Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Land of Light

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.