Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

“Confirm. — am — speaking to?”

“Edi — on. I — member of Dre — — cil.”

“— the —”

“Confirm. — are — Exponent.”

“Did you hear that?” Molly whispered.

“Too much basss,” Walter hissed. He reached to adjust the dials.

Molly waved him off. “Don’t. Didn’t you hear—? Why can’t we get the rest?”

“Approxima — — ordinates —.”

“It’ss a carrier wave,” Walter said. “It jumpss frequencsiess oncse a ssecond. I’m jumping after it, but the sscanner tracse I wrote hass too much lag.”

He pulled the computer into his lap and fiddled with it. Molly looked up through the canopy at the steel cliff of StarCarrier looming ahead. Something about the garbled phrases kept tugging on her subconscious, begging her to understand. She heard Cat and Scottie whispering back and forth between themselves—and then someone banged on the cockpit door.

“Tell them we need a second,” Molly said, keying the door open.

While Cat and Scottie chatted with the climbers in the cargo bay, Molly turned to see how Walter was doing, then noticed her nav screen had gone blank. A single line across the top read:

LET ME HELP_

Molly leaned forward in her seat and reached for the keyboard.

HOW?_ she typed.

LET ME TALK TO HIM_

Molly hesitated. She turned and saw one of the Navy men by the door frowning at the unexpected delay. Scottie gestured and made excuses, and finally the man turned away.

“The boys in black wanna know what’s taking so long,” Cat said.

Molly keyed the door shut. “They’re gonna have to wait.” She flicked the speakers on. “Go ahead,” she said to her mom. “Talk to him.”

Cat and Scottie gave her a funny look, then her mother’s voice came through the speakers:

“Walter,” Parsona said. “Do you remember me?”

Walter looked at the dash, then at Molly. “You’re Molly’ss friend, right?”

Molly wondered what he meant, then remembered her mom’s ruse the night Byrne nearly killed her. They had spoken before, but Parsona had pretended to be radioing in from another ship.

“That’s right,” Parsona said. “Do you remember helping me with the missiles?”

“Yeah,” Walter said. “About that, I didn’t mean to be ssso—”

“No, that’s fine. You did great. Now I want to help you .”

“With what?” Walter asked. He looked to Molly and shrugged.

“I want you to give me that program you’re using. I can do the frequency switching a lot faster than your computer.”

“Okay,” Walter said. “I guessss that’ss okay.” He turned to Molly. “Sshould we go and meet her?”

“She’s in the computer, Walter.” Molly pointed to his nav screen, which had gone black except for a blinking cursor. “She’s a part of the ship.”

Walter stared at the screen. He reached forward and poked one of the keys on the dash. The letter ‘W’ appeared, and the blinking cursor shifted to the right.

He glanced over at Molly, then bent forward, typing out the rest:

WALTER_

He hit enter.

HELLO WALTER_

He smiled at the screen, then turned to Molly, beaming. “I thought you were talking to yoursself all thosse timess!”

“Can you type in the program, or do you want to interface with my computer?” Parsona asked.

“I’ll type it,” Walter said, rather hurriedly. He bent to the task, referring to his small screen several times. Molly looked back and widened her eyes for Cat and Scottie. They both shrugged and remained silent. The Wadi flicked her tongue out into the air.

After less than a minute of typing, Walter sat back, and the nav screens changed. Molly felt her stomach drop a little, realizing she’d just let the Palan write a program into the ship’s computer. When the conversation with her mom went blank, her heart stopped for a brief moment, but then the screen flashed and showed a display similar to the one on his portable unit with audio bar graphs dancing up and down.

The same radio chatter as before came through Parsona’s speakers, louder, though, and without the annoying pauses:

“—need to fall back. Listen to your translators. Group two will have the lead from here on out, assuming they make it through. We’ll give them time before zipping up the rift. Until then, nobody transmits on standard frequencies. Keep chatter to a minimum on this channel. Follow your instructions and be good Berns until we can sort this out.”

“Group Five, affirmative.”

“Three, out.”

The chatter ceased, leaving the cockpit silent. Molly shook her head and grumbled under her breath.

“Why so glum?” Cat asked. “This could come in handy. We’ll know what them bastards are thinking before they pull it.”

“I know,” Molly said. “It’s just… one of those voices reminded me of someone. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

She waited for the chatter to return, but the radio remained silent, the bar graphs flat and mocking. Molly let out her breath, drew in a new one, and reached for the ship’s controls, pulling Parsona out of its low hover and up along the tilted cliff of steel toward Gloria’s hangar. Behind her, Scottie keyed the cockpit door open and went back to join the climbers. Walter leaned toward the radio, presumably to shut it off.

“Can you leave it scanning?” Molly asked him. “Just in case the Bern say something important?”

He nodded and pulled his hand away. “Why would they be sspeaking Englissh?” he asked as he returned to his computer.

“They have to be good at blending in,” Cat answered.

“They look a lot like us,” Molly added. “Do you remember the guy from Dakura that nearly—that you rescued me from?”

Walter nodded.

“He was one of them, but you would never have known it.”

Molly saw Walter flinch. He looked at her with a strange expression—fear mixed with something else. She thought she understood how he felt, having been floored by the revelation herself.

“The ssame guy that sstrangled you,” he hissed.

“That’s right. We don’t have to worry about him anymore, but now you know why they speak English. You have to keep all this a secret, okay? People would panic, otherwise. Nobody would know who they could trust.”

Walter sniffed and nodded.

Molly guided Parsona into the Carrier’s hangar, high up the ship’s leaning belly. As she flew along the downward-sloping floor, she sensed Walter was dying to ask her another question, or possibly tell her something. She nearly pressed him to come out with it, but the more important task of close-quarters piloting required her attention.

She flew at a steep angle down the calm sea of riveted steel, ignoring the craggy reef of ruined and twisted Firehawks piled up at the bottom. Just above the open stairway door, she spun Parsona around and lined up the open door with her own ship’s cargo bay. As the landing struts settled to the decking, she locked the thrusters and accelerator just right to keep the ship from sliding back or flying forward. Parsona was basically in an inclined hover, held fast to the side of a steep cliff with her skids pressing against the bay’s decking.

Walter excused himself. He left his computer behind, crawled over the control console, and padded back through the cargo bay. Molly turned and watched him scurry past the climbers and their piles of gear, wondering what had gotten into him. She turned back around and adjusted the throttles one final time, double-checking that Parsona wasn’t sliding through the StarCarrier’s hangar.

Satisfied they were stable, Molly keyed open the cargo door, allowing the muffled anger of Parsona’s thrusters to invade the hull. She watched the cargo cam as the door opened fully, its rim swinging out and touching down to the StarCarrier’s deck.