4
The bubble of absolute darkness popped, the disk filling with stars that hadn’t been there a moment before. The color of the cosmos—the usual hue of space that lies between the stars like black velvet—suddenly seemed gray compared to the oily substance that had just been there. Molly’s brain churned through it all, still in an observational, not a thinking state.
In the background, she could hear Cole yelling. It wasn’t coming through her speakers—he must have keyed the mic off in his glove—the sound came to her through both of their helmets, arriving muffled, like the dull roar of a beach a block away.
Molly pulled her gaze from the stars to look at him; her head snapped to the side, pressed painfully into the back of her seat. She looked down and saw the throttle still pressed all the way forward, Parsona continuing to accelerate as fast as it could.
Straining against the Gs—and assisted by the grav panels in the dash—Molly reached forward and got a hand on the throttle. All she had to do was relax her muscles and let the rearward pull bring the stick to neutral. The thrusters shut down completely. Molly eyed the temperature gauges warily.
As soon as they stopped accelerating, Cole’s arms joined his mouth’s jubilation. He waved them, clapped them together, slapped Molly’s back. She tried to process what he was so happy about, the memory of the extreme L1 gradually returning as he tore off his helmet and threw it over the back of the seat. His dark complexion made the wide, white smile of his seem blinding. Molly stared at him, still a little dazed, her hand on the throttle, her helmet resting on the back of her chair.
Cole leaned over and kissed her visor, leaving a comically perfect imprint of moisture on the plastic shell.
“CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT?!” he yelled through her helmet, shaking it with both hands. He smiled wide and planted another kiss on her visor.
Molly reached up to snap her own helmet off. She had a sudden impulse to check the SADAR for missiles, then realized the threat no longer existed. The image of the black hole, with its mesmerizing event horizon, returned. Molly tried to focus, but her ability to think straight had been sucked down that well, pulled in and destroyed by the attraction of something too beautiful to remember.
Cole held her head just as he had the helmet and pecked her face with loud kisses. He broke away and attempted a frown, which came out more as a subdued grin. “Don’t you put me in a situation like that ever—”
A strange roar interrupted him—an anguished howl rumbling up from the cargo bay. It dissipated the fog in Molly’s head and brought an end to Cole’s celebrations. They both tried to scramble over the flight controls at the same time, jostling with each other in panic.
Molly shoved Cole back into his seat.
“We’re going too fast,” she told him. “Spin us around and decelerate, but no more than the gravity plates can compensate for.”
He nodded gravely and reached for the forward thruster controls; the couple had spent too many hours in simulated warfare to unlearn that ability: snapping to an important task, distractions set aside for later.
Molly jumped down from her chair and nearly passed out. She caught herself on the cockpit wall and waited for the dizziness to pass, for the blood in the rest of her body to redistribute itself after all those Gs and the effects of so much anti-grav fluid racing through her flightsuit.
“MOLLY!” Edison yelled her name in that deep, guttural voice of his, the solitary word thundering up the passageway like an enraged animal. She staggered forward, fighting off another dizzy spell, worried about her large friend.
As soon as she rounded the corner, she saw the problem lay with Anlyn, not Edison. Walter, strapped to the neighboring seat, leaned as far as he could away from her. Edison knelt before Anlyn, his normally dexterous paws fumbling at the flight harness.
Anlyn’s face looked awful. Blotchy and bruised. The sight should have exacerbated Molly’s dizziness, but she was in charge.
Responsible. Adrenaline surged through her body, working miracles. She unbuckled Walter first.
“Give us room,” she told him, which he did eagerly.
Next, she tried to push Edison back, but his bulk was a steel wall draped in fur. “Edison, I need you to get back.”
Edison shook his head, but did as she asked. He cradled Anlyn’s helmet in both paws, rubbing it.
Molly knelt down in front of the young Drenard. The girl’s skin, normally a translucent light shade of blue, had turned a splotchy purple. Individual capillaries and veins streaked across her bald head in a tangled web. Two rivulets of blood snaked out of the hearing holes behind her jaw and tracked forward to the center of her face, pulled there by the force of acceleration.
Her chin rested on her chest as if she were merely sleeping, but the back of her head was ashen. She was clearly suffering from SLAS. Molly tried to remember how many Gs they’d been pushing before the jump and whether any of Cole’s alterations to her suit had required retooling the anti-grav pockets.
She reached into the collar of Anlyn’s flightsuit and encircled the Drenard’s thin neck with both hands, the universal method used to locate an alien’s pulse. It occurred to her as she waited for a sign of life just how unprepared she was for commanding her own ship and its crew. The Navy taught her how to shoot down aliens from a distance but not how to manage living with nonhumans while caring for their well-being.
Looking over her shoulder, she asked Edison, “Do you know where her heart is?”
The pup shook his head. Molly could see the skin around his nose where the fur was thin. Normally it was pink and healthy—now it was as pale as the back of Anlyn’s head.
“Take her to your bunk and get her flightsuit off,” she told him. Molly reached to unplug the suit from the anti-gravity and life-support module but noticed someone had already done so. She ran back for the first aid kit above the galley sink.
As she unstrapped the kit, she watched Edison scoop up his small friend with a paradoxical mix of strength and gentleness, then surge past her with long, even strides, back toward his crew quarters.
????
Walter watched the ordeal from across the cargo bay, then slid across the wake of all the frenzied activity. He settled into his chair, his elbow stretching out into the seat beside him. Anlyn’s seat. But he could remember back when this whole side of the crew lounge had been his.
Even though he said the word silently, to himself, he did so in English.
Within his Palan brain, it came out as a hiss.
????
By the time Molly made it back to Anlyn with the first aid kit, Edison already had her flightsuit off. He stood there, the empty suit draped over one massive forearm as he looked to Molly for more instructions. She could tell he needed to be told what to do next. Something. Anything. The color seemed to be draining from his very fur.
Molly knew the two aliens had gotten close during their brief time together, especially over the week they spent alone repairing Parsona. She also recognized Anlyn had taken to clinging to Edison for security. But she had no idea they might be in love with one another.
She did now. The same emotion bursting within her own heart for Cole seemed to visibly pour out of Edison. She recognized it in his worry, in his fear. As Molly knelt to attend to Anlyn, she also realized she had two patients in the room.
“Go get some clean rags and water,” she told him. “I want you to clean up her face and keep her head cool.”
That was the prescription for Edison’s heart. Now she needed to locate Anlyn’s.
There had been no pulse in her neck, and unless she was like the Bel Tra—with their arteries hidden within their very spines—that wasn’t an encouraging sign.
At least the girl was on her back, the blood able to drain down toward the gravity plates in the hull’s decking. Now Molly just needed to get those fluids circulating again. Every known sentient being relied on the potent chemical energy locked up in ATP and fueled by oxygen. Without a constant supply, the girl would die.
Molly unzipped a side compartment on the aid kit and pulled out two plastic tubes, then slid them into the small breathing holes above Anlyn’s mouth. There was no way to know how far to do this, so she pushed until there was some resistance before backing the tubes out a little. With the press of a button, a small compression fan on the side of the aid box whirred to life.
Reaching into another pouch, Molly pulled out the small medical reader and searched “Drenard,” even though she was almost certain she wouldn’t find anything. The race wasn’t in any of the Navy’s aid manuals, either from absence of knowledge or lack of caring. Why she thought there’d be anything in her parents’ old civilian gear was beyond—
Her parents.
Molly turned and bolted out the door, nearly breaking her nose as she crashed into Edison. “I’ll be right back,” she shouted over her shoulder. She dashed through the cargo bay, leaving Edison behind, the poor pup not knowing what to do.
Tears streaming down his fur.
????
Molly bolted into the cockpit, not bothering to crawl into her seat. She leaned across the flight controls and switched the nav screen over to Parsona’s old charts.
“Everything okay?” Cole asked.
Molly ignored him. A chart of astral information went off the screen, replaced with line after line of text—her mother wanting to know what was going on.
NO TIME. I NEED TO KNOW WHERE THE DRENARD HEART IS_
THE DRENARD HEART?_
LITERALLY. MEDICALLY. ANLYN DOESN’T HAVE A PULSE. DO YOU KNOW WHERE HER HEART IS?_
OH, DEAR. I USED TO. IN THE UPPER THORAX, ANTERIOR, I BELIEVE. MOLLIE, WHAT’S GOING ON? THE COMPUTER WAS WORKING ON A CALCULATION THAT DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE_
Molly pushed off Cole’s chair, ignoring another question from him and several more from her mom. She darted back across the cargo bay, past Walter playing his video game, back to Edison’s room.
“A little space, buddy.” Molly pushed Edison gently on the shoulder, and the pup moved aside. It was stuffy with the three of them in the small cabin, but Molly didn’t have the heart to ask him to leave, and the circulation pump should be pushing plenty of oxygen into Anlyn’s lungs.
The girl had suffered a severe case of SLAS—her skin two-toned as all of her blood pooled up in the front half of her body. Molly wouldn’t be able tell if anything was ruptured or what kind of hope they had for saving the girl until she could help the heart distribute the fluids evenly. Rolling Anlyn onto her stomach was going to make things worse, but Molly had to get to her circulation organ, and according to her mom, it was high up and in her back.
Anlyn felt incredibly frail as Molly rolled her over. “Keep those tubes from kinking,” she told Edison. He reached out, eager to assist, and managed the air supply. Molly grabbed the pillow Anlyn’s head had been on and placed it under the girl’s chest. It went right below what must be her race’s taboo area, encircled as it was with a white undergarment.
Edison’s fur waved with nervous energy. Molly considered her other patient before she began. “I need you to keep her head to one side, okay? Make sure she’s getting air.”
He nodded vigorously and moved to cradle Anlyn’s head. Molly straddled the girl’s back as if she were about to give the Drenard a massage. She placed her left palm high on the girl’s thorax and wrapped her right hand around it. Locking her elbows, Molly leaned forward to apply some force straight down. She used her first tentative thrust to gauge the effort that was going to be required; she didn’t want to accidentally hurt her friend while attempting to save her. Resistance was surprisingly stiff, Anlyn’s bones unusually rigid to be so light.
Lifting her knees off the bunk, Molly hovered the full heft of her torso onto her arms, hoping the recent break in her right one could handle the thrusts. She pressed down with a fast and hard shove.
A loud crack shot out into the room. Molly felt a stabbing pain in her wrist, buckling her and sending her forward. Edison’s head snapped up in concern as Molly gasped in anticipation of severe pain.
But the snapping sound hadn’t come from her arm. It had come from Anlyn’s back!
Molly’s right arm felt tender, but not broken. She probed below Anlyn’s nape with her left hand and could feel the difference beneath her palm, like some wall of subcutaneous cartilage had broken free.
A new pocket of softness lie there. Molly had no idea if her efforts were helping or hurting, but she knew what would happen if she did nothing—Anlyn would die. She gritted her teeth against the pain in her wrist and started performing a series of steady thrusts.
Waves of purple spread out from beneath her hands with each push. Something definitely moved beneath Anlyn’s skin—fluids, perhaps, spreading out through her back. Molly counted twenty pushes while she watched for an evening of the color, then she rested and reached for the alien’s neck again. She encircled it completely with both hands, careful to not let her thumbs press too hard and fool her with her own pulse.
Nothing.
She rubbed her right wrist before putting her hands back in place, then watched a bead of sweat drip off her nose and splash on Anlyn’s bare back. Molly had a sudden impulse to tear her own flightsuit off; the damn thing was cooking her without the life-support system plugged in.
She felt Edison looking at her and met his eyes, saw the question on his face.
She shook her head.
Edison grimaced as she began another round of thrusts. A dozen more. She began to wonder if the purple waves of fluid beneath Anlyn’s skin were signs of forced circulation or just subcutaneous flow from the pressure.
Once again, she searched for a pulse, her wrist throbbing. She visually scanned the rest of the alien’s body for any sign of internal life, anything moving. Something twitched near the first knuckle of her left hand. Maybe. She slid the pads of two fingers there, holding her breath. Molly could hear her own pulse in her ears, confounding her. Was the skin on the back of Anlyn’s arm turning a pale shade of blue? Molly tried to guard against wishful thinking. Focus on—
But, there! A pulse. Molly searched the opposite side of her neck and found a weak sign of life there as well.
She smiled at Edison. “Help me roll her over.”
Edison tried to say something to her but couldn’t. Molly noticed for the first time that he’d been crying, that her normally verbose friend had not said a single thing since wailing her name. She wanted to ask him to say something, anything, to get the horrible echo of his groans out of her head.
But Edison seemed lost in space. He cradled his friend in his large arms, rocking her slightly. Molly watched him reach down to adjust one of the oxygen tubes coming out of her nose. She noted the delicate precision of his movements—one of his race’s defining characteristics—but saw something tender in the way he did it as well.
Molly touched both of her friends softly and hurried out of the room.
They needed to get help. Anlyn wasn’t out of the asteroid field yet.
????
“What’s going on?” Cole asked. “Is Edison okay?” He leaned around his seat, looking back through the cargo bay.
Molly worked her way into the pilot’s seat as she tried to work out Cole’s question. “It’s Anlyn,” she said. “Edison was just yelling for help. She has a bad case of SLAS. Really bad. Two-tone. It’s hard to really gauge because she’s so translucent.”
Cole looked as if he’d been punched in the gut. “Was it my alterations? Gods, I knew we should have tested them harder, it was only a matter of time before something like this—”
“Don’t jump to conclusions and don’t beat yourself up. We just need to get her to Drenard, and fast.” Molly checked their velocity. They were back to a sane rate of speed, but it was still higher than she’d like for another jump.
“We can probably make it in three more jumps. I’m guessing we’ve run the blockade by shaking the Navy back there.”
“Too much time cycling the hyperdrive. We need to try it in two. Pull up the Bel Tra charts and see if there’s a shortcut you feel comfortable risking. Maybe an L4 or an L5 we haven’t considered. And jump us as soon as our speed gets out of the red.” Molly pulled her nav keyboard out of the dash and rested it on her thighs.
“What’re you gonna do?”
“I need to have a chat with my mom. Find out what’s going on here.”
Cole looked over from the star charts. “Yeah, that’d be great.”
Molly skipped past the new questions on her nav screen. She felt bad about her mother being trapped in absolute darkness, calling out with no response for what probably felt like ages. This guilt, however, was offset by the way she was being kept in the dark. She just wanted to know where her father was, and what she needed to do to rescue him.
MOM?_
SWEETHEART, WHAT IN THE GALAXY IS GOING ON?_
ANLYN HAS A BAD CASE OF SLAS. WE’RE GONNA TRY AND GET HER TO DRENARD. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT YOU TOLD HER. HOW YOU SPEAK A LANGUAGE NOBODY IS SUPPOSED TO KNOW_
“Got it in two jumps,” Cole interrupted. Molly gave him a thumbs-up, but concentrated on what her mother was typing.
I CAN’T TELL YOU YET. I’M SORRY. YOU NEED TO TRUST ME. I PROMISE, I WOULDN’T KEEP ANYTHING FROM YOU THAT YOU NEEDED TO HEAR. TRY AND UNDERSTAND, YOUR FATHER AND I TRUST YOU WITHOUT EVEN REALLY KNOWING WHO YOU ARE. IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME_
There was a lull in the flow of words. Molly jumped in with another question: IF YOU TRUST ME, THEN JUST TELL ME WHAT’S GOING ON. THE NAVY WAS WILLING TO KILL ME TO GET THEIR HANDS ON THIS SHIP. LUCIN TRIED TO KILL ME, MOM_
She hated revealing this while she was angry. It was something she planned on getting to gradually. She felt bad as soon as she hit “enter,” wishing there was some way to delete it from her mother’s memory.
NO. NOT LUCIN_
The flat denial dissolved Molly’s will to remove the words. Now she wanted to pound them home.
YES, LUCIN. HE HAD A GUN ON ME. HE WANTED THIS SHIP BADLY ENOUGH TO KILL ME FOR IT. I WANT TO KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON. I’M NOT A KID ANYMORE. I’M 16 AND I’VE BEEN CLEAR ACROSS THE GALAXY ON MY OWN, I’VE BEEN THROUGH SOME CRAZY STUFF IN THE PAST MONTH -- I THINK I CAN HANDLE WHATEVER IT IS_
Molly watched as Cole finished an emergency spin-up of the hyperdrive, preparing for the first jump. She trusted his calculations and didn’t bother double-checking them. Instead, she concentrated on the nav screen while her stomach tightened up, maybe in preparation for the jump, possibly because of what her mother might tell her.
MAYBE YOU COULD HANDLE IT. THE NAVY COULDN’T, BUT MAYBE YOU COULD. WE’LL SEE. JUST KEEP IN MIND THAT WHATEVER SORT OF FAITH YOU’RE USING TO TRUST THAT THIS IS ME, I’M HAVING TO DO THE SAME THING TO TRUST THAT YOU ARE YOU. IT’S A DARK PLACE HERE. I’M JUST AS SCARED AS YOU ARE. MAYBE MORE, KNOWING WHAT I KNOW. WE’LL SORT THIS OUT ON THE WAY TO DAKURA OR LOK_
Molly tried to digest the idea that her mother couldn’t know who she was talking to. That she was just as much a stranger to her own mother as her mother was to her. It seemed to plug missing pieces into her view of the world. And no matter how many times this happened—that Molly learned things weren’t always what they seemed—she couldn’t yet seem to generalize the idea. She constantly felt wiser, yet she kept getting fooled. Or hurt. She leaned over the keyboard.
WE’RE GOING TO DRENARD FIRST. AFTER THAT, AND ONCE MY FRIEND IS OK, WE’LL GO TO DAKURA. I PROMISE_
OK, the screen read, BUT PLEASE, TALK TO ME. IT’S THE ONLY THING I’VE HAD SINCE YOU UNLOCKED ME_
Molly thought about that, her fingers resting on the keyboard. She understood completely. Suffering a childhood alone, lying in her bunk at night in the Academy, surrounded by darkness and the whispering of strangers . . . she understood. She used to lie in that state and dream of the comforting presence her missing parents could bring her.
She never imagined it could be the other way around. Or reciprocal.
Molly considered the things she’d like to have heard from her parents when she was alone and confused. She wondered what her mother would enjoy knowing. Once again, the realized dream of having a conversation with her mom paralyzed her. She didn’t know where to begin. Peering out through the carboglass, gazing at the stars, her fingers hovered over the keys while her mind raced.
Maybe just tidbits to start with. Random likes and dislikes. She started to type the first thing that came to mind while Cole thumbed the hyperdrive.
Outside, the constellations shifted.
Ever so slightly.