Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

sleepy-eyed. She could see Saunders waving his arms in explanation, producing sheaves of paper, as smoke leaked from a crack in thick blast doors and GU guards moved in to investigate a contained explosion.

Nearer, now, she saw three friends hugging in the ruin of an old building. A crack of light, emitting photons that had streamed past her just moments ago, drifted around them. But high above, the Lokian sky kept moving up like a great zipper to swallow the whiteness. The closing of the rift sliced a Bern ship in half, just as it was coming out from hyperspace. The severed end of the craft leaked small figures, their arms waving in the snow-filled atmosphere as they and their craft fell toward the prairie.

And then there was Cole, emerging from the ruin of a downed ship. Cole the brave. Cole, her father. He was carrying a figure the Seer knew would be there, but didn’t want to know. It was Mortimor, her grandfather. Cole was crying, and the Seer felt the need to look away. She wanted to, but she couldn’t. Some things, some sights, she had avoided for too long. Avoided because such things shouldn’t be seen until they had already happened. So she forced herself to watch, taking solace in the opportunity she’d had to tell them both goodbye.

And Molly, flying. Her brave mother, not yet half the woman the Seer would know her to be. Tears were streaming down her mother’s young face, even though she did not yet know the full tally of her losses.

Her mother flew with bound hands, with a lifeless pet curled in her lap, with eyes sad and determined. She soared down toward the surface of Lok and all the horror and heartbreak that awaited her there.

And sitting silent at the locus of it all was Parsona. Her old ship. Her mom’s old ship and her grandfather’s old ship. It housed the one person—or thing—the Bern Seer had never gotten to pay her dues to. And now she never would.

The Seer suddenly realized she had seen enough. With a glance at the planet of Palan, that blue orb shimmering on its own film of cellophane-like vision, she saw that the time had come. The time had come to put a beginning to all things. She pulled her eyes away from the seeing lenses and returned to her world of utter blindness. Pushing up from the saddle, she slid back along its wet length to the small porch behind, the pounding of the rain on a tin roof loud and near.

With a shudder, the cabin heralded the passing of another event. Old hands gripped the rails, keeping the rest of her steady. With a weariness that can only come from seeing so much, the Bern Seer shuffled her way toward the back of her cabin, the patter of rain on her helmet urging her along.

She stopped by the two trunks on the back porch and sat on the one she never opened. She lifted the lid of the other one and set her helmet inside. As she nestled it in place, she rubbed her hands over the bumps and scrapes, feeling each indention.

Some of the marks were hers, and she remembered them well, her mind and recollection made keen from all the day’s activity. Other dents and dings belonged to her mother, and she only had stories to go with some of them. A scratch here from her crash into Glemot. A dent there where she said she’d once gone through a carboglass canopy after some cadet named Jakobs. One deep gash her mom would never talk about, always looking away with tears in her eyes.

In her normal, daily routine, the Seer would next take off the flightsuit. She would go to the galloping Theyrls, thank them for their hard work, then dry off inside and crawl between her sheets. But in a land where there were no days… this day was different.

She closed the lid before her and rotated around to sit on it. Leaning forward, she opened the trunk she never opened, grasping the lid tightly as the cabin shimmied yet again. Once the tremor passed, she lifted the lid all the way and locked it into place, having to grope for the unfamiliar clasp.

Inside the trunk lay the last hyperdrive Doctor Ryke would ever build. His “masterpiece,” he would one day call it. He had rigged it for the Seer’s blind eyes: Three simple buttons that could only be pressed in one particular order. She ran her hands along all three, familiarizing herself with them, recalling instructions given so long ago.

First, she said a silent word to her Theryl friends, who had held her and her cabin in place for so many endless hours. Nothing fancy—gods knew she wasn’t a poet—just a final thanks and a message of love. She then pressed the first button, setting loose half a liter of special fusion fuel.

There were a series of pops beyond the porch as the animals disappeared, whisked back to Phenos, hopefully for a long and lazy life of idle grazing on warm, dry fields.

As soon as they departed, the incessant creaking of the shack stopped. The vibrations halted. Like a ship turning out of the wind and moving to a broad reach, the Seer’s world fell silent while her tiny shack ceased its long fight against a slide into the past. Now it drifted along, moving with events rather than be bucked by them, coasting along on the surface of hyperspace.

The Seer pressed the second button, freeing most of the remaining fusion fuel. At first, nothing seemed to happen. There was a delay as the low, flat rift began to open above Palan’s solitary continent. Ryke had programmed the rift to iris out for seven hours, gobbling the rains before snapping shut forever. If the hyperdrive was his masterpiece, then this was Ryke’s crowning achievement, a breakthrough he wouldn’t have for many more years. The Seer tried to recall his explanation of how it would work, how hyperspace, by its very nature, multiplied the two keys of life: light and water. She never could appreciate how all the persistent rain and snow of her home came from mere molecules of water and a handful of photons, but she had seen enough strangeness there to take some things for granted. If Ryke said a single Palan rain, falling through a rift opened over its lone continent and multiplied a trillion trillion times would be enough to destroy hyperspace, the Seer was inclined to believe him.

Now that the second button was pressed—that button she had long agonized over—the Seer could allow herself to feel sorry for the billions of innocents she had just doomed. They would become stranded as hyperspace closed to them forever. There were ships between work and home, fleets along lines of battle, families separated from one another by work or happenstance, people injured in need of a hospital. Soon, hyperspace would be unavailable to them. Jolts of electricity might shock fusion critters in their fuel tanks, but they would no longer respond. The days of cheap, instantaneous travel for most people were over, including for the spreading Empire of the Bern.

The Seer could no longer see their massive invasion fleet arranged throughout hyperspace, but she could feel their violating presence. She took solace in knowing that the billions of lives of blood on her hands would also be the undoing of the Bern, the rulers of tens of thousands of universes. She pictured her land, a giant cone, as it filled to bursting with Palan’s water. She thought about all the slits, the little tears each of those invading Bern warships had left behind from their jumps into hyperspace. Each one would soon burst open, freeing a shower of frozen water, all of it laced with the Bern’s microscopic undoing, the creatures known as fusion fuel. Soon, they would conquer all attempts by the Bern to hem in life and control it. They would free countless other galaxies, just as they had ensured the Milky Way and its local cluster would remain too wild to tame.

A sharp pain in the Seer’s knuckle disturbed her lapse into dreaming. She was still holding down the second button, her finger trembling under the furious strain. She let go. She reminded herself to breathe.

She wasn’t sure how much more time she had. It was a novel sensation after years of not being able to be late, of never having time run out on anything, but now she had so little of it left.

The floods were going to come and take her away.

So the Bern Seer pressed the third button, the one she had begged Ryke to include, the one they had argued over, as neither of them understood its consequences. Not even Ryke and his powerful mind, not the Seer with her all-seeing vision, could tell what might become of it. Still, they saw no other way to protect the past and warn the future, so the remaining fusion fuel disappeared, moving through time and space, taking along what they chose to, or were told to.

In this case, they grabbed a simple silver canister, beat up and dented, but containing a strange and dangerous letter. It was a letter addressed to the very person who had written it, kept safe in a cylinder once used to send messages of peace through hyperspace to the planet Drenard.

The Seer knew Doctor Ryke would find the letter and use his own imparted knowledge to best purposes. He would learn about the end of hyperspace and the need for a handful of rifts stationed throughout the Milky Way, rifts to link major planets like Earth, Drenard, and now Lok. He would also learn not to build too many, about the danger in weakening the fabric of space. He would even learn hints of a new type of hyperdrive that would aid travel in strange ways. He would receive the barest tease of formulas his older brain glimpsed brilliance in, that perhaps his youthful mind could fully sort out.