Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

Anlyn’s hand flinched, just as if he had touched her body. Just like when he touched her body. She yanked her flightstick the other way, worried he might lock the two Interceptors together. As she created a few paces of space—and before she could reconsider—she followed the instructions in the help file and typed in the override commands, entering them in triplicate and agreeing to all the warning messages.

The jump switch finally turned from black to solid blue.

Anlyn punched it without hesitation.

The twin suns of Hori disappeared, replaced by a blanket of alien stars and a maelstrom of violence. Plasma blasts the size of solar flares ripped through the distance, arcing toward a blazing ball of destruction the size of a planet. Anlyn saw, just in time, that similar plumes of racing fire were heading her way. She slammed the thrust forward and dove out of their path as the columns of sure death slid by in silence.

Where have I jumped? she wondered. It certainly wasn’t the empty space she’d been aiming for.

Besides the large rivers of marching plasma fire, Anlyn saw that the cosmos around her was peppered with a swarm of racing ships and the less powerful streaks from their cannons and missile pods. She banked her own ship around—still getting used to the feel of the controls—and searched for a way out of the commotion.

But the chaos was everywhere; it seemed whatever star system she had jumped into was embroiled in an outright orgy of war. At first, she thought it was a trinary star system, an alien land with one more sun than even her own Drenard, but eventually she recognized the other two glowing, fire-stricken orbs to be planets. Former planets, anyway. Both were being devoured by all-encompassing blazes, almost as if the crust of each had opened up to reveal the molten mantle beneath.

Anlyn headed up the star system’s orbital plane, hoping to escape the flat battleground where most of the activity was taking place. She threw the accelerator all the way forward and felt her body sag back into her seat with the ever-increasing velocity.

What have I done? she thought to herself.

Red alarms winked across her dashboard in answer. Anlyn fought to unravel them, her eyes darting from one to the next, none of the alarms ever having come up during her brief training regimen:

MISSILE LOCK_ HOSTILE TARGETS_ PLASMA SIGNATURES_

Her hands shook as they hovered over the hundreds of keys and knobs on the dash, so few of which she knew how to operate. The trembling worked its way up her arms, through her shoulders, back into her heart, and all the way to her legs. Anlyn wrapped her arms around herself, trying to hold her body still, trying to prevent herself from flying apart like the distant planets, quaking from their onslaught. She pulled her knees up to her chin, dug her heels into the seat, and tucked her head down, quivering and crying.

And then the first missile struck.

The ferocious blast vaporized one wing and ripped the fuselage in half. Anlyn was slammed into her flight harness, the pilot’s suit coping with a majority of the Gs, but not all of them. Her head whipped to the side, her arms and legs fortuitously protected by her tight fetal position as the wounded Bern Interceptor spun out of control around her, the physical whirlwind of disintegrating machinery exploding into the cosmos.

A bolt of plasma ripped through the Interceptor next, punching a clean hole, ringed in red and dripping sparks, right through the ship’s body. Anlyn heard her visor snap shut automatically, cutting off the banging of steel and the whine of a dozen alarms. The sound of air moving, of a tiny fan somewhere in her suit circulating her precious oxygen, was all she heard besides her heartbeat.

The end had come for her, she realized. Bodi had been right. She wouldn’t last a second out in the galaxy alone.

The next missile cruised her way, its red tip armed and hungry. As it plowed through the cosmos after a warm body to devour, a countdown in Anlyn’s Interceptor ticked toward zero. It was a warning, giving her the chance to override an automatic safety system.

But Anlyn wasn’t aware of it. She tried to hold herself together as her ship screamed and was wrenched apart. The missile drew near, pushing through the fuzzy sphere of her Interceptor’s already-expanding field of debris. The counter on the safety system reached one , the alarm high and pleading, begging to be overridden before it did something that could not be undone.

It finally reached zero .

The auto-eject systems fired, launching Anlyn—still strapped to her flightseat—out into the cold blackness of space.

But that vacuum didn’t remain cold for long. The second missile finally found its prey, consuming itself and all else in a bubbly froth of fire and carnage.

In Anlyn’s dreams, the fan inside her helmet was a roar. It was the roar of the Wadi winds, those never ending blasts of air that flowed over her planet, etching the canyons from solid rock. Her heartbeat became her footfalls—the clomping of her hunting boots on the dry stone. Anlyn incorporated these sounds and constructed a dream world. A world that existed only in her memory, in her not-too-distant childhood.

There were five of them in her exclusive Rite group when Anlyn went to claim her Wadi. They were cousins, all. None of them were as near to the throne as she, if measured by begottens, but her three male cousins were lightyears closer for other reasons. Anlyn didn’t mind. She had no desire to sit where her father sat; she couldn’t stand the thought of giving speeches for a living or having to decide matters of galaxy-wide importance. Her ideal life involved moving to a frontier planet, something along the rim of the Drenard arm of the Milky Way, and finding some peace and quiet to surround herself with.

She had imagined her life there a million times in a million different ways, but every variation revolved around common themes: They started with a large plot of land, something not constrained by perpetual night on the one side and day on the other, but spread out. The land would be rolling in places and flat in others. At least one gurgling creek would pass through, playing and skipping over the rocks in little white leaps. The grass would be kept tall so it could wave to and fro with fickle, unpredictable gusts of wind, nothing like the perpetual hurricane roaring around her home world.

And there would be days . There would be a growing light expanding in the morning to swallow the sky. The sun would move through the air, shimmering and becoming white-hot as it rose to its peak. Then the nightfall would come to cool the sweat from her neck. She had heard about days from her uncles who governed distant planets. She had heard and imagined for herself the gradual sinking of suns, like balls of molten lava, crashing through the horizon.

Supposedly, the colors weren’t as severe on these other planets when their suns rose and set—they weren’t nearly as beautiful as what she’d grown up with on Drenard. But she could do without the frozen sunset of her home. Maybe, as the sight varied with each day, she would love the lesser spectacles even more. Their temporary nature might make them dearer, if drearier. She had heard as much from elders visiting from other planets.

And after the setting of the sun on her dream world, the night would come. It would be like the dark side of Drenard, but not deadly. The world would cool, shedding itself of its aura of trapped heat. The stars would begin to flash and twinkle, the sight of them temporary and fleeting. Anlyn and her husband—chosen by her and madly in love with each other—would lie out in the waving grasses and shiver and snuggle up together as their land began a plummet in temperature.