Molly Fyde and the Land of Light

1

I NEED YOU TO HELP ME RESCUE YOUR FATHER_

The words stood out in green phosphor on the nav screen. They would burn there if left too long, becoming seared as they were in Molly’s retinas. Still, she couldn’t tear her eyes from them. She looked across the simple sentence, left to right and back again, waiting for it to morph into something she could grasp.

Her parents were dead. Her mother passed away during childbirth; her father had left her on Earth six years later and disappeared. And yet this thing—this computer—claimed to be her mother. And it insinuated her father might still be alive.

Sitting in Parsona’s cockpit—the very ship her dad had named after her mom—Molly felt as if someone had keyed open the airlock and sucked every cubic meter of atmosphere right out.

She scanned the sentence once more, waiting for it to change, to grow handles. In her peripheral, she could see Cole, her boyfriend and navigator, glancing from her to the screen. He started to say something, then stopped. He leaned forward and directed a single word toward the dash:

“Hello?”

He said it cautiously, as if it might set off a bomb. It pulled Molly’s attention away from the incredible sentence.

“Hello?” he asked again.

“You have to type something.” She gestured toward his keyboard, as if the proper method for communicating with the deceased through one’s nav computer should be obvious to him by now.

“How do we know it can’t hear us?”

“Because ships don’t have ears—” Molly stopped. She looked at the radio mic on the dash, then glanced over at the intercom system. She turned to Cole; they studied one another, each of their faces reflecting their own confusion right back.

A new message crawled across their nav screens:

HELLO? MOLLIE?_

“What do I say?”

Cole reached toward his own keyboard, stopped, then shrugged. He raised his hands up to his shoulders in quiet defeat.

Molly exhaled. Loudly. She needed more help than that. And she needed more time. There were so many questions—it was impossible to know where to begin. Pulling the keyboard closer, she typed:

I’M HERE. CAN YOU GIVE ME ONE SECOND? THIS IS A LOT TO TAKE IN_

I UNDERSTAND. BUT PLEASE KEEP IN MIND THAT MY PROCESSING SPEED IS A BIT SWIFTER THAN YOURS. IT FEELS LIKE HOURS ARE PASSING BETWEEN SENTENCES. I WILL COUNT TO A QUADRILLION. YOU TAKE YOUR TIME_

Molly didn’t even know how to incorporate this dollop of new information. She turned to Cole for better advice than a shrug, only to find him rising out of his chair.

“Where are you going?” she asked, a note of panic in her voice.

“I have a hunch this is just Walter messing with us. I’m gonna go make sure.” He bent down and kissed Molly on the top of her head, smoothing her hair with his hand. “If you see the airlock light flash on and off, that means the problem’s been taken care of.”

She started to complain, then found herself alone with the computer claiming to be her long-lost mother.

What to ask? Where to start? Should she voice her doubts? The computer knew the original spelling of her name. Was that enough to believe it might be her mother? Why else would “she” be hidden in her father’s ship? What about the clues from her childhood that had led to its discovery?

Once again, the atmosphere in the ship felt thin, the gravity panels weakened. She bent her fingers over the keys and managed the two most pressing questions, the ones still visible through her confused haze: WHERE ARE YOU? WHERE’S DAD?_

The words flitted across the screen as she typed them, then bounced up as new text flowed across from the left:

I’M IN THE SHIP. THE NAV COMPUTER, TO BE PRECISE. MY PERSONALITY AND MEMORIES WERE STORED HERE LONG AGO. YOUR FATHER_ The cursor blinked twice. I’M SORRY SWEETHEART, I CAN’T TELL YOU WHERE HE IS. YOU MIGHT DO SOMETHING RASH TO GET THERE QUICKLY, AND THERE’S MUCH TO BE DONE BEFORE WE GO_

Molly closed her eyes; she could feel her questions multiply faster than they could be answered. What was there to do? Go where? What would be rash about rushing off to save Dad? She added these to her growing list, took a deep breath, then turned and looked over her shoulder down the length of the ship. She could see Cole beyond the cargo bay, standing at Walter’s door. He was right to be wary, and she knew she should be cautious as well.

But she couldn’t.

Too many childhood dreams—impossible fantasies—beckoned at her fingertips. Molly turned and rested her hands on the keys. She cursed herself for being naïve, for setting herself up for another crushing disappointment. She imagined, if any narcotic could be as exhilarating and soul-splintering as hope, that drug addicts felt the same way. Knowing better, she typed:

MOM, WHAT DO I NEED TO DO? I’LL HELP YOU ANY WAY I CAN_

I KNEW YOU WOULD. FIRST, WE NEED TO GET TO DAKURA. I HAVE MEMORIES THERE THAT NEED TO BE_ TAKEN CARE OF. THEN WE MUST TRAVEL TO LOK, BACK TO WHERE THIS ALL BEGAN. FROM THERE, WE CAN RESCUE YOUR FATHER_

The mention of Lok reminded Molly of something her godfather Lucin had said. She wasn’t sure how to break the news of his betrayal and subsequent death to her mom–if indeed, this was her mom–but Molly needed to know what he had meant. Before he died, he had said something about Lok, about how her parents’ work there might end the Drenard War.

WHAT HAPPENED ON LOK? She typed. LUCIN SAID MY BIRTH CAUSED PROBLEMS_

There was no answer at first. It felt like hours went by for Molly; there was no telling what it felt like for her mother.

Eventually, the text moved, haltingly, from left to right:

BAD THINGS HAPPENED ON LOK_ BUT IT WASN’T YOU, SWEETHEART. YOU WERE THE ONLY GOOD THING THAT EVER CAME OFF THAT DAMNED PLANET_

Molly read the sentence twice. Then once more. Certain parts made her feel better, soothing away worries she’d been harboring since that fateful conversation with Lucin. Other parts caused tinges of doubt to creep up inside. She’d never heard her father curse, even lightly. And though she knew almost nothing of her mom, the language felt out of character.

Which meant she was being duped. Or something truly awful had happened on Lok, something that had to do with her parents.

Either way, she could feel the buzz of her favorite drug wearing off.

Hope began dissolving into dread.

As much as Cole wanted to feel excited for Molly, as happy as he would be if her parents were alive, his logical mind had settled on a simpler answer: Walter, their devious junior-pirate-in-training from Palan, was up to something. He’d recently used his computer skills to frame Cole, nearly getting them all killed for a stupid reward. Impersonating Molly’s mom would be a step down for him—both in skill and moral depravity.

He reminded himself of this as he strode through the cargo bay. Part of him—the part that wanted revenge for his betrayal—hoped he’d open Walter’s door and find the runt typing away on his little computer, an evil sneer on his metallic-colored face.

If the sleeves on his flightsuit had been a bit looser, Cole probably would’ve been rolling them up as he marched aft.

He keyed open the door. It was pitch black inside. He could hear the hissing sound of Palanesque breathing leaking out of the boy’s bunk. Cole flicked on the room’s light and watched Walter pull his head under the sheets in protest.

“Walter. Wake up.”

“Hnnn?”

Cole couldn’t tell what he was saying. Right then, it was because of the barrier of blankets, but usually it was due to the dreadful lisping problem Palans have with English.

“Wake up!” he said again.

Walter flapped his covers back, clearly annoyed. His eyes squinted against the light, two dark slits in a plate of dull steel.

Cole pointed a finger at him. “If you’re the one doing this, I swear on my life—you’ll be airlocked.”

Walter cocked his head, opening his mouth to ask something, but Cole flicked the light off, allowing his threat to linger in the darkness. He stood in the doorway for a few moments, trying to make his silhouette as large and menacing as possible, then stepped back in the hall and shut the door.

Walter found himself alone. In the dark. And in more ways than one.

Whatever they suspected him of, it was bad.

And the annoying injustice was that he was innocent!

For once.

Cole hesitated outside of Walter’s door. If the kid was responsible for the nav computer, it was a pretty clever trick. He looked up the long central shaft toward the cockpit, where Molly’s elbow could be seen jutting out over the flight controls, her fingers obviously still pecking away at the keyboard.

If it wasn’t Walter, Cole wondered who—or what—was responding.

What if that really is her mom? It wouldn’t be much crazier than some of the other things he’d seen in the last month. He glanced toward the rear of the ship. One of those crazier things could be heard snoring just down the hall, his low, rumbling growl rolling out of the crew quarters. Cole took a few steps toward the open door and checked in on the most unlikely of couples.

He could see them both in the soft light left on for Anlyn’s benefit. The sight of her filled Cole with mixed emotions. As a Drenard, Anlyn represented everything he’d been programmed by the Navy to hate. Here was the enemy of the rest of the galaxy, a member of the race of aliens humans warred with all along one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms. Moments ago—before the nav computer had interrupted—he and Molly had been arguing over whether Anlyn could be trusted. Not to mention the sanity of their current plan to take her home, far behind enemy lines.

As much as he wanted to doubt Anlyn, however, there was something endearing about the poor creature. Maybe it was the manner in which they’d discovered her: shackled and starving, a slave in chains. She still looked so thin and frail, her blue translucent skin catching the soft light, making her look innocent, pure, and harmless.

But Navy training videos had shown Cole what the Drenard people could do—at the helm of their fighter crafts and with their deadly lances. He had no difficulty seeing past her fragility to the horrors her people had wrought. This mix of emotions made him as wary around the young girl as he was around Walter—Anlyn because of her fierce potential, Walter due to his past treachery.

Ironically, Anlyn’s sleeping companion was a perfect mix of these two horrible traits, and yet, Cole trusted him completely. It didn’t matter that Edison had lied to them a few weeks ago, engineering one of the worst tragedies in the history of the Milky Way. It didn’t matter that the pup’s ferocious bulk and fierce claws could rend Cole in two. They had fought alongside one another, forging that bond of war that overrode all else.

Leaning against their doorjamb, the rumbling snores of the Glemot washing over him, Cole considered this bit of personal hypocrisy. He feared an innocent-looking creature that had saved his life a week ago, but he completely trusted a bear-like alien that had committed genocide against his own race. He had to shake his head at how effective the Navy programming was and at how eager he must be to rank personal experience above tragedies too vast in scope to properly comprehend.

He just hoped he could learn to judge Anlyn the same way: by her actions and not by the biases he’d formed over years of schooled hatred.

Cole pulled himself away from the slumbering couple and headed back to the cockpit, eager to see what the nav computer had to say. As he wandered through the cargo bay, he felt a stab of jealousy at having seen Anlyn and Edison snuggled together. Ever since Lucin’s death, he and Molly had been working through some problems. Even so, he’d considered broaching the subject of sharing a room, but didn’t know how to bring it up.

Or perhaps he was just scared of what Molly would say once he did.

She was still clattering away at her keyboard as he squeezed back into his chair. “If Walter’s screwing with us, he’s doin’ it in his sleep,” he told her.

Molly stopped typing and looked over at him. “Hey,” she said. “Be honest with me. Am I crazy to think this might be my mom? Because this is something that I really, really want to believe, and I’m sick and tired of being lied to and disappointed.”

Cole rubbed his face. He’d been on shift for a long time and really should be getting some sleep. But there was no way he could rest while Molly dealt with something as surreal as this. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “You sure nobody else could know how to spell your old name?”

“I can’t think of anyone. Not besides a bunch of backwoods frontier people on Lok, and they shouldn’t be involved in any of this.”

“What about the titles of those old books?”

Molly shook her head. “Nobody besides me and my dad, I’m pretty sure.”

“I just don’t know,” Cole said. He scanned the screen, taking in the snippets of conversation above the flashing cursor. “I don’t wanna get your hopes up, but we’ve seen some crazy stuff in the past month. The technology they had in the Darrin system blew my mind—”

“Have you ever heard of the Dakura system?” Molly asked.

Cole thought for a second. “No. But the name seems familiar. Why?”

“That’s where my mom says she was integrated into the ship, and where we need to go. Watch.”

Molly typed another question: COLE AND I WANT TO KNOW HOW WE CAN BELIEVE THAT IT’S REALLY YOU_

I CAN PROVE IT TO YOU AT DAKURA_

“See?” Molly asked, turning to Cole. “Pull it up on one of our newer charts. See how far we are from this place.”

Cole leaned forward and switched the nav computer from the bizarre conversation to the duller use for which it was intended. Pulling up the Bel Tra charts—the most accurate depiction of the Milky Way they owned—something horrific occurred to him. He slapped his forehead and shouted, “Flank me!”

Molly startled like the hull had been breached. “Gods, Cole! What?”

“When we were on Darrin, installing these new charts, do you remember how close I came to wiping out the old ones?”

She turned white. “Oh, my gods. I’d forgotten all about that. Do you think it would have—erased her?” She nodded toward her nav screen, having very nearly said “killed” instead of “erased.”

“I don’t know. We need to find out how fragile she is, or if we need to make a backup or something.”

“Good idea. I’ll add it to my to-do list.” She gave Cole a wry smile. “Now, if you’re done giving me heart problems over stuff that nearly happened weeks ago, you can get back to navigating.”

Cole grinned and gave Molly a crisp Navy salute. “Aye, aye, Captain,” he said.

She rolled her eyes and returned to her keyboard.

MOM, WE’RE AT 24% ON THE HYPERDRIVE. COLE IS CHECKING DAKURA AND OUR CURRENT LOCATION_

She hit enter, then thought of something else.

CAN YOU SEE ANYTHING? ACCESS THE SHIP’S COMPUTERS OR CAMERAS?_

NO, MOLLIE. BUT I WOULD LIKE THAT. I WOULD LOVE TO SEE WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE, AND MAYBE ONCE WE GET TO DAKURA OR LOK, WE CAN WORK ON THAT_

There was a pause. And then her mother fired off a question of her own:

WHO IS COLE? IS HE A BOY? HOW OLD IS HE?_

Molly smiled, and some of the doubts rising up inside began to settle back down. The questions comforted with their normalcy. She glanced over at Cole to make sure he was busy with his calculations, then she leaned over her keyboard to shield the screen from his eyes, launching into a conversation she had long dreamed of having with her mother—but never thought possible.

And not just because her mother had never been around, she thought, glancing over at her navigator.

A few minutes later, Cole sighed and flopped back in his chair.

“Not good,” he groaned. He leaned forward again to switch back to the conversation with Parsona, and Molly started tapping the enter key furiously, filling the screen with blank lines to push the conversation off the top of the display.

Molly stole a glance at Cole and saw him surveying the blank screen of empty prompts, his head tilted as he tried to puzzle it out. She could feel sweat popping out of the pores on her scalp and became consumed with the impulse to scratch her head.

Her mother lobbed a bomb into the stillness.

AS LONG AS YOU TWO ARE JUST KISSING, MOLLIE, THAT IS WONDERFUL NEWS. HE SOUNDS LOVELY_

A contest began: seeing who could turn the brighter shade of pink. Cole tried to look distracted, fiddling with the flight controls, but Parsona had been floating in empty space for hours.

“Uh… nowhere near enough juice to get us to Dakura,” he said. “We can’t even make it back to Lok, which we passed two jumps ago. Our course from Earth to Drenard took us near both, but we’re now too close to our destination to do anything but forge ahead. Unless, of course, you want to get arrested while we ask the Navy for some fusion fuel.”

Molly began communicating the bad news to her mom, eager to change the conversation away from romantic advice:

NOT ENOUGH FUSION FUEL FOR DAKURA. AND WE’RE IN A BIT OF A SPOT WITH THE LAW—CAN’T TOP UP AT ANY ORBITAL STATIONS. WE’VE BEEN HEADING TOWARD DRENARD FOR SEVERAL DAYS NOW_

DRENARD? WHY ARE YOU GOING TO DRENARD? IS THE WAR OVER?_

This woke Molly up to how long her mother must have been shut away in a computer. It felt nice to not be the only one with gaps in her knowledge. Even better was the feeling of having answers to someone else’s questions.

WE HAVE A DRENARD ON THE SHIP WITH US. HER NAME’S ANLYN, BUT DON’T WORRY, SHE’S A FRIEND. SHE SAVED MY LIFE. SAID WE’D BE SAFE ON DRENARD AND THEY’D STOCK US UP WITH FOOD AND FUEL_

The screen stayed blank, the cursor flashing. Her mom seemed to need some time to digest the news. Molly really wanted to jab the enter key a dozen more times and get the “kissing” sentence off the screen. She felt like Cole could see the sweat beneath her hair, then worried her mom was gonna be angry at them for having an enemy alien on the ship.

Her stomach knotted up with worry, impatient for a response.

When her mother finally typed out her reply, Molly realized she hadn’t been queasy enough.

I NEED TO SPEAK WITH THE DRENARD. ALONE. AS SOON AS POSSIBLE_

2

“Should I go wake her?” Cole leaned forward, his hands on the armrests of his seat. Molly couldn’t tell if he was eager to help or just feeling the urge to get away from the nav computer before it said something even more peculiar.

She looked from the screen, to Cole, then back again. Shrugging, unable to make sense of anything herself, she whispered, “I guess so.” Her voice sounded weak and feeble to her own ears, as if temporarily stunned.

Cole crawled out of his chair and padded away, leaving Molly alone with the computer once again. She reached for her keyboard, partly obliged to keep her mother occupied—not sure what the passage of a few minutes might feel like to a consciousness that could compute billions of operations a second—but also in an attempt to alleviate some of her confusion.

MOM_

She wasn’t sure how to phrase what she felt, so finally settled on being completely honest: YOU’RE SCARING ME_

I’M SORRY. IT ISN’T LIKE THIS IS EASY FOR ME. I_ THERE IS SO MUCH I WANT TO TELL YOU, TO CATCH UP ON. THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU, WE WEREN’T EVEN SURE IF YOU WOULD LIVE FOR A YEAR. AND I WAS VERY SICK. EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT YOU ARE JUST FACTS GIVEN TO ME LATER. I’M SORRY, IS THE DRENARD THERE YET?_

NO, COLE IS WAKING HER UP. WE’RE ON A NIGHT SHIFT. AND HER NAME IS ANLYN _

VERY WELL. PLEASE INTERRUPT ME AS SOON AS ANLYN IS THERE. WHAT I WANTED TO EXPLAIN EARLIER IS THAT MY WORLD FEELS VERY STRANGE RIGHT NOW. STRANGER, PERHAPS, THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE. I HAVE MY THOUGHTS, AND THEY SEEM LIKE A WAKING DREAM. LIKE I’M IN A DARK ROOM WITH MY EYES CLOSED, ALONE WITH MY MEMORIES_

Molly heard someone stomping through the cargo bay. She peered around her seat and saw Cole heading her way, Anlyn in tow. The young alien had on one of Cole’s oversized shirts as a nightgown, and was wiping sleep from her eyes.

Holding up a hand, Molly urged Cole to stay back for a moment. She felt guilty for delaying her mom’s conversation with Anlyn, but she needed to hear more:

THEY COME SO FAST, MOLLIE. I HAVE TO TRY AND OCCUPY PROCESSING CYCLES BY DOING OTHER THINGS IN THE BACKGROUND. ALL I HAVE FROM THE OUTSIDE WORLD IS THE TEXT YOU INPUT. JUST WORDS IN A VACUUM. I’M JUST AS SCARED AS YOU ARE, SWEETHEART, AND SOME OF THE THINGS I KNOW ARE TRULY AWFUL. NOT ANYTHING I WANT TO BURDEN YOU WITH RIGHT NOW. IS ANLYN THERE?_

SHE JUST WALKED UP_

Technically, it was the truth. She turned to Anlyn, only to find her friend standing just beyond the boundary of the cockpit, her face rigid and expressionless.

“I’m so sorry!” said Molly, scrambling out of her seat and sickened by her thoughtlessness.

Anlyn hadn’t been in a cockpit since she escaped the Darrin system, where she’d been chained to a flightseat and forced to pilot a ship as a slave. In all the excitement over her mom, her friend’s fears had slipped her mind. She pushed past Cole to turn Anlyn away, but before she could get to her, the young Drenard stepped over the boundary, crossing the threshold.

“It’s fine,” Anlyn said softly. She held both hands out in front of her as she crept forward, almost as if probing for obstructions. “As long as the engines are off.”

“Are you sure?”

Anlyn nodded, her face aglow in the cockpit’s constellation of lights and readouts. Looking around, her eyes eventually settling on the radio set into the dash. “Cole said you need me to talk to someone?”

Molly was unsure what should be revealed. She hated lying, but the truth would take hours to relate. She decided to leave it up to her mom to explain it however she liked.

“That’s right. You’ll have to communicate with—” Molly paused, realizing how little she knew of Parsona’s young crewmembers, even after two weeks of living together. “You’ll have to talk using the keyboard. Can you read and type? In English?”

Disappointment flashed across Anlyn’s face. “Not much,” she admitted. “Enough to fly, mostly indicators and alarms.”

Of course, Molly thought. Why teach a slave pilot to read anything else? She turned back to the nav computer, a surge of guilty relief washing over her. There had been enough secrets lately—translating the conversation would keep her from not knowing what was going on. And assuming the worst.

She leaned over her seat and typed:

ANLYN SPEAKS ENGLISH, BUT SHE CAN’T TYPE OR READ MUCH OF IT. I’M GOING TO HAVE TO INTERPRET_

There was almost no pause before the reply came:

SHE DOESN’T NEED TO RESPOND, SHE JUST NEEDS TO READ ALONG. TELL HER TO PRESS A KEY ONCE THE TWO OF US ARE ALONE. AND PLEASE GIVE US PLENTY OF TIME_

MOM, SHE CAN’T READ ENGLISH_

THAT’S OKAY, DEAR. I SPEAK DRENARD_

Cole and Molly retired to the lazarette. He had suggested they wait the conversation out in her room while discussing their plans, but Molly seemed too anxious to sit still. She had grabbed some tools and crawled into the thruster room—the center reactor was still having intermittent issues ever since they backed into that asteroid in the Darrin system.

Cole didn’t have much room to argue since he’d been the one flying at the time.

Holding a medium spanner out in the air, he waited for Molly to reach up and grab it. “Can our nav screen even display Drenard?” he wondered aloud. “I don’t even know what Drenard looks like, do you?”

“Not a clue,” Molly said. Her voice leaked out from below the center thruster’s reactor, tinny and muffled. A hand came up holding a power screwdriver; Cole took it and slapped the electric wrench in its place. “I don’t see why it couldn’t display it, though,” Molly continued. “That screen can show star charts. Any language is just a bunch of pixels.”

“I guess you’re right,” said Cole. He put the screwdriver back in the tool pouch; below, he could hear Molly wrestling with an overly tightened bolt. “Hey, maybe we should let Edison have another go at that.”

“I like knowing my own ship, smarty pants. Besides, Edison would have to pull the floor beams out just to get down here. Probably why it’s still acting up.” Molly pushed her upper body out of the hole and looked back at Cole. “The question we should be asking ourselves is why we had to leave the cockpit if Mom is talking in Drenard. It’s not like either of us could follow what she’s saying. And how does she know Drenard in the first place? I always heard the language was a complete mystery, even to the Navy.”

She left her doubts in the air and went back to work, her head disappearing below the decking.

Cole felt relieved to hear some of his cynicism rubbing off on Molly. Prior to recent and unfortunate events, she used to think him pessimistic and paranoid. Conspiratorial, even. He moved closer to the access hatch. “Have you ever heard of the Turing Test?” he asked.

“I’ve heard of the Turing star system,” Molly said after a pause.

“Yeah, same guy. It was named after him. He was an old twenty first century math dude, or maybe it was the twentieth, I get those periods confused—”

“What in the world does this have to do with anything?”

“I’ll get to that if you stop interrupting. You see, Turing was one of the first guys to start thinking about artificial intelligence—”

“Is that what you think my mom is?”

“Gods, Molly, gimme a chance. And I can barely make out what you’re saying, anyway. Where was I? Oh, Turing devised what he called the Turing Test as a check for artificial intelligence. What you do is put your program in a room and talk to it through a door, or some other way, the important bit is this—if you can’t tell the thing on the other side is human or machine, it passes the test.”

Cole inched deeper into the mechanical space to make sure his voice was dropping down the hole in the floor. “Did you hear me?”

“I’m not interrupting you.”

“Well, that was it. That’s the story.”

Molly pulled her head out of the hole again. “What’s the point?”

“The point is, whatever we’re talking with passes the Turing Test, but that doesn’t tell us if it’s human or not. In fact, there’s this other guy, Surrel I think his name was, who came up with another scenario called the Chinese Room.

“You know, your mom speaking Drenard must have made me remember Turing. Anyway, Surrel said that you could have something stupid in a room, a simple program or a book that would look intelligent, but it wouldn’t be. It goes something like this: you have a man in another room that doesn’t speak Drenard. But he has a book of rules. Someone slides a piece of paper under the door with some Drenard on it. The guy looks in the book, follows the rules, and writes out a reply.

“The person on the other side will think they’re communicating with a real Drenard. The Turing Test will be passed. But the guy inside the room, or the program, is just following simple rules. And that’s all a computer does, really. Follow rules. It can look smart without being smart.”

Molly shook her head. “I can’t believe I’m listening to this instead of fixing the pressure problem with the thruster.”

“Hey, this stuff’s important. You need to keep it in mind when you’re talking to your mom.”

Molly grabbed a clump of hair off her cheek and tucked it behind her ear. She rolled her eyes at Cole. “That Surrel guy was an idiot, just so you know.”

“I think I have his name wrong,” Cole said, “but trust me: the guy was a genius.”

“Well, I must be a Glemot, then. The guy following the rules might be dumb, but the woman who wrote the rules for him to follow speaks Drenard fluently and is quite intelligent. Which means there is a smart person in the room that’s passing the Turing Test, not just some algorithm. It doesn’t matter if she wrote her smartness down or was sitting beside the guy whispering the answers; if the result’s the same, the delivery method shouldn’t matter.”

Molly bit her lower lip and glanced past Cole. “Whether it’s a brain or a computer holding her memories–either way–I think that’s my mom out there.”

She ducked down below the decking, then popped back up. “And this is what I hate about these philosophy debates you drag me into. The questions are only baffling if you have the IQ of a Venusian sea slug—”

“Wait,” Cole interrupted, lifting a hand. “Did you hear that?”

They both fell silent. “That’s the SADAR alarm,” Molly said.

Cole scrambled backwards, out of the cramped space. Molly followed after, her hands leaving greasy prints on the decking. They both rose and sprinted toward the cockpit, forty meters away, the pounding of their feet on the metal decking waking the rest of the crew.

“Contacts! At least two dozen ships!” Cole looked from the SADAR screen to the porthole on his side of the ship. A small fleet had appeared off their starboard side. Anlyn backed out of the cockpit, her eyes still on the nav screen, which remained full of bizarre symbols.

“Everyone in flight suits!” Molly called out, which broke Anlyn’s spell and sent her scurrying back toward the crew quarters.

“That includes you,” said Cole.

Molly looked down at her dirty work shirt and greasy hands as if confirming his suggestion. “Okay,” she said, “turn on the radio and find out who they are. And tell Mom what’s going on. I’ll be right back.” She left him alone in the cockpit and raced back to her room.

Cole plugged his own suit into the console between the seats. He put the radio on channel 2812, the galaxy-wide standard for hailing and ship-to-ship communications.

Someone was already transmitting.

“—yourself. Repeat. This is Naval Task Force Delta KPR76 calling the vessel point two AU’s off our bow, velocity zero knots absolute, identify yourself.”

Cole’s nav screen was covered in gibberish. He typed in a quick line to whoever was on the other side of Turing’s door.

TROUBLE. GOTTA RUN_

He hit the enter key and switched over to the Bel Tra nav charts. Comparing Parsona’s location to the position of the Navy fleet made his stomach drop. He heard someone run up behind him.

“Troublesss?”

Walter. His hissing voice scraped across Cole’s nerves even more than usual. “Go strap in,” he told him, “and stay out of the way.” He didn’t look back to see the expression on the boy’s face, which was just as well.

The next set of approaching feet left no doubt as to their owner. The vibrations came up through Cole’s nav chair as Edison stomped his way to the crew seats. Cole flipped on the cargo bay cam and made sure everyone had their helmets on and their harnesses secure. This would be the first time Anlyn wore one of Walter’s flight suits; he hoped his alterations would keep her smaller frame protected.

The radio demanded identification again just as Molly arrived in a dead run. She vaulted into her chair, landed on her feet in a crouch, and then let them shoot out from under herself into the pocket below the dash. She fastened her harness and plugged in her flightsuit, all with the coordinated swiftness of an emergency drill.

“Navy?” she asked.

“Yeah, and we’re in a spot here.” Cole pointed to the SADAR. “My anniversary gift is the hard place and that fleet is the rock.”

Molly looked out her porthole. The “gift” Cole referred to loomed off the port side of the ship. It was a binary pair—a black hole and a large star locked in each other’s orbits. A wide trail of plasma leaked off the star and swirled into the black hole, the rotation of the system creating a pinwheel of light millions of kilometers across.

The display had been Cole’s one-month anniversary gift. Beautiful and touching ten minutes ago, now it created a gigantic wall of gravitational mass that prevented their escape into hyperspace.

“This is Naval Task Force Delta KPR76 to the stationary vessel off our bow, please identify yourself.” The voice had become more insistent—and the SADAR unit flashed a warning that they were being scanned. Molly admired the way the fleet spread out before closing in. Without a zero-gravity chunk of the cosmos to jump from, Parsona was trapped.

She grabbed the flight stick and pushed Parsona’s nose toward the nearby star. With one of her three thrusters on the mend, she was able to give the ship full throttle without worrying about the forces on her and the crew; the anti-grav fluid in their flightsuits could handle anything Parsona dished out in a straight line. Which was unfortunate, really. She would need more if they were going to outrun these guys.

“GN-290 ship identification Parsona, do not flee. Cease thruster burn immediately. We will fire. I repeat, this is Naval Task Force Delta KPR76, and we will fire to kill. You are in a hostile no-fly zone. Cease thruster burn immediately. Over.”

Cole tagged each Navy ship with hostile indicators. Parsona had received a few upgrades over the past two weeks: two laser cannons recessed in the leading wings, a missile pod hidden in one of the large rear wings, and some basic defenses to boot. It wasn’t enough to take on a few Firehawks, much less an entire fleet, but the routine tasks seemed to give him something to do.

“What’d you tell my mom?” Molly asked.

“Are you serious? I told her we’d get back to her. Now what’s your plan, ’cause I don’t see any way out besides a brig and a court-martial.”

“I’m thinking—”

The radio cut her off. “GN-290 Parsona, this is Naval Task Force Delta KPR76. There’s a seizure notice out on your ship. You will be considered hostile. Cease thruster burn or we will begin firing missiles. Over.”

“Think faster, babe. We’ve got two chaff pods, and I’m just guessing here, but they probably have more than two missiles.”

“The first thing we’re gonna do is not call me ‘babe.’ Ever.” Molly shot Cole a menacing look and leaned forward to study the nav charts and SADAR display. She had the ship in a straight-line burn away from the fleet and toward the black hole and star. She did some quick and dirty math in her head. Even if the Navy fleet came after them at full speed, Parsona would still get to the two-body system first.

“Okay, I’ve got an idea. I need you use that charming mouth of yours and talk the Navy out of firing their missiles. I’m gonna make a full burn right at the star and get there before they do.”

Cole reached to the controls that patched his helmet mic through to the radio. “I’d like to veto hiding inside the star. Can you give me a few other ideas to choose from?”

“I’m not going to hide in the star, wise guy, I’m gonna use it to catapult us into clear space on the other side, just like we slingshot cargo from one orbit to another back home.”

“Not bad,” Cole said. “I’ll buy you some time.” He keyed the radio mic. “Naval Task Force Delta KPR76, this is Parsona KML32. We’re having a thruster malfunction. Requesting assistance. Over.”

Molly shot Cole a look of disappointment.

He shrugged. “What?”

The nearest Firehawk spat out a missile in reply.

3

“Gods, Cole, I wanted you to buy us some time, not instigate them.”

“It was the first thing I thought of,” Cole said. “I figured the grain of truth would help. Can’t they see we’re running with a limp?” He keyed the radio again. “KPR76, Parsona here. We’re having thruster problems, I repeat, we are having thruster problems. Cease fire. Over.”

Molly watched the SADAR to see if another missile would punctuate Cole’s lie. This was the first time she’d seen his charms fail so spectacularly; she’d always thought it’d be an enjoyable experience if it ever happened—but she was wrong. Without doing the math, she could see the missile would reach them well before they got a boost from the star’s gravity.

“Less comms, more chaff,” she said.

Cole keyed up their new chaff modules. “You want me to release early so we have time to arm the second pod?”

Good question, Molly thought. If they waited too long, they were giving themselves only one chance to fool the missile. On the other hand, if they showed their cards too soon, the Navy would see they were dealing with an armed vessel and ramp up the attack.

As a team, Molly and Cole had hundreds of hours in Navy simulators together, facing these exact tactical quandaries. They always tried to pretend the situations were actually occurring—to truly feel the specter of death hovering over them, pressuring them to make mistakes. It was the only proper way to train their minds as well as their reflexes.

Now they were in actual danger. A blinking red light crept across the SADAR screen, making its way to the center of the concentric range circles like a bullet homing in on a bull’s-eye. Only, this time, it wasn’t for keeping score; they wouldn’t get yelled at if they made the wrong decision. That red dot was not part of a game or training exercise—it represented their deaths.

Molly considered all this in a flash and marveled at how calm she felt. Her brain seemed clearer than it had ever been in the simulator. Despite the reversal of roles—her piloting from the left while Cole asked her advice—she felt like this was what they’d trained for. And it was more than just the thousands of hours in the simulator. In many ways, the fear of dying could not match the anxiety of humiliation. Not for her, at least. She considered the approaching missile and the timing on the chaff pods, performing some quick and dirty math.

“Wait for it,” she told Cole. She keyed the shortwave radio and tried a bit of old-fashioned honesty.

“This is KML32 Parsona, Captain Molly Fyde speaking. I’m a former Naval cadet. There are children onboard this ship, I repeat, there’s a crew of five youth aboard this ship. Cease firing. Over.”

A second missile spat out of a neighboring Firehawk.

Cole fired a curse at his SADAR screen. Molly started to protest, but the radio chimed in before she could. “Parsona, Naval Task Force Delta. If you cease thruster burn, we will de-arm both missiles prior to impact. This is your final warning. Cease thruster burn and prepare to be boarded. The missiles will be de-armed. Over.”

Molly pulled her hand away from the mic and rested it on the accelerator controls, contemplating pulling back. “What are our chances here?” she asked.

Cole surveyed the situation on SADAR, watching the second missile speed after its companion. “If both chaff work, we could stop these two and probably get to your slingshot gambit in time. But only if they don’t fire any more in the next few minutes.” He looked over at Molly and raised his visor; she could see the worry on his face, clear as carboglass. “I don’t think it’ll go well for you and me if they pick us up, but we gotta consider the rest of the crew.”

“Trust me, I am thinking about them. They’re the reason I haven’t pulled back on the throttle yet.”

“I don’t follow. And we have about two minutes before we need to decide.”

“You think they’re gonna to be harsh on you and me for Lucin’s death? And Palan? Think about Walter being sent back to his uncle after breaking us out and stealing Parsona from them. Think about what they’ll do to Anlyn, Cole. Or how kindly the Navy will take to Edison after they were run out of the Glemot system. I would poll them if we had the time, but I have a feeling they’d rather take their chances with the missiles.”

“We need to decide,” Cole said.

Molly tried. If it were just her and Cole, she probably would never have run in the first place. She would’ve taken their chances in a Navy courtroom, explaining the sequence of events that had led them to their current predicament, trusting their status as minors, anything to guarantee Cole would live another day. But they all were running from something, her crew especially. Each of the crewmembers had taken a massive risk to get away, placing his or her trust in them. They had to do anything they could to escape.

The radio crackled: “Parsona, Naval Task Force Delta. Advise, you have one minute before impact. Cease thruster burn immediately. Over.”

Molly turned to look at Cole. They were pushing over sixteen Gs, and she could really feel it through her flightsuit and in her neck. Cole’s visor remained up, those hazel eyes of his wide with trust, awaiting an answer.

“Release chaff pod number one,” she commanded.

Cole thumbed the defense controls. The new and untested chaff module in the rear of their ship popped open and ejected the decoy. It showed up on SADAR as a second ship with the same signature and mass as Parsona. Molly altered course slightly to see if the missile would follow.

It stayed on its original vector, homing in on the chaff pod.

“How long before the second impact?” Molly asked.

Cole was already working on it. “Under two minutes—damn! Contact. Three more missiles incoming.”

Molly saw them on her SADAR screen. Things were getting ugly.

“They’re gonna reach us after we slingshot,” Cole said, confirmed what her mental calculations already suggested. “If they vector around the star after us, they’re gonna get the same boost we will. They’ll track us down before we get to clear space for a jump.”

Molly looked up from the nav screen and had to lower her visor. Her new course had them heading right for the star. The automatic filters in the carboglass handled most of the direct light and all the harmful radiation; the visor in her helmet took care of the rest, allowing her to gaze upon its surface. For a brief moment, she became lost in the sight of the fiery orb, transfixed by the hundreds of black spots on its surface, the “cooler” areas where magnetic disturbances prevented the plasma from mixing properly.

She followed the wide trail of fire that streamed out from the star to the black hole. They were approaching from above, but getting so close that the overall shape and beauty of the spiral had become lost.

Now it was just the massive, deadly, intoxicating details.

“Release chaff pod number two,” she said.

Cole thumbed the controls while she altered course, heading toward one edge of the star. The missile behind them jogged slightly, following Parsona rather than the pod.

“We’ve got a problem,” Cole said.

“I see it.” That was their last chaff pod, and the missile wasn’t fooled. Molly started composing their surrender in her head, losing herself in the beauty of the star and the long, curving river of plasma coursing off the surface. A solar flare had erupted recently, its smaller stream of hot matter jetting out tens of thousands of kilometers, curving close to their current heading.

Very close to their current heading.

Cole’s gift had become a threat, but Molly saw that it could also be their savior.

“Hold on,” she said, altering course slightly toward the thick column of plasma that made up the solar flare. Even the gradual change in direction could be felt at their high rate of acceleration. Molly glanced at the three crew members strapped in on the cargo cam. They were awfully still; she hoped that meant they were doing okay.

After a moment, Cole seemed to get the plan. “How close are you going to try and get to that mess?”

“Not too close. Shouldn’t have to. The heat radiating out from the plasma will detonate the warhead from a distance. Those things can’t carry the shielding we do and still be that fast.”

Cole worked some numbers through the nav computer, his glove fixed to the panel by his side. Molly watched the results crawl across her own screen.

“I hope you’re right,” he said, “because that missile is gonna get to us before we get to that flare.”

She glanced at his calculations and started to agree. His results had them a thousand kilometers short of the solar flare when the missile struck, further away than she had hoped. Then she saw he hadn’t factored in the difference in mass between Parsona and the missile. They were going to get more suction from the combined gravity of the star and the black hole than their little friend was.

“It’s going to be close,” she admitted.

“We’ve still got three more missiles behind this guy, and the fleet is closing in pretty fast. What happened to surrendering?”

It was a lot to think about at once. Even if the plume of plasma set off the first missile, they were going too fast to come to a complete stop and let the heat take out the other three. Besides, any decrease in speed would just bring them in range of the fleet’s lasers. Molly felt completely cornered, as powerless as the coil of fire being sucked off of the star’s surface, rolling across space into the black hole.

The black hole.

“The what?” Cole asked.

Molly must’ve said it out loud.

“Do I get two vetoes per day? ’Cause I’m against hiding in the black hole as well.”

She didn’t have time to explain herself. The missile was half a minute from impact, and the wide column of fire streaking off the star and joining the spiraling river was close enough to see its features. Smaller arcs of plasma leapt up and crashed back into the main body like fiery fish breaking the surface of a lava lake and diving back in.

Cole updated the situation: “Fifteen seconds to impact.”

Molly couldn’t just hold her breath and see if the gambit with the missile would work; she needed to calculate her next dumb idea. She keyed the ridiculously large numbers into the nav calculator with one hand while she gradually altered course with the flight controls. The key was to keep assuming everything would work, like during the Tchung simulation when she’d moved from one audacious move to the next. Only this time, with very real consequences.

She moved Parsona gradually closer to a new heading, using a rough guess while the nav computer struggled with an enormous Lagrange calculation. She wondered if Cole could feel the slight change in their heading and the forces acting on their bodies.

He counted down the second missile’s impact over their private channel:

“Six…”

Molly concentrated on the nav computer, waiting on it to spit out an answer.

“Five…”

She remembered, all of a sudden, that her mother was in there somewhere.

“Four…”

Hopefully the grueling load on the CPU eased her boredom, slowing down her sense of time—

“Three…”

Molly shook the thought out of her head, amazed her brain would even go there right then.

“Two…”

The calculation finally popped up. Molly was impressed to see how close the answer was to her rough estimate.

“Detonation!”

The missile behind them expanded into a miniature version of the nearby star. Cole felt a change in his flightsuit as the explosion slewed the back of the ship slightly. He tried to pump his fist in celebration, but they were moving at a blistering pace. The suit could keep his flesh from being crushed—and the gravity panels in the dash could make it easier for his hands to work the controls—but nothing could help him wave his limbs in jubilation.

Then he realized there wasn’t anything to celebrate. Molly had altered their heading, giving up on the slingshot maneuver. Even if the other three missiles exploded from the heat, the fleet was going to catch up to them, engaging them while they were trapped in this crazy system. A red warning indicator flashed on the SADAR screen. It finally struck Cole that Molly’s new vector had problems. Whatever celebratory mood he had felt quickly drained away.

“Why’re we heading toward the black hole, Molly?”

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

“We aren’t. We’re heading for the L1 in this system.”

“This system doesn’t have an L1, it’s—” Cole realized he was wrong just as he voiced his complaint. It was easy to see the star orbiting the black hole as an anomaly, as if there was only one “body,” and the black hole was just an exotic companion. But they were both just points of gravity to the computer. Lots of gravity in the case of the black hole.

Between the two masses, there had to be a Lagrange point, an L1 where the force of gravity from both objects cancelled out. And Parsona should be close to the L1—it would be much nearer the less-massive star.

Cole looked at his nav screen and saw Molly had already calculated the spot. When had she done that?

“Uh… we might be going too fast for a safe jump to hyperspace. We aren’t gonna to be in the L1 for a full second at this speed.”

“I know. So you’d better time it just right.”

“Me?”

Cole looked over the numbers, trying to remember the recommended limitations for their hyperdrive. It wasn’t a question of whether they were exceeding them—he just couldn’t tell if they were tripling or quadrupling the max speed on the warranty card.

“Yeah, you, navigator. And try to anticipate the flinch that’ll probably come just as you thumb the drive.”

Cold checked the hyperdrive. It was still spooled up from his last shift. A glance at the three missiles on SADAR told him they’d be a non-issue—the jump would come before the explosion. Still, the warheads trailing behind were like snarling dogs chasing him toward a high fence, helping to steel his resolve.

Most likely, they wouldn’t come into play at all. Because he was probably going to get them all killed first.

Molly smiled to herself, resigned. Just as with the last missile gambit, the die had already been cast. Now she could enjoy the wait while Fate read the pips.

The radio hissed to life, interference from the solar flares garbling the transmission and drowning out every other word in a chorus of pops and hisses. It sounded like the Navy was warning them of the impending danger.

Someone in the command ship must’ve plotted their new course and realized what they were up to. Probably someone right out of the Academy, Molly thought. Someone whose creativity hadn’t been beaten out of them. She pictured a young navigator, maybe someone a class or two ahead of her, possibly even someone who’d picked on her. She could imagine him going to the fleet commander with a sense of excitement, his voice trembling as he explained her wild plan.

The radio crackled loudly, ending the garbled warning message.

“So says the assholes trying to blow us up,” Cole remarked.

His voice, and the laughter that followed, sounded good in Molly’s helmet. She checked her nav screen and made sure they were on a perfect line for the L1. It was a shame she had to approach it from this direction—skimming past the star and heading straight for the black hole. It made their window narrower than if they’d come in perpendicular to the system.

She imagined it as a runway in space, stretched out in a wide plane of safe jump points between the star and the singularity of the black hole. Anywhere along that plane, the gravities pretty much cancelled out. But, the way they were moving, that plane was more like a sheet of tissue they would tear right through, rather than a long safe zone they could run down for a length of time. It meant their jump needed to occur the exact moment they bisected it.

They had another problem. A big one, even if it was created by something very small. The actual black hole was probably no larger than a fist, but its effects, its incredible density, spread out before them like a mitt poised to catch a hurtling ball.

“Cole, if that hyperdrive doesn’t fire,” Molly took a deep breath, her chest heavy as the grav suit could no longer remove all the force of acceleration, “I can’t clear the event horizon.”

She could see the invisible border clearly. It formed the edge of a black circle ringed with a halo of light. No stars could be seen through the circle, and any photons that fell in that disc were consumed completely. However, a lot of the stars on the other side could be seen along the rim. Their light bent around the black hole, coming to Molly’s eyes from the edge of the event horizon.

If the hyperdrive didn’t fire, Parsona would be another dollop of mass added to the crushing center. The Gs required to pull up wouldn’t matter; they’d already be in the object’s massive grip.

“I already thought about that,” Cole said, a tenor of calm resignation leaking through the physical strain in his voice.

The radio hissed again. Molly snapped it off with the switch in her glove. She sank back in her chair, allowing the Gs the flightsuit couldn’t handle wash over her. It felt comforting, like a heavy blanket on a crisp night. She’d done all she could, and now it was up to Cole; the next minute could be spent just admiring the rare sight in front of her, the black emptiness that could crush entire worlds.

Beside her, a river of orange and white plasma flowed in a column, arcs of flame licking out as the torrent fell parallel to them, toward the dark beast ahead.

She took it all in as if the sight would be her last. The void ahead loomed larger and larger, a blackness so rich there needed to be another name for it. A new color. A primary color. It was the shade of absence. A nothingness so real, it had an edge.

Molly imagined them falling into a pit in space—a gaping well with no bottom. Then, the bubble of black seemed to expand rapidly, like the ground rush she’d felt the first time she’d trained with a parachute. There’d been a moment when it seemed as if she’d waited too late to pull the ripcord—that the plummet would be to her death.

Just like that first fall toward Earth, the visual spectacle overwhelmed her other senses, the sight of approaching doom drowning out all else.

She didn’t even hear Cole cursing into his mic, yelling with fear as he jammed the hyperdrive switch.

4

The bubble of absolute darkness popped, the disk filling with stars that hadn’t been there a moment before. The color of the cosmos—the usual hue of space that lies between the stars like black velvet—suddenly seemed gray compared to the oily substance that had just been there. Molly’s brain churned through it all, still in an observational, not a thinking state.

In the background, she could hear Cole yelling. It wasn’t coming through her speakers—he must have keyed the mic off in his glove—the sound came to her through both of their helmets, arriving muffled, like the dull roar of a beach a block away.

Molly pulled her gaze from the stars to look at him; her head snapped to the side, pressed painfully into the back of her seat. She looked down and saw the throttle still pressed all the way forward, Parsona continuing to accelerate as fast as it could.

Straining against the Gs—and assisted by the grav panels in the dash—Molly reached forward and got a hand on the throttle. All she had to do was relax her muscles and let the rearward pull bring the stick to neutral. The thrusters shut down completely. Molly eyed the temperature gauges warily.

As soon as they stopped accelerating, Cole’s arms joined his mouth’s jubilation. He waved them, clapped them together, slapped Molly’s back. She tried to process what he was so happy about, the memory of the extreme L1 gradually returning as he tore off his helmet and threw it over the back of the seat. His dark complexion made the wide, white smile of his seem blinding. Molly stared at him, still a little dazed, her hand on the throttle, her helmet resting on the back of her chair.

Cole leaned over and kissed her visor, leaving a comically perfect imprint of moisture on the plastic shell.

“CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?!” he yelled through her helmet, shaking it with both hands. He smiled wide and planted another kiss on her visor.

Molly reached up to snap her own helmet off. She had a sudden impulse to check the SADAR for missiles, then realized the threat no longer existed. The image of the black hole, with its mesmerizing event horizon, returned. Molly tried to focus, but her ability to think straight had been sucked down that well, pulled in and destroyed by the attraction of something too beautiful to remember.

Cole held her head just as he had the helmet and pecked her face with loud kisses. He broke away and attempted a frown, which came out more as a subdued grin. “Don’t you put me in a situation like that ever—”

A strange roar interrupted him—an anguished howl rumbling up from the cargo bay. It dissipated the fog in Molly’s head and brought an end to Cole’s celebrations. They both tried to scramble over the flight controls at the same time, jostling with each other in panic.

Molly shoved Cole back into his seat.

“We’re going too fast,” she told him. “Spin us around and decelerate, but no more than the gravity plates can compensate for.”

He nodded gravely and reached for the forward thruster controls; the couple had spent too many hours in simulated warfare to unlearn that ability: snapping to an important task, distractions set aside for later.

Molly jumped down from her chair and nearly passed out. She caught herself on the cockpit wall and waited for the dizziness to pass, for the blood in the rest of her body to redistribute itself after all those Gs and the effects of so much anti-grav fluid racing through her flightsuit.

“MOLLY!” Edison yelled her name in that deep, guttural voice of his, the solitary word thundering up the passageway like an enraged animal. She staggered forward, fighting off another dizzy spell, worried about her large friend.

As soon as she rounded the corner, she saw the problem lay with Anlyn, not Edison. Walter, strapped to the neighboring seat, leaned as far as he could away from her. Edison knelt before Anlyn, his normally dexterous paws fumbling at the flight harness.

Anlyn’s face looked awful. Blotchy and bruised. The sight should have exacerbated Molly’s dizziness, but she was in charge.

Responsible. Adrenaline surged through her body, working miracles. She unbuckled Walter first.

“Give us room,” she told him, which he did eagerly.

Next, she tried to push Edison back, but his bulk was a steel wall draped in fur. “Edison, I need you to get back.”

Edison shook his head, but did as she asked. He cradled Anlyn’s helmet in both paws, rubbing it.

Molly knelt down in front of the young Drenard. The girl’s skin, normally a translucent light shade of blue, had turned a splotchy purple. Individual capillaries and veins streaked across her bald head in a tangled web. Two rivulets of blood snaked out of the hearing holes behind her jaw and tracked forward to the center of her face, pulled there by the force of acceleration.

Her chin rested on her chest as if she were merely sleeping, but the back of her head was ashen. She was clearly suffering from SLAS. Molly tried to remember how many Gs they’d been pushing before the jump and whether any of Cole’s alterations to her suit had required retooling the anti-grav pockets.

She reached into the collar of Anlyn’s flightsuit and encircled the Drenard’s thin neck with both hands, the universal method used to locate an alien’s pulse. It occurred to her as she waited for a sign of life just how unprepared she was for commanding her own ship and its crew. The Navy taught her how to shoot down aliens from a distance but not how to manage living with nonhumans while caring for their well-being.

Looking over her shoulder, she asked Edison, “Do you know where her heart is?”

The pup shook his head. Molly could see the skin around his nose where the fur was thin. Normally it was pink and healthy—now it was as pale as the back of Anlyn’s head.

“Take her to your bunk and get her flightsuit off,” she told him. Molly reached to unplug the suit from the anti-gravity and life-support module but noticed someone had already done so. She ran back for the first aid kit above the galley sink.

As she unstrapped the kit, she watched Edison scoop up his small friend with a paradoxical mix of strength and gentleness, then surge past her with long, even strides, back toward his crew quarters.

Walter watched the ordeal from across the cargo bay, then slid across the wake of all the frenzied activity. He settled into his chair, his elbow stretching out into the seat beside him. Anlyn’s seat. But he could remember back when this whole side of the crew lounge had been his.

Even though he said the word silently, to himself, he did so in English.

Within his Palan brain, it came out as a hiss.

By the time Molly made it back to Anlyn with the first aid kit, Edison already had her flightsuit off. He stood there, the empty suit draped over one massive forearm as he looked to Molly for more instructions. She could tell he needed to be told what to do next. Something. Anything. The color seemed to be draining from his very fur.

Molly knew the two aliens had gotten close during their brief time together, especially over the week they spent alone repairing Parsona. She also recognized Anlyn had taken to clinging to Edison for security. But she had no idea they might be in love with one another.

She did now. The same emotion bursting within her own heart for Cole seemed to visibly pour out of Edison. She recognized it in his worry, in his fear. As Molly knelt to attend to Anlyn, she also realized she had two patients in the room.

“Go get some clean rags and water,” she told him. “I want you to clean up her face and keep her head cool.”

That was the prescription for Edison’s heart. Now she needed to locate Anlyn’s.

There had been no pulse in her neck, and unless she was like the Bel Tra—with their arteries hidden within their very spines—that wasn’t an encouraging sign.

At least the girl was on her back, the blood able to drain down toward the gravity plates in the hull’s decking. Now Molly just needed to get those fluids circulating again. Every known sentient being relied on the potent chemical energy locked up in ATP and fueled by oxygen. Without a constant supply, the girl would die.

Molly unzipped a side compartment on the aid kit and pulled out two plastic tubes, then slid them into the small breathing holes above Anlyn’s mouth. There was no way to know how far to do this, so she pushed until there was some resistance before backing the tubes out a little. With the press of a button, a small compression fan on the side of the aid box whirred to life.

Reaching into another pouch, Molly pulled out the small medical reader and searched “Drenard,” even though she was almost certain she wouldn’t find anything. The race wasn’t in any of the Navy’s aid manuals, either from absence of knowledge or lack of caring. Why she thought there’d be anything in her parents’ old civilian gear was beyond—

Her parents.

Molly turned and bolted out the door, nearly breaking her nose as she crashed into Edison. “I’ll be right back,” she shouted over her shoulder. She dashed through the cargo bay, leaving Edison behind, the poor pup not knowing what to do.

Tears streaming down his fur.

Molly bolted into the cockpit, not bothering to crawl into her seat. She leaned across the flight controls and switched the nav screen over to Parsona’s old charts.

“Everything okay?” Cole asked.

Molly ignored him. A chart of astral information went off the screen, replaced with line after line of text—her mother wanting to know what was going on.

NO TIME. I NEED TO KNOW WHERE THE DRENARD HEART IS_

THE DRENARD HEART?_

LITERALLY. MEDICALLY. ANLYN DOESN’T HAVE A PULSE. DO YOU KNOW WHERE HER HEART IS?_

OH, DEAR. I USED TO. IN THE UPPER THORAX, ANTERIOR, I BELIEVE. MOLLIE, WHAT’S GOING ON? THE COMPUTER WAS WORKING ON A CALCULATION THAT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE_

Molly pushed off Cole’s chair, ignoring another question from him and several more from her mom. She darted back across the cargo bay, past Walter playing his video game, back to Edison’s room.

“A little space, buddy.” Molly pushed Edison gently on the shoulder, and the pup moved aside. It was stuffy with the three of them in the small cabin, but Molly didn’t have the heart to ask him to leave, and the circulation pump should be pushing plenty of oxygen into Anlyn’s lungs.

The girl had suffered a severe case of SLAS—her skin two-toned as all of her blood pooled up in the front half of her body. Molly wouldn’t be able tell if anything was ruptured or what kind of hope they had for saving the girl until she could help the heart distribute the fluids evenly. Rolling Anlyn onto her stomach was going to make things worse, but Molly had to get to her circulation organ, and according to her mom, it was high up and in her back.

Anlyn felt incredibly frail as Molly rolled her over. “Keep those tubes from kinking,” she told Edison. He reached out, eager to assist, and managed the air supply. Molly grabbed the pillow Anlyn’s head had been on and placed it under the girl’s chest. It went right below what must be her race’s taboo area, encircled as it was with a white undergarment.

Edison’s fur waved with nervous energy. Molly considered her other patient before she began. “I need you to keep her head to one side, okay? Make sure she’s getting air.”

He nodded vigorously and moved to cradle Anlyn’s head. Molly straddled the girl’s back as if she were about to give the Drenard a massage. She placed her left palm high on the girl’s thorax and wrapped her right hand around it. Locking her elbows, Molly leaned forward to apply some force straight down. She used her first tentative thrust to gauge the effort that was going to be required; she didn’t want to accidentally hurt her friend while attempting to save her. Resistance was surprisingly stiff, Anlyn’s bones unusually rigid to be so light.

Lifting her knees off the bunk, Molly hovered the full heft of her torso onto her arms, hoping the recent break in her right one could handle the thrusts. She pressed down with a fast and hard shove.

A loud crack shot out into the room. Molly felt a stabbing pain in her wrist, buckling her and sending her forward. Edison’s head snapped up in concern as Molly gasped in anticipation of severe pain.

But the snapping sound hadn’t come from her arm. It had come from Anlyn’s back!

Molly’s right arm felt tender, but not broken. She probed below Anlyn’s nape with her left hand and could feel the difference beneath her palm, like some wall of subcutaneous cartilage had broken free.

A new pocket of softness lie there. Molly had no idea if her efforts were helping or hurting, but she knew what would happen if she did nothing—Anlyn would die. She gritted her teeth against the pain in her wrist and started performing a series of steady thrusts.

Waves of purple spread out from beneath her hands with each push. Something definitely moved beneath Anlyn’s skin—fluids, perhaps, spreading out through her back. Molly counted twenty pushes while she watched for an evening of the color, then she rested and reached for the alien’s neck again. She encircled it completely with both hands, careful to not let her thumbs press too hard and fool her with her own pulse.

Nothing.

She rubbed her right wrist before putting her hands back in place, then watched a bead of sweat drip off her nose and splash on Anlyn’s bare back. Molly had a sudden impulse to tear her own flightsuit off; the damn thing was cooking her without the life-support system plugged in.

She felt Edison looking at her and met his eyes, saw the question on his face.

She shook her head.

Edison grimaced as she began another round of thrusts. A dozen more. She began to wonder if the purple waves of fluid beneath Anlyn’s skin were signs of forced circulation or just subcutaneous flow from the pressure.

Once again, she searched for a pulse, her wrist throbbing. She visually scanned the rest of the alien’s body for any sign of internal life, anything moving. Something twitched near the first knuckle of her left hand. Maybe. She slid the pads of two fingers there, holding her breath. Molly could hear her own pulse in her ears, confounding her. Was the skin on the back of Anlyn’s arm turning a pale shade of blue? Molly tried to guard against wishful thinking. Focus on—

But, there! A pulse. Molly searched the opposite side of her neck and found a weak sign of life there as well.

She smiled at Edison. “Help me roll her over.”

Edison tried to say something to her but couldn’t. Molly noticed for the first time that he’d been crying, that her normally verbose friend had not said a single thing since wailing her name. She wanted to ask him to say something, anything, to get the horrible echo of his groans out of her head.

But Edison seemed lost in space. He cradled his friend in his large arms, rocking her slightly. Molly watched him reach down to adjust one of the oxygen tubes coming out of her nose. She noted the delicate precision of his movements—one of his race’s defining characteristics—but saw something tender in the way he did it as well.

Molly touched both of her friends softly and hurried out of the room.

They needed to get help. Anlyn wasn’t out of the asteroid field yet.

“What’s going on?” Cole asked. “Is Edison okay?” He leaned around his seat, looking back through the cargo bay.

Molly worked her way into the pilot’s seat as she tried to work out Cole’s question. “It’s Anlyn,” she said. “Edison was just yelling for help. She has a bad case of SLAS. Really bad. Two-tone. It’s hard to really gauge because she’s so translucent.”

Cole looked as if he’d been punched in the gut. “Was it my alterations? Gods, I knew we should have tested them harder, it was only a matter of time before something like this—”

“Don’t jump to conclusions and don’t beat yourself up. We just need to get her to Drenard, and fast.” Molly checked their velocity. They were back to a sane rate of speed, but it was still higher than she’d like for another jump.

“We can probably make it in three more jumps. I’m guessing we’ve run the blockade by shaking the Navy back there.”

“Too much time cycling the hyperdrive. We need to try it in two. Pull up the Bel Tra charts and see if there’s a shortcut you feel comfortable risking. Maybe an L4 or an L5 we haven’t considered. And jump us as soon as our speed gets out of the red.” Molly pulled her nav keyboard out of the dash and rested it on her thighs.

“What’re you gonna do?”

“I need to have a chat with my mom. Find out what’s going on here.”

Cole looked over from the star charts. “Yeah, that’d be great.”

Molly skipped past the new questions on her nav screen. She felt bad about her mother being trapped in absolute darkness, calling out with no response for what probably felt like ages. This guilt, however, was offset by the way she was being kept in the dark. She just wanted to know where her father was, and what she needed to do to rescue him.

MOM?_

SWEETHEART, WHAT IN THE GALAXY IS GOING ON?_

ANLYN HAS A BAD CASE OF SLAS. WE’RE GONNA TRY AND GET HER TO DRENARD. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT YOU TOLD HER. HOW YOU SPEAK A LANGUAGE NOBODY IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW_

“Got it in two jumps,” Cole interrupted. Molly gave him a thumbs-up, but concentrated on what her mother was typing.

I CAN’T TELL YOU YET. I’M SORRY. YOU NEED TO TRUST ME. I PROMISE, I WOULDN’T KEEP ANYTHING FROM YOU THAT YOU NEEDED TO HEAR. TRY AND UNDERSTAND, YOUR FATHER AND I TRUST YOU WITHOUT EVEN REALLY KNOWING WHO YOU ARE. IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME_

There was a lull in the flow of words. Molly jumped in with another question: IF YOU TRUST ME, THEN JUST TELL ME WHAT’S GOING ON. THE NAVY WAS WILLING TO KILL ME TO GET THEIR HANDS ON THIS SHIP. LUCIN TRIED TO KILL ME, MOM_

She hated revealing this while she was angry. It was something she planned on getting to gradually. She felt bad as soon as she hit “enter,” wishing there was some way to delete it from her mother’s memory.

NO. NOT LUCIN_

The flat denial dissolved Molly’s will to remove the words. Now she wanted to pound them home.

YES, LUCIN. HE HAD A GUN ON ME. HE WANTED THIS SHIP BADLY ENOUGH TO KILL ME FOR IT. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON. I’M NOT A KID ANYMORE. I’M 16 AND I’VE BEEN CLEAR ACROSS THE GALAXY ON MY OWN, I’VE BEEN THROUGH SOME CRAZY STUFF IN THE PAST MONTH — I THINK I CAN HANDLE WHATEVER IT IS_

Molly watched as Cole finished an emergency spin-up of the hyperdrive, preparing for the first jump. She trusted his calculations and didn’t bother double-checking them. Instead, she concentrated on the nav screen while her stomach tightened up, maybe in preparation for the jump, possibly because of what her mother might tell her.

MAYBE YOU COULD HANDLE IT. THE NAVY COULDN’T, BUT MAYBE YOU COULD. WE’LL SEE. JUST KEEP IN MIND THAT WHATEVER SORT OF FAITH YOU’RE USING TO TRUST THAT THIS IS ME, I’M HAVING TO DO THE SAME THING TO TRUST THAT YOU ARE YOU. IT’S A DARK PLACE HERE. I’M JUST AS SCARED AS YOU ARE. MAYBE MORE, KNOWING WHAT I KNOW. WE’LL SORT THIS OUT ON THE WAY TO DAKURA OR LOK_

Molly tried to digest the idea that her mother couldn’t know who she was talking to. That she was just as much a stranger to her own mother as her mother was to her. It seemed to plug missing pieces into her view of the world. And no matter how many times this happened—that Molly learned things weren’t always what they seemed—she couldn’t yet seem to generalize the idea. She constantly felt wiser, yet she kept getting fooled. Or hurt. She leaned over the keyboard.

WE’RE GOING TO DRENARD FIRST. AFTER THAT, AND ONCE MY FRIEND IS OK, WE’LL GO TO DAKURA. I PROMISE_

OK, the screen read, BUT PLEASE, TALK TO ME. IT’S THE ONLY THING I’VE HAD SINCE YOU UNLOCKED ME_

Molly thought about that, her fingers resting on the keyboard. She understood completely. Suffering a childhood alone, lying in her bunk at night in the Academy, surrounded by darkness and the whispering of strangers… she understood. She used to lie in that state and dream of the comforting presence her missing parents could bring her.

She never imagined it could be the other way around. Or reciprocal.

Molly considered the things she’d like to have heard from her parents when she was alone and confused. She wondered what her mother would enjoy knowing. Once again, the realized dream of having a conversation with her mom paralyzed her. She didn’t know where to begin. Peering out through the carboglass, gazing at the stars, her fingers hovered over the keys while her mind raced.

Maybe just tidbits to start with. Random likes and dislikes. She started to type the first thing that came to mind while Cole thumbed the hyperdrive.

Outside, the constellations shifted.

Ever so slightly.

5

“Ssandwich?”

Molly turned from her typing to find Walter holding out some sort of food concoction, layers of leftovers neatly arranged between chunks of bread like geological strata.

“Mmm. No, but thank you,” she said politely.

Cole reached for the refused victuals. “Thanks, buddy.”

Walter snapped it back. “It’ss for Molly,” he hissed, his eyes narrow slits.

“I appreciate it,” Molly told him, “but my stomach isn’t feeling great. Cole can have it if he wants.” She looked over from her typing. “And why don’t you check in on Edison, see if he needs anything. And find out if Anlyn’s improved any.”

Cole took the reluctantly offered sandwich, “Thanks, man.”

“Don’t mention it,” Walter spat as he slunk out of the cockpit.

“That boy adores you,” Cole said around his first bite of sandwich.

Molly nodded. “I know. I wish he didn’t. Not so much.” She checked over her shoulder, then leaned toward Cole. “He creeps me out sometimes,” she whispered. “Then I feel like I’m just being xenophobic.” She straightened back up and pulled the keyboard close. She considered telling her mom more about Walter, but she wasn’t sure she could stick to saying nice things.

“He makes a mean sandwich, though. Oh—” Cole swallowed, then continued, “The Bel Tra have a general layout of Drenard, but they don’t have an orbital schedule. We were kinda expecting Anlyn to guide us in. Do we wait for her to come to, or do we just cross our fingers and hope we don’t jump into a small moon or a satellite?”

Molly typed: ONE SEC_ to her mom, then switched over to the chart.

“Hmmm.” She studied the Drenard system. It was one of those charts every Naval cadet recognized in an instant. Students pored over them while dreaming of a final assault, making plans for a massive invasion that would end the war.

Drenard was a binary star system, which created some strange orbital permutations. Strange for systems with sentient life, at least. Even though binaries are an extremely common astral configuration, they lead to orbits nonconducive to the evolution of large and complex life-forms.

Without an orbital schedule, Molly could only see where the planets and stars had been when the Bel Tra scouted the system, but not the dynamics of the Lagrange points in motion. Using estimates of mass and distance gave them rough guesses, which wasn’t good enough for the exactitude safe jumping required.

“Why don’t we come in the same way we escaped from the Navy?” she suggested. “We shoot for the L1 between the two stars, a point we know doesn’t move, and someplace too unstable for debris to be hanging out.”

“Good idea,” said Cole, “but it’ll be a long burn to Drenard from there. For Anlyn, I mean.”

“Any other choice gambles with all our lives. And we could risk another short jump once we’re in-system and have a visual.”

“Good point. Okay, the hyperdrive should be spooled up in a few minutes. And just so you know, we’ll be down to less than two percent on fusion fuel when we arrive. These quick cycles are murdering our fusion supply.”

“We’ll worry about that after we get Anlyn some help. Go ahead and jump as soon as you can.” Molly switched back to her mom and scanned the screen to see where she’d left off.

“What’re you ladies gabbing about over there?” Cole asked.

“Glemot,” she said.

Cole looked over, his eyebrows raised. “Really? Huh. I’m surprised.”

“Yeah, well, I’m telling her about the planet we found, not the mess we left behind.”

Cole turned back to the nav computer, seeming to want to say something, but restraining himself.

A sad silence fell over the cockpit before Molly’s loud and rapid typing broke the spell. She concentrated on the good, withholding the bad.

A style of communication her mother knew quite well.

The strangest thing about the jump into Drenard—the home system of Molly and Cole’s sworn enemy—was the naive nonchalance with which they did it. Piloting with the hubris of their youth, rather than the caution of their training, they had jumped across the front lines of a major war along unproven routes and arrival points. Desperation, and the pursuit of their own Navy, had pushed them far. Concern for their sick friend took them, unthinking, the rest of the way.

The only thing on Molly’s mind—beyond having rescued Anlyn from slavery and reuniting her with her people—was getting a friend some medical assistance. For Cole, trust had become a relative term, a commodity with fluctuating prices. Running from their own Navy for a month had him not just reconsidering allegiances, but forgetting where they once lay.

Still, there was no rational justification for what they’d just done: jumped into a hostile system with the sole local among their crew unconscious and unable to communicate. Of course, Drenard’s Orbital Defense Patrol saw their unexpected arrival much more clearly. It was a dire threat. A suicidal attack. A GN ship come to rain bombs on their home planet.

Such was their fear as the DODP jumped out to the unidentified contact on their SADAR units, weapons arming…

“Whoa. Lots of contacts.” Cole zoomed his SADAR unit out. “Hostile formation,” he added.

Molly saw it. And the representation of Parsona on the SADAR unit surrounded by a Drenard fleet shook her to her senses. She saw at once how this must look to them: a human ship popping out of hyperspace between their tightly orbiting twin stars. It’d be exactly where Molly would try to sneak into the system, even if she were dumb enough to try such a stunt on a race this technologically advanced.

Gods, I am that dumb, she realized. She looked over at Cole; neither of them had their helmets on. Anlyn was in her bunk, suffering from SLAS, and not even in her flightsuit. They’d be dead before the hyperdrive wound down and could be cycled back up.

“We’re so stupid.” She said.

None of the Drenard ships had fired yet, but they were closing in with a staggered formation—making it impossible to jump out even if the hyperdrive was ready. What did she expect? Without Anlyn to translate, was she really thinking she’d just fly in and land on the enemy’s home planet?

Molly flipped the radio on and grabbed her helmet. It was probably useless—Drenards weren’t known to communicate with Navy ships before destroying them—but she had to try.

“This is the starship Parsona to the Drenard fleet. Do not shoot. We come in peace. We have a sick Drenard youth onboard.” To Cole, she said: “Start flashing Parsona’s exterior lights in the GN distress patt—”

Parsona.

For the second time that day, Molly remembered she had someone else onboard that spoke Drenard. She reached to the keyboard and hurriedly typed to her mom:

QUICK, I NEED TO KNOW HOW TO SAY “WE COME IN PEACE” IN DRENARD_

A bizarre pair of symbols appeared on the screen in front of her—composed of straight lines, they looked like someone had dropped two bundles of sticks into separate piles.

PHONETICALLY_ she hurriedly typed, then glanced up at the SADAR screen. The rough encirclement was complete; a staggered line of Drenard fighters probed forward. In the back of her mind, she wondered if she’d spelled “phonetically” right.

SHEESTI LOOO. LONG E. AND THE LOOO SHOULD BE DRAWN OUT FOR AT LEAST TWO COUNTS_

Molly shook her head as she read the instructions. Her mom spoke Drenard, but no one else in the Navy did? It was too much—almost as crazy as having an actual Drenard as a friend. A shiver ran up her spine as she considered what the Navy would have done with Anlyn if they’d been captured. She activated the mic in her helmet.

“Sheesti Loooo. Sheesti Loooo. Sheesti Loooo,” she intoned, using the triplets common to Naval comms. She figured the repetition couldn’t hurt, even if Drenards did it differently. She looked over at Cole and nearly burst into laughter at the expression on his face. He was looking at her like she was crazy, both of his brows down low, casting a shadow over his narrowed eyes.

“Mom’s giving me Drenard lessons,” she explained, pointing to her nav screen.

The formation around them tightened, but no weapons were fired. Cole turned back to his displays. “I guess I don’t have room to talk, considering how fast I drew fire from the Navy.”

The radio squawked to life. Over the static created by the nearby stars, a strange yet pleasant cooing could be heard. Molly felt her eyelids growing heavy with the calm sounds.

“Any way for your mom to translate that?”

She turned to Cole. “Could you sound out what they just said?”

He shook his head.

“Well, we just about killed ourselves running from our own Navy,” Molly said. “What say we open the outer airlock and invite our enemy aboard?”

Cole flashed her the same look from a moment ago, his eyes retreating warily into dark caves. He reached for the airlock controls, but kept his gaze on her. “I do this under protest, Captain.”

“Duly noted,” Molly said. She unclipped her harness and watched through the carboglass as the flashing distress lights scattered across the nose of her ship.

She hoped the Drenards saw it as the white flag of assistance—not surrender.

Back when Molly and Cole first saw Anlyn in the Darrin System, they’d been shocked by how small and frail she seemed. The few front-line training videos they’d been shown at the Academy featured large and muscular aliens with dark blue flesh not nearly as translucent as hers.

After spending a few weeks with the young female Drenard, their reintroduction to the males brought another shock.

The first one came through the inner airlock stooped over. Even in the cargo bay, he couldn’t stand fully erect, which put him a bit under three meters tall.

He had a gold-colored helmet over his head and a thick neck, bunched with muscles, that led down into a decorative tunic. Powerful arms came out of a standard torso and clutched a metal lance of menacing proportions.

The weapon was kept down, pointed at the deck of the ship. Molly took it as a sign of respect, but the size and shape of the thing, combined with the fierce appearance of the large creature holding it, made her wonder if their ship itself was being threatened.

Two more Drenards squeezed through the airlock. The second was identical to the first; the third a bit smaller and weaponless. Rather than a single tunic, the last of the trio wore dozens of layers of them, each richly decorated. The innermost tunic was so long, he had to clutch the extra fabric near his stomach, which he did ceremoniously. He turned in place, surveying the crew and the ship, then launched into a soft and pleasant speech.

None of which made any sense to Molly, Cole or Walter.

“Sheesti Loooo,” Molly repeated, showing her palms.

The unarmed Drenard, already bent over slightly, bowed even further as he pulled the longest tunic up to his chin. The xenothropologist in Molly stirred at the gesture, but she didn’t have time to marvel at the cultural exchanges and the rarity of the encounter. Sworn enemy or not, all she wanted was to have them tend to Anlyn’s health without anyone else getting hurt in the process. She held up both hands to her chin, bowed as the Drenard had, and then slowly stepped toward the three fearsome figures. Somehow, she needed to squeeze past them to Edison’s room without increasing the tension in the ship.

The warriors didn’t seem to take her approach as hostile—or perhaps they couldn’t see Molly as a threat. They simply rotated their bodies to follow her movement, stepping aside slightly to allow her to pass. The ranking officer cocked his head in what Molly anthropomorphized as curiosity, but it could have been disapproval for all she knew.

She had to turn sideways to move through them, their bulk towering to either side like slabs of curtained blue steel. They loomed so close, she could smell them, a scent like warm stone.

Molly glanced down at one of the soldier’s massive hands, curled around his lance. She passed mere centimeters from him, her head not much higher than his waist. She imagined trying to fight one of these monsters, and flashed back to the fight in that Glemot bunker.

“Sheesti Looooo,” she repeated in a breathless whisper, more to herself than anyone else.

Getting past the barrier of raw muscle and into the after hallway gave her shivers of relief. If there’d been enough room, she probably would’ve taken off in a run, brushing at her arms to get rid of the willies from being so close to actual Drenard warriors. She held it together, though, and turned to the aliens as she backed away, waving with her hands for them to follow.

The officer complied. One of the warriors turned to size up Cole, his relaxed attitude suggesting no threat to be found. Molly watched this exchange as she backed into Edison’s room where her Glemot friend sat on his bunk, his long legs stretched out, Anlyn’s head on his lap.

The Drenard officer ducked through the door. When he raised his head, the two large aliens locked eyes, and Molly could feel the tension sparking across the room. The Drenard said something over his shoulder to his two companions. One of the warriors appeared at the door, his lance at a higher angle than before.

“This situation is non-optimal,” Edison said. “And the spatial requirements of our combined forms are not adequately met by the dimensional constraints of my room.”

Molly waved him silent. His English might be hard to understand, but the deep growling tenor of his voice might be something that cut across alien divides.

Using slow motions with her arms, Molly directed their guests’ attention toward the prone figure in Edison’s lap. Anlyn looked to be stable, but the front of her body remained heavily bruised from her bout of SLAS. She hadn’t moved, nor shown any signs of awareness, since they escaped from the human Navy. For all Molly knew, they were returning to the Drenard system with a brain-dead husk.

As soon as the officer saw the female Drenard, something changed. The muscles in both arms flinched, and he nearly dropped his tunics. He threw the lengths of fabric over his shoulder to get them out of the way and crossed the crowded room with one large step. He leaned over Anlyn, reached into her armpit gingerly, his other hand resting on Edison’s chest. Not so gingerly.

“Don’t move,” Molly told the cub.

Edison’s face twitched with the effort, the fur on his face and shoulders bristling. Molly pleaded with wide eyes for inaction. Her friend begged her in return with narrow slits—for something else.

The Drenard touched Anlyn in a few places, then felt her cheeks with both palms, his massive hands engulfing her small head. He turned to the warrior and said something short and soft.

Molly looked back and forth between them, trying in vain to read their body language, to get some sense of whether or not her friend would be okay.

When the officer scooped up Anlyn with one arm, Edison raised his hands in protest. Molly started to say something to calm him down, expecting the massive Drenard to shove at him with the large hand on his chest, but the officer pulled away instead.

Wrapping Anlyn in both arms, the officer leaned away from Edison, distancing himself.

Finally, a gesture Molly recognized. And not a good one.

“Wait—” she squeaked.

Edison rose as the crackle of electricity filled the room. A dazzling light whizzed past Molly’s head and struck him in the chest, sending him into a few brief spasms of vibrating limbs before his head crashed back against the bulkhead.

Molly spun to protest—to say the only two words of Drenard she knew—and saw the lance. Horizontal. Level with the deck. Her brain processed the meaning of this as the crackle of ionized atmosphere reached her ears.

The blast hit her square in the chest, launching her into the air and sending her flying toward the bunk.

She dearly wanted to arrest her fall before she passed out, but every muscle betrayed her—all of them contracting at once—vibrating with their refusal to cooperate.