Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue

Walter nodded.

“And since you seem to be good with merchandise and gear, I would love to have you as my Cargo Officer. At least until we get to Earth.”

Walter beamed; it was nothing like his sneer at all. He rubbed the shoulder Molly had squeezed. “Officser,” he repeated.

“Yeah, Cargo Officer.” Molly opened a few drawers and cabinets, looking for the ship manifest. Every compartment appeared to have been rummaged through, not at all like her father normally kept things. She eventually found the clipboard under a stack of manuals for the ship’s mechanical and electrical systems.

“This is a manifest,” she told Walter. “You keep up with everything on a ship with this. How much, what it is, what you paid for it, what you hope to sell it for, who owns it, where you got it, where it’s stored…” She ran her finger along the top row, reading the header and wondering if the Palan was able to follow along.

Walter watched, mesmerized. The way most Palan’s did things was much different. Nothing stayed in one place long enough to bother writing anything down. This was more like the way he did things. The way he would lay out team duties for his band of junior pirates when they went on market raids, or the way he’d organized his food cart after his uncle punished him with prison duty after that last heist.

His uncle. Walter figured his uncle would have a bounty out on his head by now. Stealing a spaceship and two prisoners in a single morning probably meant he could never go home again. The thought didn’t make him sad. Not at all. It made him think of the differences between him and his uncle, and of all his great ideas the old bastard had waved away.

“You can read and write, can’t you?” Molly asked him.

The insinuation hurt. He nodded vigorously then followed Molly’s gaze as she glanced around at the messy cargo bay. Nothing had been stowed properly before they took off; boxes of supplies had toppled, their contents strewn across the cargo bay.

“Until we get the Navy to reward you for helping me, I can’t offer anything more than room and board. Understand?”

“Of coursse,” he said. “It iss enough. I took a few thingss from my uncle anyway. Iss no problem.”

Molly shook her head as if she didn’t want to know. “All you have to do is keep up with all the items in the ship, put them in sensible places and write it down so we can find them. So, have fun with it or go get some rest. I need to tend to Cole and do some pilot stuff.” She smiled at him and turned to the cockpit.

He watched her go. Forlorn, like a puppy tied to a park bench studying its departing master.

“Hey, pal. You’re in my chair.”

Cole looked over his shoulder at her. He had some of the meal bar on his chin, ruining Molly’s mock anger. She laughed and pointed to her own face. He wiped it off, stepping dutifully over the control console and into the nav chair.

“ This is going to take some getting used to,” he said, adjusting the harness on the back of the seat. “Where’d you rush off to?”

“Bathroom,” Molly lied. “Nothing on SADAR?”

“A little glitch a few minutes ago, some hyperdrive discharge and a very small contact. Probably just ice peeling off or a problem with the SADAR. Other than that, geez, it’s too quiet up here. This orbit is completely dead.”

Molly agreed. “Especially for a pirate haven,” she said. “The only thing I can think is they’re fighting over some spoils somewhere. Or the recent shift in power has everyone locking down their hatches.” She looked at Cole, studied his furrowed brow. “You aren’t going to add this to your conspiracy theory, are you? You think our escape is being allowed, don’t you? ’Cause I can tell you, buddy, it’s been some damn hard work.”

Cole held up both hands in mock surrender. “Easy, I’m not saying that at all. You just keep on pointing out the obvious, and I’ll look for the difficult clues, okay?”

Oooh . She wanted to punch Cole in the arm, but he was smiling at her. And the bruises on his face made her want to hug him rather than hit him.

“You look terrible,” she said.

His smile widened. Molly would never understand why boys were so proud of their scrapes and scars. Whatever their heroics proved, the pride they had in their nicks undid it.

Cole turned back to the nav screen in front of him. The large square monitor displayed their astral charts—currently centered on Palan and her three moons. Another planet was also in view, circling the same star on a tighter orbit. “Where to, Captain?” he asked her.

“Earth, if we could, but our hyperdrive’s low; it’s gonna have to be someplace closer. Do you think the Orbital Station here is safe?”

Cole looked at her like she was crazy. “Are you crazy?” he asked, confirming the look. “The last time we went to the Navy we nearly got ourselves killed. Twice .”

“Okay, fine. So we need to go someplace with very little Naval presence that also has fusion fuel. How do you propose we pull that off?”

Cole looked at the charts again. “Here’s one that fits. And I hear Palan is nice after the rains.”

“Funny.” Molly sipped from her juice pouch. It tasted like nectar after that prison muck. “I say, for now, we just pick a safe entry zone for a small jump. We get showered and changed and get some sleep. I’m not thinking clearly enough to make a rational decision.”

Cole nodded his agreement. She watched him scroll to a spot in the vacuum of space perpendicular to Earth’s vector, a place nobody would think to follow. She could’ve done the calculations in her head, but she watched him hammer them out on the nav computer. He wielded the equations in his own way and she bit her tongue; there were probably a dozen things he’d be doing differently if he was sitting over here. They were both going to have to be patient with each other as they learned their new roles.

“Locked in and confirmed,” he told her.

Molly checked the numbers. The hyperdrive was turned back to its normal settings, locked for the ship’s current mass via the SADAR unit. She raised the glass shield over the jump button and thumbed it.

The stars shifted.

The next two days were spent in the middle of nowhere and full of bliss. Molly had been so busy using Parsona to flee Palan, she missed her chance to fully appreciate the reunion. As they drifted out along the edge of the Milky Way’s Frontier Arm, she finally had an opportunity to look over the ship.

Her ship.

A lot of the tools she remembered watching her father use were still here. Some of them looked worse for wear: the fuel cell in every power tool was bone dry; a few manual screwdrivers were missing; one of the large hammers she’d barely been able to lift as a child had a large spot of strange rust on it that needed to be filed off. Despite the abuse, most of it was still there—including her father’s old ratchet set, the sight of which flooded Molly with nostalgia.

It was the closest thing to a toy box she’d ever had. She would spend hours playing with the shiny cylinders, stacking them like blocks, building precarious things that quaked as her father stomped by. She used to hold her open hands to either side of her little metal castles as they threatened to fall, holding them upright by the force of her will alone.

That came to an end after she spilled the entire set in the engine room and had to spend the rest of the day digging greasy bits out of the bilge, cleaning them and re-sorting them. It was the last time she’d opened the large metal box.