Hugh Howey - Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue

“Gimme a break, I’m just skimming what it says here.” Cole gestured to the nav screen. “As I was saying, let’s see here… oh, so the Glemots had no technology when the Navy found them, so they put the Meln Imperative in place.”

“Watch, but don’t interfere,” Molly recited. She felt like they were back in classes at the Academy.

“Right. But get this, the Glemots were flying ships out of orbit just four years later.”

“So the Navy had it wrong. They had technology.”

“Not according to this. Supposedly they worked out the principles of space flight from their limited contact with the Navy.”

“From nothing?” Molly got up from the floor and gaped in disbelief over Cole’s shoulder. “That’s impossible. Someone made a mistake, or the Navy broke the Meln Imperative or something.”

Walter poked his head into the cockpit. “What are you guyss getting sso loud about? Can I look?”

“Pilot stuff.” Cole and Molly said in unison. They smirked at each other.

“Well, I’m going to go do more Officser sstuff,” Walter said haughtily. “The sstorage lockerss in the bilge are almosst done,” he added with pride.

While she waited for Walter to pad away, Molly noticed how close her face was to Cole’s. The nav screens were hard to see clearly from an angle. She could’ve pulled up the display on her own computer, but she’d just leaned over to read his. She hadn’t noted their proximity to one another while they were talking, but now, in silence, she could feel the heat from his cheek radiating out to hers. The warmth made her want to pull away sharply, or douse it with a kiss.

She did neither.

Instead, she reached over him and pointed to the monitor, trying to focus on something else. “An observation satellite?”

Cole nodded. “That’s the theory the Navy settled on. They lost a planetary probe during the reconnaissance phase. A faulty thruster sent it crashing to the surface. They probably decided a recovery would risk direct contact. Must’ve figured nothing useful could survive atmospheric entry and an impact like that.”

Molly moved to the Captain’s chair and pulled up the same star chart on her screen. She just couldn’t concentrate while hovering so close to him. It felt like flying next to a canyon wall in a stiff breeze.

Cole continued talking, seemingly unaware of Molly’s struggles. “And once the cat was out of the bag,” he said, “the Meln Imperative no longer applied. In fact, according to this, the Glemots made first contact themselves . And they had a rough grasp of English… oh, wait. You are so not going to believe this.”

“What is it?” she asked, trying to scan down the report to find it for herself.

“This is how the Navy figured out the satellite may have caused the sudden spike in technology. The English spoken by the first Glemot astronauts was heavy in engineering jargon. They had pulled their vocabulary straight from the satellite computers.”

“You’re right,” Molly agreed. “I don’t believe it. For once I’m thinking one of your conspiracy theories would make more sense. And what’s the point of this lesson?”

Cole glared at her. “The reason this star system matters to us is that the Navy built a small Orbital Station there before the Glemots kicked them out. The station’s still there . If the Navy left in a hurry, there might be some stuff we could use. Maybe some fusion fuel or a Bell radio that still works.”

Molly shook her head. Bell radios were the key to instantaneous communication across long distances, but they wouldn’t find one operational. The devices employed Bell’s Theorem, a bizarre 20th century discovery in quantum mechanics. The theorem hypothesized the ability to entangle two particles so a change on one resulted in a change in the other, no matter how far apart they were. Molly knew her quantum mechanics. Entangled particles are kept in magnetic storage units; they’d decay without anyone around to keep them up.

But the fusion fuel? That was a real possibility. Worth checking out. “It is close by,” Molly noted. She traced a finger across her pilot screen. “Twenty thousand light years, and in the right direction. Let’s call it six percent from the hyperdrive. We would still have enough for another small jump or two if nothing panned out. We could make the Navy station at Cephus as a bailout.”

Cole agreed. “I can’t think of anything else to try. Unless you want to go turn ourselves in to the Navy straight away. Hope the Palan office was an anomaly.”

“What do you think?”

“I think the behavior there was part of a larger pattern. The simulator sabotage, the early graduations, the way you were run out of the school. Nothing makes sense to me right now except the Navy acting screwy—”

“ More screwy,” Molly corrected him.

“Yeah, more screwy.” Cole laughed. “Or screwier . Anyway, I’d feel safer with you and some backwoods savages than I would with the authorities right now.”

“Okay, but if we’re gonna do this, it has to be stealth-like. Jump in behind this moon, here, and use the thrusters to head to the Orbital Station. No spooking the natives.”

“I don’t think they’ll be a problem. The reason they left the GU is because they started to distrust technology just a few years after they mastered it. After they incapacitated the Navy, they got rid of or stored away everything they’d built. Several groups thought this made the system safe again, Navy included. But nobody has visited them since and returned to talk about it. Nothing but a few system scans by the Bel Tra, from the looks of things.”

Molly felt wistful at the mention of the Bel Tra, the best cartographers in the galaxy. “I wish we had their latest charts instead of these old things,” she said.

“Hey, if we’re quiet, they won’t even know we’re there.”

“Like the UN ships?” she countered.

“That’s different; they were going down to the planet. Probably trying to hand out potatoes in a hail-storm of arrows and rocks.”

“Yeah, probably so,” she said, hoping he was right.

Walter bounced excitedly into the cockpit’s short hallway. “The cargo bilge iss ssorted!” he announced. Molly turned to see him fiddling with his little inventory computer before looking up at her.

She smiled at him and pointed up at Parsona’s ceiling. “Have you looked in the overhead bins yet?”

His eyes lit up, his cheeks pulling back into a sneer. “Overhead binsss?!” he hissed.

The three crew members spent another full day doing prep-work and checking over the ship and its gear. Walter uncovered four space suits in the airlock room, complete with helmets. One was in questionable shape, but the other three would keep any of them alive if they needed to work outside the ship or if the hull lost structural integrity.

Just as important was the collection of flightsuits he’d gathered from the crew quarters. These thinner outfits would be crucial if they needed to do any strenuous maneuvering on their way back to Earth. The anti-gravity modules in them were much simpler (and weaker) than the Navy’s suits, but they provided at least a modicum of protection against heavy Gs.

Cole proved himself quite handy with a needle. He made adjustments to the flightsuits to make sure they fit snugly, augmenting the effect of the anti-G fluid. Each suit also had name patches above the left breast reading “Parsona” or “Mortimor.” Cole told Molly he felt uncomfortable wearing an outfit with her father’s name on it, but she insisted he leave it.

She also asked him to take a patch off an extra suit of her father’s and add it to her own. Molly tried on the outfit after another round of alterations. Standing in front of the mirror, both of her parent’s names emblazoned across her chest, she felt a mixture of nostalgia, sadness, and joy that made her feel hollow inside. Not depressed—just empty. And kinda cold.