Molly clenched her jaw. She thought about some of the abuses she’d suffered, but none seemed as bad as what Cat had been through. Still, she got Cat’s point about the random cruelty of youth.

“Them kids done me a favor, way I see it. They not only showed me how I was supposed to be walking, they showed me how not to be behaving. Family couldn’t afford no hoverchair or prosthetics, so I made myself some walking sticks and started working out at a young age. Went health crazy. Started eating nothing but fruit and veggies from a half dozen planets and drank a few gallons of water a day.” Cat slapped her thighs and stared at her bare legs. “Thought I could fix ’em by working hard enough at it.”

“And you obviously did,” Molly said.

Cat shook her head. “Naw. I was—”

“Belay, we’ve reached the armory. Bagging up supplies and rigging the ascenders, over.”

Cat squeezed the radio. “Copy.”

“Make sure they leave the lines,” Molly said.

“Be sure to leave everything in place,” Cat radioed.

“Copy that. Belay, over and out.”

Molly and Cat smirked at each other.

“Where was I?” Cat asked. “Didn’t you want to hear about the Bern? How’d we get to talking about my childhood?”

“It’s fine. It’ll take them a lot longer to climb back up. You were telling me how you learned to walk by eating healthy.”

Cat shook her head. “Nope. I never did. Well, not like that. I dropped out of school when I was twelve. Moved to another town and started working in a plant putting buggies together. I could sit in one place with the other Callites while the parts came by, doing the stuff they did, only with a Lokian accent they made fun of me for. Anyways, I made enough not to starve. Won’t bore you with the next few years, but I eventually moved up to delivery and learned to fly. Did some local stuff around Lok, then eventually got assigned to the run between here and Vega.”

“You were a pilot?”

“Yeah, something you don’t need legs for, apparently. Unless, of course, your shift is short a man one day and you decide to run a shipment solo, then your boss figures you can do that all the time, and he starts cutting corners and pocketing the savings. Then, one day, your nav computer goes haywire and you need to run to the engine room to hit the emergency shutdown button on the hyperdrive before it jumps with bum digits, but you’re crawling through the cargo bay, dragging yourself along, breaking fingernails back on rivets and crying like a sap, and you’re not halfway to the engine room before the ship makes a bad jump—”

Cat peered into her mug.

“All that happened to you?” Molly whispered.

“Brightest shit I ever seen came next, the light flooding the ship through every porthole and crack. Thought I was in heaven. Thought maybe some sin-tallying machine had gone as haywire as my hyperdrive. Next thing I know, I’m being thrown all over the cargo bay as my ship crashes into a pile of ice. Screwed me up real good. I remember being drug through the snow, I remember when they cut my legs off, but that was about it.” Cat took one hand off the mug and rested her palm on the band around her thigh. “Wasn’t awake when they put them back on.”

Molly shook her head. “Someone cut off your legs?” She reached for the Wadi, remembering what Cat had done to save the animal’s life.

“I was half-dead anyway, the way Josh told it. But then, a few days later, I’m good as new. Legs working and everything. Some egghead ex-Navy chap is telling me the water on Lok had done it, that those gallons and gallons I drank every day while growing up had unlocked some old Callite genes from back when our ancestors could re-grow their tails. Wild-ass guesses, if you ask me. Science stirred with gobbly-gook.”

She took a loud sip, both hands back to cupping the mug.

“The next few years were a blur, sometimes literally, with people moving by so fast. I learned to fight. Learned to fight for them. Started adopting all kinds a weird beliefs—whatever they told me, I believed. You see a place like that, you’re a fool to doubt anything. Them boys loved me, said I was almost good enough to be Human. They couldn’t get over the way I could all of a sudden walk around without goggles. And my blood was useful to them. A steady supply of the Callite stuff—well, you saw how bad they needed that for yourself. I thought it was ritual shit—”

Cat looked over and frowned at her language. Molly waved her off.

“I thought it was ritual stuff. I shoulda seen what was going on, where the purple paste came from, the fusion fuel, all of it. I shoulda seen it earlier.”

Cat took another deep gulp, the bottom of the mug coming up high above her chin. She lowered the mug and peered inside, as if watching would somehow make it refill.

“It took a while for the numbness to return. Didn’t notice the sensations going away at first, not ’till I was just about completely numb all over.”

“Who were these people that did this to you?”

“Humans trapped in hyperspace. Remnants and new recruits from an old terrorist group. They think the Bern are onto something. They see aliens as a problem—and that includes themselves and other Humans. They’re pretty convincing, too. Of course, the other side also had a way with words.”

“The other side?”

“The Underground. I spent some years with them as well, after one of our raids didn’t go so well and I got captured.” Cat looked up. “It wasn’t long after I fell in with the Underground that your parents came to Lok, but of course I didn’t know about that ’till later. We eventually made a huge push, one of those raids that grows into a war, and it nearly wiped out both sides. The fighting spilled out into Lok, pretty much leveling the village where that rift is now. Most people got trapped on the hyperspace side. Me and a few others got stuck back here. I kept up the fight for a while, tried to talk sense to some people, but kept getting numb to it all. I eventually stopped caring. Hell, now I go back and forth between the two sides, seeing how one’s right and the other’s wrong, then changing my mind.”

“How we’re wrong?” Molly asked. “Wrong to want to live and be free?”

Cat shrugged. “Free and bumbling around aimlessly. Hell, your side might mess up the universe for a whole load of future people. You might unwittingly end life for everyone.”

“How would we do that?”

“Buncha physics I can’t half understand, but it’s possible. The universe goes ’round and ’round, you see? If it gets different enough, it might be the end of everything alive. The Bern basically make sure the universe is kosher for living things each time it resets itself.”

“It sounds like they make the world hunky-dory for them, but what about us? And why are you helping me if you aren’t sure who’s good or bad?”

Cat tilted her mug up and tapped the bottom, letting the last few drops fall on her tongue. She put it back in its holder for the final time and wiped her chin with her sleeve.

“These days, I just go wherever the pain is,” she said. “And you seem to be doing the same, so here I am. Here we are, you and me.”

“Belay, ascenders here. Coming up with the first load. Should be able to get it all in two, over.”

Cat grabbed the radio. “Roger,” she said. “Copy. Belay is over and out. Ten-four.”

She smiled up at Molly and winked.

But Molly wasn’t finding anything humorous at the moment. She frowned and stared off into space, thinking about the things Cat had said. There was something familiar in the argument, the claim that it might be worth it to sacrifice a few million lives to prevent the possibility of some future, even larger calamity.

“Glemot,” she whispered to herself. Cat’s claim was that the Bern might have a right to torch them all, just to keep her people from performing some unknown evil in some unseen tomorrow.

Her mind felt fevered at the thought that it all came down to that. Another calculation of risk, another bout of destruction on such a grand and unfortunate scale, and all over a bunch of what-if’s.

“What’s Glemot?” Cat asked, having overheard Molly’s disgusted whispers.

“It was the biggest mistake ever made,” Molly said, tears welling up in her eyes at the memory of that beautiful and haunting planet. “It was the biggest mistake in the universe up until this one.”

13 · Walter’s Room

Walter leaned his head out the doorway and peered to the side; Molly and Cat were still in the cockpit, talking. He stole across the hallway and let himself into Molly’s room, moving immediately to her bottom drawer. He caught the hair lodged in the drawer’s frame as it fell to the carpet, dug under her clothes, grabbed his spoils, and returned the single follicle to its place. He had raided the drawer so many times, he often worried he’d do it in his sleep one night and get caught.

He laughed to himself at the idea. There’ss no way I’d get caught, Walter thought. Not even in my ssleep!

He padded out of Molly’s room and back across the hallway, the red band from Drenard clutched in his silvery fist. As soon as his door slid shut, he pulled the band on, the seam lined up in back. Walter jumped in his bed and slid under the covers. He started thinking as loudly as he could, wishing the voice on the other side wasn’t so fond of always keeping him waiting—

••••

“Sir? There’s a message coming in for you.”

Byrne turned to his assistant and waited. The young officer pressed a finger against his ear, holding tight the small radio receiver lodged there. Byrne assumed the gesture helped block out external noises. He could only imagine how such a messy interplay between flesh and machine would work, for he was one hundred percent the latter. His assistant nodded and raised one hand to signal it might take a moment.

Byrne settled back in his chair and looked around the suddenly quiet conference room. If he still had arms, it would’ve been a fine time to cross them, signifying his comfort with the wait. He would show his creators that he was quite confident in the invasion’s progress, dispelling the worries that had drawn them together in the high command ship’s main conference room.

“It’s from the latest ship to pass through the rift,” his assistant said.

The scattered whispers around the table died down as everyone listened for the latest news from the home galaxy.

“Go on,” Byrne said. It would’ve been a fine time to wave his hand in small circles, but he had to sit, an expressionless torso, and pour as much meaning as he could into mere words.

His assistant coughed into his fist and then cleared his throat. “The Senate is not happy with the timetables, sir. They’ve sent a spreadsheet showing a revised invasion schedule, with or without the, uh . . . the data stored in your arms. I can send the file through to your internals if you like.”

Byrne felt his programming stutter at the mention of the damned arms. That was all anyone around the conference table wanted to discuss. His arms. When would he get them back? Why weren’t there backup copies of all the intel he’d gathered on the Milky Way? How had he not foreseen one day being without them?

Right then, all Byrne wanted his limbs for was to pound the conference table to bits. He wanted to wave away the criticisms, to dispel the nonsense made by hindsight. He wanted a fist to shake.

“So the Senate wishes us to hurry,” he said, forcing a smile he didn’t feel.

A scattering of laughter floated around the table.

Byrne nodded to the invasion fleet’s head physicist. “What’s the latest on the rift?”

“The size has stabilized, sir, but we’re still showing a massive strain on local spacetime with each ship that comes through.”

“So there’s no bringing them through any faster?”

“No, sir. Not and still give each of the six folded dimensions time to properly recoil—”

“We take your word for it,” Byrne said, the interruption feeling rude without a polite raise of his hand. He looked around the table at the various heads of invasion divisions. Most of the eyes pointed his way were of the fleshy variety. Not for the first time, Byrne wondered what they felt of his being in charge. Was he seen as an abomination? One of their tools out of control? He didn’t think so. He often felt something more humiliating: That they just looked at him the way they did their communicators after they’d been popped out of their ear canals and set on the table before them.

“I understand the Senate’s impatience, and I understand each of yours,” Byrne said. “However, if the science says we can’t bring the fleet through any faster, I don’t see that we have a choice. It’s not as if this galaxy poses a threat to us, so we form up as steady as we can right here until the jump data is retrieved.”

The Personnel Chief raised his hand. “But when will that be?” He glanced at the others as they turned to face him. “And it’s not that the crews are grumbling about the time away from home, they just want to know when they’ll see some action.”

“I thought you were expecting your—” The Weapons Officer looked away from Byrne’s gaze and glanced at the knotted and empty sleeves at his shoulders. “—your data back days ago.”

“I was,” Byrne said. “I am. The agent I have working on this has our coordinates. I’m just waiting for the delivery.”

“While we wait, the Drenard invasion against the Humans continues and is taking a heavy toll.”

Everyone around the table turned to the other automaton in the room, the only figure among them who didn’t look anything like a good Bern. Agent Bodi stood in a far corner, preferring as always to keep his blue-tinted skin in the shadows. As uncomfortable as his presence made the others feel, Byrne felt a sort of connection to his mechanical brethren, his fellow plant among the enemy. But he also felt a twinge of disgust. So many other, more primal circuits inside of him had been designed to loathe the appearance of anything un-Bern.