6
The starship Parsona roared a dozen meters above the prairies of Lok, low enough to scatter wild game and part the tall grasses. It was nearly dawn, and the stars over the eastern horizon had disappeared as the black gradually melted into blue. With her lights off and altitude low—clinging to the cover of a slipping night—the old ship flew with a mind of not being seen. More importantly, she flew herself for just the second time.
“Feel any better?” Molly asked. She looked up from her reader to the instruments arrayed across the dash.
“It’s not quite as sluggish as before,” Parsona said through the radio speakers. “Firing the thrusters myself feels better than updating waypoints and letting the autopilot do the rest. Of course, I wouldn’t trust me in a dogfight or in a tight canyon.”
Molly laughed. “Neither would I. You know, we have a few relays left—I’m pretty sure I could interface you with the hyperdrive. It’s the same basic hook-up we did with the laser cannons, and the nav computer has a ton of electrical triggers left—”
“I’m not sure about that,” Parsona said.
“Why? It’s no different than firing the lasers or operating the thruster solenoids.”
“I know,” Parsona said. “It’s not that. It’s just that—I’m not sure I want to be in control of the hyperdrive. I don’t know that I’d trust myself.”
Molly nodded. “Okay. I understand.”
And she did. Ever since she found out her father and boyfriend were probably stuck in hyperspace, the temptation to just jump to the center of Lok had become unbearable. She felt a shiver of panic every time she considered it, followed by a pang of cowardice each time she did nothing.
“Another contact on SADAR,” her mom said, interrupting her thoughts.
“I see it,” Molly said. “Looks like one of the big models.” She watched the blip intently, having become something of an expert on recognizing the signatures of the Bern ships. The flashing indicator moved away from the rift situated over her home village and slowly worked its way toward a low-altitude orbit. Leaning forward, Molly peered up through the carboglass at the glimmer of orbiting hulls overhead. The fleet moved smoothly, like an animated constellation against the backdrop of fading stars. One of the vessels, a potato-shaped monster the size of a decent moonlet, was usually visible even during the daytime. All the ships did was shuffle around in various formations, almost as if drilling for upcoming maneuvers.
“What are they waiting on?” she asked her mom. “Why don’t they attack us or just move on to someplace else?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’re just being methodical. Or perhaps they’re waiting on something. I know as little of the Bern as you do.”
Molly looked down at her lap; her Wadi was stretched out along her thigh, its gleaming scales catching the first rays of dawn. She stroked the animal’s back, right between the two nubs rising from its shoulder blades, and fretted over her mounting concerns.
“Between the Bern up there and news of the Drenard invasion, even if we do get to hyperspace, will there be any reason to come back? I mean, will there be anything left to come back to?”
“We need to plan as if there will be,” her mother said.
“And you’re sure this Cat person can help?”
“She knows the people who can. She’ll remember me.”
“You, the ship? Or the old you?”
Molly still had a difficult time separating the experiences of her mothers—the personality copied to the ship’s computer and the husk of a woman she’d met, virtually, on Dakura. Somehow, the former had become more real to her than the latter. And that was true even before she found out Walter and Cole had pulled the plug on her mom’s physical body.
“She knows of the old me, not as I am now.”
“And she was part of the group you and dad were sent to investigate? The source of the illegal fusion fuel?”
“She did some work for them, yes. It took your father and myself a long time and a spot of luck to get an introduction. Unless we go through her, it’ll take just as long if not longer to make contact again. Especially with everything else that’s going on.”
“You mean the Bern?”
“Partly. More the elections, though. Callites are tolerated seven out of eight years. Ignored, really. But come polling time, their numbers—the amount of votes they can wrangle together—it creates tension. Contacting and dealing with the Underground would be easier any other time.”
Molly sighed and looked back to her lap. Her new reader rested on her other thigh, opposite the Wadi. The creature pawed at the device playfully, almost as if it knew Molly was about to redirect her attention away from scratching its back and return to the letter she was writing Cole. She patted the animal’s head and looked over the first line of the note, wondering why she was bothering with writing it. It wasn’t like she could send it to him, or even be sure he was still alive. Her thoughts drifted to her father—and the same nagging doubts arose for him as well.
As her chest grew heavy, the Wadi gave up its jealous jousting and crawled from her thigh to her shoulder; it wrapped its tail around Molly’s neck and flicked its tongue against her cheek. It did stuff like that, and always in response to the same few moods, almost as if it could sense how she felt. Molly was cautious, however, about reading too much into its idiosyncrasies. She tilted her head to nuzzle the animal and wished, not for the first time, they could somehow communicate with each other, mostly to find out what was wrong with the alien creature. No matter how much she fed it, or how much water it drank, the poor thing kept getting smaller and smaller.
It had taken a few days to be sure, but by now there wasn’t any doubt. Except for some plumpness around its belly, the colorful lizard had gone from iguana-sized to something half that, like a big gecko. The troubling part was not being able to ask anyone about the species or research it any way. There was little enough out there on the Drenard planet and even less on its fauna. All Molly knew was that the strange animal had taken to eating and drinking more than a Glemot—but despite all that intake, it continued to waste away . . .
????
Walter’s door slid open, recessing into the jamb with a quiet hiss. The young Palan exited his room and peeked across the cargo bay. Up in the cockpit, he could see one of Molly’s elbows sticking out over the flight controls. The ship was dark and silent, the barest glow of dawn lighting up the sky beyond the canopy. Walter tip-toed across the hallway and unlocked Molly’s cabin door with her Captain’s codes. He kept an eye forward as he waited for her room to slide open.
Slipping inside, Walter forced down the panicked feeling that gets Junior Pirates in trouble—the “heist shakes” that’ll get someone busted faster than the floods. You have to think clearly, he always reminded himself. Stay focused on the loot. Remember what you’re after.
It helped that he’d done this several times in the past weeks.
He went to her dresser, dropped down to one knee, and opened the narrow drawer at the bottom. Two stacks of clothes: the white tanks she wears under her flightsuit on one side and the plain cotton underwear on the other.
Walter reached under the latter, feeling for his treasure. His.
He wrapped his fingers around the small piece of fabric and pulled it out. Rubbing it with one thumb, he realized how unnecessary this charade was. She should just give it to him. Willingly.
Bending close to the carpet, he looked for the single hair he knew would be there and found it. He slid the drawer closed, holding the hair in place until it caught in the dresser. Walter shook his head at the ancient trick, resolving to love her even though she did stupid stuff like this.
He keyed open her door and bent down low, his palms on the ship’s decking. Slowly, he peeked around the corner of the doorway, keeping his head in a spot people rarely looked. Molly’s elbow was still visible sticking out over the controls. Walter pushed up from the deck and darted across the hall, back to his own room. As he ran, he clutched his new favorite thing to his chest, eager to get alone with it.
He left the lights out in his room and went straight to the bed, jumping under the covers. Feeling with his fingers, he found the seam in the piece of cloth and made sure it was in the back. With a shiver of anticipation, he lowered the red band down over his forehead.
“Hello?” he thought.
Silence. He waited, growing impatient. Several minutes seemed to go by, but it could’ve been a fraction of that—
“Ah! Walter, it’ss been a while.”
“Yeah,” he thought, “I haven’t had the time. Been bussy.” It was a lie. Truth was, Molly hadn’t been off the ship long enough to do any proper snooping in almost three days.
“Well, I can’t wait to hear about what you’ve been up to.”
“Ssure, but not now. I, uh, can’t talk long thiss time.”
“I undersstand. Hey, I meant to assk you about ssomething lasst time, but you had to run before I could bring it up. You know thosse two armss you have? The oness in the bottom of the tool chesst?”
Walter cringed at the incessant hissing from the stranger’s choice of words, the red band relaying everything in his own voice.
“Arms?” he thought aloud. “I—how did you know about thosse?”
“You were thinking about them the firsst time we sspoke. Don’t you remember? I heard it quite clearly.”
“Oh.” Walter forgot it worked that way. But why would he have been thinking about those stupid things?
“Ssurely you know the armss I’m talking about. Unlesss you jusst have armss sstrewn all over the sship—”
“What? No. No. They’re the only oness. But I wanted to talk about—”
“Right, right. The gold. Well here’ss the deal, Walter, I really would love to help you claim it, but firsst I’m going to need a favor from you.”
“Okay, but it better not get me in trouble.”
“Of coursse, of coursse. All I need you to do iss get me thosse armss. Do you think you could do that?”
“What? Why?”
“Doess it matter? I could jusst asss eassily assk you what you want with thoussandss of barrelss of gold.”
“I don’t know.” Walter rubbed his head, thinking. His coppery hair felt soft under his hand; it was getting too long and needed another pass with the shaver. He tried to picture himself with it grown out and what Molly would think about it. “How do I get them to you?” he asked. “Where are you?”
“I’m on my way to a little planet called Lok. Do you know it?”
Walter nodded. “Yeah.”
“Exscellent. Wait, you’re not there now, are you?”
“Am I thinking that?” Walter asked.
“Why don’t you tell me where you are?” the voice asked. “I’ll come right to you. Quick as I can.”
Walter shook his head. He knew how these transactions went down. It was always best to get information, never a good idea to give it.
“I’ll bring them to you,” Walter thought. “Jusst pick a sspot.”
“And you can deliver them? You have a sship?”
“Yess,” Walter hissed.
It was another lie, but he kept those thoughts deep. Palan deep. The truth was: it didn’t matter that he had no ship of his own, nor did it matter he couldn’t even fly one. What he could do was reprogram hyperdrives to go wherever he wanted, just like how he’d sent Cole into a star and what he’d done back on Palan. With that kind of talent, every ship was practically his, and he may as well be the one flying them.
????
Molly checked the instruments on the dash one more time, making sure her mom was on course and holding steady, before she leaned over her reader. Typing on the thing was quite painful with the current state of her fingers, all of which were scabbed and blistered with dozens of votes. And yet, the writing was psychologically soothing, somehow, even though she couldn’t properly phrase an ounce of what she was feeling. It didn’t seem to matter; just attempting to do so—to reach out to Cole in some tangible way—eased the pressing weight off her chest, allowing her to breathe a little.
She stared at the first two sentences of the journal tab while the Wadi crawled down her flightsuit and stretched back out along her thigh.
????
6/10/2414
Dearest Cole,
I got a new reader on Lok. So, here I am, writing you a letter on it.
Horrid. She deleted the entry. Then she wrote the exact same thing. She deleted it once more. She repeated the same stilted, juvenile wording over and over. Molly finally shook her head and decided to start from scratch, forgetting the need to make it perfect. She would simply write her thoughts as they came to her, unscripted and unedited.
Cole. I don’t know where to start. Trust me, I’ve tried. It’s just … I’ve always been bad at this, being faithful to a journal. I never know what to write. I think my last one had two entries in it. The first entry was about how many entries I was planning on writing. I remember composing that one on my first day of school at Avalon. My second entry was an apology to myself for going so many months between entries. I remember writing it on the Orbital Station while I was waiting on you. I’d love to read what I wrote back then. Can you imagine if I knew all the things that would take place as soon as we left Earth? I wonder if I would’ve gone. Anyway, that reader is long gone, probably being used by a pirate somewhere on Palan.
Speaking of Palan, Walter kinda saved my butt again. Some crazy stuff went down when we got to Lok. That guy from Dakura, the one who tied me up in his ship, he was here. I thought he was you when I landed. Walter and I zapped him to hyperspace, but we may’ve accidentally opened a very bad door in the process. I’ll tell you more about it once we’re back together…
Gods … who am I kidding? Who am I even writing this to? I think I’m getting too used to talking to machines. It doesn’t help that the only crewmate I have left is the color of metal and that my mom is a computer.
Speaking of mom, she told me where you probably are -- that you’d be in hyperspace somewhere. She also told me how awful it was there. And that my father is probably there, too. I hope you landed someplace safe. I hope you two already found each other and are just hanging out and swapping stories and waiting on us to come pick you up.
Just … watch each other’s backs, ok? I’m trying to get there, I promise. I’m coming to rescue you both. Just stay alive until i get there, okay? Cause I’m a little messed up without you…
Drenards … now I’m blubbering. I shoulda waited till Bekkie and bought a waterproof reader. This stinks.
You know what else stinks? Not telling you I loved you the second I felt it. It was years ago. I bet you don’t remember. It was after Hobbs showed us how we could stream vids to our school computers. You and I stayed up all night watching episodes of Water Marines and we had to hide under my bunk after lights-out with the sheets hanging over the edge.
Actually, you probably do remember, just … maybe not the same way I do. It was when our foreheads touched, leaning over the little screen, and you were laughing and I could smell your breath. I remember thinking how much I loved your laugh, and how normal everything felt. It was like being on a date. Like regular kids. I even liked the way your breath smelled, which has to mean something, right?
I’ve loved you since then, I’m pretty sure. Or maybe I’m just projecting back. That’s been, like two years? And I’ve told you what … three times? I feel like an idiot. And not just for typing you a letter you’ll never read. I should’ve let you call me “babe” or “sweetheart” or whatever you wanted to. If you were here you could call me anything…
Molly looked up as Parsona swerved to port a little. She checked the cargo cam to see if Walter was milling about, but the screen was empty, the boy still asleep. She bent back to the reader, annoyed at how stiff the buttons were on the keyboard and how her fingers throbbed after using them.
Anyway, you aren’t here, and I seem to have to lose crap before I appre-ciate it. My parents, my reader, you, Glemot, Lucin … everything I really love gets snatched away. Or that’s what I used to think. Now I think the things that get snatched away are the only things I can truly love. Jeez … I hope that isn’t true. I hope neither’s true.
Well, i guess that’s my first entry. I think it sucks vacuum and I’ll probably delete the whole thing later and this keyboard is the worst. Anyway, we’re on the last leg to Bekkie, looking for an old friend of mom’s so we can get some kinda special fuel for the hyperdrive. So, I gotta go. And now I can’t stop typing, like I’m hanging up on you or something. This is definitely getting deleted.
I love you I love you I love you. Now be alive when I get there, ‘cause I’m
gonna kill you if you aren’t.
You know what i mean. -Molly
She looked over the entry and felt like a fool, every sentence clumsier than the one before. Holding down the function key with one finger—the pressure causing her pulse to throb up into her wrist—she hovered another finger over the “del all” button.
She stopped and wiped at her eyes. She powered the thing off, instead.
“Whatcha doing?” Walter asked.
Molly jumped, and the Wadi shot up to her shoulder, wrapping its tail around her neck and licking the air.
“Good gracious, Walter, don’t sneak up on me like that.”
“That wass my loud walk,” Walter said. “What’re you working on?”
“Oh, just writing some notes to myself.”
“Like a diary?” Walter peered over at her reader.
“No. And don’t you think of hacking into it. You’ve got enough gadgets to play with that you can leave mine alone.”
Molly knew it was pointless as soon as she said it. Keeping the little pirate out of anything electrical was like tugging against the pull of a black hole. He was gonna get in, and she probably just made it more tempting to tell him not to.
“How far are we from the next csity?” Walter asked. He crawled over the flight console and into the navigator’s seat. Cole’s seat.
“Not far. Another half-hour. See where it says ETA on the nav computer?”
Walter leaned forward and glanced at the dash. He nodded, and Molly told herself he probably didn’t need the lesson. The kid had recently done stuff with the ship’s missile systems that she didn’t think possible. He was worthless with a physical tool but a wiz with the digital sort. Then again, that may have just been due to laziness—
“There it iss!” he hissed, practically standing up in the nav seat.
Molly peered through the carboglass and saw it as well. Beyond the prairies and past a long stretch of dry dirt lay Bekkie. The town was nothing more than a wide and growing sprawl of hastily-built wooden structures, yet it was as cosmopolitan a city as Lok could boast. Which wasn’t saying much.
“Careful where you put your hands,” Molly told Walter, urging him back in his seat.
“It’ss ugly,” he groaned. “Jusst like all the lasst placses.”
His disapproval was quite a blow to Molly’s birth planet, seeing that his home planet of Palan was the sort of place you wouldn’t strand an enemy.
“It’s just different, that’s all,” said Molly, not able to summon up any-thing more positive. “Hopefully this’ll be our last stop.”
“The friend I sspoke to on the radio iss here?”
“Yeah,” Molly lied. The truth was: Walter had spoken with her mother, but Molly had kept her presence in the nav computer a secret for so long, revealing her now would be hard to explain—and harder the longer the ruse lasted. She felt like a kid probably does who keeps something from their parents until they can’t figure out why they started lying in the first place. And then they find themselves trapped into lying even more.
“What’ss her name again?”
“Are you kidding me? We’ve been looking for her for two weeks and you still can’t remember her name? It’s Catherine. With a cee.”
“That’ss right. A hard csee.” Walter turned and smiled at Molly. “I like that name.”
“Yeah, well try and remember it. This is already taking longer than I’d hoped. Now, the mechanic I met in the hardware store said we’ll probably find her in one of the pubs, so I want us to stick together, okay? The election stuff will probably be worse here than it was in the smaller towns, so we really need to be careful.”
“Okay.”
“Another thing: No looting.”
“Fine.”
“I really mean it, Walter.”
“I ssaid fine!”
Molly narrowed her eyes at him to hammer it home, then leaned forward to disengage the autopilot relays, taking over from her mom. She pulled back on the flightstick to gain a bit of altitude. There was enough traffic in the air around town to feel safe from the fleet above, almost like a solitary bird feeling emboldened by joining a large flock.
With a better view of the layout of town, she started picking out which of the many stables to land in. There were several to choose from on the near side of town, all of them a few kilometers from the city center to minimize thruster noise. Most looked extremely busy, whether due to the Bern fleet or the upcoming election, she couldn’t know. She picked one in the middle of style, with not too many fancy ships, but no derelicts propped up on wooden stilts, either. Something she could afford, but where Parsona wouldn’t get robbed.
“There’ss a better one over there,” Walter said as she peeled away for the stable she’d chosen. He pointed to one closer to town where fancy hulls gleamed in the growing light of dawn.
“A little out of our league, pal.”
Molly thumbed the landing gear down and grabbed the radio. The town ahead stirred with plenty of activity despite the early hour. Headlights moved through the city streets, each pair kicking up a plume of dust that streaked off and thinned in the breeze.
Molly squeezed the mic. “GN-290 Parsona to . . .” she read the stable’s info from the nav screen, “. . . Pete’s Hideaway. Come in.”
She pulled into a hover and waited for a reply.
“Pete’s Hideaway, here. Come back.”
“Yeah, this is the Gordon Class ship hovering east of you. The two-ninety. We’re looking for a place to stay, over.”
“Roger and welcome, you picked the right place. Anywhere you like. Those small huts with lotsa room around them are the heads. Over.”
Molly laughed. “Thanks for the heads-up. Parsona out.”
She hung up the mic and brought the ship down between two other craft a little nicer than her own. The thrusters sent up a puff of dust, blocking out the view through the windshield. Molly moved the Wadi to the back of her seat and crawled over the control console to go check in at the stable office. As she crossed the cargo bay, she felt a sudden surge of giddiness, a rare crack in her two weeks of loneliness and dour moods. She could feel it as she lowered the cargo ramp into the cloud of swirling dust outside: today was going to be her lucky day.
????
“How many nights you need her stabled?” the man behind the counter asked. A patch on his coveralls said “Pete,” but it looked like a logo rather than a nametag. Molly pegged his age at sixty, but knowing Lok, it was probably a rough forty. They had skipped introductions, so she decided to think of him as Possibly Pete until she discovered otherwise.
“I’m not sure how long we’ll be here, to be honest.” Molly eyed the voting machine on his counter, the ‘L’ nearly worn off. “Should I pay as I go?”
“Yup, that’ll work. Just need you to fill out them papers. She need water?” Probably Pete bent down over the counter and squinted through a grime-streaked window in the general direction of Parsona. Like the pane of glass, Pete had a sheen of grease on him, almost like it oozed straight from his pores. Even his long hair, which fell out of a backward cap in stringy clumps, seemed coated in something foul.
“She need water?” he asked again, giving Molly a curious glance.
“Uh, no, but thanks. We filled up in Cramerton.”
“Cramerton? They got water out there?” Potentially Pete slapped the counter. “Don’t that beat all!”
Molly laughed politely, but wasn’t sure it was a joke. On her mental to-do list, she added dropping another iodine tablet into the freshwater tank, just in case Possibly Pete’s sense of humor wasn’t intentionally dry.
“There you go,” she said, handing back a form with mostly made-up information. She had checked the “Liberty” box under political affilia-tion to match his voting machine.
Probably Pete narrowed his eyes at the form, his hands coating the fresh paper with his oily perspiration. “Fyde,” he said. “Wait a second—” He pulled off his cap and ran a tarry hand through his hair, the black on him so dark it verged on purple. “I know your ship. My Uncle Pete did some work on her once. What was your father’s name?”
“Is,” Molly corrected him. “His name is Mortimor—”
“Mortimor!” Poseur Pete slapped the counter, leaving another hand-print. “That’s right! How’s your old man doing?”
Molly shivered, a sudden wash of paranoia tickling her scalp. Two weeks of traipsing across her childhood home had teased her with a weak sense of nostalgia, but she never considered the chances of bump-ing into someone who might know her. She had been six when she left and could barely remember anything from her childhood.
“My dad? He’s, uh . . . fine, I guess. We don’t talk much anymore. He, um . . .”
“He split on you, did he?” Pretend Pete pulled off his hat and slapped the counter with it, smearing the grease there. Molly was beginning to pick up on his unique brand of non-verbal communication. It made her feel sorry for the counter.
“Don’t that beat all?” he said, tugging his hat back on. “Never thunk him to be a runner.”
“Yeah . . .” Molly didn’t know what to say, figuring it didn’t do any good to replace a misconception with a lie. “Do I pay now, or at the end of the day?” She clenched her fists, waiting for the reply.
“Each night up front, usually.” He turned his cap the correct way and pressed the bill up with a single, blackened finger. “But we’ll settle up when you get ready to go, how’s that?”
“Thank you so much,” Molly said, sighing. She smiled at him and relaxed her fist. Pretend Pete pulled out a slip of paper and shoved it across the counter, leaving a trail of purplish slime behind.
“The codes for the heads are on the back. TP’s for sale in the ship store. If you need power for any reason, we have one thousand and two thousand amp hook-ups. No partyin’ after three, and welcome to Pete’s.” He smiled at Molly. “I’m Pete, by the way. Pete the fourth. And that’s my boy in the picture.” He pointed a filthy digit at a curling print of film taped to the register. “That’s the newest Pete. Pete the fifth.”
He beamed with pride. Molly wasn’t sure if it was for siring another Pete or being able to count that high—or maybe both.
“Nice to meet you,” Molly said. “And good looking kid.”
He rubbed one hand on his coveralls, the direction of the grease transfer questionable, and held it out to Molly. “Nice to meet you too, Molly Fyde.”
She moved her hand into his nasty clutches as gently as possible. Penultimate Pete shook it, his grip firm and slick. She could feel her hand sliding around inside his palm and half expected it to pop out like a freshly caught fish.
Pete’s lips pulled back in a smile so wide she could see his gums. A bright trace of purple gunk ran along the edges of his teeth.
“Molly Fyde,” he said again, pumping her trapped hand.
????
“Walter?” Molly poked her head into his room and then looked back through the cargo bay toward the cockpit.
“He left almost as soon as you did,” her mother said through the intercom. “I almost said something—”
Molly glanced at the camera in the corner of the bay; it had begun to feel as natural as looking someone in the eye. “No, that’s okay. I’m glad you didn’t.” Molly went to the sink and started washing her hands. “I guess this is what being a parent is like, right?” She shook her hands over the basin and reached for a towel.
“I wouldn’t know,” her mother said.
“Yeah . . . sorry, I wasn’t trying to—”
“No, I’m sorry. I was just thinking out loud. And I want to remind you to be careful looking for Cat today. If she’s still politically active, there’s no telling what she’s getting herself into.”
“I’ll be fine.” Molly folded the towel, left it on the counter, and walked toward the cockpit. “I’m probably better off hunting her down without Walter, anyway. Oh, by the way, the guy who runs the stables knew Dad. Pete the fourth.”
“Hmmm. Never heard of him. Must’ve been during the years I was out of action—after my body went to Dakura but before your father smuggled a copy of me off.”
“Do you think I could ask him about the fusion fuel? He seems shady enough. Like, literally.”
“Maybe. Could be dangerous. If Cat doesn’t turn up, we’ll give it a shot. Check in with me if you don’t find anything.”
“Okay. Is there anything else you want to tell me about her—?”
“Head’s up,” her mother said tersely. The speaker popped, the inter-com falling silent as Parsona killed the connection.
Molly heard footsteps on the boarding ramp and turned to lecture Walter on what “stay put” means.
But it couldn’t have been Walter stomping up the ramp.
He doesn’t have six legs.