Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace tbs-4

by Hugh Howey

  Layer upon layer of happenings loomed in her vision, and the bumps in time came fast and furious, swaying her shack, making it difficult to stay on her saddle. She rode the flurries out, then concentrated on seeing, on allowing her focus to drift near and wide, settling now and then on events in-between and watching those play out as well.

  Each thread of happenings was like a layer of cellophane with a small vid displayed on it. She had but to shift her focus mentally to tease out one from the other. She could blur a near happening and hone in on a deeper one, or ignore those and look at something more recent. So much to see. The days of long boredom, of unblinking ennui, had been shattered. Now she had so much before her all at once and not enough eyes or time to take it in.

  Not enough time, she thought. In hyperspace.

  A thin smile formed, but then her focus switched to the ships fighting over Lok, to the ferocious charge by the small but powerful fighters from Darrin. They tore through the larger Bern craft, their shields and exotic weapons more than making up for their diminutive size. They buzzed like hornets, but with a controlled and well-timed grace, as one large shape after another exploded into mist.

  The small fleet from Darrin suffered their own casualties, though. Every now and then, one of them disappeared in a much smaller pop of debris. The Seer watched as two of the Bern craft turned on their own kind, and she knew these to be the ones with her friends from hyperspace. The shock from this treachery threw the Bern fleet into chaos. Formations splintered. Doubts coursed. More and more craft joined those that had perished down in the prairie, but now the lands of Lok were littered with far more foe than friend.

  Looking deeper, the Seer saw the President of the Galactic Union back on Earth. She saw him confused and 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 th
ey 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.

  Three buttons pressed, three satisfying clicks, and the Seer’s work was done. She was done and tired and ready to go. She stood, legs creaking audibly now that her home had fallen silent, and she considered crawling back into bed to wait for the floods.

  But no, she decided, she would go to the front of the cabin instead, back to her wall of tin and her skinny porch. And she wouldn’t get in the saddle or take her helmet with her. She would go and stand there, stand in the rain with no protection at all. She would raise her arms and wait for the floods to wash away the wicked.

  And she would go gladly.

  Part XXIV – The Circle Closing

  “We are born into this universe.

  We live, we play, we war in it.

  And over time, it changes us.”

  ~The Bern Seer~

  52 · Free

  “This is it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Cole peered out his porthole at the maze of canyons below, at the web of black traces and the tan marble like the latticed skin of a Callite.

  “How can you be sure?” he asked. “They all look the same to me.”

  “Trust me,” Molly said. “This is the one.”

  She lowered Parsona into the dead-end canyon, aiming for a bank of shade long enough to reach the cargo bay and keep them out of the sun. The ship’s struts met the hard rock and settled under the pull of Drenard’s gravity.

  “Be careful,” Parsona said through the radio.

  Molly didn’t reply. She unbuckled her harness and left the cockpit without bothering to wait on Cole.

  “I’m coming too,” Cole yelled after her. He shrugged his harness off and hurried to catch up.

  “Here.” Molly handed him a set of egg graspers as he entered the cargo bay. She kept a set for herself. Neither of them wore any of the rest of the Wadi gear, their flightsuits comfortable enough in the shade. Molly stomped down the cargo ramp and into the eerie howling of the windswept canyons. Cole watched her click the graspers nervously as she went.

  “You’ve gotta talk to me about what’s going on,” Cole said, running up beside her. “How do you even know these eggs need rescuing?”

  Molly pointed toward one of the Wadi tunnels at the base of the high cliff, then started off toward it. The sight of the large tube, big enough to crawl inside, sent a powerful numbness through Cole’s knees. He remembered his ordeal in just that sort of cave not so long ago. He hurried after Molly, his fears about her deep depression taking a new and more severe turn.

  “Molly—”

  She ducked her head inside the cave, one hand resting on the upper lip of the smooth hole in the marble. She turned and looked back, her face veiled by a shadow on top of a shadow.

  “The Wadi told me,” Molly said flatly. “I saw this place in her mind like I was here. I saw the eggs, what the other Wadi did to her, and what we need to do right now.”

  With that, she turned to the darkness and stepped inside.

  Cole fumbled in one of his pockets for a glowstick. He cracked it back and forth, then hurried in after her, shuffling along on his knees and knuckles, his egg graspers in one hand and the feeble glowstick in the other. Molly moved ahead of him as if she would’ve slid through the pitch black even had he not joined her.

  They crawled for dozens of meters, past holes in the floor and drips from the ceiling. The green light from the stick would fade, Cole would work it back and forth, and a bit more soft glow would keep the cave barely discernable. When Molly stopped, Cole bumped into her, his knuckles scraping on the rough rock.

  “Oh my gods—” Molly breathed.

  Cole held the glowstick aloft.

  “I didn’t realize they would be this big,” Molly said. She moved to the side to allow more of the light to pass, and Cole felt goose bumps surge up his arms when he saw the objects on the other side of her. There were at least three of him that he could see, nestled against one another and halfway reaching the roof of the cave. The colors and patterns were remarkable, even muted by the awful green cast of his glowstick. The shells of the eggs seemed to dance and waver like the skies outside. They were big enough that a fully-grown human could pop out, which had him worrying about what was inside of them, and how safe this “egg canyon” really was.

  “Hey, Molly, I think we need to reconsider this.”

  She looked back at him and brushed some loose strands of hair off her face. She bit her lower lip and nodded.

  “I think you’re right,” she said. “I think we’re gonna have to free them right here.”

  “No,” Cole said, shaking his head. “That is most definitely not what I meant.”

  “Give me your knife,” Molly said. She leaned on one palm and stretched her other hand out to him. Cole’s lightstick ebbed a little, dimming the light in the tunnel.

  “Molly, we need to pause for a sec and talk about this—”

  “Give me your knife,” she said again. Her voice had not risen nor modulated, but Cole felt himself succumbing. The past weeks had been full of one attempt after another to soothe Molly’s hurts. He knew there was no denying her this, not after what they’d gone through to get permission to fly out there unescorted.

  He reached back, pulled his knife from his ankle holster, and placed it hilt-first into her palm.

  Molly situated herself in the tight confines, wedging h
er back against the side of the tunnel, her legs folded up beneath her. She gripped the knife with both hands and slammed its point down into the shell of the massive egg. There was a solid twack, like an axe on wood, but nothing more. She looked over at Cole as she reared the knife back once more.

  “In my vision, I saw a Wadi claw doing this.” Molly struck the egg again, harder this time. It left a mark, and she pulled the knife up for another blow. “I don’t think the moms sit on them. I think they guard them, and then they do something like this right before they die.”

  She hit the same spot, and a series of cracks appeared, fanning out from the impact. Molly ran her finger over one of the cracks, feeling it. Cole held the glowstick closer, but he was searching Molly’s face. There was a grim determination, a profound sadness there that he wanted desperately to break through. He had high hopes that this day, this mission she had spoken of for weeks, would do her some good. He was suddenly worried that nothing ever could.

  “I think it’s trying to help,” Molly said.

  Cole moved the light and redirected his attention. Something seemed to stir beneath the colorful shell. Molly scrambled to the next one, the knife attacking with vigor.

  “We need to hurry,” she grunted between blows.

  Cole extended the glowstick over the first egg to help light up the next two. He watched the creature inside the egg move like an amorphous shadow. Between Molly’s blows, he could feel something striking the egg beneath him, but from the inside.

  Molly moved to the last egg. “We don’t have much more light,” Cole warned her. He worked the plastic back and forth, but his efforts did little. Molly struck the egg’s shell, her palm flat on the back of the knife’s hilt, both arms driving as hard as they could. She rubbed the cracks in the shell and whipped her head around to face Cole.