Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

You know what i mean.

-Molly

She looked over the entry and felt like a fool, every sentence clumsier than the one before. Holding down the function key with one finger—the pressure causing her pulse to throb up into her wrist—she hovered another finger over the “del all” button.

She stopped and wiped at her eyes. She powered the thing off, instead.

“Whatcha doing?” Walter asked.

Molly jumped, and the Wadi shot up to her shoulder, wrapping its tail around her neck and licking the air.

“Good gracious, Walter, don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“That wass my loud walk,” Walter said. “What’re you working on?”

“Oh, just writing some notes to myself.”

“Like a diary?” Walter peered over at her reader.

“No. And don’t you think of hacking into it. You’ve got enough gadgets to play with that you can leave mine alone.”

Molly knew it was pointless as soon as she said it. Keeping the little pirate out of anything electrical was like tugging against the pull of a black hole. He was gonna get in, and she probably just made it more tempting to tell him not to.

“How far are we from the next csity?” Walter asked. He crawled over the flight console and into the navigator’s seat. Cole’s seat.

“Not far. Another half-hour. See where it says ETA on the nav computer?”

Walter leaned forward and glanced at the dash. He nodded, and Molly told herself he probably didn’t need the lesson. The kid had recently done stuff with the ship’s missile systems that she didn’t think possible. He was worthless with a physical tool but a wiz with the digital sort. Then again, that may have just been due to laziness —

“There it iss!” he hissed, practically standing up in the nav seat.

Molly peered through the carboglass and saw it as well. Beyond the prairies and past a long stretch of dry dirt lay Bekkie. The town was nothing more than a wide and growing sprawl of hastily-built wooden structures, yet it was as cosmopolitan a city as Lok could boast. Which wasn’t saying much.

“Careful where you put your hands,” Molly told Walter, urging him back in his seat.

“It’ss ugly,” he groaned. “Jusst like all the lasst placses.”

His disapproval was quite a blow to Molly’s birth planet, seeing that his home planet of Palan was the sort of place you wouldn’t strand an enemy.

“It’s just different, that’s all,” said Molly, not able to summon up anything more positive. “Hopefully this’ll be our last stop.”

“The friend I sspoke to on the radio iss here?”

“Yeah,” Molly lied. The truth was: Walter had spoken with her mother, but Molly had kept her presence in the nav computer a secret for so long, revealing her now would be hard to explain—and harder the longer the ruse lasted. She felt like a kid probably does who keeps something from their parents until they can’t figure out why they started lying in the first place. And then they find themselves trapped into lying even more.

“What’ss her name again?”

“Are you kidding me? We’ve been looking for her for two weeks and you still can’t remember her name? It’s Catherine. With a cee.”

“That’ss right. A hard csee.” Walter turned and smiled at Molly. “I like that name.”

“Yeah, well try and remember it. This is already taking longer than I’d hoped. Now, the mechanic I met in the hardware store said we’ll probably find her in one of the pubs, so I want us to stick together, okay? The election stuff will probably be worse here than it was in the smaller towns, so we really need to be careful.”

“Okay.”

“Another thing: No looting.”

“Fine.”

“I really mean it, Walter.”

“I ssaid fine!”

Molly narrowed her eyes at him to hammer it home, then leaned forward to disengage the autopilot relays, taking over from her mom. She pulled back on the flightstick to gain a bit of altitude. There was enough traffic in the air around town to feel safe from the fleet above, almost like a solitary bird feeling emboldened by joining a large flock.

With a better view of the layout of town, she started picking out which of the many stables to land in. There were several to choose from on the near side of town, all of them a few kilometers from the city center to minimize thruster noise. Most looked extremely busy, whether due to the Bern fleet or the upcoming election, she couldn’t know. She picked one in the middle of style, with not too many fancy ships, but no derelicts propped up on wooden stilts, either. Something she could afford, but where Parsona wouldn’t get robbed.

“There’ss a better one over there,” Walter said as she peeled away for the stable she’d chosen. He pointed to one closer to town where fancy hulls gleamed in the growing light of dawn.

“A little out of our league, pal.”

Molly thumbed the landing gear down and grabbed the radio. The town ahead stirred with plenty of activity despite the early hour. Headlights moved through the city streets, each pair kicking up a plume of dust that streaked off and thinned in the breeze.

Molly squeezed the mic. “GN-290 Parsona to…” she read the stable’s info from the nav screen, “… Pete’s Hideaway. Come in.”

She pulled into a hover and waited for a reply.

“Pete’s Hideaway, here. Come back.”

“Yeah, this is the Gordon Class ship hovering east of you. The two-ninety. We’re looking for a place to stay, over.”

“Roger and welcome, you picked the right place. Anywhere you like. Those small huts with lotsa room around them are the heads. Over.”

Molly laughed. “Thanks for the heads-up. Parsona out.”

She hung up the mic and brought the ship down between two other craft a little nicer than her own. The thrusters sent up a puff of dust, blocking out the view through the windshield. Molly moved the Wadi to the back of her seat and crawled over the control console to go check in at the stable office. As she crossed the cargo bay, she felt a sudden surge of giddiness, a rare crack in her two weeks of loneliness and dour moods. She could feel it as she lowered the cargo ramp into the cloud of swirling dust outside: today was going to be her lucky day.

••••

“How many nights you need her stabled?” the man behind the counter asked. A patch on his coveralls said “Pete,” but it looked like a logo rather than a nametag. Molly pegged his age at sixty, but knowing Lok, it was probably a rough forty. They had skipped introductions, so she decided to think of him as Possibly Pete until she discovered otherwise.

“I’m not sure how long we’ll be here, to be honest.” Molly eyed the voting machine on his counter, the ‘L’ nearly worn off. “Should I pay as I go?”

“Yup, that’ll work. Just need you to fill out them papers. She need water?” Probably Pete bent down over the counter and squinted through a grime-streaked window in the general direction of Parsona. Like the pane of glass, Pete had a sheen of grease on him, almost like it oozed straight from his pores. Even his long hair, which fell out of a backward cap in stringy clumps, seemed coated in something foul.

“She need water?” he asked again, giving Molly a curious glance.

“Uh, no, but thanks. We filled up in Cramerton.”

“Cramerton? They got water out there?” Potentially Pete slapped the counter. “Don’t that beat all!”

Molly laughed politely, but wasn’t sure it was a joke. On her mental to-do list, she added dropping another