerged on the Campton’s hill. Hundreds of Glemots milled about down by the stream, several of them arguing loudly, their voices rumbling. The entire hill shuddered from heavy feet stomping this way and that. Two Glemots rushed over to her and Cole.

“Detail recent coordinates!” one of them demanded with a growl.

Molly was unable to speak, her stomach crawling up her throat and attempting to flee.

“Uh, reporting back from the training camp,” Cole said.

The two Glemots bristled with anger, the fur along their shoulders waving in the windless air. One of them held a stick as thick as Molly’s thighs; even his casual gestures with it seemed life-threatening.

Another Glemot down the rise yelled, “Nikola! Leo!”

The duo turned and waved, then spun back to Cole and Molly. “Report to Doctor Watt,” one of them commanded before they bounded off.

Molly spotted Watt by one of the tents; he waved at them frantically. She and Cole rushed down, marveling at the level of activity on what yesterday had been such a quiet sylvan glade. Like the Navy’s satellite, Parsona had arrived and disrupted the order of things. Now they needed to do the impossible: piece her together and return to orbit. Molly felt overwhelmed by their plan as she hurried down to Watt.

The doctor checked Molly’s arm before surveying their faces. “Your acquaintance Walter, and Edison, my offspring, have simultaneously been apprehended by the Leefs.”

Molly had no problem feigning worry. Confusion looks similar enough. Why would Edison be missing? This wasn’t part of the plan.

Watt also informed them that some from the council saw the arrival of their ship into the Glemot system as a bit of a coincidence. So much had happened, and happened fast, since it was brought to the surface. There was talk of recalculating risk/reward formulas that involved Cole and Molly. So far, it was just a few Glemots, but the growling would spread.

“How do you know Edison’s missing?” Molly asked. She hoped the pup was off looking for the Campton’s EMP device, the one they were going to pass off to the Leefs as a nuke.

“Moderate fur samples matching Edison’s were discovered near Walter’s containment area,” said Watt. “Querying observers resulted in counter-claims. Several noted Edison in the vicinity of camp late morning, approximately. The antitheses is suggested by group two: the subject in question was in fact his litter mate Orville. No sample saw both simultaneously.”

Molly couldn’t believe it. The fur Edison and Cole had used to frame the Leefs was backfiring. There would still be a war, and a trap, but events were moving too quickly… emotions amplifying equations.

“Where’s Orville?” Cole asked.

“Whittling war sticks alongside the young.”

“Can we talk to him? See how he’s doing?”

This seemed to please Watt immensely. He pointed down to the woods beyond the stream.

Molly patted Watt on the arm before she hurried off. “Your boys will be okay,” she told him.

“Everything will,” Watt said, his thick jargon missing from the simple phrase.

Cole led Molly into the forest, following the sounds of young Glemot chatter. “Let me do the talking,” he told her.

“Glad to,” she replied.

As they approached, the circle of pups fell silent and turned to glare at them. Cole had a bad feeling this wasn’t going to go well. Orville shot up from the ground and strode toward them, a sharpened stick in hand.

“Follow,” he said as he rumbled past.

Cole grabbed Molly’s hand, and they followed the pup deeper into the woods, out of sight from the rest of the youth. He spun on both of them, his swiftness startling.

“Inciting hostilities? Brainwashing my litter mate? Enunciate!”

Cole held up both hands, palms out. If this came to blows, it would go badly for them. Somehow Orville had sniffed out his brother, so lying was probably not the best option. But neither was the whole truth.

“Whoa, pal. Your brother came to us. Said he had a plan to disrupt the balance or something. That he’d kill us if we didn’t go along.”

Orville’s face flashed as some part of this registered. “Disrupt the balance?” Orville repeated.

Cole seized on this. “He said he had a way of wiping out the Leefs. He wanted to use our friend, Walter, as bait. We agreed if it meant sparing his life.”

“This ruse I am previously cognizant of. My suspicions were great when he queried me on the electromagnetic pulse device.”

Cole wanted to groan out loud, but contained himself. Everything hinged on that device, and on Edison being able to deliver it.

“Where’s your brother?” Molly asked.

Orville shifted his gaze over to her. “Detained.” It was all they were going to get.

Cole squeezed her hand; he tried a different route. It didn’t look like they were going to be turned in or killed by Orville. And if they were from the same litter, perhaps their goals were different, but their basic needs were the same. “Did Edison also tell you how he was going to get onto the council?” he asked.

Orville bent his knees and lowered his face down to Cole’s level. The hair on his shoulders waved back and forth. “Talk,” he said.

Cole did. And he hoped it wouldn’t trouble Molly to see how good he was at stretching the truth…

“…and after the last Leef was killed in the trap, Edison would reveal to the adults that it had been his plan. He’d show the detailed calculations, the numbers of increased Campton procreation, how an overall balance could be restored while breaking the local one. Your brother thought the Council would honor him with a seat, that he’d be on a fast track to leading this tribe, long before his fur darkened.”

Molly tried to keep her composure as Cole wrapped up his fictionalized account of the past day. She could tell Orville was riveted—she had been as well. It fascinated her how Cole weaved truth with lie, understanding which emotions to trigger and reeling his prey right in. She wondered if his imagination for conspiracy theories tapped into this ability or if the skill was just finely-honed, thanks to his paranoia.

She chewed on this possibility while Orville seemed to be considering something else.

“Edison,” Orville finally said, shaking his head. “That deceptive brigand.” He looked down at Cole and waved his stick back and forth through the air between them. “Enormous wisdom to divulge completely, young human. My sibling attempted many untruths, a crazed speech of tactical warheads and double-crosses. Your account contains accuracy. Come. Together we confront the upstart and his plan transfers to me. Afterwards, my litter mate’s rumored demise becomes reality.”

Orville thumped the ground with his stick and slapped Cole on the shoulder. It nearly drove him off his feet. “Come,” he said cheerily, and bounded through the forest.

Molly and Cole looked at one another. The plan was falling apart, but they had no choice. They hurried off after Orville, struggling to keep up.

19

The brutal pace quickly exhausted them both, their lungs burning while Orville loped along with an effortless gait. He weaved through the trees, sensitive to accidentally creating a path, while his long youthful fur whisked up and down like miniature whips as he bounded along. Molly lost herself in the sight of them as she fought to steady her breath. Her broken arm jounced in its sling, thrumming with pain.

Orville came to a sudden stop in a section of the forest no different from the rest. He looked around himself in every direction while Molly and Cole bent over, huffing. He reaching down into the leaves and pulled up a patch of the forest floor, hinging it away neatly. A dim light floated up from the square hole; Orville waved them down first.

It was a simple ladder, but the descent felt as dangerous for Molly as the one that had broken her arm. The rungs were spaced over a meter apart, their diameter too big for her to properly grasp. With one arm strapped and useless, she was forced to employ her chin, pressing a knee against the side rail as she adjusted her grip. Cole tried to descend beside her, steadying her back with one hand and giving her encouragement as Orville shouted at them to increase the pace. It seemed to take forever to get to the metal floor below.

Metal. It was jarring to see something modern on Glemot. The ladder, the lights, the floor—they didn’t prepare her for what awaited as she turned around.

They were inside a long rectangular chamber carved out of the dirt and lined with metal panels. Along one entire wall stood a massive row of consoles with readouts that reminded Molly of SADAR units, and stations that resembled cockpit controls. A large tactical table dominated the center of the room, and a solitary male Glemot hunched over one of the stations. He turned to appraise this intrusion, pulling a wire from one of his ears.

When he saw Orville step off the ladder behind them, he nodded, replaced the wire, and turned back to his work. Molly glanced at Orville and saw fury in his eyes; she followed his gaze across the room. Edison huddled in the far corner, bound and gagged. The poor pup’s eyes were wild with fear, his fur bunched around the restraints.

“Your nefarious plan is uncovered, brother.” Orville marched toward him and twirled his sharp stick. Primal fear surged through Molly, the weight of the jungle floor pressing down from above. They were a couple of puny humans in a lair full of monsters. Could the plan work with Orville rather than Edison? Would she even want it to? She couldn’t imagine allowing Edison to be harmed just so they could get off this planet.

She turned to Cole, who practically vibrated with nervous energy. The only thing going for them was the adult’s distraction. The important activity on the screen ahead seemed to require more attention than the squabbling of cubs behind.

Orville was halfway across the room, walking by the tactical table. He spoke to the screen operator. “The plot is far simpler than we thought, Mentor, but the cunning exponentially greater than my brother’s falsehoods. A mere maneuvering for stature, nothing beyond.”

Oh, gods, thought Molly, this was Orville’s mentor, the anti-tech council member! The only way out of this room was going to be with Edison dead and their plan ruined. It would be a mad dash deep into the woods as their promises to both tribes met on tomorrow’s battlefield and were destroyed.

Orville’s mentor turned away from his screen for a moment to look back at his protégé. “End him.” He stated it like the solution to some playful riddle.

Molly took a step back, reaching for Cole to pull him toward the ladder.

But Cole was no longer there.

She watched in horror as her friend rushed off to his death.

Time slowed as Cole raced to the tactical table and threw himself up to the top. He ran by Orville, who stopped and turned, seemingly confused. Cole scooped up one of the battle pieces off the table; it looked like a painted metal figurine of a tent. He figured it would be useless against Glemot hides, but maybe it would help him unlock the only weapon in here they could use.

He leapt to the ground on the other side of the table, still moving at full speed. Ahead of him, Edison cringed back into the steel wall. He seemed unsure of which of these approaching figures meant him more harm: his brother with his large stick or the strange alien rushing him with an improvised dagger.

Orville roared from behind, obviously realizing what Cole had planned. The Glemot pup lurched after him, bringing his stick up high. Cole dove, crashing into Edison and hacking at the rope around his arms, not concerned at all about harming the pup. Edison’s arms strained against the fibers, a few vicious slashes and they parted. His freed paw struck out at Cole, knocking him roughly to one side. He slammed into one of the consoles, drawing the attention of the adult. Orville’s stick swished the air where his head had just been, barely missing Edison’s face.

The room filled with a confused silence as each combatant sized up the others. Cole noticed Molly rushing toward the brothers, her one arm still trapped in a sling and useless. Orville was readying another blow with his massive stick while the adult attempted to untangle himself from his station, yelling at both pups to stay where they were.

The adult was the biggest problem. Literally. Cole knew he’d be ripped in half by the monster, so he pushed off the console and charged into Orville, choosing a foe closer to his size. Tackling a bear would’ve been easier. Cole tried to hang on as the enraged child thrashed, clawing at his back to tear him to shreds.

Molly arrived at full speed around the clear side of the tactical table. Cole tried to shout her down as she threw herself into the air, bringing her heels into the back of Orville’s knee. The pup crashed down under Cole’s weight, the stick pinned beneath him.

Edison pressed off the wall and rushed past to meet the charging adult. They crashed into each other with a boom, the rage in the youth enough to match the elder’s size. Molly wrestled with one of Orville’s arms, trying to keep it pinned back, as Cole launched a series of blows at the cub’s skull. The strikes stung his fists, but he wasn’t sure the angered youth even felt them. He looked up to see Edison gouging at the elder’s eyes, the two locked in a fight to the death.

Orville howled beneath him and lifted his shoulder, sending Molly flying back toward the table. With a thud, Cole drove a knee into the bundle of fur. Orville just pushed his bulk from the ground with Cole still on top of him, wearing him like a cape. His massive stick whizzed through the air, narrowly missing Molly’s head.

Cole screamed and reached around for Orville’s eyes, but the pup shrugged him off his back like an afterthought. Cole felt a massive paw wrap around his knee before he was tossed into the metal wall. He collapsed in a heap and fought for his senses. Molly yelled something; he looked up to see the sharpened stick, like a battering ram, hurtling toward his abdomen. He fell flat and the deadly log exploded against the steel in a bloom of splinters.

Orville howled with rage.

Cole pushed himself up, wrapping his hands around a fragment of wood the size of a baton and sharp as a dagger. Orville looked down for what remained of his weapon and Cole obliged by shoving the shard right into the pup’s eye.

The room rumbled with the sound of pure fury. The other two Glemots stopped clawing each other to see what had happened. At the sight of his wounded protégé, the adult let out a roar of his own. He tossed Edison aside with a shiver of rage and took a step toward Cole.

Molly was already backing away from the terrifying creature when Cole turned to her. “Run!” he commanded.

She stumbled toward the ladder, the sound of thunder echoing off the steel around her. Cole caught up, steadying her as they rushed past the tactical table. Molly glanced over her shoulder to see the adult thrashing toward them, striking the wall with his fists as he went, mad with fury.

Running to the ladder filled Molly with the dread of a living nightmare. She was trying to climb a fence and feeling the bad thing at her back. She knew it would get her, but she had to scramble anyway, her arms not working.

Fear traveled up her spine; she jerked her arm out of the sling and grabbed rungs, one after the other. She kicked and fought her way up. Every time her right arm took its share of weight, Molly had to bite down on her body’s urge to pass out. Each rung brought pure torture.

The ladder was wide enough for Cole to come alongside her, just as they had descended. They were over two meters up, scrambling as fast as they could, when the adult reached them. He yanked Cole down first, his arm banging on a rung at her feet. The Glemot raised both paws to pulverize him into the ground. Molly didn’t hesitate. She launched off the ladder and wrapped both arms around the creature’s neck. The adult peeled her off and cast her aside, tossing her violently into the wall. A wall of fur flashed before her, Molly tensed for death, but it was Edison joining the action, a large fragment of splintered wood in hand.

Molly flinched as he crashed into the larger alien, driving the shard deep into the Glemot’s side. The adult’s howls deepened and strengthened. Edison stabbed again. And again. The injured beast swung his arms and stumbled back against a console, looking at the blood on his fur, pawing at it confusedly.

The fear on the adult’s face knotted Molly’s stomach. They were not battling a trained warrior—this was a politician. Pity stirred, then recoiled from her rising wrath. This was the sort of beast that killed with calculations, concocting war and disease and wiping out millions from the safety of a council meeting. She wanted to launch herself at the wounded thing and peel its flesh.

But Edison beat her to it…

The aftermath made her want to vomit. Molly had been trained to kill, but from a distance. A puff of fire and a cloud of silent debris was as close to death as she was ever meant to be. The hand-to-hand courses at the Academy were a formality, designed to instill confidence and build muscle.

They’d never prepared her for this.

The council member was dead—his blood everywhere. The tangy scent of it filled the air; Molly could taste it like the metal of a dry spoon. At the other end of the room, Edison and Cole subdued the injured Orville, tying him up in Edison’s old restraints.

Molly tore herself from the gruesome sight of the dead Glemot and made her way toward the others, drawn by Orville’s howling. At the tactical table she paused, reaching up for a metal figure, the one resembling a pointed tree. It looked to be the sharpest.

She gripped the painted metal in her left hand, her right arm out of its sling and limp with pain. She remained unaware of it and paid no heed to the disarray of her robe as it barely clung to her shoulders. She approached Orville and lowered herself to her heels, clutching the tree with white knuckles.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. She reached down and raked the metal point across the fabric of her robe, cutting off a wide strip from the hem. The hunk of wood had already been removed from his eye and blood matted down the fur on half his face, dripping with the universal red of life in contact with oxygen. Molly folded the fabric up into a pad, making sure a clean portion was left on the outside. She pressed it to Orville’s eye and looked to Cole for help, hoping he’d understand why she needed to do this.

Cole nodded and tore a long strip from his own robe. “For you,” he told her. “Not for him.”

Orville’s face displayed no gratitude, but his angry panting subsided. The youth seemed resigned to his fate, whatever it would be.

Edison.

Molly turned to see how he was taking all of this. After flaying the elder and rushing to secure his brother, the pup had collapsed into one of the station chairs. His eyes were focused on a blank spot on the opposite wall. He could have been catatonic or calmly planning for world domination—it was impossible to tell.

Orville began testing his restraints for a weakness while Cole stood over him warily. Molly rose and walked over to Edison, placing a hand on his shoulder, the fur sticky with sweat and much else. There was a lot of blood on him.

On all of them.

“The plan is still viable,” he said calmly. He broke his gaze away from the steel plating and looked into Molly’s eyes. “The great imbalance remains a possibility.”

Molly couldn’t think about it clearly. There was too much horror down here. She needed to get out and breathe some fresh air, to think about what had just happened and what it meant for their immediate future.

“I have to get out of here,” she said.

Neither Cole nor Edison tried to stop her. They just looked at each other: breathing hard, sweating, unknowingly forging the bond that only battle welds. They sat like this as Molly made the slow and painful climb.

Up and out.

Cole spoke first. “What do we do with your brother?”

“He remains incarcerated here. We secure the hatch mechanism from without.”

“Where’s the EMP?”

Edison shrugged and looked side to side. “Here, somewhere.” It seemed like a guess.

They began pulling panels off the cabinets and below the consoles; they rapped the walls. Orville seethed with anger but they didn’t waste time questioning him, Edison assured Cole that they could only expect delaying lies.

Edison shoved the tactics table to slide it out of the way and get to the consoles on the other side of it. The top hinged up instead.

“Located,” he said.

Cole had to hoist himself up and rest his stomach on the lip of the open chest to look inside. There were two large EMPs nestled in individually padded compartments. Each looked extremely impressive, complex enough to pass for a much more dangerous device when presented to the Leefs.

“Are you sure they won’t know the difference between an EMP and a nuclear bomb?” Cole asked Edison.

The pup smiled at this. “Trust me completely, Cole. Ascertaining the difference will be impossible for them.”

Cole smiled back. There was still a chance this could work.

In the corner of the room, Orville groaned to himself. He thought back to the plan his brother had spilled and realized the horrific truth of it all. He wanted to scream but he knew it would serve no purpose. He was better off down there, anyway.

Of that, he was sure.

20

Cole crawled out of the bunker and found Molly collapsed  against a tree. She looked horrible, but at least her arm was back in the sling and her robe re-fastened. He knelt beside her and checked her splints—saw she’d already secured them. Her chin was down, her hair matted to her forehead. Cole placed his fingers below her jaw and lifted her gaze to his.

“You okay?”

She didn’t say anything. She just pulled him down to her by his neck and pressed her cheek to his. Cole slipped an arm around her back and helped her stand up. It was getting late and they needed to keep pressing forward.

Edison walked up with the device cradled in front of him, leaning back with the weight of the thing.

Cole had sudden doubts about the device’s reach. EMPs were great at knocking out electronics over a wide distance, but what kind of range would they need in order to fly out of here? Edison had said there were several hidden bunkers like this, each capable of locating Parsona and taking control of it, but he wasn’t privy to all of their locations. And all it would take was not reaching one of them, and their escape would be short-lived. The other problem was making sure they were beyond the EMPs range before it went off. Otherwise, Parsona’s electronics would be hit, she’d go lifeless, and they’d all come crashing back down to the planet.

Timing would be everything.

The trio set off through the woods on a long, circuitous hike that would bypass the activity around the Campton hill. It would be an excruciating hike for Edison. Cole felt horrible, but he was useless for helping with the load. He had tried to assist in removing it from the case, but he was unable to budge the thing. It certainly was an impressive device, able to pass for a nuke even to his Naval eye.

He thought about the trap the Leefs would set with it, their fury when the weapon proved to be nothing more than an electro-magnetic pulse, scouring the hidden bunkers as Parsona broke through the atmosphere.

Cole’s eyes drifted from the device to Edison’s tense frame. He couldn’t work out what the Glemot youth was getting out of this. Sure, if the Leef trap ended up a Campton rout, he could take credit for the plan and assure his fame and fortune. But was that really enough to explain the brutality they’d witnessed below the forest floor? What about Orville? Why keep him alive?

Could Glemots really be this calculating over what they thought was right or wrong? Maybe they had some evolutionary advantage that prevented emotion from usurping their decision-making. Cole considered this possibility and wondered about his own habit of using people to achieve his own goals. Did it excuse him that he felt bad about it later? His brief time on Glemot had been punctuated by little lies to every side. What made him any different? He glanced at Molly and cringed from other lies he’s told, despite his powerful reasons for telling them.

The guilt served to distract him from his plan’s worst-case scenario: disturbing the balance on Glemot. If they set this force loose on the galaxy—this trinity of wrath, genius, and power—it could mean the end of everything else. Perhaps in the universe.

No, that was not something Cole could afford to dwell on. Thoughts like that made action impossible.

By the time they arrived at the meeting spot, Edison was visibly worn out. They hid the EMP nearby and Molly paced nervously, looking back to where the sun had disappeared over the horizon. She fretted over whether or not they’d been too late.

Out of the darkness, a dozen forms emerged. The Leef warriors. They surrounded them noiselessly and pressed in. One warrior spoke quietly to Edison, noting the matted blood in the pup’s fur. Several other warriors approached the youth and patted him, speaking softly. Molly could make no sense of this other than some sort of alien cultural tradition.

The plan had been to get Molly and Cole to their ship to oversee the repairs. Only then would the “nuke” be handed over. But time had grown short; exhaustion within both parties moved them along the shorter path of faith and trust. They agreed to exchange the device right there and rush the repairs.

Edison, Molly, and Cole huddled for a brief moment to touch and speak, sharing the electricity that courses through those who have been willing to die for one another.

Molly wished Edison the best of luck as Cole pulled her away, allowing their guide to lead them toward their ship. By the time her thoughts had returned to the task at hand, she realized they were going the wrong way. She tugged on Cole’s arm and gave him a questioning look.

“They probably moved it,” he said, shrugging.

A pan-galactic starship? Through a forest? With no mechanical advantage? Molly assumed the ship would be repaired in place, the Camptons too busy war-planning to guard it adequately. If her ship was safer, she couldn’t complain, but something in the demeanor of their new allies told her that all was not honest with them. She wished Walter was here with his olfactory lie-detector.

Her growing mistrust melted when she heard the rattle and clang of construction filtering through the trees. A shifting light could be seen ahead, dancing like a hundred fairies. It sounded and looked like a party of sprites celebrating by banging pots and pans.

They followed their guide through a line of trees and popped into a massive clearing. Molly gasped aloud. Hundreds of Glemots crawled over the frame of her ship, many of them wearing straps on their wrists that glowed with enough light to work by. They worked furiously and efficiently. Lines of smaller Glemots passed parts along, communicating softly.

Ahead of them stood one large adult who surveyed the progress, his paws on his hips. Their escort approached this figure and tapped him on the shoulder. The adult whirled to take in Molly and Cole. She thought she recognized his posture, but couldn’t make out his face, silhouetted as it was by the floating lights beyond.

Their escort returned. “Follow,” he said. The other Glemot spun to face the work before him.

Molly led Cole down to the ship, hope rising in her chest. Fifty meters away from Parsona, they were spotted and Walter came bolting out of the cargo bay, his face almost nothing but teeth. He rushed straight for Molly and practically tackled her with a hug.

“Molly,” he said, his silver face pressing against her shoulder.

She could feel the coolness of his skin warming with joy. She hugged him with one arm and fought to keep the other from being broken again.

After a moment she had to push away, confident Walter would have remained like this forever. “It’s good to see my Cargo Officer is still on duty.”

“Molly, thesse animalss are putting everything in the wrong placsse.” He swept his hands around the scene and seemed absolutely anguished at the ruining of his organizational system.

She squeezed his shoulder firmly, as a good Captain might a real crew member, and said with seriousness, “We’ll have plenty of time to fix it when we get out of here, okay?”

Walter sniffed and nodded. Molly watched Cole rush over to offer some advice and realized she could be useful here as well. “Get back to work, Officer.”

Walter grinned. If he knew how to salute properly, she felt certain he would have done it right then. He spun back into the cargo bay, shouting orders to Glemots several times his size.

It was going to be a long night, Molly realized.

21

Molly stood in the cockpit doorway and watched as one of the smallest Leefs installed the last panel. The first rays of morning sunlight sliced through the tall trees and sparkled against the carboglass. All night she’d been mesmerized by the way the Glemots worked individually and in groups, and she finally had a chance to see what their prehensile claws could do, twisting into various shapes for driving screws or shaping metal. They were not above digging into Parsona’s well-stocked tool chests, but rarely needed to.

The Glemot took a step back from his work and indicator lights lit up the dash. Molly threw her arms around the pup and squeezed him. She leaned over the dash and pulled up the nav computer and the SADAR—it felt like a miracle had been performed. She turned and looked up at this young member of the Leef tribe; he beamed with pride. Molly smiled back, but the closer they got to leaving, and the more she’d worked with these people, the worse she felt about betraying them. She patted him on the shoulder and hurried out to find Cole.

In the cargo bay, Walter was conducting an orchestra of organizational activity. Most of the repair crew had already departed to join the warriors, leaving just the children to help clean up. Walter had pulled them off those duties and was using them to sort and arrange Parsona’s gear. Most were smaller than Edison, but this still meant a crowded cargo bay and a lot of noisy stomping. Molly weaved through the activity, shaking her head.

Outside, Cole was conferring with the few remaining adults. Molly walked up behind him and placed her hand on his shoulder. “We have basic systems running right now,” she told him. “The ship is going through its diagnostics and I’m cycling the hyperdrive.”

Cole nodded, thanked the Glemots, and pulled Molly back toward the ship. “Our timetable still looks pretty good, but we need to think about getting out of here soon. These guys are very anxious to use the device,” he stressed the word and Molly heard both meanings, “and the ship’s systems are not going to be happy if they get caught in the blast.”

“How much time do you think we have?” Molly sorely missed the steady days on Earth where donning a watch made some sort of sense. Here, on various star systems and in the void of space, when you can circle a planet in a few minutes, you were left just counting arbitrary ticks between two events.

“Probably not even an hour. I say we do a basic flight-check and see if the thrusters fire up. Worst-case, we fly to another clearing halfway around this green rock and do more repairs there.”

“Sounds great to me.” Molly nodded to the Glemots and walked back up the cargo ramp. Walter stood just inside the bay, ordering the placement of more gear. “I’m gonna need you to get your crew out of here, buddy. We’re taking off as soon as the engines are warm.”

“Yess, Captain!”

“And Walter? Make sure we don’t have any stowaways. Check every compartment big enough for a toddler.”

“Yess, Captain!”

He hurried off and Molly smiled as Cole strode in to join her. It was good to have the group together again. Strange how they’d already created such a bond that a day apart felt like a week. Molly turned to close the cargo ramp and paused at the sight beyond. If all went well, it would be the last time she ever set foot on this planet. She pulled in a deep breath of the fresh air—rich with oxygen—and held it in. She admired the way the sunlight filtered through layers of leaves, turning the very air green. The grass that wasn’t trampled from the night’s work popped with leaping and flying things. Massive trees stood erect all around the ship like duty-bound sentinels.

It felt wrong to flee this place, to want to leave it. Molly hoped beyond all hope that they’d have a chance to return. She longed for an opportunity to see this place cloaked in peace, rather than war. She sighed and keyed the cargo hatch, watching the cold steel rise up and choke away the view. As beautiful as Glemot was, Molly was happy to be back in her temporary home of metal and electricity.

She made her way to the cockpit and settled into the captain’s chair, her flightsuit itchy and uncomfortable after getting used to the soft robe. She pulled up the chase camera to make sure no Glemots were near the rear of the ship. Every device she touched clicked right into operation, filling her with wonder. The Glemots had done an incredible job putting everything back together; the thrusters fired without a hitch. If anything, they sounded healthier than before. They whined up to their working speeds without the accustomed stutter around 1,500 RPMs. Strong and vibrant sounds hummed up from the back of Parsona.

“Better than new is right,” she muttered.

As tired as she was from being up all night, Molly forced herself to do an engine room check before they pulled away. As she crossed the cargo bay, she saw a few Glemots through the portholes lingering by the edge of the forest, as if to watch their handiwork take flight. Molly gave the engine room a visual inspection and opened the door to the lazarette. The thrusters purred with precision, the fluid and temperature gauges reading normal.

She headed back to the cockpit, pausing to ensure Walter was buckled in tight. The boy seemed immensely appreciative of her attention.

“Looks good back there,” she told Cole as she settled into her seat.

He nodded, checking the angle of the thrusters to make sure they were ready for lift and gave her a gloved thumbs up. Molly pointed to her sling. “You have the honors,” she reminded him.

“Oh—of course,” he stammered.

Molly watched him grip the flight controls with his left hand and felt a mixture of nervousness and humor. “You wanna switch seats with me?” she asked.

He gave her a hurt look. “I’m fine. It’s just been a while… and this baby was a bucket of bolts, literally, like a day ago.”

Molly raised her eyebrows.

“Okay, I’m nervous,” Cole admitted. “Does that make you happy?”

Molly laughed. “Hell no, man, it just makes me nervous, too.” As much as her broken arm annoyed her, watching hours and hours of simulator banter play back in reverse nearly made it all worthwhile. She settled back in her seat while Cole gripped the throttle.

“Liftoff,” he whispered, giving the ship thrust.

Unsteadily at first, then balancing with the increase in height and speed, the GN-290 Starship Parsona suspended itself in the heavens once more. Walter whooped from the cargo bay. Molly checked the chase camera and watched the trees recede into forest and then into a carpet of green. After a series of wild escapes, such a banal exit seemed foreign and strange to her. She braced for the ship to be taken over, wondering how long it would be before the EMP cleared the ground of electronics. They’d be out of the atmosphere before long, but she knew from experience that the range of those bunkers extended out to the largest moon.

Every second that nothing bad happened got them closer to the Orbital Station. Molly felt as if their luck was finally changing for the better.

The thing hiding in Parsona’s escape pod #2 would have agreed with her completely.

22

Mekhar huddled with a few other Leefs in the small clearing, disbelieving his good fortune. Many years of precise calculations led up to this moment. That he had been picked with the flip of a stick symbolized much: The Great Ambush embodied Glemot planning, yet it would be topped off with a flourish of randomization.

He could see the fear and envy in the eyes of his tribemates. Their fur shivered anxiously, along with his own. One of his paws rested on the impressive device in the center of the group. He glanced expectantly from it to his great leader, waiting for the signal.

The sounds of heavy marching filtered through the trees, likely from the Campton forward guard. The legions of great Campton warriors would follow, armed with their sharpened sticks and more sinister devices. Mekhar thought of the battles he’d been lucky to survive. He looked down at his scars, like white worms trampling his fur, and recalled how badly things had gone in the past.

This time, though, things would be different.

He leaned forward to shield the shiny device with his wide back. One glint through the woods would give them away. He glanced up at the great leader, but the old Glemot still looked to the sky, waiting on just the right moment. Mekhar could now make out the footsteps of individual Camptons and grew nervous. They could have sprung this trap from anywhere. Why here? he wondered.

The ground vibrated as the main column of Camptons drew near. Mekhar imagined it was the old planet shivering in anticipation. He took it as a mystical sign to begin his assignment, but fought the urge. The great leader would tell him when. His paw moved closer to the first of two buttons.

At first, the roar of thrusters burning in the atmosphere sounded like another column of warriors. When the marching stopped, however, the sound of last night’s hard work became clear. With a great roar, the machine he’d helped reconstruct lifted into space. Mekhar wished he could see the look on those Campton faces as they realized they’d become mere variables in a Leef calculation. He rested his finger on the first red button; the great leader turned to him and held a paw up. Mekhar felt the first chill of hesitation as the enormity of this moment vibrated through him. He met the gaze of this great Leef, who had chosen to live as a Campton, and tried to borrow some of his strength.

The paw closed, leaving a single digit out. Mekhar looked down at his own hand. The claw on his first finger twitched; he forced it into a dull shape. The button went down with a loud click and the device whined up like a turbine, humming with great power. Mekhar thought about what this mechanism was alleged to do and had a moment of doubt. Deep inside, down where calculation gave way to intuition, something told him that the device would not go off as planned. Surely this moment was too big for the likes of him. He looked up, certain he should voice his concerns, when a second digit flicked out of his leader’s paw.

All eyes were on him, and he hesitated. His first bout of weakness had come at the worst time. He scanned the faces around him and felt their surety, found power in their conviction. He moved his finger to the second button and closed his eyes, summoning the courage to do something great. Something terrible.

He pressed down. The button clicked, but no ear would ever hear it. Rushing ahead of that sound was a wave of heat and light, consuming all.

The Camptons, retreating back to their camp in worry, confused by the sight of Parsona rising, never saw it coming.

A dozen alarm lights went from green to red, bypassing amber entirely. Molly’s first thought was another hijack. She turned to Cole, who seemed to understand that pounding the dash was not going to fix this. Then she noticed one of the blips was a munitions warning. There was nothing out the windshield ahead of them.

The chase cam, still selected on the vid screen, held the answer.

“Cole. Oh my gods!” She pointed at the screen. Cole tore himself away from the confusing indicators and leaned over to look.

“What in the galaxy—?”

A bloom of white expanding out from the forest. A circle of smoke ringed a cap of puffy cotton pushing its way up into the cloudless atmosphere. It grew and grew to an incredible size. Part of Molly’s brain knew what she was seeing, but it was unable to communicate with the rest of her.

“That’s not an EMP,” Cole said.

Molly could sense her chest sinking in. It felt hollow. Her vision swam and she reached for her wrist with her left hand, trying to cover and protect the broken parts of herself.

“What have we done, Cole? What have we done?”

The explosion explained the warning lights, but nothing could explain the explosion. How had the Camptons turned an EMP device into a fusion bomb? One had nothing to do with the other. If you could do that, you may as well build your own from scratch.

“It was always a nuke,” Molly said out loud. She could not piece together what had happened over the last day, but she knew this: it was always a nuke.

Below, the ring of smoke was replaced by a hoop of fire. Eerily concentric, it spread out at a furious rate. Beyond the billows of peaceful cotton, orange tendrils of fire and plasma danced and grew. Paradise was ablaze.

“Uhh, I think we have another problem,” Cole said.

How could this get worse? Molly thought. She could feel herself sinking into a depression, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from the carnage below.

“I don’t think I’m in control of the ship,” Cole said.

That got her attention. She reached across her body with her left hand and confirmed it for herself; the thrusters were no longer responding. And suddenly, she didn’t care. She cinched her harness down and made sure her flight suit was plugged in. “Don’t fight it, Cole.” Her wet eyes went back to the vid screen, watching the orange and red circle expand faster than the planet could shrink in their wake.

“We’re vectoring toward the Orbital Station. Six Gs and steady. You sure we shouldn’t be fighting this?”

Molly looked at him, her cheek pressed back into her helmet, her helmet resting on the headrest. She didn’t have a response—she just wanted to look at him—at something that made sense. She could feel her entire body relaxing its grip on the world, sinking back into her suit in the steady single gravity it fought to maintain.

An hour later, Cole was still wrestling to resume control of the ship. He’d given up on communicating with Molly, who seemed nearly catatonic. All he felt was pure vehemence. She might want to lay there and allow some beast to shred her, but he’d die first, just to delay it.

Parsona lined up to dock with the Orbital Station. Cole unbuckled his harness and fumed in his seat, building up his rage for whatever came next.

A metallic thud rang through the hull as their tiny craft mated with the vast station. Cole sprang out of his chair, closed the lower half of his helmet, and rushed toward the airlock, ready to die or kill.

But something was already inside the ship, squeezing itself out of the escape hatch in the floor beyond the airlock. Cole skidded on the metal decking and fell down in fright and confusion. Behind him, Walter hissed in alarm.

The large beast rose to its full height, its head nearly brushing the ceiling. It lumbered in Cole’s direction.

“Minimal alarm, Cole.” Edison had his hands up, his claws as blunt as possible. “Minimal alarm,” he repeated.

Pushing with his feet, Cole scampered back and yelled for Molly. His world felt upside down. Edison should not be on the ship with them. And yet, there he stood. Right beside the airlock. He watched his friend thumb the inner hatch open.

“Follow,” he told Cole before stepping through. The outer door made a sound as it rushed open—the air pressure inside Parsona remained constant. He stumbled back to the cockpit, working his helmet loose.

“Molly, you aren’t going to believe this—”

She pointed to the vid screen, the cargo cam active. “I saw,” she told him.

Cole reached over to see if control of the ship had returned. It hadn’t. “Stay here,” he said. “I’m going to find out what’s going on. If you get control of the ship back—get the hell out of here and keep the chase cam off. I mean it.”

She thumbed the latches on her helmet and popped it off. “I’m coming with you.”

“No, you’re not,” he said firmly. He startled as Walter squeezed in beside him.

“I’m sssorry, Molly. I forgot about the esscape podss. Ssso ssorry, Molly. Ssso ssorry.” Walter’s head was against the small cockpit hallway, metal on metal. He looked absolutely dejected.

“It’s fine,” Molly said quietly. “It’s a very minor thing. Don’t worry about it.” The words leaked out of her, but to Cole it sounded like someone else.

“I’m coming with you,” she told him again.

“Me, too,” added Walter.

Cole moved closer to her, reaching a hand to her shoulder. “Molly, you’re exhausted and confused. I want you to stay here and get to safety. If you can—”

“I DON’T WANT SAFETY!” she screamed from the captain’s chair. Both of her hands clenched up into fists, her broken wrist popping out of her sling. Her feet lifted from the cockpit floor and her knees pulled into a fetal position. Molly’s head bent forward, completing the impulse.

“I WANT ANSWERS!” she yelled into her lap. Her left hand slammed into the arm of the chair, legs springing out in anger and protest. She shot up, nearly ripping her suit cord out of its socket.

Cole had never seen her like this. He and Walter flattened against the wall as she stormed by. After the initial shock drained away; he chased after her, yelling, “Molly! Wait!”

She ducked through the airlock and into the Orbital Station. The dock led directly into a long hallway. Cole and Walter caught up with her as she started down it. None of them spoke, the sight at the end of the passage drowned out even their thoughts. Edison stood by a massive expanse of glass, an observation window. It faced his old world beyond, which glowed in the wrath of fire. Beside him stood another Glemot, tall and as black as the space that framed him.

Neither alien turned as Molly and her crew approach. They stood, transfixed by the sight of utter destruction below. The ring of burning trees was halfway to the horizon already and night had fallen over a portion of the devastated land. Before long, the fire would be wider than a Glemot day.

There was no rain to stop it. No oceans or cleared fields for buffer. The lakes were skirted as easily as a child hopping a puddle. The most beautiful thing Molly had ever beheld slowly turned to fire and ash. And she was the cause of it.

Her rage melted at the sight of the horror. She could feel the urge to sleep overcoming her again. Her stomach, her entire body, felt hollow. She was overwhelmed by a lack of appetite—for food, air, even life.

“Why?” The pathetic question trailed out of her in a feeble voice. Directed at no one in particular, she wasn’t sure if it ranged beyond her own ears.

Edison turned away from the view and met Molly’s wet eyes with his own. “Inevitable,” he said quietly.

She looked beyond the pup to the large black Glemot, who had turned to face them. Water streaked down the fur on his cheeks and his dark lips were pressed tight, his small ears folded flat to his head. He addressed them all in perfect and jargon-free English. “Go get some rest. I will answer your ‘why’ soon enough.”

Cole had to physically drag Molly away from the depressing vista. Rooms were offered on the Station, but Cole ignored the black beast, his anger defused by the obvious sadness resonating between the Glemots. Nothing made sense, but they weren’t going to kill them. Yet. Rest and then some answers sounded good. In that order.

Back in Molly’s quarters, he helped his friend out of her flightsuit, but left her jumper on. He held the sheets back as she curled into the bed, a thing with no will. To Cole, the sight of her suffering was even sadder than the horror below, the blackness growing in her more blinding than the firestorm on Glemot. It was the destruction of something even more beautiful in his eyes. He wiped moisture off his cheeks and turned to his own quarters.

Walter passed by, heading out the cargo door with his computer in hand and a bounce in his step. His joyful energy twisted Cole’s last nerve into a knot.

“Officser Walter out to sscout,” he announced to nobody and everyone.

Cole moved to throttle the kid, unadulterated wrath coursing through every fiber in his body. He wanted to harm the boy, to hurt something. He moved behind Walter, but stopped himself just in time. He leaned against the bulkhead and watched the kid bound through the airlock.

Walter had no clue about the nightmare below. The amount of destruction unfolding, the number of creatures dying, he probably didn’t understand the danger his own life had been in, or what Molly and Cole had gone through to get them all off the planet. To Walter, his time on Glemot had been just another dandy adventure, and now he was off to loot a Naval complex.

Cole’s anger faded into irritation, and then envy. He could imagine how nice it would be to not understand. To see one’s microcosm as the macrocosm. To focus a meter beyond one’s own nose. Who was Walter harming by remaining ignorant? Cole wondered. Who was Molly harming by regressing? Curling up in a ball and having something else keep you warm—it was an ugly, yet seductive, coping strategy. Cole went to his room and stripped down to his bare skin before sliding between sheets that smelled of forest floor, of moss and bark.

He shut his eyes and dreamed of not knowing or caring. The hideous and alluring thoughts danced in front of him, beckoning and repelling at once.