by Hugh Howey
Cole must have been thinking some of the same thoughts. “Okay, the first thing we need to do is go to the Navy Office ourselves. I have my credentials with me, and Molly should be in the system as well. We’ll get them to loan us some Marines, we’ll go clear out the Parsona, and then we’ll get out of here.”
A wild look of agitation shivered across Drummond’s face.
“Don’t worry,” Molly said, raising her hand, palm down, “We’re gonna take you with us.”
“Our cover is busted,” Cole added, “so the pirate gangs will realize they’re dealing with Navy. That means we’ll have to get out quick. If they realize the bounty came from Naval personnel, with no bartering at all, they may think they have something priceless. We’ll never see that ship again.”
He looked to Drummond. “We’re gonna need you to round some stuff up so we can make a quick escape. Tell me which systems you checked out on the ship and what condition she’s in.”
“Yes, of course. I can help. Oh, thank gods you guys are here. You have credentials, which is good—”
“The ship’s condition, Drummond.”
“Yeah, sorry. She looks great on the outside, I mean for an older ship. No big dents, could use some paint. A few micro-meteor burns, but what ship doesn’t, right? Um, the inside is a bit rough, but the important bits seemed shiny. And uh, diagnostics didn’t turn up anything, but I did a quick scan, you know? Before I was interrupted.”
“Okay.” Cole turned to Molly. “Are you fine with this? We go to the Navy, show them the ownership papers, storm in with Marines and all that? It’s your call.”
“No. I mean, yeah, Cole, that sounds like the best course.” She was glad he was here, that someone was making decisions. There were times when she flashed back to the Tchung scenario and felt like she was the one playing dead while he took the helm. If they could keep doing this for each other, taking control when the other was out, everything should be all right. As long as both of them were never out of commission at once, or separated, this hiccup might not turn out to be a big deal after all.
9
Picking her way across the sad mounds of prostrate bodies, Molly found herself looking forward to the lesser stench that awaited them outside. Her left foot came down between two forms and slid a little on something wet. She regained her balance, but nearly dropped her black duffle.
“And why didn’t we leave the bags in the room?” she hissed back at Cole, who lagged behind this time. The lobby had become more crowded; it favored small feet rather than long legs.
“Did you see that place? If Drummond didn’t run off with our stuff, one of the rodents would have. Besides, if all goes well we’ll be sleeping in the ship tonight. I don’t care if it doesn’t have overnight bunks, I’ll spread out on the diamond plate steel in the engine room and work on my cute snore there.”
Molly nearly retched as she passed through a small pocket of foulness that stood above the rest. It smelled like death. Like the time a bat got trapped in the ceiling above the cadet dormitory and died. It smelled like that, but times a hundred.
“Some of these people might be dead,” she whispered above the moans and shuffling of those who clearly weren’t. Yet.
“Not funny.”
“I’m serious. Who would check them for a pulse, and how often? Look at all the luggage and bundles scattered between them. Some of it looks like it hasn’t been disturbed in ages.” She considered this.
“Hey, that gives me an idea.” She veered to the side, picking her way toward one of the lobby walls. “This way,” she called back to Cole.
••••
He swerved to follow and one of his large boots pinched an arm. He pulled his weight off that foot, collapsing forward as the limb sucked in like a startled snake. No yelp. No complaint. Cole turned back, leaning down to apologize…
“Ssorry.” It was barely a whisper, a mere hiss leaking out of the prone, bundled form.
Cole teetered on the edge of apologizing back, confused. Then it occurred to him that the lobby guest may actually consider the fault theirs. They weren’t leaving enough of a clear path for the room’s intended purpose. Inconsiderately spread out. Unconscionably too comfortable.
He rose, shaking his head as he carefully picked his way to Molly; she’d come to a halt in a small pocket of floor space along the far wall of the lobby.
“We’re leaving our bags here.” She stooped to nestle her duffle between two other mounds. Cole watched, bemused, while she rounded up a few bits of trash and sprinkled them on top, as if garnishing a meal.
“Uh, why?” His backpack didn’t budge.
“’Cause my bag is heavy, for one thing,” she told him. “I’m sick of carrying it. And also, ’cause there’s a slight chance crazy boy upstairs isn’t all that crazy. I can’t see Lucin trusting my life with a deranged lunatic. Which means he either ate some bad fruit here, a possibility I rank pretty high, or the Navy is up to something, an idea you’ve been lodging ever deeper into my head.
“So, we leave the bags here, a spot where you could hide a dead body in plain sight. We’ll grab them on our way back to collect Drummond and his supplies. Trust me, nobody’s gonna touch something that people here are sleeping beside.”
“Great plan. For your bag.” Cole gave her a grin and hitched his pack further up his shoulder in protest.
“I’m serious. If you have anything important in there, it’ll be safer here. I’ve got my ID and a copy of the will and transfer papers, but everything else is staying, just in case.”
“And I’m taking my bag, just in case. Think of it as having our eggs in two baskets.”
“Whatever,” grunted Molly, leaving him behind again as she picked her way toward fresher air.
Cole made careful note of where she left her duffle and hurried after her.
••••
Outside, the slightest sense of a breeze brought a little relief. They hadn’t been on Palan for two hours and already Molly could see how a traveler could get used to pretty much anything. She wasn’t there yet, and probably wouldn’t be on such a short stay, but her imagination could piece together a sequence of events that led from disembarking the shuttle to sleeping on that lobby floor. She shivered at the thought, picturing how quickly it could happen, even to her. A simple series of bad decisions could lead to a life of prone depression in the Regal.
Cole hurried past her, waving at the first taxi in a line of four. Each was a small, completely enclosed vehicle balanced on three-wheels. The driver didn’t respond to Cole’s gestures. In fact, he appeared to be fast asleep.
The gutter between the sidewalk and the parked vehicles was too wide to step over and the small bridges arching across the gap were too eroded to trust. They looked more like sculptures than pathways, curves of cobblestones erected to protest gravity. Molly watched Cole vault over the gap and did the same, landing neatly as he turned to help her across.
“Thanks anyway,” she smiled.
Cole looked a little flushed. “No problem.”
Molly beat him to the taxi and rapped on the windshield. “Hello?” she called through the glass.
The driver slowly brought his head to a full vertical. No startle reflex, as if this happened to him dozens of times a day.
He cracked his door open. “Where to?” he asked.
“The Naval Offices. How much?” Drummond had insisted they get a price before entering a cab.
“Earth credits,” Cole added from behind her.
The driver lit up at this—almost literally. The metallic sheen of his face seemed to glow as though a dull light shone upon it. He looked past Molly. “Twenty,” he said.
Cole grasped her arm and gently pulled her away from the driver, heading back to the next taxi in line.
The driver opened his door wide. “Fifteen!” he yelled after them.
“C’mon,” Molly pleaded. The next driver was waking up from the ruckus and she didn’t want to waste time bartering them down few
more bucks.
They turned back to the first cabbie, who held the door open as Molly slipped into the tiny rear seat. Cole squeezed in beside her. Their driver stepped to the back of the vehicle and Molly heard the sound of chains rattling. She tried to see if threats were being made between the two taxis, but it was too cramped to shift even slightly. The driver returned in a flash, muttering to himself and rocking the car as he pulled the door shut.
“Firsst time on Palan?” he asked as he pulled out into the light, yet frantic, traffic.
Molly looked up to meet his eyes in the rearview mirror, but there wasn’t one there. In fact, there weren’t any safety devices or indicators anywhere in the buggy. It was just a smooth shell perched on thin wheels, two narrow benches comprising the seating arrangements. The driver took up most of the front one and Molly and Cole were pressed together in the back.
There weren’t even any windows to roll down, just solid carboglass on the sides. As bad as the smell of Palan was, Molly longed for a breeze.
“First time,” confirmed Cole.
“Firsst day?”
“First day,” parroted Molly, giving Cole a smile.
“Where you gonna watch the rainss?” The driver asked, looking up at the sky through the windshield as if they were due to begin at any moment. Distracted, he almost ran into another rolling egg. He leaned on the horn and yelled through the window at the other driver, obviously not concerned with the answer, just making small-talk.
Something triggered in Molly’s memory at the mention of the rains. Something she’d learned in an old Planetary Astralogy course in Junior Academy. And then the filling lobby started to make sense, the wide gutters, the locals setting up their market in the shuttle concourse. It occurred to her why this rickety taxi seemed to have only gotten one thing right: being watertight.
Even some of the Palan smells started to register in her olfactory nerves as various types of mildew and mold and rot.
The driver performed a post-yell grumble routine in his own language, gripping the steering wheel with residual anger. Molly tilted her head toward Cole’s to explain what she could remember about the torrential downpours and regular floods.
Cole absorbed the PA lesson, his eyes flashing a hint of memory as well. “Drummond, you fool,” he muttered. “We’re gonna have to be quick in the Naval Office to get back to the Regal in time.”
Molly nodded. She leaned forward and interrupted the angry grumbling. “How far away are we?”
“One more than five minutess,” answered the driver.
Molly settled back in her seat, wondering if that was their way of saying “six.” Such an odd place, Palan. Outside the glass she saw two silver-faced people wrestling with a package. It looked like things might get violent. As they passed, she craned her neck to follow, but there wasn’t enough room to turn her shoulders.
She felt Cole twisting to survey the same scene. “Not much law here, huh?” he asked quietly.
“Too far from the war, I guess.” She looked straight ahead. “The fight with the Drenards means fewer security forces on the frontier. Lok was the same way when I was young. I think my dad took me away from that place ’cause of the violence. Crazy how the Drenards can affect us without being able to push the war beyond their arm of the Milky Way.” Molly laughed at herself. “Listen to me. A few months exposure to opinion reporting at Avalon, and I don’t talk tactics anymore, I just moan about the toll the war is taking on innocent civilians.”
Cole grunted. “No one mentions it at the Academy, but everyone must see it when they look at the charts. We can’t win this bloody war. The Drenards have an entire arm of our spiral galaxy well-defended. They never push the fight into our space, and we seem hell-bent on breaking through. It’s become an imaginary wall in space that we throw money and lives at.”
“Well, don’t get me wrong,” Molly said, “I want to beat the snot out of them just like the rest of the galaxy. What they did at Turin—what my father and Lucin fought through—that was the worst sort of crime. Unforgivable. But the way the stars are laid out in this galaxy, with those damn spiraling arms, there’s just too much empty space to stretch supply lines across, even with hyperdrives. It’s like Major Clarke taught us in Philo-History, how the Revolutionary War was immoral, ’cause independence was assured by the Atlantic.”
“Clarke was a loon,” Cole jerked his head toward the world beyond the carboglass. “Try telling these people to wait patiently while progress meanders forward. No thanks.”
The taxi fell silent and Molly sucked in a deep lungful of it. She missed these conversations with Cole. Not so much the philosophy, but the history and the tactical ruminations. They used to stay up late in their bunks whispering bold plans that would turn the tide of war one way or the other, always with bold gambits the generals missed simply from being at it too long. Some of those ideas seemed ridiculous to her now, but then she remembered the stunts they pulled off in the simulators that no AI routine had ever been ready for.
The nostalgia made her chest swell and feel heavy. She’d put that behind her at Avalon. Eventually. She thought back to those big plans and her dreams of being a great Navy pilot, ending the war with the Drenards. She could almost feel the confetti sticking in her hair…
But those old dreams made her sad now. Especially as she looked out at this miserable world sliding by. It wasn’t just her ambitions that had taken a hit, so had this planet and its people. She knew from her Materiel Analysis class what each missile and bomb cost. She imagined what a few munitions could mean here if they were converted to Earth Credits. It drained the last of her giddiness away. The excitement of retrieving Parsona and traveling with Cole back to Earth was being replaced with the ugliness of Palan, the problems detailed by Drummond, and the fear of not knowing what to expect from the looming rains.
Cole had fallen silent, gazing out of the carboglass. Maybe he was thinking along the same lines as she, or was it something else? Here they were, two pilots with tons of potential, crammed together in a dinky cab on this miserable planet and stuck with a worthless guide while a war was being lost. What kind of sense does that make? Molly wondered.
“Do we have to take Drummond with us?” she asked aloud, breaking the silence.
“Who?”
“Drummond. Do we really have to take him with us? Once we get Parsona back, I just want to fly her home ourselves. Spend more time talking like this.”
Cole leaned close to her. “You mean Sssimonssss,” he whispered with a hiss.
They both laughed. And for a few moments, their lives returned to normal.
••••
Their little bubble of metal and glass lurched to a stop. “Naval!” announced the cabbie, not even attempting the word “offices.”
Cole handed him a wad of Navy funds and exited the cramped cab mostly by falling out of it. Molly spilled out the same door, as Cole vaulted over another massive gutter. He turned, and this time she accepted his outstretched offer, his hand wrapping around hers. It felt smooth and warm, unlike the stiff flight gloves they normally bumped together. It reminded her that she and Cole had been around each other as civilians for less than two days, and most of that time he’d been asleep.
It always amazed her to feel the rapid bonds foreign situations could weld. It reminded her of a math camp Lucin sent her to one summer. She was only there for a week, but some of the friendships she’d formed felt unbreakable at the time. Something about being with a person night and day, never leaving their side, made hours feel like months.
As Cole released her hand, Molly thought about how equally fast those undying bonds faded as soon as she and her new friends went their separate ways. She wondered if the same would happen between her and Cole when they got back to Earth.
She snapped away from the depressing thought as Cole held open the door for her. She passed under the GN Creed, Latin for “Expanding Freedom,” and into the foyer of the Naval Offices. There was the faintest impression o
f an old official seal in the marble tile, but a million shuffling steps had worn it down to a sad smear. A waft of air-conditioning leaked through the next set of doors, beckoning them inside.
The room beyond was much smaller than seemed possible from the block building’s façade. Unless the walls were as thick as the foyer, there was some sort of optical illusion at play. Molly suddenly realized they were in a bunker disguised as an office. A room meant to take the worst kind of pounding and survive. For some reason, walls so thick made her feel less safe. Like she had moved to the center of a bull’s-eye.
A man in Naval black stood behind a low greeting desk, peering down at a mess of papers. Both of his hands were spread out and pressed flat on its surface, as if removing them would send the documents fluttering off to safety. He looked up at the squeak of the door. “No refuge from the rains—” He paused. A glimmer of recognition flashed across his face, or perhaps it was the obvious conclusion that this young couple was out of place on Palan. “Can I help you?”
Cole held out his credentials. “Ensign Mendonça, Cole, Naval Special Assignments, sir.”
The man behind the desk frowned and took Cole’s badge from him. “Didn’t know they had Ensigns in Special Assignments, Mendonça.” He looked at Molly with a sly smile. “You must be the Admiral?”
One of the men stationed at another desk snickered.
Sarcasm was not what Molly had hoped to find here, but she could understand someone posted to Palan having a bad attitude about it. This must be where the absolute worst were sent to rot their way to retirement.
