by Hugh Howey
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 h
e 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.
