Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue

about mandatory hygiene and strict dress codes.

Walter also kept himself busy. He took his new duties as “Cargo Officer” more seriously than Molly had expected. It turned out the kid could do more than just read and write, he was a whiz with computers. Probably from a childhood of hacking into banks or stealing holovids—Molly didn’t dare ask. He wasted no time retiring the manifest sheets and writing his own inventory program into a small computer. Molly had no idea where it had come from, but it seemed suspiciously newer than anything else on the ship. He carried the device with him at all times, hissing with delight when he found something new in a hidden cubby.

Between Cole’s cleaning and Walter’s organizing, the wreck of Parsona’s interior quickly transformed into a model of perplexing orderliness. This is not what living with two males should be like. Especially when one of them was a citizen of Palan, having seen what passes muster on that planet. Then again, perhaps this was the way Walter had chosen to rebel. Or maybe it was his attempt to impose order on the universe. It was no longer a mystery to Molly that her offer to get the boy off-planet had succeeded where other deals had fallen short. He must’ve been miserable there.

The only bad news, besides the hyperdrive reading eighteen percent, was the lack of some common spares for the thrusters and the state of a few mechanical systems. Numerous lights were out and needed replacing, the air conditioning unit in one of the crew rooms was broken, some paint needed to be chipped off and re-applied, and various other tasks started filling the to-do tab in the ship’s computer.

The only deal-breaker, though, was the hyperdrive. They had no way of charging it up themselves.

In fact, filling up the hyperdrive and avoiding the Navy were going to be difficult to do at the same time. Supposedly, only a few people in the entire Galactic Union knew how hyperdrive engines worked. Fusion coil technology was a closely guarded secret, and refills were overseen at Orbital Stations under the watchful eyes of Navy personnel.

There were dozens of rumors about who actually discovered the technology and owned the rights. Conspiracy theorists maintained an alien race sold the technology to Humans ages ago, but Molly didn’t buy it. Every race Humans encountered in the galaxy had received hyperdrive technology from them, not the other way around. The only exception was the Drenards, who had made the same technological breakthrough at some point, and the only technology they seemed eager to give humans were missiles. Lots of them. Pointy ends first.

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