Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue

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.

15

The next two days were spent in the middle of nowhere and full of bliss. Molly had been so busy using Parsona to flee Palan, she missed her chance to fully appreciate the reunion. As they drifted out along the edge of the Milky Way’s Frontier Arm, she finally had an opportunity to look over the ship.

Her ship.

A lot of the tools she remembered watching her father use were still here. Some of them looked worse for wear: the fuel cell in every power tool was bone dry; a few manual screwdrivers were missing; one of the large hammers she’d barely been able to lift as a child had a large spot of strange rust on it that needed to be filed off. Despite the abuse, most of it was still there—including her father’s old ratchet set, the sight of which flooded Molly with nostalgia.

It was the closest thing to a toy box she’d ever had. She would spend hours playing with the shiny cylinders, stacking them like blocks, building precarious things that quaked as her father stomped by. She used to hold her open hands to either side of her little metal castles as they threatened to fall, holding them upright by the force of her will alone.

That came to an end after she spilled the entire set in the engine room and had to spend the rest of the day digging greasy bits out of the bilge, cleaning them and re-sorting them. It was the last time she’d opened the large metal box.

Molly ran her fingers across its silver hasps; she flipped them up, paused a moment, then hinged back the lid. Every piece was still there, each one in its proper place. She grazed a row of metrics and picked one at random, held it up close, then put it back. That was what she loved about the ratchet set. Everything had a slot that it went into. Everything fit. You could mess it up, but it would go back together again, just like it was.

She wished it was a metaphor for life, but it wasn’t. She knew.

It seemed odd that an old set of tools would stir such emotions, when the staterooms elicited hardly a response. Her own room had been rummaged through; nothing remained from her last time aboard. And the captain’s quarters, which she entered hesitantly, no longer smelled like her father.

Molly recalled sneaking into his room whenever the strange noises in the ship gave her bad dreams. He would sit up and hold her, softly explaining which pump or motor was turning on and what it was doing to create each sound. The next morning, she would wake up in her own bed.

Moving into his room, rather than sleep in her old one, may have appeared to the others a natural result of her rank, but Molly knew it was something different. It was a scared child once again looking for respite from her bad dreams. And it worked. The nightmare that’d been haunting her for ten years didn’t make its customary appearance that first night. Nor the next one. No longer terrified of being left behind, Molly had become a part of what she’d been chasing.

Another wonderful discovery was the ship’s original logs. They went all the way back to Parsona’s maiden voyage. Molly pulled up the waypoints her parents must’ve used on their first flight to Lok. She traced her finger across the nav screen, thinking about the planet where she’d been born, imagining her mother alive and happy, her parents in love.

She read the log entries that went with the routes, knowing they would’ve been typed in by her mother or father. The words glowed phosphorous green on the readout—her parents talking to her across time and beyond the grave. As a pilot now, in charge of their old ship, she felt connected to them both in a way she never had before. Eighteen years ago, her father had left the Navy and moved with his new bride to a frontier planet. They would’ve been crossing the galaxy just like Molly was about to, trying to start a new life.

While she spent her time reminiscing, Cole launched into a whirlwind of productivity. Nobody appreciated the hot shower as much as he did. The swelling on his face and the purple around his ribs faded with rest, medical cream, and clean bandages. And surprisingly—to Molly at least—it was Cole that busied about the utility room, washing the mildew out of the sheets, trying to salvage their Palan clothes, and organizing their supply of soaps and cleaners. Molly couldn’t remember him being this fastidious at the Academy; then again, the only way to recognize an overly neat person in the military was to note the few people who weren’t complaining