by Hugh Howey
26 · Lok · The Present
Mere hours after Molly dealt with Saunders’s reaction to Anlyn, she found herself faced with an even more daunting proposition: Now she had to introduce her friend to an entire crowd, a crowd that had been raised and taught to loathe her kind.
She cupped her hands around her face and leaned against the cargo bay’s porthole. Beyond, in the dim glow of Parsona’s landing lights, she could see the surviving Navy crewmen and the remaining Callites seated in rows, listening to Admiral Saunders speak.
“I’m nervous,” Anlyn said beside her.
Molly turned to see her friend’s face pressed up against the adjacent porthole, looking out.
“It’s not too late to back out,” Molly said. “You don’t have to lead this mission if you don’t want. I could go, and you could take Parsona to the Carrier for the missiles. You’d be hidden there—”
Anlyn shook her head but continued to gaze out through the carboglass. “I’m not nervous about that,” she said. “Going back to Darrin, flying in combat again… I think I can handle those things—”
“Are you nervous about facing them?” Molly pressed a finger to the glass.
Anlyn turned away from the view outside. “Let’s put it this way: If you didn’t have all the guns stored away in here, I don’t think I’d feel safe going out there.”
“They’ll be fine. The Admiral is breaking the news to them gradually, so there won’t be the same degree of shock.” Molly looked back out the porthole. “I hope,” she added quietly to herself.
Saunders looked like he was just warming up, his arm-waving reminding Molly of her Academy days and all his energetic debriefings after simulator missions. Like all his former cadets in the audience, she could tell when he was nearing his final point by how high his hands got in the air. They fluttered like featherless, wounded birds flapping for altitude. The poor things hadn’t made it past his shoulders yet, so she went to see how Ryke’s engineering lesson was going.
Molly joined Edison in the aft hallway and peered into the engine room.
Two of the new arrivals from the Underground—warped down from another of the captured Bern ships just hours earlier—were also in the hall. One was a Callite, an old recruit from Lok and a friend of Dr. Ryke’s. The other was a race Molly had never seen before, a smaller version of the Bel-Tra, thin and hairless. The two of them quietly chatted together, paying little attention to the lesson going on inside the engine room. Molly hoped their distracted affect meant they already knew what they were doing.
She patted Edison’s arm, and he moved aside enough for her to peek in. Ryke stood in front of Parsona’s hyperdrive. He had the control panel off, wires hanging everywhere. A large electrical schematic was taped to the side of the open drive, and Ryke waved a soldering iron in the air as he spoke. Molly listened in for a minute; she watched several of the gathered nod their heads as they absorbed the step by step routine. Counting Edison, they had a total of seven engineers who would soon know how to make alterations to hyperdrives, giving them the potential to jump from any one place to another while ignoring gravity and all obstructions between.
The only other piece they needed to make it work was Ryke’s secret nav program. It was at that point in his earlier conversation with Molly that she had balked. Her preference had been to wave off the entire mission, taking their chances with the long way back, rather than risk trusting anyone with such powerful knowledge. But Ryke had just grown more excited, explaining the alterations he could make to the code to create an absolute failsafe.
Each drive they altered, he explained, would be good for a single jump. Four of the tap wires soldered by the engineers would have nothing to do with making the modification work. They would fire when the hyperdrive engaged, but they would be connected to the control board that housed Ryke’s program. The ship would make its solitary jump from Darrin back to Lok, but the business end of the hyperdrive would jump somewhere else entirely.
Molly stood by the engine room door and watched Ryke conduct the lesson. She smiled as he paused now and then to scratch his beard or brush his hands across the schematic. The Lokian dialect seemed an odd match with the subject matter. Combined with his squat build, the jarring mix of pure genius and provincial upbringing made him instantly lovable.
“I think they’re almost ready for us,” Anlyn whispered.
Molly turned to see her friend at her side, her pale blue face scrunched up in what she recognized as Drenard worry. She nodded, then reached past Edison and waved at Ryke.
“Five more minutes,” Ryke said, holding up his grease-streaked hand, his stubby fingers spread out.
Molly patted Edison on the back and followed Anlyn into the cargo bay. In the cockpit, she could see Cat leaning back against the console, her lips moving as she conversed with Parsona. Molly snapped her fingers and waved, then pointed toward the cargo ramp. Cat nodded and held up one finger. Someone slapped on the outside of the hull.
“You ready?” Molly asked Anlyn.
“No, but let’s do it anyway.”
Molly keyed the loading ramp open. The lip swung away and toward the dirt, gradually revealing the faces of those standing in the back rows and then those seated on the ground. A palpable wave of shock washed over the bodies of those gathered, Human and Callite alike. Molly could sense two conflicting emotions in Gloria’s survivors, both of them borne of military training. There was the primal and uncontrollable fear reaction of seeing an enemy in the flesh, and then there was the stoic formality unique to a gathering of those in uniform.
Anlyn stepped cautiously onto the ramp, her boots joining the whistles of the night bugs as the only sounds. The regal tunics she had been wearing for weeks had been replaced with her old Parsona flightsuit, which she and Molly agreed would soften the visual blow and help the gathered see her as a pilot and one of them.
Anlyn held up both of her slender arms, the lights from the cargo bay filtering around them and into the dark forest beyond, casting large and hazy shadows.
“Greetings,” she said. “My name is Anlyn Hooo.”
Molly watched her friend scan the crowd, amazed at the poise and bearing of what she had once seen as a fragile girl in slave chains.
“I wish I could greet you in peace,” Anlyn said, “but I bring you tidings of war instead. War against a common foe that has, for too long, brought our races together in conflict. Your commander has just told you the nature of the threat above us, these glimmers in the night sky that shot down your friends and loved ones. Know then, that I was raised to fear the sight of you, just as you were trained to loathe the visage you see standing before you tonight—”
“We’re supposed to trust you?”
Anlyn stopped speaking, her arms frozen mid-gesture. The gathered grumbled, turning to look amongst themselves, but no one took credit for saying it. Saunders stepped toward the cargo ramp, his face lit up crimson in the light spilling out of Parsona.
Molly waved him off and stepped forward, taking a spot beside Anlyn.
“Do you trust me?” she asked the crowd.
There were nods and a chorus of assents, none among either of the groups easily forgetting the nature of their rescue.
“Yeah, but you’re one of us!” someone shouted.
“Am I?” Molly asked. She took another step forward. “Am I one of you? As most of you know, I was recently locked up on your very ship for murder and for treason. Am I one of you? I was kicked out of the Academy for being different. I never graduated as you did.”
“You’re asking us to follow a Drenard into battle,” the anonymous voice protested.
“Would you follow me?” Molly asked. “A girl, not yet eighteen, with no military credentials to her name. Would you follow me into battle?”
The chorus of assents was louder, the back few rows of seated rising to their feet.
“Well, I am a Drenard!” Molly shouted, pressing her fist to her chest. “I have been to their home planet. I have p
articipated in ancient rites, and I am just as much a Drenard as she.” She pointed to Anlyn, and the crowd hushed. Even the night bugs ceased their twittering.
“The only difference between me and Anlyn is that I’m not half the pilot she is. I don’t have a fraction of the familiarity with where you’re going. She—” Molly took a step back up the ramp and put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. She lowered her voice. “She was held captive, a slave, by a Human from the Darrin system. She has more reason to hate our race than we have of hating hers—but she is able to see past this. And now I beg of you to show the same restraint.” Molly scanned the crowd, pausing to catch her breath. “Anlyn is my friend,” she said simply. “If you trust me, you can trust her.”
The crowd remained still. Saunders stood frozen between them and the ramp, only his head moving as he turned to look back and forth from the duo to the assembled crowd. Anlyn squeezed Molly’s shoulder, then took a step down the ramp.
“The present is defined by history,” she said softly. “Hate burns from fires set so long ago that their source has become charred and forgotten—it has become a mystery. There is so much more to fear here than simply each other.”
She pointed to the sky. “There is our doom, whether it is on the battlefield of tomorrow or our gradual defeat a generation hence. Look at how few of you remain from your previous encounter. Just an inconsequential fraction. Well, our distrust of each other is just as meaningless. We have a chance, however slim, to succeed—to take down even a handful of those great ships above. And even if we fail, even if we join the already fallen, our actions, taken together, will be the locus of a new fire, one that might spread through the generations. One of trust and hope, rather than hate and fear. Today could eventually become the new past that shapes a better tomorrow.”
Her soft voice faded out over the crowd and amongst the trees. The night bugs resumed whistling, softy at first, testing this strange intrusion into their habits. Molly watched the crowd as they turned to each other, whispers growing into murmurs as the twilight chirping swelled to its own chorus. Molly feared the solid stone of military formality had been cracked by their doubts, fear and rage seeping through the fractures. She feared the Callites would see more empty promises, more potential letdowns.
But the whisperings and murmurs didn’t grow any further. They didn’t rise with a mad hiss interspersed with shouts for violence. The hushed sputtering remained calm and grew calmer. The crowd seemed to be accepting—believing—or at least wanting to.
Saunders strolled up the ramp, his eyes sparkling with wetness as he glanced toward Molly and Anlyn. He took his place between the two girls, his poise and carriage several light years from the shocked pile of jelly he’d been earlier that afternoon. He looked out over the Callites and what remained of his fleet, his throat bobbing as he fished for his voice.
“For the Gloria,” he finally said, his words cracking with emotion.
“For the Gloria,” someone whispered.
“The Gloria,” Molly said.
The chant grew, finding its rhythm, gathering its voice even among the Callites, who had their own, smaller shuttle crashes to consider. These aliens rose alongside the meager survivors of a once-great ship, stirred by the cheer, all of them defying the silence of the night. They stood and shouted in the openness of that wooded clearing, daring the menacing fleet above with the audacity of their plans and with the power of their full-throated promises of war.
27 · Lok
After the stirring rally, the attack plans on the Darrin asteroid belts were reviewed for the final time. Squads were formed, gear equipped, rations portioned out. Molly busied herself among the fevered activity, helping where she could, her own mission to the StarCarrier lingering at a lower level of thought. She had no time to fear her involvement in the next day’s plans—she was too busy worrying over the impossible task she was about to send these poor, bedraggled survivors out to perform.
Perhaps, she wondered to herself, this was too much for any of them to absorb and process all at once. Most of the raiders had only a few hours training with the bizarre swords sent down from the Underground ships. The vast majority of the Navy pilots had never flown a real mission outside a simulator. And with their paltry numbers, they only had the crew and supplies for forty ships with an average of three crewmembers per ship—a minimum verging on unsafe.
Molly went over the plan in her head one more time, taking each stage individually to remind herself how doable might be the whole: Using the data from Parsona’s recent visit to Darrin, each squad would jump inside one of the asteroid bases, just on the other side of their force fields. Teams of three would then storm each weapons shop, commandeering any ships they might find. Once secured, the crews would jump out to the predetermined rendezvous point where they would lock up in pairs, moving Ryke’s engineers from one craft to another as they modified the hyperdrives. If any of the ships need more fusion fuel, or any of the crews needed medical attention, that would be taken care of at the same time. Meanwhile, the pilots could familiarize themselves with the ships’ controls and test the weapons systems.
They had set aside a full eight hours for the Darrin phase of the plan, with two hours reserved for the rendezvous and modifications, which meant—thanks to Ryke’s modifications to the drives—they would be back at Lok by local sunup. That should give Molly and her crew plenty of time to set up in the StarCarrier and begin bombarding the Bern command ship with teleported missiles.
Going through it slowly, it seemed almost too simple. However, as she watched Navy brass squeeze their bellies into combat armor, and Scottie show Callite civilians how to load firearms, the plan seemed destined to fail. Molly helped one of the crewmen secure a Velcro strap around the back of his armor, getting it as tight as possible; she then walked around Parsona to see how Ryke and Walter were coming with their “rift.”
“You guys about ready?” she asked, walking out to where they’d set up a few floodlights.
Walter nodded without looking up from his computer. He typed furiously, wires trailing from his handheld to a control console that had been jumped down from one of the Underground ships. The device had been one of the five originally meant for closing the rift on Lok. The Underground command was still waiting until the bulk of the Bern fleet moved off before risking a flight to the planet’s surface. They had sent the console reluctantly, seeing the distraction gained from the Darrin mission as a greater boon than the loss of one more backup platform.
The number-crunching for the jumps to Darrin would fall to Parsona, who had the SADAR data from their recent trip to that system in her memory banks. With the mass of the hundred and twenty or so crewmembers and their gear, they had more than enough fuel for the one-way jump with plenty left over for the missiles. All the fusion fuel Molly had longed for and bartered for, and had nearly used to jump to hyperspace, would go instead to this mission. The consequences of her decision, the reality of having fully made it, dawned on Molly for the first time as she watched Walter and Ryke work. This was the thing she had wrought, whatever happened next. This was her plan, with real lives at stake. This was what she had chosen to do, rather than rescue Cole and her father.
She suddenly felt pregnant with doubt.
Stepping past the console, she checked on the appearance of their fake “rift.” It was nothing more than a gap between two trees that had been smeared with the droppings of mooncrawls, giving the halo a pale glow. Molly found the getup ridiculous, but she figured it seemed ominous enough. Besides, once people started disappearing as they walked through the “rift,” there would be no doubts that it was working. And work it would, thanks to the jump platform sunk into the ground between the trees and the four insulated wires snaking from it to Parsona’s hyperdrive.
Molly saw Walter had covered the platform with leaves, even though he must know they would only be sitting there until the first jump. After that, she guessed everyone would be too nervous to see that they were passing
over a flat, black pad on the ground.
Satisfied with her inspection, Molly turned back to the console. Ryke looked up from its display screen, his face lit with an eerie, green glow.
“It’ll be almost two in the morning Darrin local time when they arrive,” he told Molly.
“Perfect,” she said. Molly squeezed Walter’s shoulder. “Are you set?”
He nodded without looking up from his computer. Molly had given him a supervisory role of making sure the rate of escaped fuel was matching their projections—nothing he could cause trouble with but something that made him a part of the greater plan. Over the past day or two, perhaps ever since the StarCarrier incident, he had seemed overly eager to lend a helping hand. It was something Molly wanted to foster as much as she could.
Seeing that she wasn’t needed around the rift, Molly walked back toward her ship, steering for the small planning group that included Saunders, Anlyn, and several of his senior staff.
“How long?” Saunders asked as she approached.
“We can go at any time. We just need to get everyone lined up in the correct order so we know who we’re sending where.”
“Quite lucky to have one of these rifts so close,” Lieutenant Robinson said. Saunders’s chief of staff flashed Molly a friendly smile.
“No luck involved,” Molly told him. “That’s how my friends even knew this clearing was here. Besides, the rifts are everywhere, you just have to know how to look for them and how to open them up.”
The lies came out like honey, sweet and smooth. Molly felt an odd sense of déjà vu, remembering another time in a wooded clearing when she’d been shocked with the ease that lies could be told. The flash of recollection settled like particulates in water, arranging themselves in a thickening film. She suddenly remembered Cole lying to Orville on Glemot, how she’d barely known him back then—not as a civilian, anyway. She recalled how shocked and disgusted she’d felt, afraid even, of Cole’s ability to lie so well and so easily.