Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

swallow.

“You be careful, Cat.”

“I will,” she mumbled into his shoulder.

Ryn hugged her next, his powerful Callite hands slapping fondly at her back.

“Don’t hesitate to send up those missiles,” she told the boys. “Don’t you think on me and Molly—you worry about that fleet coming back from Darrin.”

“We won’t let you down,” Scottie said.

Cat pulled out of the hug and waved the boys back. She stepped onto the jump platform and sat down in the ready position, her arms wrapped around her chest, her legs pulled up in front of her. She looked up to Ryke to let him know she was ready and caught him wiping at his eyes. The tears that had snuck by glistened in his beard.

“Let’s do it,” she told him.

He shook his head sadly, but stepped to the relocated control console. Ryke glanced up one final time, his finger poised over the button, and seemed to want to say something. For Cat, it was the first and last time she’d known the chatty frontiersman to be at a loss for words.

••••

The jump happened in a jarring, disorienting flash. The cargo bay and her friends winked out of existence, and Cat popped out of hyperspace one meter above and two meters to the side of Molly’s hyperspace trace. The idea had been to follow her, but not precisely. With the modified hyperdrive they were using, two dangers were to be avoided: one risk was arriving in the middle of something solid; the other was the risk of arriving in the middle of Molly. To minimize both, Cat arrived higher than Molly’s head and in as tight a ball as she could manage.

It wasn’t tight enough, however, and the direction they’d chosen to offset proved unfortunate. Both of Cat’s feet and the entire length of one shin immediately occupied the same space as a solid metal wall. Molecules jiggled as their electrons made room for these incoming strangers, and the two elements fused into a new one—a living alloy of steel, a dying wound of flesh, or something of both.

Cat cried out in shock. It was the shock of pure raw pain. It was the rape of neurons.

Her body fell back, limp, bending at the waist.

She pivoted around the stuck bits of herself, her back slamming against the steel, her skull cracking against it just a moment later. Cat hung there, upside down, gasping for air. The pull of her weight against the invaded flesh heightened the experience. Through the haze of it all, she could see transparent walls surrounding her, like a cell, but with no sign of Molly or Walter. She could’ve jumped right on top of the trace coordinates and been perfectly safe.

But then, she would’ve missed out on experiencing all that glorious pain.

More of it lanced out of her foot, as neurons too shocked at first to respond finally kicked into gear. Cat ground her teeth as she hung upside down. Her lips quivered somewhere between a grim sneer and an ecstatic smile. She flexed her stomach muscles and hoisted herself up, levering off her trapped shinbone back into a semblance of the ball in which she’d arrived. Glancing down by her waist, she saw her radio had fused with the wall as well. Thankfully, the buckblade swung free from her belt. She pulled the weapon loose and powered it on, careful to keep it pointed away from herself. Working slowly, concentrating on not puncturing the steel wall in case the vacuum of space existed beyond, she moved the blade down across the surface of the steel with the invisible thread parallel to it. She slid the molecule-wide cutter through the top of her knee, hacking her shinbone in two. She watched the flesh part under the weight of her body, the blue insides revealing themselves as her flesh magically unzipped. She continued to cut, upset at having to do it, at having the painless blade move through her gloriously injured nerves, parting their connections to her brain. She would have preferred to hang there, enjoying the agonizing sensation a little longer, but Molly needed her.

So Cat cut herself free, slicing down to her ankle where both feet were taken off just before the heels. With over an inch of meat still to go, her weight did the rest and ripped what remained, tearing the flesh in two. She fell and slammed into the steel decking below, sending out a spray of blue Callite blood tinged with purple.

Cat lay perfectly still, groping in her mind for the throbbing ache, the sensation of hurt. She pawed at it with mental fingers even as she felt the roar begin to fade and slip through her numbed grasp. Lying in a pile of her own blood, chunks of her former body hanging above and dripping her vitality down the wall, Cat the Callite groaned with dismay at the end of the experience, the end of the welcomed and foreign pain, and the beginning of the cursed healing.

41 · Lok

Parsona flew herself low and fast, the buffeting wind of her approach flattening the grasses ahead and the flame of her thrusters leaving them smoldering behind. Over the horizon, the glow of dawn signaled an end to their short preparation time and the looming return of the fleet from Darrin.

Doctor Ryke rode alone in the cockpit, watching the instruments arrayed across the dash as the mighty ship piloted itself. In the cargo bay, Scottie and Ryn coiled hyperdrive wires, their climbing harnesses already on, carabineers and ascenders jangling as they worked.

“Are you sure you can duplicate what that Palan boy did with the missiles?” Ryke asked Parsona.

“I have total recall, Sam. I’m looking at Walter’s individual keystrokes right now. It’s a pretty clever hack.”

“That means you can arm them remotely, right?”

“I can, I’m just not sure yet if I’ll be able to, if that makes any sense.”

Ryke mulled that over. He wondered if he would be capable of doing what they were asking of Parsona. Would he be able to send those missiles through hyperspace? Could he kill his only child in order to save a galaxy? What about a universe—did that finally tip the scales? It was so easy to expect it from another when looking at the equation from without, but then… he didn’t know what it meant to have a child, or to be in a position to make that level of sacrifice.

“It is a large ship,” he reminded Parsona. “It’s the size of a moon. We won’t send any of the missiles near Molly’s coordinates.”

“You know that would just be symbolic, Sam. We aim to kill her and Cat both, or all the ships returning from Darrin will go down as sure and fast as Zebra, and all the fleets of all the Milky Way’s worlds will soon follow.”

“You can’t be sure. Let’s not think like that—”

“I wish you hadn’t let Cat talk you into jumping her up there,” Parsona said.

“You coulda stopped her just as well. It’s your drive and all.”

Parsona seemed to hesitate.

“No,” she finally said quietly. “You’re right. And I’m sorry. Besides, there’s no stopping her once she gets like that. I—Life is full of hard choices, I guess. Even when you can crunch all the probable outcomes in a blink.”

“Yeah,” Ryke said, nodding and completely understanding. He looked up through the carboglass as the dark silhouette of the upright StarCarrier came into view. Another few minutes and they’d be there.

“I have to be honest with you, Sam. If it weren’t for Anlyn, I’d refuse to do this. It wouldn’t even be a question to ponder. The Bern could take the whole flanking galaxy for all I care, just for the chance they’d keep Molly alive afterwards.”

“Anlyn? The Drenard? I didn’t know you guys were that close.”

“It’s not so much that. Well, that’s not true, we are close. She made a huge sacrifice to make this all possible. But the reason I have to save her is because it’s what Molly would do if she were here. It’s what she would want me to do. I don’t think she’d forgive me if I chose any other way. Yeah, she might survive if I don’t agree to arm the missiles, but she’d be miserable the rest of her life. She’d hate me and loathe her own existence if saving her meant Anlyn came back to an ambush. I couldn’t force her to live with that kind of guilt, you know?”

Ryke nodded sadly, understanding the last bit, if nothing else.

“I guess that’s it then,” Parsona said. “It’s one thing to calculate it all, another to voice the decision and feel