5
“Ssandwich?”
Molly turned from her typing to find Walter holding out some sort of food concoction, layers of leftovers neatly arranged between chunks of bread like geological strata.
“Mmm. No, but thank you,” she said politely.
Cole reached for the refused victuals. “Thanks, buddy.”
Walter snapped it back. “It’ss for Molly,” he hissed, his eyes narrow slits.
“I appreciate it,” Molly told him, “but my stomach isn’t feeling great. Cole can have it if he wants.” She looked over from her typing. “And why don’t you check in on Edison, see if he needs anything. And find out if Anlyn’s improved any.”
Cole took the reluctantly offered sandwich, “Thanks, man.”
“Don’t mention it,” Walter spat as he slunk out of the cockpit.
“That boy adores you,” Cole said around his first bite of sandwich.
Molly nodded. “I know. I wish he didn’t. Not so much.” She checked over her shoulder, then leaned toward Cole. “He creeps me out sometimes,” she whispered. “Then I feel like I’m just being xenophobic.” She straightened back up and pulled the keyboard close. She considered telling her mom more about Walter, but she wasn’t sure she could stick to saying nice things.
“He makes a mean sandwich, though. Oh—” Cole swallowed, then continued, “The Bel Tra have a general layout of Drenard, but they don’t have an orbital schedule. We were kinda expecting Anlyn to guide us in. Do we wait for her to come to, or do we just cross our fingers and hope we don’t jump into a small moon or a satellite?”
Molly typed: ONE SEC-_ to her mom, then switched over to the chart.
“Hmmm.” She studied the Drenard system. It was one of those charts every Naval cadet recognized in an instant. Students pored over them while dreaming of a final assault, making plans for a massive invasion that would end the war.
Drenard was a binary star system, which created some strange orbital permutations. Strange for systems with sentient life, at least. Even though binaries are an extremely common astral configuration, they lead to orbits nonconducive to the evolution of large and complex life-forms.
Without an orbital schedule, Molly could only see where the planets and stars had been when the Bel Tra scouted the system, but not the dynamics of the Lagrange points in motion. Using estimates of mass and distance gave them rough guesses, which wasn’t good enough for the exactitude safe jumping required.
“Why don’t we come in the same way we escaped from the Navy?” she suggested. “We shoot for the L1 between the two stars, a point we know doesn’t move, and someplace too unstable for debris to be hanging out.”
“Good idea,” said Cole, “but it’ll be a long burn to Drenard from there. For Anlyn, I mean.”
“Any other choice gambles with all our lives. And we could risk another short jump once we’re in-system and have a visual.”
“Good point. Okay, the hyperdrive should be spooled up in a few minutes. And just so you know, we’ll be down to less than two percent on fusion fuel when we arrive. These quick cycles are murdering our fusion supply.”
“We’ll worry about that after we get Anlyn some help. Go ahead and jump as soon as you can.” Molly switched back to her mom and scanned the screen to see where she’d left off.
“What’re you ladies gabbing about over there?” Cole asked.
“Glemot,” she said.
Cole looked over, his eyebrows raised. “Really? Huh. I’m surprised.”
“Yeah, well, I’m telling her about the planet we found, not the mess we left behind.”
Cole turned back to the nav computer, seeming to want to say something, but restraining himself.
A sad silence fell over the cockpit before Molly’s loud and rapid typing broke the spell. She concentrated on the good, withholding the bad.
A style of communication her mother knew quite well.
????
The strangest thing about the jump into Drenard—the home system of Molly and Cole’s sworn enemy—was the naive nonchalance with which they did it. Piloting with the hubris of their youth, rather than the caution of their training, they had jumped across the front lines of a major war along unproven routes and arrival points. Desperation, and the pursuit of their own Navy, had pushed them far. Concern for their sick friend took them, unthinking, the rest of the way.
The only thing on Molly’s mind—beyond having rescued Anlyn from slavery and reuniting her with her people—was getting a friend some medical assistance. For Cole, trust had become a relative term, a commodity with fluctuating prices. Running from their own Navy for a month had him not just reconsidering allegiances, but forgetting where they once lay.
Still, there was no rational justification for what they’d just done: jumped into a hostile system with the sole local among their crew unconscious and unable to communicate. Of course, Drenard’s Orbital Defense Patrol saw their unexpected arrival much more clearly. It was a dire threat. A suicidal attack. A GN ship come to rain bombs on their home planet.
Such was their fear as the DODP jumped out to the unidentified contact on their SADAR units, weapons arming . . .
????
“Whoa. Lots of contacts.” Cole zoomed his SADAR unit out. “Hostile formation,” he added.
Molly saw it. And the representation of Parsona on the SADAR unit surrounded by a Drenard fleet shook her to her senses. She saw at once how this must look to them: a human ship popping out of hyperspace between their tightly orbiting twin stars. It’d be exactly where Molly would try to sneak into the system, even if she were dumb enough to try such a stunt on a race this technologically advanced.
Gods, I am that dumb, she realized. She looked over at Cole; neither of them had their helmets on. Anlyn was in her bunk, suffering from SLAS, and not even in her flightsuit. They’d be dead before the hyperdrive wound down and could be cycled back up.
“We’re so stupid.” She said.
None of the Drenard ships had fired yet, but they were closing in with a staggered formation—making it impossible to jump out even if the hyperdrive was ready. What did she expect? Without Anlyn to translate, was she really thinking she’d just fly in and land on the enemy’s home planet?
Molly flipped the radio on and grabbed her helmet. It was probably useless—Drenards weren’t known to communicate with Navy ships before destroying them—but she had to try.
“This is the starship Parsona to the Drenard fleet. Do not shoot. We come in peace. We have a sick Drenard youth onboard.” To Cole, she said: “Start flashing Parsona’s exterior lights in the GN distress patt—”
Parsona.
For the second time that day, Molly remembered she had someone else onboard that spoke Drenard. She reached to the keyboard and hurriedly typed to her mom:
QUICK, I NEED TO KNOW HOW TO SAY “WE COME IN PEACE” IN DRENARD_
A bizarre pair of symbols appeared on the screen in front of her—composed of straight lines, they looked like someone had dropped two bundles of sticks into separate piles.
PHONETICALLY_ she hurriedly typed, then glanced up at the SADAR screen. The rough encirclement was complete; a staggered line of Drenard fighters probed forward. In the back of her mind, she wondered if she’d spelled “phonetically” right.
SHEESTI LOOO. LONG E. AND THE LOOO SHOULD BE DRAWN OUT FOR AT LEAST TWO COUNTS_
Molly shook her head as she read the instructions. Her mom spoke Drenard, but no one else in the Navy did? It was too much—almost as crazy as having an actual Drenard as a friend. A shiver ran up her spine as she considered what the Navy would have done with Anlyn if they’d been captured. She activated the mic in her helmet.
“Sheesti Loooo. Sheesti Loooo. Sheesti Loooo,” she intoned, using the triplets common to Naval comms. She figured the repetition couldn’t hurt, even if Drenards did it differently. She looked over at Cole and nearly burst into laughter at the expression on his face. He was looking at her like she was crazy, both of his brows down low, casting a shadow over his narrowed eyes.
“Mom’s giving me Drenard lessons,” she explained, pointing to her nav screen.
The formation around them tightened, but no weapons were fired. Cole turned back to his displays. “I guess I don’t have room to talk, considering how fast I drew fire from the Navy.”
The radio squawked to life. Over the static created by the nearby stars, a strange yet pleasant cooing could be heard. Molly felt her eyelids growing heavy with the calm sounds.
“Any way for your mom to translate that?”
She turned to Cole. “Could you sound out what they just said?”
He shook his head.
“Well, we just about killed ourselves running from our own Navy,” Molly said. “What say we open the outer airlock and invite our enemy aboard?”
Cole flashed her the same look from a moment ago, his eyes retreating warily into dark caves. He reached for the airlock controls, but kept his gaze on her. “I do this under protest, Captain.”
“Duly noted,” Molly said. She unclipped her harness and watched through the carboglass as the flashing distress lights scattered across the nose of her ship.
She hoped the Drenards saw it as the white flag of assistance—not surrender.
????
Back when Molly and Cole first saw Anlyn in the Darrin System, they’d been shocked by how small and frail she seemed. The few front-line training videos they’d been shown at the Academy featured large and muscular aliens with dark blue flesh not nearly as translucent as hers.
After spending a few weeks with the young female Drenard, their reintroduction to the males brought another shock.
The first one came through the inner airlock stooped over. Even in the cargo bay, he couldn’t stand fully erect, which put him a bit under three meters tall.
He had a gold-colored helmet over his head and a thick neck, bunched with muscles, that led down into a decorative tunic. Powerful arms came out of a standard torso and clutched a metal lance of menacing proportions.
The weapon was kept down, pointed at the deck of the ship. Molly took it as a sign of respect, but the size and shape of the thing, combined with the fierce appearance of the large creature holding it, made her wonder if their ship itself was being threatened.
Two more Drenards squeezed through the airlock. The second was identical to the first; the third a bit smaller and weaponless. Rather than a single tunic, the last of the trio wore dozens of layers of them, each richly decorated. The innermost tunic was so long, he had to clutch the extra fabric near his stomach, which he did ceremoniously. He turned in place, surveying the crew and the ship, then launched into a soft and pleasant speech.
None of which made any sense to Molly, Cole or Walter.
“Sheesti Loooo,” Molly repeated, showing her palms.
The unarmed Drenard, already bent over slightly, bowed even further as he pulled the longest tunic up to his chin. The xenothropologist in Molly stirred at the gesture, but she didn’t have time to marvel at the cultural exchanges and the rarity of the encounter. Sworn enemy or not, all she wanted was to have them tend to Anlyn’s health without anyone else getting hurt in the process. She held up both hands to her chin, bowed as the Drenard had, and then slowly stepped toward the three fearsome figures. Somehow, she needed to squeeze past them to Edison’s room without increasing the tension in the ship.
The warriors didn’t seem to take her approach as hostile—or perhaps they couldn’t see Molly as a threat. They simply rotated their bodies to follow her movement, stepping aside slightly to allow her to pass. The ranking officer cocked his head in what Molly anthropomorphized as curiosity, but it could have been disapproval for all she knew.
She had to turn sideways to move through them, their bulk towering to either side like slabs of curtained blue steel. They loomed so close, she could smell them, a scent like warm stone.
Molly glanced down at one of the soldier’s massive hands, curled around his lance. She passed mere centimeters from him, her head not much higher than his waist. She imagined trying to fight one of these monsters, and flashed back to the fight in that Glemot bunker.
“Sheesti Looooo,” she repeated in a breathless whisper, more to herself than anyone else.
Getting past the barrier of raw muscle and into the after hallway gave her shivers of relief. If there’d been enough room, she probably would’ve taken off in a run, brushing at her arms to get rid of the willies from being so close to actual Drenard warriors. She held it together, though, and turned to the aliens as she backed away, waving with her hands for them to follow.
The officer complied. One of the warriors turned to size up Cole, his relaxed attitude suggesting no threat to be found. Molly watched this exchange as she backed into Edison’s room where her Glemot friend sat on his bunk, his long legs stretched out, Anlyn’s head on his lap.
The Drenard officer ducked through the door. When he raised his head, the two large aliens locked eyes, and Molly could feel the tension sparking across the room. The Drenard said something over his shoulder to his two companions. One of the warriors appeared at the door, his lance at a higher angle than before.
“This situation is non-optimal,” Edison said. “And the spatial requirements of our combined forms are not adequately met by the dimensional constraints of my room.”
Molly waved him silent. His English might be hard to understand, but the deep growling tenor of his voice might be something that cut across alien divides.
Using slow motions with her arms, Molly directed their guests’ attention toward the prone figure in Edison’s lap. Anlyn looked to be stable, but the front of her body remained heavily bruised from her bout of SLAS. She hadn’t moved, nor shown any signs of awareness, since they escaped from the human Navy. For all Molly knew, they were returning to the Drenard system with a brain-dead husk.
As soon as the officer saw the female Drenard, something changed. The muscles in both arms flinched, and he nearly dropped his tunics. He threw the lengths of fabric over his shoulder to get them out of the way and crossed the crowded room with one large step. He leaned over Anlyn, reached into her armpit gingerly, his other hand resting on Edison’s chest. Not so gingerly.
“Don’t move,” Molly told the cub.
Edison’s face twitched with the effort, the fur on his face and shoulders bristling. Molly pleaded with wide eyes for inaction. Her friend begged her in return with narrow slits—for something else.
The Drenard touched Anlyn in a few places, then felt her cheeks with both palms, his massive hands engulfing her small head. He turned to the warrior and said something short and soft.
Molly looked back and forth between them, trying in vain to read their body language, to get some sense of whether or not her friend would be okay.
When the officer scooped up Anlyn with one arm, Edison raised his hands in protest. Molly started to say something to calm him down, expecting the massive Drenard to shove at him with the large hand on his chest, but the officer pulled away instead.
Wrapping Anlyn in both arms, the officer leaned away from Edison, distancing himself.
Finally, a gesture Molly recognized. And not a good one.
“Wait—” she squeaked.
Edison rose as the crackle of electricity filled the room. A dazzling light whizzed past Molly’s head and struck him in the chest, sending him into a few brief spasms of vibrating limbs before his head crashed back against the bulkhead.
Molly spun to protest—to say the only two words of Drenard she knew—and saw the lance. Horizontal. Level with the deck. Her brain processed the meaning of this as the crackle of ionized atmosphere reached her ears.
The blast hit her square in the chest, launching her into the air and sending her flying toward the bunk.
She dearly wanted to arrest her fall before she passed out, but every muscle betrayed her—all of them contracting at once—vibrating with their refusal to cooperate.
Part VII - The Thin Line
“Symmetry, by surrounding us, makes itself invisible.”
~The Bern Seer~