The adult was the biggest problem. Literally. Cole knew he’d be ripped in half by the monster, so he pushed off the console and charged into Orville, choosing a foe closer to his size. Tackling a bear would’ve been easier. Cole tried to hang on as the enraged child thrashed, clawing at his back to tear him to shreds.

Molly arrived at full speed around the clear side of the tactical table. Cole tried to shout her down as she threw herself into the air, bringing her heels into the back of Orville’s knee. The pup crashed down under Cole’s weight, the stick pinned beneath him.

Edison pressed off the wall and rushed past to meet the charging adult. They crashed into each other with a boom, the rage in the youth enough to match the elder’s size. Molly wrestled with one of Orville’s arms, trying to keep it pinned back, as Cole launched a series of blows at the cub’s skull. The strikes stung his fists, but he wasn’t sure the angered youth even felt them. He looked up to see Edison gouging at the elder’s eyes, the two locked in a fight to the death.

Orville howled beneath him and lifted his shoulder, sending Molly flying back toward the table. With a thud, Cole drove a knee into the bundle of fur. Orville just pushed his bulk from the ground with Cole still on top of him, wearing him like a cape. His massive stick whizzed through the air, narrowly missing Molly’s head.

Cole screamed and reached around for Orville’s eyes, but the pup shrugged him off his back like an afterthought. Cole felt a massive paw wrap around his knee before he was tossed into the metal wall. He collapsed in a heap and fought for his senses. Molly yelled something; he looked up to see the sharpened stick, like a battering ram, hurtling toward his abdomen. He fell flat and the deadly log exploded against the steel in a bloom of splinters.

Orville howled with rage.

Cole pushed himself up, wrapping his hands around a fragment of wood the size of a baton and sharp as a dagger. Orville looked down for what remained of his weapon and Cole obliged by shoving the shard right into the pup’s eye.

The room rumbled with the sound of pure fury. The other two Glemots stopped clawing each other to see what had happened. At the sight of his wounded protégé, the adult let out a roar of his own. He tossed Edison aside with a shiver of rage and took a step toward Cole.

••••

Molly was already backing away from the terrifying creature when Cole turned to her. “Run!” he commanded.

She stumbled toward the ladder, the sound of thunder echoing off the steel around her. Cole caught up, steadying her as they rushed past the tactical table. Molly glanced over her shoulder to see the adult thrashing toward them, striking the wall with his fists as he went, mad with fury.

Running to the ladder filled Molly with the dread of a living nightmare. She was trying to climb a fence and feeling the bad thing at her back. She knew it would get her, but she had to scramble anyway, her arms not working.

Fear traveled up her spine; she jerked her arm out of the sling and grabbed rungs, one after the other. She kicked and fought her way up. Every time her right arm took its share of weight, Molly had to bite down on her body’s urge to pass out. Each rung brought pure torture.

The ladder was wide enough for Cole to come alongside her, just as they had descended. They were over two meters up, scrambling as fast as they could, when the adult reached them. He yanked Cole down first, his arm banging on a rung at her feet. The Glemot raised both paws to pulverize him into the ground. Molly didn’t hesitate. She launched off the ladder and wrapped both arms around the creature’s neck. The adult peeled her off and cast her aside, tossing her violently into the wall. A wall of fur flashed before her, Molly tensed for death, but it was Edison joining the action, a large fragment of splintered wood in hand.

Molly flinched as he crashed into the larger alien, driving the shard deep into the Glemot’s side. The adult’s howls deepened and strengthened. Edison stabbed again. And again. The injured beast swung his arms and stumbled back against a console, looking at the blood on his fur, pawing at it confusedly.

The fear on the adult’s face knotted Molly’s stomach. They were not battling a trained warrior—this was a politician. Pity stirred, then recoiled from her rising wrath. This was the sort of beast that killed with calculations, concocting war and disease and wiping out millions from the safety of a council meeting. She wanted to launch herself at the wounded thing and peel its flesh.

But Edison beat her to it. . .

••••

The aftermath made her want to vomit. Molly had been trained to kill, but from a distance. A puff of fire and a cloud of silent debris was as close to death as she was ever meant to be. The hand-to-hand courses at the Academy were a formality, designed to instill confidence and build muscle.

They’d never prepared her for this.

The council member was dead—his blood everywhere. The tangy scent of it filled the air; Molly could taste it like the metal of a dry spoon. At the other end of the room, Edison and Cole subdued the injured Orville, tying him up in Edison’s old restraints.

Molly tore herself from the gruesome sight of the dead Glemot and made her way toward the others, drawn by Orville’s howling. At the tactical table she paused, reaching up for a metal figure, the one resembling a pointed tree. It looked to be the sharpest.

She gripped the painted metal in her left hand, her right arm out of its sling and limp with pain. She remained unaware of it and paid no heed to the disarray of her robe as it barely clung to her shoulders. She approached Orville and lowered herself to her heels, clutching the tree with white knuckles.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. She reached down and raked the metal point across the fabric of her robe, cutting off a wide strip from the hem. The hunk of wood had already been removed from his eye and blood matted down the fur on half his face, dripping with the universal red of life in contact with oxygen. Molly folded the fabric up into a pad, making sure a clean portion was left on the outside. She pressed it to Orville’s eye and looked to Cole for help, hoping he’d understand why she needed to do this.

Cole nodded and tore a long strip from his own robe. “For you,” he told her. “Not for him.”

Orville’s face displayed no gratitude, but his angry panting subsided. The youth seemed resigned to his fate, whatever it would be.

Edison.

Molly turned to see how he was taking all of this. After flaying the elder and rushing to secure his brother, the pup had collapsed into one of the station chairs. His eyes were focused on a blank spot on the opposite wall. He could have been catatonic or calmly planning for world domination—it was impossible to tell.

Orville began testing his restraints for a weakness while Cole stood over him warily. Molly rose and walked over to Edison, placing a hand on his shoulder, the fur sticky with sweat and much else. There was a lot of blood on him.

On all of them.

“The plan is still viable,” he said calmly. He broke his gaze away from the steel plating and looked into Molly’s eyes. “The great imbalance remains a possibility.”

Molly couldn’t think about it clearly. There was too much horror down here. She needed to get out and breathe some fresh air, to think about what had just happened and what it meant for their immediate future.

“I have to get out of here,” she said.

Neither Cole nor Edison tried to stop her. They just looked at each other: breathing hard, sweating, unknowingly forging the bond that only battle welds. They sat like this as Molly made the slow and painful climb.

Up and out.

••••

Cole spoke first. “What do we do with your brother?”

“He remains incarcerated here. We secure the hatch mechanism from without.”

“Where’s the EMP?”

Edison shrugged and looked side to side. “Here, somewhere.” It seemed like a guess.

They began pulling panels off the cabinets and below the consoles; they rapped the walls. Orville seethed with anger but they didn’t waste time questioning him, Edison assured Cole that they could only expect delaying lies.

Edison shoved the tactics table to slide it out of the way and get to the consoles on the other side of it. The top hinged up instead.

“Located,” he said.

Cole had to hoist himself up and rest his stomach on the lip of the open chest to look inside. There were two large EMPs nestled in individually padded compartments. Each looked extremely impressive, complex enough to pass for a much more dangerous device when presented to the Leefs.

“Are you sure they won’t know the difference between an EMP and a nuclear bomb?” Cole asked Edison.

The pup smiled at this. “Trust me completely, Cole. Ascertaining the difference will be impossible for them.”

Cole smiled back. There was still a chance this could work.

••••

In the corner of the room, Orville groaned to himself. He thought back to the plan his brother had spilled and realized the horrific truth of it all. He wanted to scream but he knew it would serve no purpose. He was better off down there, anyway.

Of that, he was sure.

20

Cole crawled out of the bunker and found Molly collapsed  against a tree. She looked horrible, but at least her arm was back in the sling and her robe re-fastened. He knelt beside her and checked her splints—saw she’d already secured them. Her chin was down, her hair matted to her forehead. Cole placed his fingers below her jaw and lifted her gaze to his.

“You okay?”

She didn’t say anything. She just pulled him down to her by his neck and pressed her cheek to his. Cole slipped an arm around her back and helped her stand up. It was getting late and they needed to keep pressing forward.

Edison walked up with the device cradled in front of him, leaning back with the weight of the thing.

Cole had sudden doubts about the device’s reach. EMPs were great at knocking out electronics over a wide distance, but what kind of range would they need in order to fly out of here? Edison had said there were several hidden bunkers like this, each capable of locating Parsona and taking control of it, but he wasn’t privy to all of their locations. And all it would take was not reaching one of them, and their escape would be short-lived. The other problem was making sure they were beyond the EMPs range before it went off. Otherwise, Parsona’s electronics would be hit, she’d go lifeless, and they’d all come crashing back down to the planet.

Timing would be everything.

The trio set off through the woods on a long, circuitous hike that would bypass the activity around the Campton hill. It would be an excruciating hike for Edison. Cole felt horrible, but he was useless for helping with the load. He had tried to assist in removing it from the case, but he was unable to budge the thing. It certainly was an impressive device, able to pass for a nuke even to his Naval eye.

He thought about the trap the Leefs would set with it, their fury when the weapon proved to be nothing more than an electro-magnetic pulse, scouring the hidden bunkers as Parsona broke through the atmosphere.

Cole’s eyes drifted from the device to Edison’s tense frame. He couldn’t work out what the Glemot youth was getting out of this. Sure, if the Leef trap ended up a Campton rout, he could take credit for the plan and assure his fame and fortune. But was that really enough to explain the brutality they’d witnessed below the forest floor? What about Orville? Why keep him alive?

Could Glemots really be this calculating over what they thought was right or wrong? Maybe they had some evolutionary advantage that prevented emotion from usurping their decision-making. Cole considered this possibility and wondered about his own habit of using people to achieve his own goals. Did it excuse him that he felt bad about it later? His brief time on Glemot had been punctuated by little lies to every side. What made him any different? He glanced at Molly and cringed from other lies he’s told, despite his powerful reasons for telling them.

The guilt served to distract him from his plan’s worst-case scenario: disturbing the balance on Glemot. If they set this force loose on the galaxy—this trinity of wrath, genius, and power—it could mean the end of everything else. Perhaps in the universe.

No, that was not something Cole could afford to dwell on. Thoughts like that made action impossible.

••••

By the time they arrived at the meeting spot, Edison was visibly worn out. They hid the EMP nearby and Molly paced nervously, looking back to where the sun had disappeared over the horizon. She fretted over whether or not they’d been too late.

Out of the darkness, a dozen forms emerged. The Leef warriors. They surrounded them noiselessly and pressed in. One warrior spoke quietly to Edison, noting the matted blood in the pup’s fur. Several other warriors approached the youth and patted him, speaking softly. Molly could make no sense of this other than some sort of alien cultural tradition.

The plan had been to get Molly and Cole to their ship to oversee the repairs. Only then would the “nuke” be handed over. But time had grown short; exhaustion within both parties moved them along the shorter path of faith and trust. They agreed to exchange the device right there and rush the repairs.

Edison, Molly, and Cole huddled for a brief moment to touch and speak, sharing the electricity that courses through those who have been willing to die for one another.

Molly wished Edison the best of luck as Cole pulled her away, allowing their guide to lead them toward their ship. By the time her thoughts had returned to the task at hand, she realized they were going the wrong way. She tugged on Cole’s arm and gave him a questioning look.

“They probably moved it,” he said, shrugging.

A pan-galactic starship? Through a forest? With no mechanical advantage? Molly assumed the ship would be repaired in place, the Camptons too busy war-planning to guard it adequately. If her ship was safer, she couldn’t complain, but something in the demeanor of their new allies told her that all was not honest with them. She wished Walter was here with his olfactory lie-detector.