Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue

Molly ran her fingers across its silver hasps; she flipped them up, paused a moment, then hinged back the lid. Every piece was still there, each one in its proper place. She grazed a row of metrics and picked one at random, held it up close, then put it back. That was what she loved about the ratchet set. Everything had a slot that it went into. Everything fit. You could mess it up, but it would go back together again, just like it was.

She wished it was a metaphor for life, but it wasn’t. She knew.

It seemed odd that an old set of tools would stir such emotions, when the staterooms elicited hardly a response. Her own room had been rummaged through; nothing remained from her last time aboard. And the captain’s quarters, which she entered hesitantly, no longer smelled like her father.

Molly recalled sneaking into his room whenever the strange noises in the ship gave her bad dreams. He would sit up and hold her, softly explaining which pump or motor was turning on and what it was doing to create each sound. The next morning, she would wake up in her own bed.

Moving into his room, rather than sleep in her old one, may have appeared to the others a natural result of her rank, but Molly knew it was something different. It was a scared child once again looking for respite from her bad dreams. And it worked. The nightmare that’d been haunting her for ten years didn’t make its customary appearance that first night. Nor the next one. No longer terrified of being left behind, Molly had become a part of what she’d been chasing.

Another wonderful discovery was the ship’s original logs. They went all the way back to Parsona’s maiden voyage. Molly pulled up the waypoints her parents must’ve used on their first flight to Lok. She traced her finger across the nav screen, thinking about the planet where she’d been born, imagining her mother alive and happy, her parents in love.

She read the log entries that went with the routes, knowing they would’ve been typed in by her mother or father. The words glowed phosphorous green on the readout—her parents talking to her across time and beyond the grave. As a pilot now, in charge of their old ship, she felt connected to them both in a way she never had before. Eighteen years ago, her father had left the Navy and moved with his new bride to a frontier planet. They would’ve been crossing the galaxy just like Molly was about to, trying to start a new life.

While she spent her time reminiscing, Cole launched into a whirlwind of productivity. Nobody appreciated the hot shower as much as he did. The swelling on his face and the purple around his ribs faded with rest, medical cream, and clean bandages. And surprisingly—to Molly at least—it was Cole that busied about the utility room, washing the mildew out of the sheets, trying to salvage their Palan clothes, and organizing their supply of soaps and cleaners. Molly couldn’t remember him being this fastidious at the Academy; then again, the only way to recognize an overly neat person in the military was to note the few people who weren’t complaining about mandatory hygiene and strict dress codes.

Walter also kept himself busy. He took his new duties as “Cargo Officer” more seriously than Molly had expected. It turned out the kid could do more than just read and write, he was a whiz with computers. Probably from a childhood of hacking into banks or stealing holovids—Molly didn’t dare ask. He wasted no time retiring the manifest sheets and writing his own inventory program into a small computer. Molly had no idea where it had come from, but it seemed suspiciously newer than anything else on the ship. He carried the device with him at all times, hissing with delight when he found something new in a hidden cubby.

Between Cole’s cleaning and Walter’s organizing, the wreck of Parsona’s interior quickly transformed into a model of perplexing orderliness. This is not what living with two males should be like. Especially when one of them was a citizen of Palan, having seen what passes muster on that planet. Then again, perhaps this was the way Walter had chosen to rebel. Or maybe it was his attempt to impose order on the universe. It was no longer a mystery to Molly that her offer to get the boy off-planet had succeeded where other deals had fallen short. He must’ve been miserable there.

The only bad news, besides the hyperdrive reading eighteen percent, was the lack of some common spares for the thrusters and the state of a few mechanical systems. Numerous lights were out and needed replacing, the air conditioning unit in one of the crew rooms was broken, some paint needed to be chipped off and re-applied, and various other tasks started filling the to-do tab in the ship’s computer.

The only deal-breaker, though, was the hyperdrive. They had no way of charging it up themselves.

In fact, filling up the hyperdrive and avoiding the Navy were going to be difficult to do at the same time. Supposedly, only a few people in the entire Galactic Union knew how hyperdrive engines worked. Fusion coil technology was a closely guarded secret, and refills were overseen at Orbital Stations under the watchful eyes of Navy personnel.

There were dozens of rumors about who actually discovered the technology and owned the rights. Conspiracy theorists maintained an alien race sold the technology to Humans ages ago, but Molly didn’t buy it. Every race Humans encountered in the galaxy had received hyperdrive technology from them , not the other way around. The only exception was the Drenards, who had made the same technological breakthrough at some point, and the only technology they seemed eager to give humans were missiles. Lots of them. Pointy ends first.

Filling up with enough fuel to reach Earth, and the safety of the Academy seemed an intractable problem. One Molly struggled to solve while everyone cleaned and recharged their spirits.

But it was Cole who came up with an idea. It happened as he was poring over the astral charts in Parsona’s nav computer, logging in potential jump routes to Earth.

“This makes no sense,” Cole said, his voice tinny and subdued by the bilge. Molly had her head under a floor panel in the cockpit, tightening some hydraulic lines. It made communicating difficult, so naturally Cole was being unusually chatty. “Hey, Molly, you ever heard of Glemots?”

“Glemots,” she repeated. “Why does that sound familiar?” She raised her head to hear him better and banged it on a floor truss. She nearly dropped her wrench.

“Be careful,” Cole cautioned. “And Glemots aren’t a that , they’re a them . Remember the race that left the Galactic Union all those years ago? They completely shut out the rest of the universe. You can’t even get near their home planet.”

Rubbing her head, Molly pulled herself out of the bilge. She could see grease on her own cheeks, black smudges in the edge of her peripheral. She had her hair tied back under a triangle of white cloth and figured Cole had already seen her at her worst after the Palan rains. “Are they the ones Unity Now tried to help out after a supernova irradiated their corner of the galaxy?”

“Bingo. The UN sent a few supply and refugee ships, and not a one of them was ever heard from again.”

“And what makes you want to go and say ‘hello’? Was that dinner you cooked last night some attempt to fatten me up for the savages?”

“They aren’t savages. Or weren’t, anyway. Look, there’s a log in the nav computer about them. The Navy first encountered these guys back in the frontier expansion, so it must’ve been over two hundred years ago. Smart race, roughly humanoid—”

“That is such an offensive term, Cole. You’re supposed to say bilaterally symmetric quadruped .” Molly sang the term with the cadence of something memorized but not completely understood.