by Hugh Howey
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.
“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.
Walter shared none of Molly and Cole’s uneasiness with the suits. He was absolutely ecstatic to have one of his own. When he found out they had no way of embroidering a patch with his name on it, he just printed it with a black marker, as neatly as he could. He took to wearing the thing all the time, even as Molly kept reminding him it was only useful when they were accelerating.
The helmets that locked into these flightsuits were looser than the Navy variety, but Molly and Cole were both growing out their hair, which should eventually pad the space. For Walter’s close-cropped pate, there was nothing to be done, but he didn’t seem to mind. He would shake his head vigorously and fill the helmet with muffled laughter as it continued to bobble around.
Overall, the condition of their safety gear was in far better shape than it deserved to be. If the Orbital Station didn’t have any atmosphere—which they fully expected after hundreds of years of disuse—they would be able to carry their own in with them.
As the plan solidified in Molly’s mind, she started forming various lists of the things she wanted to salvage, ranked by likelihood. A long-range communicator was on top on her Implausible List. Even without entangled particles, it would be nice to grab one. An operating fusion coil full of fuel headed up her Dream List, along with a functioning manual pump to move the precious stuff to Parsona. On her Necessities List was all the food and spares they could get their flight gloves on. Even if they didn’t need the stuff, they could sell or barter it down the road. Salvage laws applied to Navy property after fifty years of abandonment. If nothing else, grabbing as much as they could would keep Walter occupied; they had enough room in the cargo bunkers to keep him out of their hair for the rest of their passage to Earth.
As she compiled these lists and contemplated the wealth of supplies that likely awaited them, Molly became more and more confident with the plan. Almost as much as Walter, who had gone bonkers when he learned what they were preparing for. He ran around the cargo bay in tight circles, hissing excitedly. “Loot a GU Orbital Station?!” He practically tackled Molly, throwing his arms around her and thanking her endlessly.
They’d eventually settled him down and explained the mission, how they needed to go about this very quietly. Not a hiss. Walter nodded violently while his helmet, visor open, stood perfectly still. “I undersstand,” he said. “An eassy ‘in and out’ job.”
He got half of it right.
••••
Parsona winked out of hyperspace in the middle of an L2, the Lagrange point on the other side of Glemot’s largest moon. “Largest” being a relative term; the rock was small enough to keep its odd shape rather than crush into a rough sphere with the force of its own gravity. Still, a few hundred kilometers wide, it was more than enough to conceal their arrival. It wasn’t like a primitive race was going to be scanning the sky with telescopes, but Naval training was strong in two thirds of the crew. And the remaining third consisted of a born and bred sneaky bastard.
They swept the far side of the potato-shaped moon with SADAR, revealing the Orbital Station just beyond. Everything was still out of sight as they crept up behind their lumpy, cratered shield. Cole scanned for any electrical or mechanical activity from the station, but they were on the extreme edge of their sensor’s range for those functions. Meanwhile, the Glemot planet dominated the SADAR display with its quiet bulk.
“All clear?” Molly thumbed through the post-jump systems checks. Seeing the hyperdrive down to twelve percent made her stomach knot up.
“All clear,” Cole confirmed.
Molly checked the cargo cam. Four crew chairs with life-support hookups were arranged across the bulkhead outside the cockpit. They faced backwards, two to either side. Walter had been strapped into one of them after much cajoling and a bit of force, unable to contain his anticipation of the heist ahead. His head was bent forward as he toyed with something in his lap, probably working on the game he’d begun programming into his computer. He’d been trying to show it to her for the past two days, but Molly never really had the time.
Satisfied that they were prepared for pretty much anything, Molly pushed Parsona’s nose around the small moon. The first glimpse of the Glemot planet rose over its dark surface like a green sun. It was a spectacular contrast to the sight of the last planet they’d left. Where Palan was almost entirely blue, with just a single high continent of eroded brown rock, Glemot was the vibrant hue of photosynthesizing life, a verdant color that triggered something emotional in the primitive parts of Molly’s and Cole’s brains.
They both gasped at the sight of the large planet as it rose into view, almost as if their lungs could suck in all that oxygen from across the vacuum of space. No clouds obscured the land, an oddity neither of them noticed at first. Instead of vast oceans: thousands, possibly millions of tiny lakes dotted the orb. It was one thing to read the dry Naval reports during the planning of this operation—something else entirely to see it with their own eyes.
This was why at least one poet should be assigned to every survey vessel, Molly thought, just to do images like this justice.
“So pretty,” she said aloud.
“Stay focused,” Cole told her, but it sounded like it could’ve been a reminder to himself. He couldn’t keep his eyes off of the green world, either, or the thin halo of pale-blue atmosphere clinging to it.
A red indicator popped up on one of Cole’s readouts, breaking the spell.
“Mechanical activity on the Orbital Station. Looks like thruster signatures.”
Molly pulled it up as well.
“It’s just maintaining its orbit. That’s not a good Lagrange point. Moon’s too small, so it’s gonna have to boost itself periodically.”
“After all these years?” he shook his head. “Something’s not right. I’ve never known the Navy to build anything that didn’t need a weekly greasing. Wait. Thruster’s off now. Okay, maybe you’re right. That orbit can’t be stable, anyway. Too much mass in the OS and not enough in the moon. And yet, all these years later it’s orbiting the planet in lockstep—”
“And at a lower orbit,” Moll
y added.
“You think this is good news or bad news, Cap?”
“I’d say good. There’s no ship activity in the area. The thing’s probably just functioning on its own. That means we have a good chance of fueling up the hyperdrive.” Molly looked over at Cole and noted his furrowed brow. “You thinking we should pull back?”
“No. You’re probably right. But can you get us around the moonlet and behind the station? That planet is so pretty I might ask you to take us down for a look.”
“Absolutely,” Molly said, gripping the flight controls and nudging them forward.
But she wasn’t the only one trying to control the ship.
16
The first sign of trouble was the flickering of the nav screen. Cole rapped the top of the dash with his fist in the primitive problem-solving reflex common to males. The screen returned to normal.
“Better,” he said.
Molly rolled her eyes at the unfortunate result this would have at strengthening a silly habit. She didn’t think any more of the glitch as they approached the station.
When they closed to within a thousand meters, Molly prepped for docking maneuvers. The universal coupling on the outside of Parsona’s hull needed to be lined up with the one on the Orbital Station’s maintenance bay. The airlock on the GN-290 was high up the starboard side to prevent the wings from getting in the way, so Molly rolled Parsona over and began her approach. Hopefully, they’d be able to open the hangar doors manually from inside the station to make loading salvaged goods even easier.
Molly focused the external camera on the Orbital Station. Distances were displayed on a nearby readout, but she felt uncomfortable doing this for the first time without a spotter.
“Would you mind going to the airlock and calling out distances?” she asked Cole.
He nodded and moved to unbuckle himself from the nav seat—but the ship lurched forward, pressing him back into his chair. “Hey!” he complained.