14
Nothing rose in the atmosphere to challenge their flight. Molly wasn’t sure if it was the recent changing of the guard or the general disorganization below. She didn’t care. Physically and emotionally, Palan was proving to be an easy planet to run from.
She wanted to rush back and tend to Cole, but he made his own way into the cockpit. She could see his reflection in the carboglass, one hand pressed to his ribs, the other one reaching forward to tousle her hair.
“Miss me?”
Molly wanted desperately to turn and reach out to him, to verify he was safe. But just the feeling of his cold hand on her scalp made flying difficult. She had too many emotions racing through her, mixing with the adrenaline. She pulled her head away and reached for the radio, dialing it to full scan mode. Her hand shook visibly; she left Cole’s question unanswered.
He stood beside her, peering at the vid screen. She glanced at it as well and saw Walter glaring toward the cockpit.
“I guess not,” he said. “So. You’ve been out making friends while they tried beating me to death, is that it?”
Molly tried to laugh, but thanks to her nerves, it came out more like a cough. “You’re welcome,” she managed, her voice quaking.
Cole slid his hand down the back of Molly’s neck, supporting himself on her shoulder as he leaned over the flight console. He peered through the windshield then scanned the dash, checking out its SADAR unit and nav charts. “She’s a beaut,” he said.
Molly nodded. Cole’s hand no longer felt cold. Or maybe it was just her neck flushing with heat. The adrenaline shakes went away in an instant, replaced with a feeling of paralysis. She didn’t want to move and hoped Cole wouldn’t either.
But he did.
Leaning down, Cole kissed her, briefly, on the top of her head. He patted her on the shoulder. “Thank you,” he whispered.
As he pulled away and stumbled back into the cargo bay, Molly’s face and ears burned. She could hear Cole and Walter introducing themselves over the pounding of her pulse, but just barely. She tried to imagine how the two of them were going to get along on the flight to Earth, and it made her feel as though she should be remembering something important, something she needed to tell Walter or ask him. Did it have to do with the food cart, or a key? Her stomach interrupted her, the thought of Palan prison food making it erupt in protest. She gathered her voice and threw a request over her shoulder, “When you guys get done talking sports, could you bring me something to eat?”
On the vid screen, she saw Walter bolt into action, hopefully rustling up better fare than he’d served yesterday. Meanwhile, she busied herself with the systems checks she should’ve performed before takeoff—the routine tasks that seem to get in the way of prison breaks. She checked the astral charts first, and the news there wasn’t good. Drummond was supposed to have updated them, but the charts were almost as old as she was. At least a hundred planets had been discovered since these things were made and a few stars were no longer around. Dozens of safe jump zones had moved and better ones located.
Jump zones. Drenards! Molly looked at the small fusion fuel readout and felt sick. It showed 20% and falling! She’d forgotten the aluminum rig and the wires, assuming she could just turn off the drive and it’d be safe.
“Cole?” she yelled over her shoulder.
“Yeah?”
“I need you to take the stick for a minute.”
Molly turned as he entered the cockpit, chewing on something. He slurped on a small bag of juice. “Some of Drummond’s stuff,” he explained, his mouth full. “Walter’s bringing you some.”
“In a minute,” she said, taking in Cole’s appearance. His face was bruised and blood was caked below his nostrils. Molly felt an urge to tend to him, but she needed to worry about the hyperdrive first. “Keep us heading away from Palan, and don’t turn on the hyperdrive.”
Cole worked himself into the pilot’s seat. “You don’t want to jump out of here?” he called after her. But Molly was already crossing the cargo bay, heading toward the engine room.
Passing the workbench, she grabbed a welding glove and a scrap of aluminum pipe left over from her “craft time.” She tugged the glove on and clutched the pipe as she entered the engine room—where she discovered what she’d feared she might. The hyperdrive indicator was flashing green; the thing was running, even though the cockpit controls were locked off!
Molly surveyed the main hyperdrive housing. The device was as big as a refrigerator laying on its side. Most of the interior was a firing chamber for the fusion fuel. There wasn’t much else to the device: its principles of operation were closely-guarded secrets. Hyperdrive Mechanics had been a weekend Lab tacked onto their semester of Advanced Thruster Repair. All cadets had to know was how to ensure coordinates were fed properly from the nav computer and to make sure the four drive wires were grounded to the ship’s chassis.
It was the drive wires that Molly had re-routed in order to spring Cole. And all four of the posts she had soldered them to were sparking slightly. They hadn’t been before.
There must be a short somewhere, she thought, probably in the cargo door. Luckily it had happened after Cole’s crazy stunt, or else he wouldn’t be here anymore. He would’ve moved thirty meters up, bumped into the rock in his way, and winked out of existence.
Molly stepped forward, raising the pipe with one arm. She swung it as hard as she could at the nearest post, hoping to break the wire off. Time slowed to a crawl. She flashed back to the day before, to the brutality of hitting that Navy man in the head. At the time, she thought she’d killed him.?.?.
Molly was jarred back to the present as she struck the post and knocked the wire free. The hyperdrive light went red. And most of the aluminum pipe disappeared right out of her hand!
Only a few inches of the metal tube were left, the rest probably warped thirty meters straight up. The cleanly severed tip stuck out of her gloved fist, the polished metal interior gleaming in a way that no mechanical cut ever could. Molly loosened her grip on the bit that remained and wondered what would’ve happened if the hyperdrive had been turned up a little more. Would she be looking inside her wrist? And what did she think the welding glove would have protected her against?
She left the piece of pipe in the engine room and decided, right there, that this little episode would never leave the engine room.
Returning the glove to the workbench, she accepted the rations Walter held out to her. He seemed extremely pleased with himself and with all the goodies he had strewn around the cargo bay. Molly took a sip of juice and squeezed his arm. “Thanks for getting us out of there,” she told him.
“My pleassure,” he said.
“There are four cabins past the engine room. You can have either one on the Starboard side, okay?” She gestured back toward the rear of the ship. “Right side,” she added, pointing for emphasis.
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.