by Hugh Howey
Cole laughed at this. “Well, that’s crap. You remember that last mission? The one with the Tchung having a few extra ships?”
“Hmmm. No.” She gave him a withering look. “Doesn’t ring any bells, sorry.”
“You’re hilarious. Now look, there’s something serious going on here. We never did another full-scale mission after that one. And even though our class did better than some others, there wasn’t anything particularly inspiring about individual performances that day. Well, except for yours, and you got expelled for it. But get this, our simulator was never used again. Ever. Right up to the day some of us were graduated. Check the maintenance log.”
Molly thumbed through some reports and maintenance schedules.
“It’s the green one, there.” Cole tapped the edge of a piece of paper and then continued in a lowered voice. Other first-class passengers, mostly humans, were filing onto the shuttle now.
“I was teamed up with Riggs in his simulator, and his navigator got the boot down to Services.”
Molly looked up from the folder. “You were a navigator for Riggs? Not that he isn’t a good pilot, but why weren’t you just given a new navigator?”
Cole looked startled for a second. “Didn’t Lucin tell you? I was demoted after the Tchung simulation. I graduated with the navigators based on my scores from the previous year. I mean, I get to keep my simulator hours if I ever want to be one of those guys.” Cole tossed his head up toward the nose of the plane, “But no Navy ships for me.”
“Oh.” Molly looked back to the folder’s contents.
“Hey, I’m not upset, so don’t get all pitiful on me. Hell, you always wanted to be a pilot more than I did. I love the math and the tactics. And training as a pilot made me one helluva navigator, so I have no problem with the decision. I’m more worried about this conspiracy. Our simulator was taken off-line almost before you were out of the building.”
“That makes sense,” said Molly, “the thing was screwed.”
“No. It was screwed with.”
“That’s right, you thought you saw Jakobs by the control panel of our pod earlier that day.”
Cole corrected her. “I never said it was Jakobs.”
“You said it was someone who reminded you of Jakobs.”
“Right. Same size, same swagger, but it could have been anyone in Navy black. Look at this page right here.”
Molly pulled out the one he indicated. It was a library computer log. “How’d you get this?”
“I had two months left at the Academy to gather this stuff together. And you wanna know what they demoted Riggs’s navigator down to?”
“What?”
“Cryptography.”
They both giggled at this.
“He got me a lot of this stuff. The rest I got through Saunders’s secretary.” Cole’s voice seemed to taper off at the end of this sentence.
“Do I even want to ask how?”
“Yeah, you obviously do. But I don’t kiss and tell.” Cole raised and lowered his eyebrows suggestively. He was obviously lying.
“Yeah, right,” Molly said. “So what do the library records tell us? Oh.” She traced Jakobs’ name. “Lemme guess, this is the time when you thought you saw someone by the simulator?”
“Bingo. Wasn’t him. Besides, he isn’t smart enough to do something like this. And why would they shuffle me around, graduate us early, close down that simulator, any of the other stuff if it was a cadet prank?”
“No way. You’re suggesting this was higher-up?” Molly started flipping through some more pages, wondering what Cole had uncovered.
“I’m not sure. But the people they graduated were not the best cadets. They were the few people close to you, the ones that really interacted with you on a daily basis. Whether it was the people that liked you, which would be me and…” Cole scratched his chin and made a point of looking up at the ceiling of the fuselage.
It took a few seconds for Molly to get the joke. “Ha. Ha,” she said.
Cole beamed in triumph. “Thanks. So it was me and Riggs and the people bullying you all the time. Only six of us were graduated early. And what sense does it make to demote me and then say I’m obviously too capable for another semester?”
“Well, Lucin did confess something to me that day. But you have to promise not to tell.”
He gestured to her lap. “You’re holding crap that can get me thrown in the brig for a very long time. Try and think of those documents as a promise ring, okay?”
Molly smiled. She hoped she twisted her lips enough to make it seem sarcastic. “Saunders had it in for me,” she confided. “Lucin said he and his wife had three daughters and no boys, so he didn’t want me to succeed or something.”
“That seems a bit backwards, but it might be better than what I’ve been working on.”
“Yeah? What’s your big conspiracy?”
“I was starting to think it had something to do with your father.”
The words punched her in the gut, the folder heavy in her lap. Molly chewed on Cole’s suggestion. The idea was ludicrous, yet seductive. She shook her head. It was tempting to have this be about something more significant than schoolyard pranks, but she knew that wasn’t true. It was just a fantasy to want the Tchung simulation and her expulsion to have greater meaning, for the cruelty of life to have some larger purpose.
“That’s ridiculous,” she finally said. “I don’t know the first thing about my father’s disappearance. I haven’t seen him or the ship since I was six years old. And besides, they didn’t find it until after they booted me out.”
“Yeah, but I was thinking your father was connected before I even heard of the Parsona.”
“Why? How could you?”
Cole gestured to the folder. “Because this is too much effort for a bunch of cadets. It has to have something to do with your father. Nothing else makes any sense.”
“Sure it does. Somebody screwed with our simulator because I was in it. Part of that sabotage included getting you killed from a minor scrape and leaving me in charge. The rest of this nonsense is someone cleaning up afterwards.” Cole frowned at her, clearly unhappy with her sound reasoning and its banal conclusions. “Look,” Molly continued, “I agree that this had to be higher up, that it wasn’t a simple prank, but no way does this have to do with my father. Somebody just wanted me out of the Academy. I mean who knows how to program those pods besides the geeks in IT? Saunders not only had access—”
“It wasn’t Saunders, he’s too fat and—”
“Don’t interrupt. I know it wasn’t Saunders you saw, but he could have had any of the IT guys do it. And we know his motive: he didn’t want me in the Navy, and he had the power to pull off the early graduations, so it all fits.”
“None of the IT guys were transferred.”
“What?”
“That yellow slip is the personnel change summation for the end of the year. If they were trying to hush this up, they didn’t move anybody who would’ve been able to do the most illegal part of the job.”
Molly shuffled through the folder, looking for the slip. “What are these thick white bundles stapled together?”
“Heh. I brought those along for your enjoyment. They don’t have anything to do with my theory, though.”
Molly turned to Cole. There was a faint white line where his lip had been busted open. The scar remained invisible unless his full mouth thinned into a smile. “What are they?” she asked.
“Medical files for Jakobs and Dinks. From the day you got kicked out.” He settled back into his chair. “There’s a lot there,” he added, a smirk on his face.
Molly thumbed through the stapled pages and looked back to Cole. The silence in the barracks that day finally made sense. She wasn’t sure she approved, but it was nice to feel him beside her, even across the extra room provided by the first class tickets. She didn’t really appreciate the space, but it was balanced out by them not having to wear their visors, reflecting back the world arou
nd them. It was just her and Cole. Their real faces. Scars and all.
7
The best thing about first class, as far as Molly was concerned, was getting to see nearly every single passenger of the ship file by. For an alien-watcher, it was a cross between a parade and a fashion show. Even the humans, who made up a majority of the crowd, were garbed in such splendid regalia that some of them looked stranger than the handful of aliens wearing simpler outfits.
Children bounced past excitedly, chased by nervous parents. There was an air of excitement in the crowd as vacations began, homes were returned to, and business deals still held the potential of not falling apart.
The only morose passengers Molly saw were the handful of Palans who must have been returning home from vacation. She assumed they didn’t like their stay on Earth very much. She was dying to ask them why and find out more about their home planet. In fact, Molly wanted to set up a toll booth in the middle of the aisle, stopping each passenger and demanding answers for passage:
Who are you? Where are you going? What are you going to do there?
She wanted to know everything about everyone. But part of her suspected this urge was only half the story. The other half was her desire to let every single one of them know that she owned a starship, and the cute guy beside her was pretending to be her boyfriend.
When a Delphian in coach had a hard time reaching the luggage bins and wouldn’t accept offers of help, she nearly got her tollbooth. The meter-tall, stubborn little alien wrestled with his bag as the parade slowed to a crawl. Molly smiled and nodded at each person that passed her by, hoping they wouldn’t think her a snob just because she was in first class.
When the procession came to a full stop, a young Palan girl, her eyes fixed on Molly, crashed into the back of her father. She quickly checked to see if Molly had noticed, and then her face flashed with embarrassment. Molly smiled at the child and waved her fingers, which sent the girl’s face into the folds of her father’s coat, hiding from the world. Molly was fascinated by the girl’s skin, the color of dull steel. The ears on her stubbly head were very low, almost pointing downward. Molly wanted to try out the three or four words she knew in Palan, but she couldn’t muster the courage. Neither could the Palan child, who remained hidden until the line lurched into motion. As her father moved away, she peeked out and smiled shyly at Molly, then was carried off by her grip on his coat.
One of the last floats in the parade was a stunner: a Bel Tra couple. They sat in the very front of first class, which provided only a brief glimpse of their tall, thin frames and colorful attire. They both wore traditional Bel Tra lace, the dozens of layers of different transparent colors piling up to create an opaque hue unique to each individual. Molly felt goose bumps ripple up her arms; she nudged Cole to make sure he was looking.
“Huh?”
Molly turned in her seat to start talking his ear off, only to find Cole’s head resting against the window.
“Are you asleep?” Molly asked.
Cole didn’t even open his eyes. “I was,” he complained.
“Do you have any idea what you’re missing?” She hissed.
Cole cracked one lid and gazed at Molly for a second. “My nap?”
“Bel Tra!” Molly whispered.
“Seen ’em before.” His eyelid returned to its state of rest, sealing him off from the sights.
Molly couldn’t believe him. She thought they’d been watching the cultural display together. She leaned out and peered up and down the aisle, wondering if anyone would mind if she took some pictures with her reader.
Beside her, Cole emitted a strange snuffling sound. Molly turned back at the man of her dreams.
Just as he started snoring.
••••
When the passenger ship reached Earth’s primary Lagrange point—the spot in space where the gravity of the planet and its moon cancel each another out—it began its countdown for the jump to Menkar.
Molly leaned across Cole’s sleeping form to gaze through the small porthole. Earlier, she’d been eager to wake him, but now she was glad he wasn’t witness to her nervousness. She hadn’t done this outside of a simulator since she and her father came to Earth. The thought of getting sick, or having her heart race uncontrollably like it often did, had Molly squirming in her seat.
She glanced up at the numbers ticking down by their reading lights. When the counter reached “2,” she looked back through the carboglass, tightening her stomach reflexively. The only visual cue anything had happened was each star shifting to a new place. It was indistinguishable from a simulator display.
But there was no nausea. The hyperdrive in this monster must punch a big enough hole in space to prevent the sensation, Molly thought. She settled back in her chair and slowly released her grip on the armrest. The blood returned to her knuckles, coloring them pink.
So far, the grand adventure was proving to be a dud. Molly hoped all that would change once she took possession of Parsona. As long as their chaperone didn’t get in the way, she’d have Cole to herself and be able to keep him so busy with navigational duties that he couldn’t sleep through the trip back.
The Navy had pulled some strings to make this flight non-stop to Palan, an oddity for a frontier planet, but a measure to reduce the number of things that could go wrong on this mission. As they passed through Canopus, Molly heard several first class travelers express their dismay. Their final destination was Canopus, but they were having to return here via the Palan system?
Once more, the Navy’s thoughtfulness irked Molly. She felt horrible that she was responsible for messing up flight schedules. Even the sole Palan couple in first class seemed upset at the itinerary. Molly couldn’t understand this, unless they, too, were eager for layovers on new and strange Orbital Stations.
What everyone got instead was a direct flight from Earth to Palan. It took almost a full day to make the trip, most of it in a dimly-lit gloom of people trying to sleep half as well as Molly’s companion. By the time they arrived at the Palan system, he must’ve had eighteen hours of uninterrupted rest. No bathroom breaks. No food. No flirting.
Molly couldn’t understand how he contained himself. Even from the last.
Stressing about it prevented her from getting any sleep, herself. It even made it difficult to read or watch a holovid. Then she started worrying he would be a ball of energy on the trip back, while she would be a zombie. And this anxious line of reasoning made any chance of a nap impossible.
Cole finally woke when the Palan shuttle airlocked itself to their giant passenger ship. Palan’s Orbital Station could handle a vessel this size, but with only a few travelers getting off here, a direct shuttle flight made more sense. Molly wondered if this wasn’t just more of Lucin’s protectiveness. What a wreck he would’ve been if she’d gone off to fight in the Navy.
The airlocks on the two ships pressed together, sending a faint vibration through the hull. Cole bolted upright, wide awake. “Where are we?” he asked, completely alert.
“Palan,” she said, as grumpy as everyone else on the ship, but for a different reason.
“Already? Man, that went by fast. Why didn’t you wake me?”
“You seemed pretty out of it. And when you started snoring really loud, I went and sat with some guys back in coach. They taught me this cool card game called Mossfoot. You start off with—”
“I don’t snore that loud,” Cole interrupted.
“Well, I just got back and people were complaining.”
“Hmmm. Record it next time. I don’t believe you.”
Molly stood in the aisle with a few other passengers and reached up to collect her bag. “You’re just jealous I had a great flight and all you did was sleep.” She yawned and stretched, feeling exhausted. She really needed a nap.
And a shower.
Part II – Escape Velocity
“The floods will come to wash away the wicked. And I’ll go gladly.”
~The Bern Seer~
; 8
Only a dozen or so passengers boarded the shuttle to Palan’s surface. Molly and Cole were the only two humans, making them the aliens to gawk at. The young girl from earlier was just as shy the second time around, recoiling from Molly’s wave, but with a timid smile. A Palan steward came down the aisle, checking that everyone had their harness secure before rushing to join the pilot in the cockpit. Or had that been the pilot? Molly wondered. There didn’t seem to be many crew members on the shuttle.
Cole automatically sat to Molly’s left again, beside the window. Molly assumed it was more so he’d have a place to rest his head than any attempt to pull rank. He nudged Molly and she turned to see him pointing out the glass. There was nothing out there but stars.
“What am I looking at?” she asked.
“That!” he said, rubbing his finger on the glass with a squeaking sound.
Molly loosened her shoulder straps and leaned over Cole, focusing on his finger. There was a faint crack in the carboglass running the length of the window! Molly felt the airlocks decouple and the shuttle slide sideways in space, preparing for its descent.
“Should we tell somebody?” she asked, cinching her harness up tight.
Cole craned his neck to inspect the porthole one row back. “That one’s even worse,” he marveled. “There’s no way this ship passed inspections.”
Molly felt like they should warn somebody, but the shuttle was already accelerating, pinning her to her seat.
“Wow. That’s a few Gs,” Cole said. “Somebody’s in a hurry.”
If he was trying to lighten the mood, it wasn’t working. A few minutes later, the shuttle hit the atmosphere and started taking a beating. None of the passengers spoke, they just looked ahead or out to the steel wings, which seemed to be flapping up and down like a bird’s. The sounds of grinding metal and bending trusses groaned throughout the ship, reverberating over the roar of air knocking against the hull.
After a few minutes, the heat inside the shuttle became intolerable. There was no air coming out of the vents overhead. Molly reached up, straining against the Gs, to twist the nozzle open. The plastic unit came off in her hand. She held the broken piece in her lap, beads of sweat streaking back from her forehead as the friction of reentry blasted the fuselage, heat radiating through the insulation and into the cabin. Molly sweated profusely, partly from the rise in temperature, but mostly out of fear.
