Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue

Despite her age, and the limited run of the model, she looked swift, even at rest. Flecks of paint were missing here and there, and lots of micro-meteor burns streaked down the hull, but overall the ship looked to be in fine condition. And aside from being lazily parked nose-in, a habit typical of jittery pilots, Parsona looked ready to fly.

Frozen in the doorway, Molly absorbed the sight. She wanted to shout for joy, but thoughts of Cole being locked up in a rock cell tempered her enthusiasm. She needed to get to work.

Walter seemed to agree. He clapped his hands to break her spell and asked about getting the hangar doors open. Molly nodded and watched him scamper over to a rusty console. She left him to it and rushed around the other side of the ship where the cargo ramp stood wide open. Her feet hit the old metal, the sound and spring of it taking her back to her childhood. Inside, familiar scents greeted her, bringing back more memories. She paused, feeling closer to her family than she had in ten years.

Then the enormity of their predicament hit her, making her feel alone and overwhelmed. This was a massive piece of machinery. Real machinery. She’d learned to fly in a simulator. In classrooms, she’d learned basic maintenance and mechanical duties. Now she stood in the cargo bay of a starship over fifty meters long. When she fired it up, actual mechanical bits would be roaring into motion, not the simulated vibration of a glorified computer. The thought of taking off in this thing without someone here to help her made her stomach flip; she had a sudden urge to use the bathroom.

She fought these self-doubts and nervously made her way toward the cockpit as the sound of metal scraping on metal filtered in from beyond the ship. Molly heard the hiss of a powerful wind and glanced through one of the portholes. Walter had the hangar doors opening up.

He joined Molly inside the ship, anxious to get underway. “Take off,” he told her.

“It’s not that easy,” she explained. “I have to do some things first.”

“No time. Daylight ssoon.”

“Walter, we can’t get out of here until I fix the hyperspace drive. Arrange those boxes or load some more supplies, I need at least an hour.”

“An hour?!” Walter frowned, then sniffed the air. “An hour it iss.” He ticked off fingers with his thumb. “Four tripss to the ssupply room,” he muttered to himself before hurrying down the cargo ramp.

“I was kinda hoping you’d help out here ,” Molly called after him, but the boy was already gone. “Okay then.” She turned to the workbench and charged up her father’s old welding torch. This is going to work , she told herself.

She lost herself in each task: cutting lengths of metal tubing from one of the bunks, welding them into a single rod six meters long, running wires from the engine room. The distraction forced her worries away from Cole and the upcoming challenge of flying the old ship.

It also freed her subconscious to secretly fiddle with a puzzle of its own: if Walter didn’t have keys for the gates leading to Cole, how had he disappeared that direction yesterday without passing back in front of her cell?

Cole lay prone on the freezing floor. He had no choice; his cell was a meter wide and just as tall—a stone coffin. Yesterday, his new friends had to drag him into the hallway to have enough room to beat on him properly. One of his ribs felt cracked from their hospitality, and he’d been spitting up blood all night.

The window at the end of the cell, however, was the primary source of his misery. A steady flow of cold evening air poured in with no way of escaping it. He tried blocking it off with his feet, but even through his boots he could feel the chill damaging his toes. His teeth chattered violently as he rubbed his arms to keep the blood circulating through his chest. The uncontrollable shivering was a relentless assault on his tender ribs.

The only food he’d been given looked like something you’d feed a dog—one you didn’t particularly care for. A hissing Palan had tossed the pellets in by Cole’s head. A tin of water thrown in after spilled across the stone and soaked through Cole’s shirt. He couldn’t turn around to see who tormented him, but the mysterious figure promised he’d be executed in the morning.

Cole wasn’t sure he could hang around long enough to make the appointment.

What hurt the most, the thing that kept digging into him, was having failed to protect Molly. No telling what their captors were doing to her. Would they be given a trial? Would Molly have to watch him be executed? Would Lucin and the Navy ever be able to piece together what had happened here?

Cole’s neck cramped up from the shivering of his head and shoulders, and his jaw felt numb from the continuous muscle spasms clattering his teeth together. Minutes dragged out into hours as he suffered the longest night of his life.

It seemed a lifetime later when the faintest glow of a new day began filtering past his boots. Cole parted them, allowing the chilled air to travel up his stomach and chest. It was worth the pain to watch the distant canyon wall color itself in a welcomed dawn. The sunlight signaled his promised execution, but also an end to the biting cold and the strange mixture of numbness and agony.

I may just live long enough to be killed , he thought to himself. It made him want to laugh out loud, this private joke. Laugh and scream.

Delirium must be setting in.

And now he was hearing things. Over the rush of the wind and the staccato of his crashing teeth, Cole imagined he could hear starship thrusters roaring outside: the high pitch of jet turbines mixing with the loud air nozzles used for maneuvering. It seemed awfully detailed for an auditory hallucination.

Pulling his boots completely out of the window, Cole raised his sore chin and looked down the length of his beaten body.

Through the small square of light, he gaped disbelievingly at the mirage rising into view.

If that wasn’t real, Cole knew he’d really lost it.

Walter tested the webbing harness, yanking the tether that secured him to the cargo bay. He couldn’t believe he was going along with this. He’d nearly mutinied when he learned what Molly had planned. Not that he understood how this would work, but nobody broke out of Palan Max. He’d tried it himself. It was impossible. The only two ways out were bribery and death. And most Palans only had coin for the latter.

Then again, he’d gone and helped her escape for nothing but a promise and the mere hope for reward. What had he been thinking? Or had he been thinking? This girl—floods take him—she was strange and incredible and intoxicating, making him do stupid stuff. And he was not stupid.

Walter watched the canyon wall slide by beyond the porthole, wondering how he’d gotten himself in this mess. Didn’t matter now , he decided. There was no turning back. Someone would be waking his uncle soon, blabbering about an empty cell and a lot of oiled hinges. He just needed to stall the escape and hope the guards had already gotten to the boy. What choice did he have? He couldn’t fly this contraption, and now he really needed to get off-planet. He’d return for the other spoils later. Much later. When someone else was in charge.

He shifted the strange contraption in his hand. It was nice and light; he couldn’t see how this thing was going to free the human. At one end of the pole the girl had welded a wide cross, about six feet between the tips. The other end, about twenty feet away, had a chain attached which snaked back to the workbench. Four wires trailed from the tips of the cross and disappeared around the corner into some sort of mechanical room.