Molly Fyde and the Fight for Peace

gasp for a breath.

“It was an accident,” Walter whispered.

His uncle’s eyes flared. Disbelieving hands loosened their grip. “Tell me,” he said softly.

Walter looked beseechingly to the pilot, but the other man sat rapt in his seat, his eyes searching Walter for an impossible explanation. Walter, still pinned to the bulkhead, looked the other way to see Pewder standing in the doorway of the cockpit, rubbing one elbow he must’ve bruised in his fall to the decking. His uncle seemed to sniff the collapse of Walter’s resistance. The hands clenched around his neck relaxed further until they were simply draped on his shoulders. Walter looked to the leader of his clan, his mother’s brother, his sometime stand-in of a father, a man he used to know simply as Karl, and he saw in his terrified and shock-glazed eyes the forgotten fragility of the old man. There was a stunned horror there that Walter couldn’t match up with his own fear of his uncle. He couldn’t conceive of the possibility that he, little Walter, had engendered that fear.

“I just wanted to rid us of their ships,” Walter breathed.

He searched the three faces turned his way.

“I didn’t think we’d be up here.” He widened his eyes for his uncle. “I didn’t know we were getting a ship!”

His uncle’s large hands left Walter’s shoulders and moved to the sides of his head, like he had suddenly been seized by a headache.

“I thought you didn’t want ships,” Walter told him, the excuses beginning to gather like the floods. “This way none of us would have them. We’d be equal.” A new reason popped into his head, and Walter added it to his premeditated list: “You said Terran banks owned them. All I did was send them back.”

“To Earth?” the pilot asked.

Walter nodded.

“From here? With one jump?”

More nodding. The pilot slumped down in his seat.

Walter’s uncle turned and sniffed the air. The stench of fear from the pilot hit Walter a moment later.

“What is it?” the Senior Pirate asked.

“We’ll never hear from them again,” he said. The pilot looked back over his shoulder at Walter, an odd mix of fear and shock on his face as well. “You can’t jump like that,” he said. “People who try are never heard from ever again.” The Palan pilot waved toward one of the screens on the dash. “There’s procedures you have to follow. There’s way too much stuff between here and Earth.”

“So how long before they come back?” his uncle asked.

“Aren’t you listening?” The pilot waved his arms. “They’re not ever coming back. They’re dead.”

“What the floods?” Pewder mumbled to himself.

“I thought you’d like this,” Walter begged of his uncle. The pilot’s words weren’t registering with him at all. He couldn’t think of the possibility that thousands might be dead when he was still facing the possibility of being in trouble.

“I thought I’d be promoted to Full Pirate and Hommul wouldn’t be at the very bottom of the clans. But now look!” He waved toward the empty space beyond the windshield. “We’ll be at the top!” Walter exulted.

Walter’s uncle looked out toward Palan’s most distant moon. He seemed to chew on the consequences of Walter’s actions, on this new power vacuum as real and great as the void of space. He looked to the pilot with a frown, then to Walter, then Pewder. His face grew suddenly serious.

“By the might I have vested in me,” he chanted, “by my wiles and my guiles, by the authority of a clan all mine, I now bestow the privilege of Full Pirate to you, Pewder Hommul.”

Walter watched Pewder positively glow from the hasty but proper proceedings. It wasn’t with all the pomp and circumstance the boys had imagined it, but the occasion was no less momentous. Their lives, everything they did and said around Palan, it was all about to change. They were moving from boys to men, and it didn’t matter to Walter how exactly that had to take place—

“You.” His uncle turned to face him. “You can wait another year. You’re grounded.”

“What—?”

His uncle stepped back and reached into the folds of his jacket.

“How can you ground me?”

A pistol came out. Walter immediately recognized it as the one he’d found on the Simmons guy.

“Wait,” Walter said, raising his hands. “Uncle, please, think on what you’re about to—”

His uncle’s arm came up, the gun pointing out. He swiveled to the side and with a concussive roar made mighty by the confines of the cockpit, he shot a bullet, point blank, into the side of the pilot’s face.

Blood and bone scattered, adhering to the dash and windshield in a wide cone of gore. The smell of burnt powder stung Walter’s nose, the ringing in his ears cutting off the first of what his uncle said next.

“—so that nobody ever knows what you did.” His uncle turned to Pewder. The gun did as well. “Is that understood?”

Pewder’s head nodded so hard, Walter imagined it could pop right off.

“Okay. Now.” The Senior Pirate of the Great Hommul Clan, highest and mightiest of them all, turned to survey the mess Walter had made. “The first job for you, Junior Pirate, is to clean this man’s blood off my spaceship.” He looked back and forth between the two boys, waving the smoking gun at the ship’s controls as he did so. “After that, I might need you to tell me how much you remember of what this man was doing with all these gizmos and knobs to get us out here.”

38 · Near Palan’s Furthest Moon

By the time Walter had the dash clean—filling two large garbage bags with nasty wads of paper towel in the process—the three Palans had argued enough over the ship’s controls to realize they had no idea how to get themselves home. Pewder and Walter took turns pointing out that their uncle could just as easily have shot the man after they’d landed back on Palan. Their Uncle Karl didn’t want to hear any of it. And during the argument, Walter was dismayed to see how quickly Pewder had begun talking down to him.

“You missed a bit of skull there, Junior Pirate.”

Walter grabbed the offending piece, imagining it a gold coin to keep the kill scents out of the air. The next year would certainly be the longest of his short life, he realized.

With the dash clean, the crew of three began to deduce the functioning of simpler systems. The changing room turned out to be an airlock. Once they dragged the pilot’s body inside, Walter took great pleasure in figuring out the hallway controls and opening the outer hatch. The vacuum sucked hungrily at the body, the arms and legs whacking limply at the jamb as it was yanked out into space along with a misty fog of crystalized air.

One of the only other devices to succumb to their combined wit—the hyperdrive being something not even Walter could summon the courage to fiddle with—was the radio. It soon transmitted a load of lies and the honest promise of future reward to any pilot willing to come fetch a poor, stranded crew in distress.

The ensuing flight back had been a deathly silent affair, the smells of rotted flowers and dirty dishes wafting through the confined space. Walter spent the time dizzy with the wrongness of his punishment. He had given his uncle power beyond the wildest hopes of his schemings, and the reward had been practically a demotion from the true rank he’d honestly earned. That, plus a year of being grounded. Not to mention a year of hearing it from Pewder, and of now never being able to outrank him in seniority, even when he eventually took over the clan—!

Thoughts like that were too much to take. Walter practically vibrated from holding it all in.

Their new pilot set the ship down in the spaceport, and Walter was the first out the ramp. He ran across the tarmac and through the market, bumping off busy shoppers as he went. He ran out into the streets, the pavement