As Molly waited, she spotted more crimson by her father’s collar. She undid his flightsuit’s zipper and found, rather than a wound and more blood, a Drenardian headband tucked down by his neck.
Molly ignored it, went to perform another series of thrusts, then felt her mind spin with wild notions.
She grabbed the band and reached for her father’s forehead. The girl seemed to understand; she moved out of the way while Molly arranged the band, working as well as she could with the short length of steel rope between her shackled wrists.
Molly patted her own chest, feeling for the band she’d taken off Byrne’s body. She pulled it out as the girl bent for another round of breaths. Molly checked the fabric for any damage from the Wadi’s burrowing. She felt Cole’s hand on her back as she slipped the band on and spun the seam to the back. The icy hollow in her lungs was matched by a stab through her chest. To have Cole so near after so long—the thought of losing her father—not knowing if the galaxy was doomed or saved—she forced it all out of her mind and concentrated on a single thought, bringing it to the surface, bright and loud:
“Dad? Dad!”
The universe was a dull thumping. Her own pulse filled her ears, the same pounding felt in her chest, muffled wails and shouts a background around her, dim awareness of the bright flashes high above as ships bloomed into fire and then faded to nothingness, the last of the melting snow as the great rift closed up in the hazy Lokian sky, even the flutter of the parched grasses, their beady tips waving in a breeze, brushing against one another—
“Mollie?”
She turned to Cole, but her love’s cheeks were pulsing as he clenched and unclenched his jaw.
He hadn’t spoken.
“Dad?”
“Mollie, is that you?”
She fought the urge to throw herself across his chest.
“Dad, I need you to breathe.”
Arms straight, Molly leaned her shoulders over her hands and gave his chest five more sharp thrusts.
“Dad, I need you to wake up!”
“Where are you? Your voice—It’s my voice—Is it the bands?”
“Dad, I need you to try and wake up. I need you to breathe, damnit.”
Molly fought to keep her words calm. Intelligible. She had to remind herself to breathe as well.
“Oh my sweetest girl, I don’t think that’s possible. I’m—I’m dying. I can feel it—”
“No you’re not!” Molly gave his sternum five more thrusts. The girl with the red hair bent low and gave him more air, her father’s cheeks puffing out in a mimicry of life.
“You’re not gonna die,” Molly thought. She tried to will it true, just like forming loud words out of mere thoughts.
“I already am dead, I think.”
“Don’t say that—” More thrusts. More air, cheeks billowing lifeless.
“Squeeze my hand, baby girl.”
Molly shook her head, and tears leapt off her nose.
She kept her palms on his great chest and heaved down. She watched herself move as if a spectator from some great height. She saw her hands splayed wide, knuckles white from exertion and shock. She saw that the red stain across her father’s chest had spread. She felt a wall of rapt eyes arranged around her. The other girl forced his cheeks wide with more air pushed down into his lungs.
“Squeeze my hand.”
“Dad—”
“Please. Before it’s too late.”
Molly stopped her thrusts and checked for a pulse. She ran her fingers along the edge of her father’s graying beard, probing his neck for any feeble hint of life. The girl with the fiery hair bent over and turned to the side, hovering her cheek above Mortimor’s lips, waiting for a puff of breath. She looked up and met Molly’s questioning gaze out of the corner of her eyes.
Set lips said enough.
“My hand—”
Her father’s words leaked into Molly’s mind, pleading her in her own voice. Reluctantly, she allowed her bound hands to fall from his sternum and her hopeful fingers to retreat from his neck. She clasped her father’s hand with both of her own and held it tight. Some distant sense, some numb awareness, told her that Cole was holding her shoulders and crying, whispering her name, his body shaking with sobs.
“There,” her father thought. “I can feel it. I can feel you. Oh, how I’ve longed for this.”
Molly squeezed his hand harder. “Come back to me,” she pleaded.
“Oh, my sweetheart, I’m so sorry I ever left you—”
Molly shuddered with trapped sobs. Her tears were welling up so thick and fast, the world around her had become a shiny, bulging blur. The only things clear were the words in her head, her father’s and her own.
“How long do we have?” she thought.
“I don’t—Are you still holding my hand?”
Molly looked down where her cream-white hands were wrapped around her father’s. She squeezed as hard as she could, holding him as if she could trap what remained of his life and keep it forever.
“I’m holding it, Dad.”
“Then I suspect our time is short. I—I can’t feel anything.”
Molly shook her head. She dropped his hand and went back to his sternum. This time, she didn’t bother counting her thrusts. She just pressed and pleaded, shaking her head, tears falling down on him.
“Please don’t—” she begged.
“Mollie—”
“Dad, please don’t—”
“I love you—”
“Oh, gods, Dad!”
“ . . . ”
“Dad!”
“ . . . ”
“Say something!”
“ . . . ”
“Please—”
“ . . . ”
Molly stopped pushing on his chest and clapped her hands over her face. She searched the pounding silence in her head for some lingering thought, for some connection, for a single word from her father.
But he was gone. All that remained were the numb echoes of his quiet thoughts, the fading sense of a connection to another mind, and then the narrow rift between the two of them closed up and sealed itself with silence.
Molly cried out. She screamed. She sobbed into her hands and fumbled in vain for that retreating connection. She clawed after it in the harsh and lonely darkness of her own mind. She filled the vacuum of her loneliness with a rage for all that had been taken. And then she shuddered, her hands balled up in front of her, her fists empty of all else, as Cole wrapped her up in gentle and loving restraint. She felt his tears fall on her neck, heard his sobs of anguish and whispered, muted sorrow, all of it mixing with her own.
51 · Hyperspace
The Bern Seer watched events unfold from her saddle, her eyes pressed tightly against the seeing cups, her lashes flicking across its glass lenses. An annoying rivulet of water snaked through her flightsuit, having wormed its way in through her visor. The thin stream wrapped down the edge of a rib and slid out the holes cut in the feet of her suit. Normally, such a stream would tickle like mad, forcing her to squirm in place as she itched herself against the insides of her uniform, but she was too captivated by the sights ahead of her to bother.
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.