Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

like you’ve really made it.” She paused. “The hyperdrive is completely cycled by the way, and we have nineteen point—”

Parsona’s voice clipped off mid-word, like a mechanical trap snapping down over her thoughts.

“Parsona?” Ryke asked.

Without warning, the ship banked hard to port, the thrusters roaring up into the red curve of the gauge. Ryke grunted as he was thrown to the side. A frightening clatter rang out from the cargo bay as piles of gear slammed into one wall followed by hollered complaints and a bout of startled cursing.

“What in the—?” Ryke began, but the radio cut him off. It came on blaring, with the background hiss of the Drenard Underground’s carrier frequency:

“—mayday, mayday, group two is going down. Repeat: we have Mortimor, but we are under attack and going down. Group two is through the rift and going down—”

••••

The Bern guards drug a furious Walter and a stunned Molly down a long corridor of transparent walls. Molly was dimly aware that a heated conversation was taking place ahead of her, but her mind felt too unraveled to participate. She lost herself in the sight of the endless glass cells, thousands and thousands of them converging in the unseen distance. The cleanliness and orderliness of the passageway filled her with a hollow dread. No, she realized, it wasn’t the neatness—it was the emptiness. It was the horrible sense of what must loom ahead, of what that ship had been designed for.

Molly wondered, if their plan on Lok failed, how long it would take for the corridor and hundreds more like it to be filled to the rim with screaming and crying refugees and prisoners of war. Looking at the empty rooms was like looking at a loaded gun, at chambers of awful potential. It made it somehow easier for Molly to see what things would look like once they failed, once the barrel was smoking and spent, once a thousand worlds had succumbed to that invading fleet, and once all those rooms were full of the people she had let down.

Her imagination tortured her with such thoughts until the guards pulled them inside a lift. Molly was actually thankful to find herself within its confines. The sliding doors pinched shut on all those waiting and empty rooms.

And that’s when Molly realized how tired she was. She tried to remember when last she’d slept. The previous night had been spent planning what now must be falling apart. The night before, she had been dealing with the Callites. The night before that, she had been strapped down and unwillingly giving blood. And now, she could feel her sense of where she was and what she was supposed to be doing slipping away from her. Through her numbed senses, her environment took on a dreamlike quality. One of the only things she was aware of was the Wadi trembling against her thigh.

She also heard Walter, his hissing dulled by the fog in her mind. She heard him vaguely arguing about mountains of gold and promises broken. The flanking Palan hadn’t shut up since their arrival. Then she remembered where she was and why. As she watched Walter beg and plead—his promises and lies mashed together in a pathetic blabber—some inner, resigned, shameful part of her hoped they were both being marched to their deaths.

At least that would make it impossible for her to ever make the mistake of trusting him again.

••••

The Wadi’s scent tongue flicked out of the soft cave, tasting the air. Trails of emotion—bright columns of drifting feelings like chords of raw communication—flashed in the creature’s head.

Something was wrong.

The good person’s scent was as black as she’d known it, and the bad one’s was as guilt-ridden and empathetic as it had ever been. The two constants in her environment, the bright smells that were always there like the twin lights of her home, seemed to be converging. Would they shift, taking each other’s place just like the rays that soaked her canyons often did? It wasn’t time yet for that change, she thought. This must be something different. Something new.

And there were other smells. Some were similar to the good one, the same type of animal or very close. Their emotions were easy to read: Ingrained duty, blind faith, the stubbornness and self-righteousness of male Wadi. If her constant companions had her confused, these others did not. They were the enemy. They were big and strong and doing harm they could justify. They were doing it without flinching. Just as the male Wadi had done to her so many cycles ago.

••••

Cat didn’t wait for her toes to fully form—she didn’t know if she had the time. Standing on her crippled feet, slipping in her own blue blood, she reactivated her buckblade and hobbled toward the glass wall between her and the corridor outside.

Her reflection greeted her in the glare of the clear material. She saw dried blood coating her legs from the knees down, the white of half-formed bone still visible through her stitching flesh. The rest of her was pale with so much blood loss. Her brown, webbed skin looked almost tan and human-like from the drain. Cat felt a surge of dizziness from the sight of it all. She flicked her wrist, and a rough circle of the cell wall fell away, taking the reflection of her with it. The clear slab landed on the metal decking outside with the chime and heft of solid diamond.

Cat sniffed the air, searching for the scent of the Palan or the Wadi, two quite distinguishable odors. She turned left, following a weak trail of fear. Behind her, she left her own sign of passing as the decking of the hallway became marked with smears of blue blood, dotted between them with wavy traces of splattered drippings.

Most of it was residue, the actual bleeding nearly stopped and the front edge of her shins regenerating with the practiced ease of a good brawl. Her pace evened out as she moved. The pads of her feet and then the stumps of her toes began to emerge anew as genetic code, junk DNA, holdovers from swerves in her evolutionary lineage, did their thing. A past adaptation from a distant, tree-dwelling ancestor had been unlocked by too much Lokian water, too many of the little life-loving critters inside that couldn’t leave well enough alone.

Cat healed as she hurried, healed even as she snuck up on the first guard station. It quickly became a mess. Not so much because of the two corpses she left behind, splurting crimson in arterial arcs, but because she’d nearly let one of them reach out and activate an alarm. The blood loss had her fighting sloppy, unable to concentrate. Cat took a deep breath and tried to steady her nerves. She searched both guards and came away with swipe badges and a radio, the latter useless with her rusty Bern. What weapons they had on them paled compared to what she wielded, so she left them behind and danced away from the spreading pools of red blood, running down the corridor, resolved that the next guard station would go smoother. Or less messy, in a way.

••••

The lift shuddered with a sense of great speed, taking them on what felt to be a very long ride. Molly endured it in silence, her thoughts racing as well. After a minute or more, the lights beside the lift doors lit up, and they opened to reveal a long ship-docking port.

Molly immediately recognized the layout as the guards drug her from the lift. She would have known what it was even without the revealing glimpses through the large portholes to either side.

Ahead of her, a long corridor stretched out with airlock hatches staggered in a classic docking bay pattern, allowing each ship’s wings to occupy the void created on the opposite side. Through the wide portholes, Molly could see various hulls locked to each hatch. Judging by the distance between hatches, and the length of their elevator ride, she felt certain they were in the biggest Bern ship, but she still didn’t understand why Walter had brought them there. She sensed that he thought, on some twisted level, that he and Byrne were on the same side, or that there was some sort of reward for bringing her along.

As the group of men drug her forward, Molly caught a glimpse of Lok far below, its bright film of blue atmosphere wrapped around the prairie brown. It looked like a Drenard’s translucent skin encasing bone. The view was just a flash, the sight gone as quickly as it came, blocked by the wing of a hanging ship. Losing the sight made Molly struggle against her captors for the first time; she pushed back against the guard, itching for one more peek of her old home before it and everything else was gone forever.

The guard shoved her forward, denying her a second look. But Molly felt, in that brief struggle, the strength of muscle and tendon in him and not the iron clutch she’d once felt with Byrne. Unless they were being gentle on purpose, these other men were different. More Human. She filed this away as the guards stopped by one of the airlock doors. It was keyed open, and Byrne stepped inside, his armless form at once