Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

cargo bay made the back and forth chatter difficult to hear.

“Copy that. Hold for instructions.”

“They sound very calm about taking over our galaxy,” Molly said. “Like it’s nothing.”

“Quite calm,” Parsona agreed. Her mother’s voice came out of the radio speakers as the hiss-filled chatter ceased.

Cat took a sip from her mug and returned it to its holder. “It ain’t their first dance, you know.”

“What do you mean?” Molly asked.

“I mean, there’s probably just a handful of galaxies they don’t already got their mitts on. I imagine this ain’t as exciting or novel for them as it is for us.”

Molly moved the Wadi to the control console, its tail tracing circles in the air as it chomped on the last few bites of sandwich.

“What do you know about them?” Molly asked Cat. She turned in her seat and pulled her knees up to her chest.

Cat smiled and arranged herself sideways as well, her lean brown legs folded up in front of her. She adjusted the fabric band around one of her thighs and looked over her knees at Molly. “Whatcha wanna know?”

“Why are they doing this? If they have so much, why not just leave us alone?”

“What if we ain’t the good guys?” Cat asked.

“Cat, don’t you fill her head with any nonsense,” Parsona said. “I don’t want to hear—”

Molly reached over and flicked the radio speaker off. “Mom, I love you, and you can listen in, but I want to hear what she has to say.”

Cat lifted her mug and smiled through the steam, almost as if to salute Molly for taking a stand. She then turned up the lip and took another deep gulp without first bothering to blow across the piping hot surface.

“Your mom’s right,” Cat said, smacking her lips. “You shouldn’t listen to me.”

“But I want to know what you mean. What you think. I want to help you, if I can.”

Cat laughed. “Help me?” She shook her head. “What makes you think I need helping?”

“I—” Molly reached to the side and muted the cockpit mic, silently apologizing to her mom for excluding her fully from the conversation. “I saw you with the rod in the campfire the other night, how you kept making it glow before wrapping your hand around it. I asked Scottie about it and he told me—”

“He told you to mind your own business, didn’t he?”

Molly nodded.

“He’s sweet to protect me like that, but I don’t care if you know.” Cat shrugged. “Hell, I told people all kindsa stuff for years, but they just look at me like I’m crazy.” The Callite glanced up at the ceiling of the cockpit, her eyes narrowing to vertical slits. “Don’t care if your mom hears, neither.”

Molly reached to turn off the mute but then stopped herself. She did care about letting someone else in on the conversation.

“What have you been telling people for years?” Molly asked, with-drawing her hand.

“That the Drenards mean no harm. That we’re the bad guys. Stuff that tends to get you beat up.”

“Is that why you say those things? Just to get beat up?”

Cat shrugged.

“You enjoy the pain, don’t you? Why is that?”

Cat shook her head. “Naw, that ain’t it. I don’t enjoy the pain. I just hate the numbness. And I say them things because they’re true, that’s all.”

“So you don’t feel anything?” Molly crossed her arms and settled back against the panel behind her. “That sounds nice, to tell you the truth.”

“Bullshit,” Cat said softly. She spread her knees and leaned closer to Molly. One hand came up, a brown and scaly fist. It wavered in the air. “Ain’t nothing worse than being numb,” she whispered. “Nothing. I—” She took a deep breath and dropped her hand. “I was born with numbness, with problems in both legs. Couldn’t walk a lick.” Cat leaned back and grabbed her mug. She didn’t drink; she just kept both hands wrapped around it and peered into the steam.

“Go on,” Molly said, then felt bad for being pushy.

“I was raised by my grandparents,” Cat said. “They hadn’t raised their own kids, though. It was like parenting skips a generation in my family, you know? Anyway, they were clueless. Didn’t know nothing was wrong till I was five or six and still crawling around on my hands and knees. Other kids knew something was up long before. They took to calling me Cat, like one of the strays in the village.”

“I thought it was short for Catherine,” Molly said.

“Naw, I lengthened it to Catherine. No point in fighting every kid in town over something so stupid, so I adopted the name. Soon as they figured that out, they started calling me Cripple. Or Cripple Cat.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Spoken like an only child.” Cat smiled through the steam rising out of her mug. “I thought you said you went through the Academy.”

Molly clenched her jaw. She thought about some of the abuses she’d suffered, but none seemed as bad as what Cat had been through. Still, she got Cat’s point about the random cruelty of youth.

“Them kids done me a favor, way I see it. They not only showed me how I was supposed to be walking, they showed me how not to be behaving. Family couldn’t afford no hoverchair or prosthetics, so I made myself some walking sticks and started working out at a young age. Went health crazy. Started eating nothing but fruit and veggies from a half dozen planets and drank a few gallons of water a day.” Cat slapped her thighs and stared at her bare legs. “Thought I could fix ’em by working hard enough at it.”

“And you obviously did,” Molly said.

Cat shook her head. “Naw. I was—”

“Belay, we’ve reached the armory. Bagging up supplies and rigging the ascenders, over.”

Cat squeezed the radio. “Copy.”

“Make sure they leave the lines,” Molly said.

“Be sure to leave everything in place,” Cat radioed.

“Copy that. Belay, over and out.”

Molly and Cat smirked at each other.

“Where was I?” Cat asked. “Didn’t you want to hear about the Bern? How’d we get to talking about my childhood?”

“It’s fine. It’ll take them a lot longer to climb back up. You were telling me how you learned to walk by eating healthy.”

Cat shook her head. “Nope. I never did. Well, not like that. I dropped out of school when I was twelve. Moved to another town and started working in a plant putting buggies together. I could sit in one place with the other Callites while the parts came by, doing the stuff they did, only with a Lokian accent they made fun of me for. Anyways, I made enough not to starve. Won’t bore you with the next few years, but I eventually moved up to delivery and learned to fly. Did some local stuff around Lok, then eventually got assigned to the run between here and Vega.”

“You were a pilot?”

“Yeah, something you don’t need legs for, apparently. Unless, of course, your shift is short a man one day and you decide to run a shipment solo, then your boss figures you can do that all the time, and he starts cutting corners and pocketing the savings. Then, one day, your nav computer goes haywire and you need to run to the engine room to hit the emergency shutdown button on the hyperdrive before it jumps with bum digits, but you’re crawling through the cargo bay, dragging yourself along, breaking fingernails back on rivets and crying like a sap, and you’re not halfway to the engine room before the ship makes a bad jump—”

Cat peered into her mug.

“All that happened to you?” Molly whispered.

“Brightest shit I ever seen came next, the light flooding the ship through every porthole and crack. Thought I