Molly Fyde and the Land of Light tbs-2

by Hugh Howey

  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 “era
sed.”

  “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 anythin
g 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.”