Anlyn jogged along the empty corridor, past a few crew quarters and a mess hall full of hastily stacked boxes. She went through a large cargo bay and then finally came upon the dreaded place. She paused at the imaginary boundary between passageway and cockpit, that invisible line in the decking rising like some Darrin forcefield. She stood there for a moment, listening to the pounding of her own pulse. When she heard Edison stomping through the cargo bay, his gait drowning out the sound of her heart, she knew she could no longer delay. Summoning her courage, she stepped inside and approached the forward seating.

Her skin crawled as she pushed through the invisible barrier, the sight of the empty chairs filling her with a sense of dread. They were human-sized, just like Lady Liberty’s, and nothing at all like the Drenard Ambassadorial ship. She rested a hand on the back of the nav chair and lifted one foot, using it to scratch her other ankle. It took her a moment to realize she was doing it. It took a moment longer to remember that the metal hoop of steel was no longer welded around her leg, the chain no longer coiled by her feet.

“Are you okay?” Edison asked. He spoke in Drenard, a sign he was communicating for feelings, rather than information.

“I’m fine,” Anlyn lied. “Just worried about where you’re going to sit.”

“The removal of the armrest mechanisms will be elementary. I’ll have the task performed prior to our intersection with the rift in spacetime.” He bounded aft to search for tools, his switch back to English telling.

Anlyn felt a stab of annoyance, but she had herself to blame for lying to him. She wasn’t worried about how poorly he’d fit in his seat, but how well she would in hers.

Walking around the outside of the pilot’s seat, she noticed the Bern arrangement conformed to human standards: leader on the left. All the controls seemed familiar in layout, though covered in the Bern alphabet. It was one of those languages she recognized, even if she couldn’t make out much of what it said. The stylistic swoops and curls were often printed in political cartoons back home; the Drenard translations below would say something funny or satirical about their sworn enemy.

Anlyn sat down and adjusted the harness straps. She figured out how to raise the seat while she waited on Edison to get back and translate; the pilot had left the thrusters running, but she couldn’t tell which control released the clamps.

When she heard Edison set down a toolbox behind her, she turned and asked him which switch decouples the ship from the airlock.

“That one,” he said, after scanning the dash a moment.

Anlyn thanked him, amazed at how quickly he’d picked up yet another language. His intellect occasionally threw up emotional barriers in their relationship, but it often opened other sorts of doors. Like getting him on the Circle as the Cultural Counselor, for example. And now it served them well as he had become, through unspeakable tragedy, their mission’s sole Bern translator.

Anlyn wrapped her pale blue hand around the control stick; she checked the needles on the gauges, making sure they were all between the black high and red low marks. She flipped the switch Edison had indicated and pushed away from the Keep.

Before she knew it—before her emotions could stage a revolt—she was flying again. Slow at first. Hesitant. But getting to the center of the Keep required a lot of twists and turns as she dodged around the trusses and steel beams built specifically to impede progress from Bern interlopers heading in the opposite direction.

As she weaved between the glass corridors, passing close to several, she could see her people lined up inside, blue hands spread out on the glass. Pairs of eyes tracked her passing, either wide with astonishment or narrow with accusations. Anlyn felt like a criminal, or a specimen arousing curiosity. Meanwhile, off to either side of her, sleek Dren-ardian starfighters kept pace, bobbing in and out of the mazelike structure while keeping their guns trained her way.

Just in case the specimen turns hostile, she told herself. She wondered if the rumored power of Edison’s lance was all that kept them at bay.

As they progressed into the interior of the keep, the habitable corridors disappeared, and the density of the obstructing beams increased. Also, more and more of the gold canisters became visible—larger slivers and triangles of shimmering honey flashing out between the beams.

After a few tight, final squeezes, the three ships rounded into an open workspace where Anlyn could see several tugs pulling the blockade apart, creating a hole for her to fly through. A collection of replacement canisters stood nearby, another tug busying itself around them like a herder tending his flock.

Anlyn had to wait while they finished. She held the ship perfectly still as the two starfighters hovered to either side, their bows pointing straight at her. As if we pose more of a threat than the rift ahead, Anlyn thought. She tried to ignore them, as well as the hollow pit forming in her gut from having their weapons aimed directly at her. Instead, she lost herself in watching the tugs work. They pulled out several more layers of armored canisters—the innermost eaten away in places—until the rift was eventually exposed.

When the tear in space became visible, Edison grumbled something in English too obtuse for her to follow. In the recess of gold opened by the tugs, she could see empty space and stars beyond. A few structures glimmered in the distance beyond that, like bright stars. It was an odd sight, for the tugs had only removed half the layers in one spot. The hole in space stood in front of the rear half of the rest of the golden cube. She and Edison were looking through them, rather than at them. And not through them so much as through a rip in the very fabric of the galaxy, a doorway to another galaxy that was not theirs.

Anlyn shook the wonder of the scene away, scared that Bishar’s men would see her hesitation as a change of heart. She increased thrust, moving the large craft forward.

“How’s the hyperdrive?” she asked Edison, wishing she’d boned up on some basic Bern during their flight from Drenard.

He pulled up a different screen on his readout. “Cycled and optimal.”

They passed the outer boundary of canisters, entering a bright, golden cave. Ahead of them loomed a hole in space where the other half of the Keep should be. Anlyn continued to power the ship forward, slow and steady. She thought of all the brave men and women who had come on the mission with her, their lives lost. And why? Had she misread the prophecy? Was she misreading it again? No longer were they waiting for the Bern to show up—she and Edison were now going to them. Once more, it felt like a mistake. She wondered if their arrival in a Bern craft would give her and Edison more time to announce their arrival in peace, or if she and her love were about to join the rest of her mission in being reduced to dust.

The nose of the Bern ship broke the boundary between the two galaxies, and then the cockpit did the same. The walls of gold were suddenly replaced with tar-black space salted with an unfamiliar constellations of stars.

Before Anlyn knew it, she and Edison were out among them. The Keep was gone, and their massive warship immediately felt like a tiny speck drifting into the dark—piercing the vast and wild unknown.

9

Molly exited the cockpit preparing to scold Walter, but instead found three strangers stomping into her cargo bay: a human and two Callites. All three of them were enormous, and all three wore coveralls splattered with a purplish paint. Plumes of dust trailed them from outside, the kicked-up fog swirling around their feet.

“Excuse me—?” Molly was barely able to begin her question before choking on the nauseating reek of the figures. A foul gaseous cloud had entered with them—the smell of alcohol and sweat and something rotten. Molly nearly gagged as the human strolled up, appraising the interior of her ship with a smirk.

“Mortimor?” the man yelled. “You in here, you old bastard?” He looked over at Molly and smiled, as if they were all awaiting some gruff reply from her father.

None came, of course. Molly blinked the tears out of her eyes and covered her mouth with the back of her hand. “Can I help you?” she managed.

One of the big Callites plopped down in Edison’s wide crew seat, his brown skin webbed with the outline of interlocking scales. The small plates gave their kind a reptilian look, despite the long, flowing hair most sported. And while the majority of aliens in the galaxy looked roughly humanoid, Callites took the similarities to another level. Human kids who painted themselves up as Callites for Halloween were almost indistinguishable from the real thing. The overall likeness didn’t help the local tensions between them and Humans, of course. Differences in skin texture seemed to be quite enough for most people. If anything, the many other traits they had in common just made cohabitation more difficult.

While one Callite got comfortable in Edison’s chair—his body sagging with obvious weariness—the other large male crossed over to the tool bench and picked up a power driver.

“Hey, don’t touch that!” Molly said.

“It’s okay,” the Human said, walking over to her. “We’re old friends of . . .” he looked pointedly at Molly’s ring finger, which was helping shield her mouth and nose from the stench, “. . . your boyfriend?”

“My boyfr—? You mean my father? And he’s not—hey, seriously, don’t touch that!” Molly stepped toward the guy inspecting her tools, but the Human grabbed her shoulder, spinning her around.

“Mollie? Mollie Fyde?” He whistled, looking her up and down. “Drenards in hyperspace, is that you? My goodness, you’ve grown up. And out!” He stared directly at her chest. The massive beast in Edison’s seat looked at her as if to confirm the observation, and then started toying with the flight harness.

“I’m Scottie,” the man said. He pulled her close, attempting to transform his grip on her shoulders into an embrace. Molly pushed against him, both hands on his chest, which left her mouth unguarded. “Scottie Paulson, your father’s old friend.”

His breath went right into her mouth, all over the surface of her tongue and back down her throat. It tasted like cheap liquor and cavities full of rotten meat. She gasped, which just drew the burn deep into her lungs. Molly visualized puking all over his coveralls but couldn’t quite manage it.

She shoved on his chest, instead. “Get off!” she squeaked, bending back over the galley counter as he pushed forward. He easily weighed twice as much as she did. “Seriously—” Molly coughed. “Get off me!”

Scottie took a step back and chuckled to his friend by the workbench. “I just wanted a hug. Hell, last time I saw you, I could bounce you in my lap!”

“Look,” Molly said. She held her hands out in front of her and scanned the three males. “I don’t know where my dad is, so I can’t help you guys. I’m gonna have to ask you to leave, okay? I was getting ready to go into town, and I won’t be on-planet long, so I need to lock up and—”

“Lock up?” The Callite by the workbench waved a power shunt through the air. “But then we can’t leave!”

“Good point, Ryn.” Scottie studied Molly, grinning. “Be odd of you to lock us up inside here, wouldn’t it?”

“Inside? I—no, you guys need to get out! My father isn’t—”

“Here? Yeah, you said. Tell you what, we’ll just wait for him to get back.” Scottie walked aft through the cargo bay. “You go on to town and we’ll keep an eye on things here.” He poked his head into the engine room, then turned and smiled at the silent oaf in Edison’s chair. “Check it out, Urg.”

Molly moved to intervene as the large Callite rose and stomped across the cargo bay. It was as futile as trying to wave down a StarCarrier.

“Listen—” she said. But nobody was.

The large Callite disappeared into the engine room while Scottie moved aft, peering inside each crew quarter.

“Hey, you guys really can’t—”

Scottie slapped his hand by Molly’s door. “I call this one!” he told his friends. He looked at Molly. “Smells nice,” he added, bouncing his eyebrows suggestively.

Molly wanted a gun. Plasma, laser, mechanical, she didn’t care. She wasn’t sure if anything would stop the two big fellows, but she really wanted to try. She turned and looked at the security cam in the corner of the bay and saw it twitching to follow the action.

Molly frowned at the camera. She backed slowly toward the cockpit as the two Callites jostled with each other, both trying to squeeze into Cole’s room at once.

ѻѻѻѻ

The cockpit door shut itself as soon as she stepped inside. Molly locked it, pulled up the cargo cam, and the Wadi jumped from the back of the captain’s seat to her shoulders. She flicked on the radio.

“You know these guys?” she asked her mom.

“Never seen them before in my lives. Either of them.”

“Either? Oh, you mean your lives. So are they’re lying? What should I do?”

“It could be your father knew them when I was on Dakura. What you should do is go find the local law. Or Cat.”

“You think the law’s a good idea? What if they check the ship’s name?”

“That won’t be a problem. The local government hates the Navy as much as you distrust them. Besides, the Navy has a minimal presence here. Your father and I were sent undercover just as much to avoid bureaucratic wrangling over jurisdiction as anything else.”

Molly leaned over the dash and looked through the carboglass toward the stable offices. She could see Pete standing by the door. He seemed to be squinting through the dust in their general direction.

“Okay, I’m gonna go for help. Can you lock the doors to the crew quarters?”