Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue

1

Molly floated in the vacuum of space with no helmet on—with no protection at all. In the distance, a starship slowly drifted away. It was her parents’ ship, and they were leaving her behind.

She swam in the nothingness, trying to keep them in view, but as always she spun around and faced the wrong direction. It was the only torment the old nightmare had left. After years of waking up—screaming, crying, soaked in her own sweat—she had whittled it down to this.

She gave up fighting for one last glimpse and tried to relax, to find some breath of peace. They were out there, even if she couldn’t see them. And as long as she stayed asleep, suffocating and alone, her parents remained among the stars. Alive.

“Molly.”

A voice pierced the dream. Molly cracked her eyes and blinked at her surroundings. Beyond the carboglass cockpit loomed a scene similar to her nightmare, but filled with a fleet of Navy ships. The fire of their thrusters blended with the stars beyond, little twinkles of plasma across the stark black.

“Gimme a sec,” she mumbled, rubbing her eyelids before snapping her visor shut. She scanned the constellation of lights and readouts across the dashboard and over her head. She could see at a glance that everything was in order. This spread of twinkling indicators and glowing dials were as familiar to her as any starchart, as recognizable as a loved one’s face.

“Take your time. Your shift’s not up for another ten.”

She turned in her nav seat to face Cole Mendonça, her pilot for the last two years. Molly sat to his right in the Firehawk’s “girlie” seat, a term meant to motivate the boys from flunking out of flight school and ending up as lowly navigators. All the insult did for Molly was infuriate her—she’d never even been given the chance to fail.

“Another ten? Drenards, Cole, then why’d you wake me?”

“I wanted you to see something. I just sent it over. Check the first tab.”

Molly frowned at her pilot and pulled the reader out of its pouch. She resented not being able to fly, but she had a hard time taking it out on Cole. Partly because he had earned his position, but mostly because she considered him a friend. And in the male-dominated galaxy in which she lived and operated, those were as rare as habitable worlds.

She yawned and tried to stretch as much as the flight harness would allow. If only civilians knew how boring space flight truly was. All they ever saw were the buzzing battles on the Military Channel, the great swarms of spacecraft darting through torrents of laser fire. In reality, flying for the Navy mostly meant dull chores: astronavigation and chart plotting, taking turns on flight shifts while your partner grabbed precious few winks, and digital paperwork. Lots of digital paperwork.

“What exactly am I looking at?” she asked. She assumed Cole was going to have her perform some more clerical heroics.

“It’s our system update log. Read it.”

She turned to Cole, her fears confirmed. “You woke me up for an update log?”

“Read it,” he insisted, facing her. With his mirrored visor down, only his lips were visible, pursed with worry. Molly heard the AC unit in her flightsuit whir to life, whisking away her excess body heat. She glanced up at the reflection in his visor. Both helmets repeated themselves over and over in a series of infinite regressions. She tried to follow herself as she receded into the indiscernibly diminutive.

“Firehawk GN-KPX to Molly Fyde, come in,” Cole said mockingly. “Can you read me? Over.”

Molly pulled her gaze away from the familiar illusion of reflections and focused on the reader.

“Well?” he asked.

“Gimme a sec, would you?”

She skimmed the report, not sure what to look for. It was standard stuff from the IT department: a software upload to their ship four days ago by Specialist Second Class Mitchell and signed off by Commander Hearst. A few bugs fixed, some navigational data updated. None of it warranted the worry in Cole’s voice.

“I don’t see the problem,” she said.

“That’s because I haven’t shown it to you yet. I just wanted you to see that before I presented this.” With an unnecessary flourish, Cole pulled up the Firehawk’s diagnostic information on the main screen of the dash.

It took a second for Molly to see it. She gaped at him in disbelief and annoyance. “Are you serious? You’re worked up over this?” She jabbed a finger at the time of their computer’s most recent update. It said the 14th. Yesterday. Two days later than the maintenance report suggested. She groaned. “I’m sure it’s just an input error, Cole.” She flipped the tab shut on her reader and stuffed it away. “And I was having such a good dream, too.”

“First of all, you don’t have good dreams. I know because you mumble in your sleep. Secondly, the reason I tracked down the report was ’cause I was already suspicious. I saw someone tampering with our Firehawk this morning. You’re looking at the confirmation, not the clue.”

“And why would someone tamper with our ship?”

“Now that’s the mystery,” he agreed. “Hopefully just someone messing with us. Jakobs, maybe. Whoever it was had his build. Man, I should’ve suspected something and taken a closer look. Still, what in the galaxy would someone be doing updating our ship’s programming? Who even knows how to do that outside of IT?”

Cole’s voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper. He was enjoying this entirely too much. “And what if it isn’t a practical joke?” he asked. “What if it’s something… worse?”

Molly nearly burst out laughing. Once Cole’s brain concocted a good conspiracy theory, there was no stopping him. She’d seen it play out dozens of times, him always jumping to conclusions with the barest of facts. It used to bother her, but then she figured out that this habit of his—playing connect-the-dots without bothering to read the numbers—was better than any game of Drenards or Dare. When Cole drew what he wanted to see, rather than what was actually there, that’s when Molly learned the most about him.

“Hey, it’s my shift,” she said, too tired to egg him on or argue. “Why don’t you take a nap and try dreaming in your sleep for a change.”

Cole opened his mouth to launch a witty comeback—but he never got the chance. Because that’s when the long tedium of astronavigating from point A to point B came to an abrupt end.

And the part people see on the Military Channel finally began.

Intelligence reports had projected an enemy force of a dozen, tops. The fleet had subsequently planned for two dozen, just to be safe. What winked out of hyperspace was several times this. So many that Molly didn’t have time to count them visually. Even her SADAR unit had difficulty teasing the clusters into individual targets. Fifty fighters? Half a dozen heavy bombers?

Cole slammed the Firehawk to full throttle, and Molly felt her chest constrict as the flightsuit struggled to compensate. Millions of tiny pockets pushed anti-grav fluid wherever it was needed, offsetting the shift in acceleration. With the suits and their conditioning, Molly and Cole could tolerate forces that would normally tear the human body apart. Which was precisely how it felt at times.

“We have three fighters breaking off for a flanking maneuver,” she noted. Keeping her gaze locked on the targets, her gloved hand pressed buttons by her thigh. The representations of all three enemy ships blossomed with an orange glow for Cole to consider.

“I see ’em,” he said, peeling off to intercept.

Riggs—their wingman in the neighboring Firehawk—locked in as well. The two ships coursed across the formation to head off the threat, even as the acting fleet commander barked orders for all craft to engage in a full-frontal attack.

Molly watched as Riggs’s Firehawk wavered on SADAR, their wingman torn between two duties, two disparate layers of command. Cole’s hand never twitched on the flight controls. He ignored the fleet commander in favor of Molly’s threat assessment, and the two Firehawks continued to barrel after the trio of enemy fighters.

“We’re gonna come in pretty hot,” he warned, his voice calm and soothing considering what they were up against. Riggs answered back on their private channel, his choice made. Meanwhile, along the front line, streaks of plasma jolted across the gap between the two fleets. Fired by the jittery and eager, these premature tendrils lanced out with no chance of inflicting damage, not at such a vast range.

The three targets Molly had chosen were trying to get around the fleet. The combination of superior numbers and crossfire would end the fight before it ever truly began. Glancing at her SADAR, she saw two other enemy groups pulling the same maneuver on opposite sides of the fleet. None of the other Firehawks were responding. She broadcast a warning on the emergency channel, more concerned with the threat than she was with violating rank and protocol. A chorus of male voices shouted her down, all of them insisting the main fleet body remain in formation, some of them telling her to shut the hell up.

Molly ignored the insults. The threat of encirclement was there. It had to be taken seriously, even if this meant thinning the formation before the first casualties were suffered.

Cole and Riggs seemed to agree. They closed in on their targets, still out of effective laser and missile range, but the gap was rapidly decreasing. Thanks to the quick response, they had a great angle on their enemies’ trajectory. They would easily cut them off.

The trio of enemy pilots realized this as well. The craft nearest them altered course, whirling around with incredible speed and precision. It darted for Cole and Riggs, one ship bearing down on two in a suicidal gambit designed to buy his partners some time.

“Lock missiles.” Cole’s voice hinted at the first sign of strain.

Molly’s fingers danced across the targeting console; the orange triangle around the attacker turned red. “Firing,” she said, pulling the trigger.

Nothing happened. Confused and flushed with heat, Molly looked at her controls and checked the safety overrides. Everything was green. It took a moment for her brain to go through the reasonable explanations. When it ran out of them, it considered Cole’s silly conspiracy theory—and how it didn’t seem quite so silly anymore.

“We’ve got a problem!” she yelled.

The first volley of enemy laser lashed out at Riggs on their starboard side. At this distance, it was easy to avoid. Cole rolled away to give his wingman more room, his foul language suggesting a similar problem with the lasers that Molly was having with the missiles. Without weapons, they’d be useless out there. Defanged. Flying nothing more than a scout ship in the biggest naval engagement of their young lives. Molly tried in vain to comprehend the nightmare they were in.

And then it got worse.

The fighter bearing down on them spun away from Riggs and launched a volley at Cole, and he was too distracted with the malfunctioning lasers to respond. Molly nearly got out a warning before the glancing blow struck the nose of their ship.

The cockpit flashed for a moment, then went dark. The Firehawk fell into a flat, lifeless spin—its nose slowly pointing back to the fleet. All three thrusters were knocked out and off-line. And as the entire dash descended into darkness, the other lights around them became vivid and bright. The stars and pink nebulae beyond the fighting glowed with intense beauty, the laser blasts directed at their wingman blooming far more sinister.

The next volley flashed by their cockpit, illuminating the interior with a red pall of death, before slamming into Riggs’s Firehawk head-on. His ship blossomed silently into the glowing cloud of debris and flaming ash that Molly had come to associate with a Navy death.

So quick.

The enemy craft flew past the carnage it had created, whipping the fine particles in its thruster’s wake. It seemed impossible, but Molly swore she could hear the ship screaming across the vacuum of space as it circled around—preparing for a run on her lifeless and useless ship.

“Cole!” Molly shook his arm, but there was no response. She leaned forward and initiated a cold boot of every system, hoping some of their defenses would come back on-line. Anything.

To Molly’s astonishment, the entire dash lit up. The laser blasts had locked up the computers and knocked out Cole, but the ship was coming back to life. Even the thruster control indicators winked from red to amber. In ten minutes she’d have propulsion again—if she could just hold out that long.

She took a deep breath and wrapped her left hand around the flight controls. Situated between her and Cole, the controls catered to the 82 percent of pilots who favored their right hand. Incredibly and unfortunately, this was one area in which Molly could be considered “normal.” Despite hours of practice from the nav seat, she would never fly as well from that side of the cockpit as she could with her dominant hand.

The large propulsion thrusters at the rear of her Firehawk were still warming up, but she had control of the maneuvering jets. Molly used them to swing the Firehawk around, squeezing the trigger as she did so, hoping the reboot had fixed the weapons glitch.

Nothing. And now she knew this was no accident. Cole’s conspiracy theory had grown legs—they kicked her for not listening.

Ahead, the enemy craft completed its victory lap around the dispersing nebula left by Riggs’s Firehawk. The first bolts of red laser winked from the sleek fighter and raced her way. Molly used the maneuvering jets to shift sideways. Her right hand flinching as her left hand worked, the dominant side of her squirming to help, to take over for its feeble partner. Molly screamed Cole’s name once more, hoping to rouse him, but he didn’t respond.

The approaching ship released another burst from its cannon as it raced toward her on a vector straight as a taut string. Molly maneuvered the Firehawk to the side, dodging the attacks. The bolts of plasma slid by her canopy, missing her by a handful of meters. She glanced at them with envy. She was being toyed with. Chewed on and released like a wounded animal.

The oncoming ship released one last round of laser fire from close range; Molly barely had time to react. She spiraled the Firehawk in place, the violence of the maneuver yanking her against her flight harness, her head snapping around with the weight of her helmet. When she came to a rest, her attacker flew by so close she could see the glint of his visor through the windshield. She wanted to throw something, anything, at him.

The ship circled wide for another run while Molly rotated her Firehawk to follow. If she could survive one more pass, she’d have the main thrusters back. But she couldn’t rely on her enemy’s ineptitude; she needed to act.

The next round of enemy fire approached. Molly resumed the dangerous dance, stepping side to side as beams of potential death raced by. It made her feel like one of Cole’s Portuguese cavaleiros trying to survive multiple passes by an enraged bull. The only difference: Molly was all cape and no sword.

The metaphor gave her an idea. She pulled up the service modules and flight deck routines—they all seemed to be working. She might not be able to arm her missiles, but at the speed the other ship was flying by, she wouldn’t need to. Another round of deadly red ribbons reached out to her. She slipped expertly to one side. With her other hand, she brought up the docking interface and lowered her landing gear.

Molly performed some dirty calculations in her head, unable to use the nav computer and pilot the ship at the same time. It helped that the craft bearing down on her flew with such precision along a fixed vector. She roughly determined where the ship would be when it passed her and spiraled around yet more laser fire.

When the landing gear extended fully, the deck routines changed from grayed-out to a selectable yellow. With the twist of a dial, Molly highlighted the missile unload commands. As far as the ship knew, they were in a hangar bay preparing to unload munitions—not moments away from being mauled by a raging bull.

Her enemy was a few thousand meters away, closing at a high but steady velocity. The laser fire became more intense, reaching out in a rapid volley. Molly twisted the Firehawk in space, trying to fit it inside the pattern of deadly plasma. One of the wings took a hit, a minor burn, but a reminder that her time was running out. The bull prepared to roar past her.

Just before it did, Molly darted across its path and thumbed a switch, releasing a single missile from the Firehawk’s belly. She may have been a harmless cape swishing in space, but behind her, an unarmed and inert hunk of metal like a gleaming sword was left in the bull’s path. A sword to impale itself on.

The enemy never saw what hit him. The missile impacted the cockpit right where the glint of visor had been. Molly had hoped to disable the craft, but she did much more. The kinetic energy of the oncoming ship forced the missile down its center, rupturing the rear of the vessel and sending out large chunks of debris. The destruction occurred so close to her Firehawk that her tail was forced to one side. The violence slammed her into her harness, and Molly fought with the flight controls to keep out of a spin.

After a tense moment, she regained full control of the ship.

Her ship.

Molly elbowed Cole, whooping with delight, but the life support readouts showed her the awful truth: She was alone.

The thruster indicators went from amber to green.

Molly gave them a test, feeling the acceleration add more weight to an already heavy chest. Out of immediate danger, she took a moment to survey the flow of battle on SADAR. The blue and green dots were no longer approaching one another in separate spheres. They intermingled, swirling in pairs until one of them disappeared.

Her side fought nobly, but the three sets of flanking craft were closing in for what would soon be a massacre. And there wasn’t much Molly could do to help.

Then she thought of how many times she’d toyed with these scenarios in her bunk at night. Here she was, at the helm, hopelessly outgunned, with nothing in the Navy manuals to suggest her next course of action.

She should run. Her wingman was gone, her pilot dead. She would score points with the higher-ups simply for surviving—for saving Navy hardware. But something gnawed at her. She couldn’t help but wonder if there was something she could do for the fleet, something that would win her the accolades she felt she deserved. Would an act of creative heroism prove what she already knew? That she more than belonged out here with the boys?

The choice seemed simple: fight or flee, but Molly’s hand came off the throttle. She wouldn’t be thrusting in either direction. Instead, she started spinning up the Firehawk’s hyperdrive.

She wondered what “the boys” would make of this next idea.

They’d probably tell her she’d lost her mind. By every standard of common sense, jumping through hyperspace during a battle was the height of folly. Hyperspace was useful for crossing vast distances instantaneously, but only if you were careful. There were two dangers—Molly was about to flirt with them both.

The first danger was the sensitive mathematics involved. To travel through hyperspace safely, you had to account for every object on both sides of the jump. Even a small gravitational disturbance could deflect you off course, or worse, suck you in. It was likened to tossing one magnet at another; if the same poles were facing, you’d end up repulsed and thrown someplace at random. If the opposite poles were lined up, you’d be forced together violently. Violently, that is, for one of the objects.

And that was the second danger Molly was about to face: Objects in “real” space have dibs—they can’t be dislodged by something else. Try and occupy the same coordinates as even a tiny object, like the millions of chunks of debris surrounding a space battle, and no one would even notice your attempt. You’d just vanish. To where, nobody knew.

Were this not the case, modern warfare would have descended into the hopelessly brutal. An arms race with no deterrent effect would ensue as attackers wiped out any target with known coordinates. All they’d have to do is hyperspace a bomb and enjoy the fireworks. The results would be instantaneous and anonymous.

This was widely considered to be a viable terror tactic until 2138. That’s when a video recording from “The Luddites” was discovered in an abandoned apartment. It seems the anti-technology organization had launched a massive suicide-bombing campaign across planet Earth. All for naught. The entire group had vanished in a puff of unexplained physics, leaving behind a taped rationalization for an action that never took place, just a group of crazies that up and disappeared.

These were the dangers. Navy instructors only had to go over them once. After that, everyone just knew not to try what she was contemplating. It was a basic, simple rule, one of the first they were taught.

But her fleet faced certain destruction, pops of orange violence bursting in the distance as her wing mates succumbed to superior numbers. Cole and Riggs were gone. There was no one there to talk sense into her. And by the moment, she was growing convinced her Firehawk had been sabotaged, tampered with. She was living on borrowed time, which made suicidal risks suddenly worth calculating.

Checking her SADAR, Molly saw a pocket of space between the two remaining enemy craft flanking her fleet. Treating the combined mass of every ship on one side of this point as a single object, she simplified the math and made an approximate calculation. Crossing one set of fingers, Molly punched in the hyperspace commands with the other. It was her second game of chicken in less than a minute.

Once again, she didn’t hesitate.

The stress of entering hyperspace was topped only by the pain of leaving it. The nausea and panic attacks engendered by a successful jump were likened to a bombardment of loud bass sounds. Many pilots never developed an immunity to the discomfort, and Molly was one of them. She often fought to hide the severity of her reaction. This time, however, she reveled in it.

The pain meant she was alive.

But a glance at her surroundings didn’t inspire much hope for remaining this way. She stood between the fleet and the two flanking ships, and they were closing in fast. Their lasers lanced out greetings at her unexpected arrival. Molly flinched, shoving the ship sideways and away from the attack. She powered up the glorious thrusters and raced parallel to her fleet, presenting a target that moved side to side.

The cape and sword gambit would never work with these guys. There were two sets of crossing laser fire to avoid. And surely they were aware of their fallen comrade by now, which meant she couldn’t rely on them underestimating her. This last assessment was confirmed as each enemy craft spat out a missile keyed to her ship’s signature.

Molly took the gesture as a compliment.

She keyed up her defense menus and scrolled to the missile chaff.

Four pods were stowed in the rear of her Firehawk, each capable of emulating her ship’s signature. Dropping one at a time should negate this new threat, but the delay would prevent her from protecting the fleet. Precisely what her enemy intended.

When the chaff menu came up, Molly appreciated the sophistication with which their Firehawk had been sabotaged. This was a high-level hack. “Drop” was selectable from the chaff menu, but not the “arm” command. It meant they were as useless as her missiles. Dead weight. And trying to place one of the dud canisters in the path of a homing missile would be like flipping a coin in front of a passing laser bolt.

Molly cursed and pulled on the flight stick, sending her Firehawk back on an arc toward the two ships. Their incoming missiles altered course slightly to hone in on her. There was no way she could out-maneuver them; the missiles could pull as many Gs as it took to track her down. She was limited by biology and her flightsuit.

Dwelling on her own constraints gave Molly another crazy idea. She recognized the old Tchung ship designs they were up against. If the missiles were Tchung as well, they had a design flaw she could exploit: their homing software was slightly more advanced than their thrusters. They could think faster than they could turn. Normally, this wasn’t a problem, as it required extreme velocities before the limitation became a factor. Besides, most targets are wise enough to move away from missiles, so the flaw rarely revealed itself. But it was there.

Molly came about as sharply as she could, forcing out puffs of air against the Gs. She pushed forward on the accelerator. Once again, she was prepared to stand in doom’s path in an attempt to escape it. Cole’s stillness made it easier—she was only gambling with her own life.

Molly shook her head and focused outside the cockpit’s carboglass. Beyond the two incoming missiles, she watched her prey speed toward her fleet. They weren’t wasting time following up the missiles with laser-fire. She was a minor annoyance compared to their primary objective: reaching the Navy’s unguarded rear. They had batted at her as if she were a fly while they stalked a heftier foe.

She wished she had time to appreciate the skill behind the tactics, but the missiles and her ship were closing on each other too fast for her to get distracted. Molly just hoped it was fast enough. She did more dirty math. Her suit could take around 40 Gs; her body could probably withstand a dozen more. She looked at her current rate of acceleration and came up with twenty degrees—that was as much as she could alter direction at these speeds without crushing her brain against the inside of her skull. It wasn’t a large vector change; she’d have to wait until the very last second, fraction of a second, even.

That sort of timing required as much luck as skill. The window was so small, the delay between thinking and doing could get her killed. She’d have to take this into account, somehow. Her left hand twitched slightly in awkward anticipation. Molly wished Cole was the one trying this.

The missiles were nearly upon her, or she was almost on them. Her danger-sense warned her prematurely—screaming at Molly to alter course now. She fought the urge, waiting until it felt too late. Only then did she issue the command to her left hand, feeling it move a millisecond later.

The nose of the Firehawk deflected up the programmed twenty degrees. The missiles vanished from view past the carboglass of her cockpit. Her body was pummeled by the radical shift in gravities.

Molly tensed up, partly to protect herself from the violent force of dozens of Gs, and partly in anticipation of a sudden death.

The corners of her vision turned black. The blood in her brain forced itself into her chest. The ring of darkness tightened until she was peering through a straw.

Molly Fyde passed out.

2

When she came to, Molly feared the battle was already over. But before she could shake the fog out of her brain, she realized she’d only been out a few seconds. The two missiles were still out there—seeking her ship’s signature. SADAR confirmed this as a curving line that had zipped right past her and was now pulling around toward her new vector, the missiles so close to one another they may as well have been one.

Molly straightened her ship back up and raced off for the enemy craft. The precision of the missile attack had saved her. If either projectile had lagged behind the other, she would’ve dodged the first and eaten the second. For the second time, her enemy’s accuracy had meant her salvation.

At full thrust, she chased down the two ships and took a moment to survey the flow of battle. Her side wasn’t doing half-bad to be so outnumbered. The additional sets of flankers posed the biggest threat as they worked their way around the other sides of the fleet. Her squad mates finally moved to head them off, their slower response negating their functioning weapons systems. They would be too late to do anything about the encirclement, while Molly and Cole had been swift enough but too powerless.

It appeared the Navy forces would be wiped out in a battle for the ages, but it might take longer than Molly initially thought. It was enough to force a grim smile, as sick and sore as her body felt. The Navy geeks that enjoyed scoring these encounters would have a blast with this one.

She returned her focus to the ships ahead of her and the lovely, zooming gifts they’d left behind. She brought up the nav calculator, temporarily comforted by her usual duties. The thrill of playing “pilot” had been tempered somewhat by the pressure of being responsible. A small part of her missed the warm embrace of being a role-player. I’ll do my simple tasks and let someone else risk failing, she thought, then pushed it to the back of her mind. She needed to concentrate on the numbers.

Three moving objects. It was a word problem flight instructors would adore. They’d be able to phrase it so no pilot would understand what in hyperspace was going on. Molly knew better than to make this more confusing than it needed to be. There were really two different problems here, and each could be solved individually.

First, she plotted the speed and direction of her ship and the two flankers. This gave her the coordinate in space at which they would meet if she kept gaining on them. Next, she did the same for her Firehawk and the missiles speeding toward her thrusters. This gave her another set of coordinates. She hoped the first point in space would be nearer than the second, giving her a chance to hurt them before they hurt her.

But the plots didn’t show that. In fact, Molly thought she’d done something wrong. Only a single nav result showed up on her display. She started to run the calculations a second time when she recognized the improbable: both problems had the same solution. She would reach her enemy at the precise moment their missiles reached her. A ship overtaking two ships, being overtaken by their projectiles.

Molly had another thought: Maybe this wasn’t a bad thing.

With the gap between her and the two craft ahead dwindling, she only had half a minute to prepare for impact. She pulled the defense menus up one more time and drilled down to the useless chaff screen. She might not be able to arm them, but maybe she could give her ship a bit of a buffer. It helped that the flankers were now in firing range of the fleet. Distracted with laser-fire from the Navy, they weren’t keeping a vigilant eye on their rears. Molly and the two missiles zipped down their wake, all three players set to meet at a single point.

Worst-case scenario: the missiles take her out just as she arrives between the other two ships. The blast would vaporize her, but it should also take her foes out of the fight. If she ended up with three dead bogeys after entering a battle with no offensive capabilities, Molly would consider it a victory of the highest order.

The best-case scenario was too much to wish for, but it had all four of her chaff canisters deploying and the missiles making impact, saving her cockpit from the blast and directing the force to the enemies on either side. It was yet another bold stunt with slim chances, but Molly decided to keep gambling while she was on a lucky streak.

As she entered the thruster-wash of the enemy, she placed her thumb over the release button. Time slowed to a silent crawl. The laser fire ahead of the flankers seemed to spurt forward like drips of red molasses. Everything moved so slowly that none of it appeared threatening, as if she could reach out and just pluck the hot plasma from outer space.

And then she was there, riding the wake of the two ships, buffeted in their thruster-wash. Her thumb twitched a command, releasing the useless chaff.

The missiles made impact, an orange glow wrapping its silent arms around her Firehawk.

And for the second time that day, Molly’s world went black.

“Molly.”

It was Cole’s voice.

Her vision returned, the black in front of her visor opening like a camera’s iris to reveal the battle raging ahead. Their Firehawk was still partly intact, the protective shell of a cockpit drifting through space with twisted hunks of metal trailing behind. Her life support readout indicated that she was dead.

“Damnit!” Molly slammed a fist into the flight controls, hurting her hand more than she did the simulator.

Cole reached his gloved hand over and patted her thigh, trying to comfort her. “What’re you so upset about? You did good, girl. Those other two ships caught most of the blast. They’re goners.”

Molly glanced at Cole. A smirk peeked out below his visor. She smiled back, a bit reluctantly. “Huh. I guess you’re right. I was hoping I’d keep getting lucky. What the hell happened to you?”

Cole tried to shrug his shoulders in the flight harness. “I dunno. The simulator said I was dead, so I must’ve been. Didn’t make sense from the damage we sustained, but nothing about this exercise makes sense. Oh, and by the way, my suit ignored the fact that I was lifeless and gave me the same Gs you took in that missile maneuver. Remind me to beat your ass later.”

She pouted. “Yeah? Did Cole get a tummy ache?”

Cole laughed and the joke lingered in the cockpit for a few minutes. On the screen, the remainder of their fleet tried in vain to stave off defeat. Gradually, the humor faded, and they started asking more questions. Serious questions. They went back to the conversation they were having before the exercise went hot, Molly more open this time to Cole’s conspiracies.

When the last Navy ship tried to flee, there were still seven fully functional enemy craft left for the mop-up. The cadets wouldn’t find out until the debriefing which race they were up against today, but Molly already suspected the Tchung. More tax dollars spent training against a non-enemy, a race no one had seen for generations.

The last Navy ship was surrounded, creating a traitorous feeling of anticipation. The end of this exercise would bring relief. Being dead and having to watch her fellow cadets struggle to extend the inevitable made Molly’s entire body twitch. It was like her right hand trying to pilot from the nav side of the cockpit. Finally, with a puff of orange pixels, the battle was over. The panorama of carnage went black, and one horror replaced another: the summation screen showing the casualty and damage reports. It wasn’t supposed to be a scoreboard, or taken as a game, but that’s how the students saw it. All but one of them were boys. Comparing anything measurable was their favorite pastime.

Molly scanned the list from top to bottom. Jakobs/Dinks sat on top with 2.5 confirmed kills, which meant one of their enemy had taken damage from another crew. They also had a wingman assist and a tactical bonus for recognizing the flow of battle and reacting properly. Subtracting their eventual death left them with 550 points. Not too bad a score, considering.

Down at the very bottom was Cole/Fyde with zero kills, an unassisted wingman penalty, three tactical violations, and a self-kill. With a score of -2080 rendered in bright red, it made everyone else look like they knew what in hyperspace they were doing.

Cole shook his head and patted Molly’s gloved fist with his. Her AC revved up to whisk away her body heat, partly rising from the shame of the score and partly—from something else.

A window on the right side of the summation screen opened up and Captain Saunders scowled back at the cadets, his round and oversized head resting on rolls of fat. “Not bad, boys.”

Molly cringed at the masculine pronoun, a military staple.

“This exercise is meant to test your endurance and teamwork. Two days of sleeping in shifts before a battle is the real deal. This is what any of you who actually graduate and fly for us can expect. We’ve been putting senior flight crews through this exact maneuver for over thirty years. Those numbers look bad, some of them especially, but you’ll be pleased to hear you’ve fared better than any other class since I’ve been here.

“Too bad you’re all dead,” he added sarcastically. “Not screwing up worse than previous generations of know-nothings means I don’t want to hear you celebrating. If more of you had recognized the real danger was the flanking craft and not the main body, we could’ve seen this scenario defeated, a feat real Navy pilots pull off in their sleep. But it’s hard to match their coordinated defense with twitchy trigger fingers on some of you and inoperable ones on others.

“The three bottom crews need to report to me immediately for a dressing down; the rest of you hit the showers then start writing up your failure reports. And I want to read what you did wrong, not excuses for why you did it wrong. The real winners today were the Tchung, so don’t feel proud for getting lucky. Dismissed.”

With that, the screens went translucent, and Molly stared out at the familiar wall of cinder blocks. Out her starboard side porthole a line of cramped simulator pods stretched out for a hundred meters. Their hatches popped open almost in unison, but she couldn’t hear them—their hatch was still shut.

Molly snapped her helmet off and looked at Cole. He held his own helmet in his lap, his face serious.

“I don’t care what they say, you did great.”

“Thanks.” Molly loaded the word with sarcasm and rolled her eyes. If she ever allowed herself to take a compliment from Cole, her face would betray the way she felt about him. It was the only thing she had in common with these boys: the need to be mean in order to keep her distance.

“I’m serious. Another thing: let’s keep the sabotage business to ourselves for now. All they need to know is that the weapons systems were off-line. They should adjust our score for that. Get rid of that bogus wingman penalty, at least.”

“Sure thing, Captain.” The half-smile turned into a full one, even if it was forced.

“You know, it’s not really a sign of respect when you say it like that.” Cole grinned and popped the hatch, letting in the sound of soldier boots as they clanged down the metal platforms outside the musky, slept-in simulators.

Jakobs and Dinks loitered by the rear of their pod. Molly could guess why.

“Nice shooting out there,” Jakobs said, smiling from ear to ear with the demented visage of the sleep-deprived. “Oh, I’m sorry, you never even got a shot off, didja?” He checked with Dinks, who validated his joke with a silent, breathy laugh.

Molly glared at Jakobs. “Your lapdog is panting,” she said. “Does he need some water?” She tried to push past them, but Jakobs grabbed her arm, spinning her around.

They glared at one another while the other two boys sized up the situation. Jakobs was tall for a 17-year-old, and he had the sort of good looks that inspired poor behavior in boys. He’d been getting away with figurative murder his entire life—soon the Navy would pay him to do it for real.

“Go to hyperspace,” she told him.

“Flank you,” he said, his dark eyes sparkling with a glint of superiority. Molly knew better. He bullied for acceptance, scaring people into liking him. She focused on his Roman nose and dreamed about punching it.

“Go watch the replay, ass’troid.” Cole spat the words and tugged Molly away from trouble. She wondered if he was sticking up for her or protecting Jakobs from a beating. And if he was defending her, was it simply as his navigator?

She turned and marched out of the simulator room with her eyes fixed straight ahead, the rims of her ears burning. The hyperspace nausea, induced with subsonic bass speakers, churned up her stomach acid. Or maybe that was just Jakobs and Dinks.

From behind, the duo kept hounding her during the long walk down the hallway. She couldn’t hear them over the pounding of her own pulse, but she could see the effects of their taunting. Sneers of petty delight spread across the faces of every cadet they walked by. Everyone was ignoring Saunders’s commands, reveling in how well they’d done.

All except for the Academy reject, of course.

Outside Captain Saunders’s office, Molly and Cole joined Peters and Simons on a well-worn wooden bench. The four clustered together, shoulders touching, as muffled shouts wormed their way through the wall panels. It was somehow worse that they couldn’t make out specific words. The Captain’s tone was more torturous—raw and full of all kinds of nasty potential.

At the tirade’s end, a moment of silence descended as excuses were likely made. Everyone on the bench could imagine the lame apologies; they were all busy rehearsing their own. The door opened with a slight click, and two despondent students shuffled out, not even pausing to wish their comrades luck.

As second-worst performers, Peters and Simons went in next. The muffled shouting resumed. The space between Molly and Cole felt more oppressive and stuffy than the crowded bench had seemed just moments ago. She wanted to talk, but she could tell Cole didn’t. It was like being back in the cockpit—next to his corpse. She needed a partner, but he was unable to reciprocate thanks to some external command to do nothing—that pressure from the other boys in the Academy to see her as a girl in every way but the one that mattered.

Or was it an internal command Cole felt? Was it a complete lack of the type of feelings Molly had to force herself to keep in check?

There was a third and far worse possibility: Maybe he felt the same way and kept waiting for her to engage, while Molly’s need to be a man amongst boys prevented her from finding out.

A period of silence jolted her back to her senses, and she and Cole sat up as straight as possible. After another round of muted apologies, the door clicked and the two boys filed out of the office. Simons glanced over his shoulder at Molly. The beat look on his face made her want to rush to him—give him a hug and tell him everything was going to be okay. She didn’t know him that well, but a few minutes on that bench together had been as much of a bond as she got out of most cadets in the Academy. She hoped her expression communicated her concern for him.

It probably just looked like fear.

Following protocol, Cole stepped into the office first. Molly took up a space to his right, her hands overlapped behind her back. She forced herself to meet Captain Saunders’s gaze and saw how tired he looked.

He was a big man, but still not fat enough to fill his skin. It hung down around his face, sagging in leathery flaps, as if he’d spent most of his career on a large planet. His white uniform, so immaculate and crisp it seemed to glow, squeezed folds of flesh from his collar. A wall of small, rectangular medals stood bricked up over his left breast—accolades from a lifetime of service.

He didn’t begin by yelling at them the way he had the others, which worried Molly even more.

“What in the hell am I going to do with you two?” he asked. He sounded sad. Confused. Molly wondered if he really wanted their input, but she wasn’t going to say anything unless she was addressed. Cole stayed mum as well.

“There were enough targets up there that you could’ve fired blindly and hit something.” He looked at Cole. “Mendonça, I’m disappointed in how quickly you were knocked out of action. I blame you for that—but everything else falls on this young lady.”

Saunders turned to Molly and looked her straight in the eye. His disappointment was worse than the anger she’d been expecting. She felt her mouth go dry and knew if she spoke—her voice would sound unnatural. Broken.

Saunders listed her offenses, referencing a report projected onto his desk. “You misfired a missile, you went into hyperspace during a battle—” At this, he glanced up to ensure his disgust registered. After a pause, he went on. “You pulled over 40 Gs in battle. You deployed your landing gear?” He shook his head. “But the worst is that it appears you released your full ration of chaff at once, which is a tactical mistake, you didn’t even arm them first, which is inexcusable, and you did this with the worst timing possible—taking out the rear half of your bird in the explosion.”

He looked up at Molly. “Navigators go through flight school for a reason, Cadet Fyde. The basics are expected out of you in the event your lesser talents are needed from the nav chair. I didn’t expect you to shoot down any enemy, but you did everything you could today to get yourself killed and the Navy’s equipment destroyed.

“I’m not certain this is a problem we can fix, to tell you the truth. You’ve had a hard time fitting in here, and I’m sure you know I was against your enrollment from the beginning. I never cared that the Admiral and your old man were close. I have a lot of respect for both of them, but I will not be held responsible for graduating someone who might get my boys killed in a real battle.”

Cole raised his hand. “Sir, I—”

“Can it, Mendonça!” Saunders pushed his bulk up from the chair and rose slowly. His jowls were still moving from the outburst, and he jabbed a meaty finger in Cole’s direction. “If you spent less time sticking up for her and more time getting her up to speed, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I’ve had it with you putting her ahead of the rest of the fleet, son. You’re dismissed. Now get out of my office.”

At this, tears drizzled out of Molly’s eyes and started rolling toward the corners of her mouth. She licked away the salt, ashamed her partner might see her like this.

Cole stepped forward to salute Saunders. He clicked his heels together and jerked his arm down to his side. As he spun around, his eyes met Molly’s tear-filled ones, and she saw his cheeks twitch. Water had already formed a reflective barrier on his brown eyes. For a brief moment, they were looking into each other’s visors again. Molly’s lips trembled at the sight, and with the thought of being expelled and never seeing him again.

He brushed against her as he moved to the door, leaving her alone with Captain Saunders.

“Are you crying, now? My goodness, girl, what made you think to join the Navy? Did you really dream of being like your father one day? Did you think you could bring him back from the dead?” He stopped himself, but had already gone too far. He looked down at his desk.

“Dismissed,” he said. It was like the last bit of air went out of him to say it. Molly forgot every bit of Navy protocol and flung herself out the door and after Cole.

But her pilot was already gone.

3

Molly wiped the wetness from her cheeks and set off for her bunk. If she skipped a shower, she might be asleep before the boys came back to rag on her. There was certainly no point in writing up her battle report if Captain Saunders’s hints of expulsion were true.

For once in her life, she didn’t care about the Academy or becoming a pilot. She didn’t look forward to post-battle reports and tactical analyses. There’d be no fantasizing tonight about what she’d have done differently had she been at the stick. Instead, an overpowering sense of disgust and shame propelled her down the empty halls. She just wanted an escape from the abuse.

“Cadet Fyde?”

Molly turned to see Rear Admiral Lucin standing in the doorway of his office. His customary hat was off, his weathered head streaked with extra wrinkles of worry. Molly felt one weight come off her chest and a different one take its place. She longed to run and wrap her arms around the old man, but she hadn’t done that for years. She wondered what it would feel like to be comforted like that again.

She snapped to attention, instead. As much attention as her body could muster. “Sir.”

“Could you step into my office, please?” Lucin vanished into the pool of light pouring out of his doorway.

Molly fought the constriction in her chest as she followed him inside. Lucin was the reason she was in the Academy. He had fought alongside her father against the Drenards. She knew it was a cliché—the military student doted on by the old general—but the stereotype existed for a reason. When children followed their fallen parents into battle, they were inevitably surrounded by the survivors who had promised to look after them. She wasn’t even the only one in the Academy with ties, just the only girl.

After her father left, Lucin had taken her in and enrolled her in the Junior Academy. It gave her a place to live. More importantly, he let her spend as much time in the simulators as she wanted—which was a lot. As long as she kept her grades up—which was never a problem—she could sit in a full military-spec Firehawk simulator for hours.

Sometimes longer.

At first, Molly would just soar around the simulated vastness of space, pretending to search for her father. Or maybe just trying to recapture her memories of him. One of her earliest recollections was of sitting on his lap in Parsona’s cockpit, her mother’s smell—the only thing she ever knew of her—lingering off to one side. Perhaps it had happened when she was an infant, or maybe the scent of her mom was just infused in the navigator’s seat. Maybe she’d made it all up.

She had clearer memories of flying with her father as she got older. How her eyes would flicker from the stars to the lights and glowing knobs on the dash. She could remember his hands on the flight controls.

During their last trip together, he’d let her do a lot of the steering. She remembered how frightening his trust had been. Instead of holding her hands steady, preventing mistakes, he just turned and peered out at the stars through the glass, talking to Molly in that deep and powerful voice of his. Usually about her mother.

They may have been running away from one life and into a new one, but she didn’t remember either of them having a care in the world.

The first time she fell asleep in the simulator, it was Lucin who found her. She had startled awake, afraid she’d be in trouble. Instead, the old man—so much older than she remembered her father being—scooped her up in his lap and let her fall back asleep. The stars kept drifting by through her eyelids, a little more of the simulated galaxy foolishly searched.

Now they stood in his office, a Navy desk and so much more between them. As soon as she’d entered the Academy, Molly could no longer be his daughter. Favoritism had to be countered with rigidity; love with harshness. Despite this, everyone whispered she was only there because of his string-pulling. So every ounce of love she went without, the affection other cadets were showered with by their families, had been given up for nothing now that she’d never graduate.

“Care to sit?” Lucin gestured to the simple wooden chair across from his desk.

Molly shook her head. She didn’t want to be too comfortable; it would make leaving his office impossible.

He nodded once, and Molly saw how tired he looked. Despite his age, Lucin had a very lithe frame—tall and thin. His youthful gait was a fixture at the Academy, his pride in its operation evident in the bounce of his step and his eternal smile. Perhaps this was why the cadets loved him so much. Captain Saunders could whip them into shape while old Lucin bounced in to tousle their hair or slap them on the back. But all of that was missing from Lucin’s face right then. Molly could see the fatigue in his sad and wrinkled eyes. His undying devotion to the Academy—which was capable of filling his chest with unmatched joy—could also break his heart. It was doing so right then.

“Captain Saunders called.”

Molly nodded.

“Hey, I’m sure when I go over the tapes, I’m going to be impressed with whatever you did out there. You always amaze me with your tricks, maneuvers even this old dog never heard of, but Saunders is in charge of the personnel decisions, and he has it out for you.”

Molly looked at her feet to hide the tears, but one of them plummeted to the blue carpet, sparkling like laser-fire in the harsh rays pouring through the window. Lucin fell silent as the tear winked out of existence in the worn sea at her feet.

“I’m talking to you as your friend now, not as the old geezer who runs this joint. Look at me.”

Molly did.

“I love you.”

A strange bark came out of Molly, something between a gasp and a cough. Her breathing grew rapid and shallow as she started crying in earnest, her shoulders quaking uncontrollably. She hugged her elbows and tried to hold it all in.

Lucin may have been crying as well, but she couldn’t see anything. His voice may have just sounded funny because she was hyperventilating.

“I do, Molly. I love you like my own daughter. But you don’t know what I’ve had to do to protect you from him. I know it isn’t fair, but if you think life has a bad reputation for that, the military puts it to shame. There’s a lot of politics involved. And look, I’m babbling here so don’t repeat any of this, but Saunders and his wife couldn’t have boys. They have three girls, and maybe he’s taking that out on you as well.”

Lucin sighed. “I just don’t know what to do here. He says you’re out. Do you have any idea how hard this is for me?”

Molly bobbed her head and dragged her hands down her cheeks. They came away slick. She wiped them on the front of her flight suit.

“Maybe this is for the best. You can still be a pilot somewhere else, but you’ve seen what it’s like in the Navy. They just aren’t ready for you yet. Listen, I know Commander Stallings, he runs the Orbit Guard Academy, I can get you in there. You’ll have a great career flying planetary patrols. Atmospheric stuff. None of this navigation junk. Don’t you think that would be better?”

Molly kept her head perfectly still. She would never admit that.

“I also have old friends in the commercial sector. With your simulator hours, you could have your 100 Gigaton license in no time. Run freight or ferry, hell, you could get a job driving those rich snobs around in their fancy space yachts.” Lucin laughed.

It wasn’t that funny, but Molly craved the levity. She peered up through her tears and forced a half-smile. She swiped away more tears, her entire face a chapped mess. “Arrgh,” she said, slapping her thighs and bending over to breathe. “Who was I kidding, right? Just because I can fly doesn’t mean I can fly, does it?”

“You can fly like nobody I’ve ever seen. It’s the system that’s screwed up, not you. Give the private sector or Orbit Guard a chance. As soon as they see what you can do, gender won’t matter to them.”

“You said the same thing when I joined the Academy.”

“I was wrong,” Lucin admitted, looking sad again. “But plenty of women make a career out of flying in other ways.”

“Plenty?”

“Okay, some. And none of the ones that made it have your talent. You’ll see.”

“I don’t want to give up, live a boring life, and die young like my mother, Lucin.”

The Admiral’s face twitched and Molly knew she’d slipped. She’d called him by his name. Her body and brain were just in a bad place, and bad things live in that bad place, and her mouth was right there—an easy escape.

Lucin’s face twisted up in a scary mask of rage. Wrinkles bunched up into muscles that weren’t supposed to be there.

Molly didn’t think her slip-up was that bad. But then—she was concentrating on the wrong mistake.

“Don’t you say anything like that about your mother ever again, do you hear me?” Lucin took a deep breath, tried to relax his face. “Listen, you didn’t mean it. You don’t know what your mother was like. She… she was a lot like you. She fought some of the same fights. So don’t disrespect her memory, okay?”

Molly nodded.

“Okay. So go get showered up. I’m going to make some vid calls and see what options you have. You can stay in the barracks tonight, or you can bunk at my place. Think on it.”

“I don’t need to,” Molly said. “Just put me in a regular school, Admiral. No more simulators. None of any of this.” She turned without waiting for permission to go. “I mean it,” she added over her shoulder. “A normal school.”

And it was a good thing her back was turned. It kept her from enduring the new expression that spread across Admiral Lucin’s face.

4

Molly’s shower stall had been built under protest, hers and everyone else’s. Her twelve-year-old body hadn’t looked much different from a boy’s when it was constructed, and she just wanted to be treated equally. Everyone else protested against her even being there at all.

She hated to admit it, but the stall had become her cubicle of solace. A place where she could be alone. She let the hot water cascade down her body, burning the tightness out of her sore muscles, and thought back to some of her private history studies. When she was ten, and had first broached the idea with Lucin of attending the Academy, she did some research at the Naval library. What she discovered had shocked her.

Women used to fight alongside men. They used to fly ancient atmospheric ships and go into combat. It was hard to determine the numbers from the history books, but it was common enough that people didn’t seem to notice.

Something happened to change all that. Somewhere along the way, it was decided that women can be Presidents and CEOs and Galactic Chairs and work in the support side of the military, but they cannot fight.

What the history books wouldn’t tell her was why this had changed. And anyone she approached with the question, including Lucin, brushed her off or reprimanded her for being “too inquisitive” or “naive.” And she had been naive. Back then, the knowledge of what women used to do gave her the optimism needed to join the Navy. Now she saw it differently. The precedents set by history didn’t mean something was possible in the future. No. The fact that they were able to go away from this progress meant something far more sinister. And final.

Molly relaxed the tension in her body, allowing her hopes to wash down the drain along with her physical pains. Somewhere, deep in a mechanical room below the campus, a filter would take this water and make it drinkable. Molly hoped the boys gagged on her disgust.

As soon as she returned to the barracks, Molly could tell something bad had happened. Her arrival in a towel invariably led to whistles and catcalls from the male cadets. These were usually followed with bouts of derisive laughter, assuring Molly the flattery was a joke.

Five years ago, Molly saw these taunts as signs of fear. An androgynous eleven-year-old stick of a girl had entered their ranks and could out fly every single one of them. Later, as she grew into a young woman, she sensed they were hiding a different brand of fear. Despite the Navy’s poor excuse for food, her thin body had filled out. Workouts and womanhood had wrapped long, lean curves over her tall frame. The narrow face that had once made her look like a gangly boy produced high cheeks, a straight nose, and a tapered chin. She was beautiful. She knew it. And she hated that everyone took her less seriously because of it.

She strode across the long room of double-bunks, and nobody whistled. Not a one of them even looked up at her. This made Molly even more self-conscious than the rude attention had. She’d briefly toyed with the idea of sleeping here one final night, but she knew that was impossible now. She couldn’t bear being in this room any longer than it took to get dressed.

Her bunk was at the far end of the room, a sign of disrespect, but a fortuitous position. Snapping off her towel, Molly tucked one edge of it under the top bunk, creating a temporary dressing room. The idea of donning Navy black sickened her, but she had no choice. She pulled a fresh set of casuals out of her clothing tube and slipped them over her damp skin.

Molly looked at herself in the small mirror on the wall. Her short brown hair stood off her head in wet clumps. She leaned closer, studying her brown eyes and the starburst of yellow around the pupil. She didn’t recognize them. And she didn’t look the way she felt. She looked powerful, not broken.

“I am powerful,” she reminded herself, mouthing the words to the mirror.

Saunders didn’t know it, Lucin probably didn’t even fully appreciate it, but Molly knew. She was good at what she did. That she wasn’t going to be allowed to do it anymore was their loss, not hers. Molly concentrated on this, on focusing the shapeless pain inside her into something that could be hardened and made useful. Something she could cling to and wield with power. She gathered her belongings, a few old-fashioned books, a change of Navy casuals, her toiletries, a towel, extra boots, and her reader, and stuffed them in a black duffel. She threw it over her shoulder and turned to march out of there.

While strolling back to the door, Molly thought about Cole. What he would think when he found out she was gone. He was probably the reason she’d considered spending one more night in the barracks. Another night they could spend whispering in their corner, sharing jokes and insults and making each other laugh. Childish stuff. She needed to get over that nonsense and forget about Cole. Lumping him in with the others would help; she could create distance with her anger.

The march out of the barracks took place between two walls of mannequins. Molly had no idea what prevented them from celebrating her departure. It was as if they were scared of something. Or someone. She didn’t care. She suddenly felt older than they were. Her delusions and naiveté had been forged into something sharp and dangerous. Something the military wouldn’t get to use in a career of killing. It was a deadly thing she would smuggle out of their blasted Academy and use for her own protection, like armor. Never hurting again.

It was a good idea. While it lasted.

Rounding the corner to the administrative hallway, Molly ran right into Cole. Literally. Her face crashed into his chest, her bag sliding across the hall. Both of Cole’s hands went to her shoulders, steadying her.

“Whoa, tiger.”

She looked up at him to say something rude, something that would let him know he was no better than the rest of them—she was gone and didn’t care if they ever talked again.

And then she saw his face.

One eye was completely swollen shut—a black slit between two purple bulges. A bandage crossed his nose, his nostrils chapped with blood. The top lip of his perfect mouth had been split wide open, black stitches tied off in a rough knot, their ends cut too long. His left cheek was a band of hues Molly had never seen before; the colors rose up to mix with the blackness below his eye. And he was standing there, smiling at her, trying to wash her worries away.

She touched her own upper lip, speechless.

Cole jabbed one of his thumbs over his shoulder, pointing back the way he’d come. “Heh. You should see the other guys. Infirmary.” His voice sounded funny, his nose stuffed and his lips avoiding each other.

Molly couldn’t speak. She threw both of her arms under his and locked them behind his back. She wasn’t sure how it was possible, but she started crying again, pressing her cheek into Cole’s unwashed flight suit. It had the same musky smell of a simulator after a battle—and something else. The smell of a real fight.

“I’m gone…” she croaked.

“I know,” he said softly. “Those bastards.”

There was so much more to say, but for now, this was enough. Molly held Cole for as long as she could stand it, until his arms reciprocated just a little, and then she pulled herself free. She ducked around him without making eye contact, grabbed her forlorn black duffel, and disappeared around the corner.

Cole called something to her as she ran away, but she could hardly hear anything over her own sobs.

5

Molly leaned back in her desk, reading Jim Eats Corn. With five years in the Navy reading nothing but technical manuals and tactical treatises, the fiction offered a blessed change of pace. Not as good as the romantic space operas she’d read in Junior Academy, but a lot better than she thought it would be.

For as long as Molly could remember, she’d been an avid reader. Her father had taught her at an early age. On Lok, he’d collected ancient children’s books for her, antiques with board backs and individual pages. She couldn’t recall their titles, but she remembered the bright colors and the odd words. She’d been reading ever since, another hobby that made her different.

Since transferring to Avalon High, she’d started working her way through the recommended reading list, the “boring” books that were supposed to teach life-lessons. Surprisingly, she found herself enjoying them, and they helped kill the excess time the other kids needed for the tests.

The pace of her new school had been a major transition. Everything was dreadfully slow; the other students got distracted by anything and everything. No one seemed to be here to actually learn—it was more like a daily prison sentence kids endured before they got to do the stuff they wanted to do.

The first week had been particularly torturous. Molly came into the school with the high expectations instilled by the Navy. It was a philosophy that clashed at Avalon, where tardiness and procrastination were the norm. Here, kids celebrated whoever got away with the worst behavior while shunning anyone attempting to do the right thing.

It was an attractive scheme, easy to be lured into if one was soft. Molly decided early on that she would not become like them. At the same time, she didn’t want to ruffle feathers or hurt feelings, so she decided to view Avalon High as just another tactical dilemma. She saw herself surrounded by aliens, and she could either let them defeat her the way the last bunch had, or make the best of it.

She chose the latter, using the slow time to educate herself in the things the Navy had neglected to teach. Once her teachers saw the quality of her work, they stopped asking her to put away the pleasure reading, which is why she could read while her classmates bent over a math test. She watched them scribble furiously, testing the multiple-choice offerings to see which ones created the least ridiculous results. Five months ago, she had been solving integrals in her head while worrying a wrong answer might get her and Cole killed.

Cole.

The smallest things reminded her of him. She found herself constantly wondering what he was doing at that very moment. Last semester it had been an easy game to play, what with the rigidity of the Academy. She could look at the time and know he was sitting in the simulator, or working out in the gym, or falling asleep during Space Strategics 202.

After winter break, she had no sense of what his schedule might be. He was everywhere and nowhere, so the game wasn’t as enjoyable anymore. Eventually Molly realized: she wasn’t having fun with wondering where Cole was, she was just fantasizing about where she should be. As hard as she struggled to accept this new life, some part of her still longed to be back at the Academy. Even as a navigator and Saunders’s “whipping boy,” she still had those hours of performing well in the simulator. And Cole.

“Time’s up, class.” Mrs. Stintson rapped her desk with her moon-rock paperweight, creating a beat for the chorus of groans. Pencils slapped desktops in frustration. Somebody continued to scratch away.

“TIME, Jordan.” One more pencil smacked down.

When the bell rang, everyone filed up to the teacher’s desk with their tests, transforming glum into good cheer. The weekend. And Spring Break was just a week away.

Molly programmed a bookmark in Jim Eats Corn and shoved the reader and her computer into her bag. As she stood and stretched, Mrs. Stintson caught her eye and waved her over.

“Yes, ma’am?”

“Someone here to see you. Check in with the office on your way out.”

“Yes, ma’am. Have a nice weekend.”

A visitor? Molly couldn’t think of anyone who knew her outside of the school and the Academy. And nobody from the latter would be caught dead here. Vaguely intrigued, she ambled toward the door thinking of Jim’s problems with the corn harvest, unaware of how profoundly her life was about to change.

Mrs. Stintson watched her prized student file out before sliding Molly’s test out from the bottom of the pile, placing it on top.

As soon as Molly opened the door to the school office, she knew who her visitor was. She knew it before she even saw him. It was in the way that all of the women were holding themselves. Even the Vice Principal was attempting to stand at attention.

Admiral Lucin.

Molly dropped her bag and went over to hug him. It was one of the small joys of being out of the Academy. She didn’t see him as often as she would like, but he was a friend again. The infrequent hugs always helped heal some of the pain that seeing his uniform caused.

“Hello, Wonderful.” He held her tight.

“What are you doing here? I thought you had business this weekend.”

“Well, this is part of my business. I’m here on official duty. They were going to send some flunky to break the news but I told them they were out of their minds.” He looked around the office and then out through the smudged windows. “Let’s go outside so we can talk.”

Now Molly was really confused. What official business could the Navy have with her? Once you were out of the Academy, there was no going back. Ever. If they made an exception, it wouldn’t be for a girl. Would it?

She led Lucin out through two double doors and into the school courtyard. A handful of students were still hurrying off to their weekend, so the two friends sat on a bench off in one corner. A Japanese cherry tree provided some shade and left a carpet of pink blossoms to stir in the breeze.

Lucin took in a deep breath and admired the campus. “It’s beautiful out here,” he said.

“Yeah,” Molly agreed. “I eat lunch over there in the grass. They give us an hour. Beats the old cafeteria with its two-meter ceilings and bare walls.” She compared the two experiences in her mind. She knew this talk was probably not about going back to the Academy, but she still made the comparison. And part of her betrayed the rest in wanting to switch places. “Anyway, what’s orbiting, Lucin?”

“‘What’s orbiting’? Is that the sort of English they’re teaching you here?” He looked at her with mock disapproval.

“Yeah, it’s nebulous.” She said it with a grin and Lucin returned it.

He reached over and tousled her brown hair. “It’s getting long.”

“I’m trying to be normal.”

“And how’s that working out for you, young lady?”

“It’s unique. Being normal.” Molly pursed her lips. She’d never known Lucin to avoid getting straight to the point. Then she understood why he would be the one coming here. Why he was having a hard time bringing it up. Why he would do this at the school. This has nothing to do with the Academy, Molly thought. This is about my father.

Her face must have betrayed it. Lucin’s brows came down in recognition of whatever flashed across her own. He nodded slightly. “We’ve located his ship.” His voice was small and tight.

“Parsona?”

“Yes, Parsona. A Navy operative working undercover on Palan came across it. It was discovered by one of the pirate gangs there and has been impounded. We’re working on getting the paperwork together to get it out of there.”

“On Palan? But that’s on the other side of the galaxy from where Dad was last seen.” Molly leaned back and looked up into the pink blossoms, doing some calculations.

“I’m glad your astralogy hasn’t gone the way of your English,” Lucin joked, a sign he was nervous, or keeping something from her.

“What’re you gonna do with the ship when you get it?”

“That’s why I’m here. Legally, it’s yours. It was all your father had, and he left it to you in his will. The fact it’s been lost for almost ten years doesn’t change that. So eventually, you’ll need to think about what you want to do with it. We’ll need to look over it first, of course. See if there’s a clue in the logs about where he was, signs of struggle, all of that.”

“My father’s dead, Lucin. Don’t give me any hope. I could feel something different in my bones the day he died. It’s hard to explain.”

“There’s no need, I felt it too. Even before I knew he was gone. I’m not saying we’ll be able to find him, or even give him a proper burial. But the Navy needs to know what happened.”

“Why?” Molly felt herself getting a little angry. “He wasn’t in the Navy anymore, remember? Why do you guys care?”

“I care.” Lucin was solemn. “I care, Molly. I want to find out if someone was responsible, and if so, I want to hurt them.” He looked down at the chips of pink color around his feet. “I mean I want to bring them to justice.”

She nodded.

Then she felt that hardened thing inside her twist into a new shape. Another layer of the film that kept her from seeing the world pulled back and the sky and the courtyard came into a tighter level of focus and detail. She looked at Lucin, and she could see the valleys in his wrinkles and the individual pores in his face. Her mind was so keen she expected to see mitochondria swimming around in his skin cells.

“I’m going to go get Parsona and bring her back.”

It wasn’t a question. It wasn’t even a decision. It was a statement of fact, like she was reading about something she did in a history book. It was as real as if it had already happened.

“We have spring break next week,” she continued. “I’ll go to Palan—it’s only, what, three jumps from here? I can be there by Monday, grab the ship, and I’ll be home before the weekend.”

“Molly—”

“As long as the hyperspace drive is working, and even if it isn’t, we can install a new one, maybe your guy can check that ahead of time. See if the astral charts are updated, clear the paperwork.”

“Molly—”

“I can do it myself. This is basic stuff, Lucin. You know I can do this. I’m almost 17, and I’ve already tested out for my private captain’s license.”

“Listen, Molly—”

But she couldn’t stop talking. Thinking. “I’ve flown that ship with my father from one side of the galaxy to the other. I know it like I know my old simulator. C’mon, didn’t you say the ship was mine? I have my license. It’s totally legal.”

“It’s suicidal, Molly. Stop it. Settle down for a second.” He didn’t seem angry. A smile snuck ’round his mouth, Molly’s excitement rubbing off on him. “Palan’s a bad place. The Navy has almost no presence there. Also, you are not traveling alone. What am I saying? You aren’t traveling at all.”

“You know I am. You can help me or you can see if I can do it on my own.”

Lucin leaned away from her, blinking, as if he couldn’t take all of her in. His brows eventually came down, throwing shadows over his eyes. “I haven’t seen you like this since the day you talked yourself into the Academy.”

“Except this will work,” she insisted.

They were both silent for a while. Molly couldn’t tell if Lucin was thinking back or planning forward. “There will be strict conditions, young lady.”

She nodded vigorously. She would agree to all of them up front.

“First, my agent is going to accompany you back. I don’t want any evidence on Parsona lost just because you didn’t know what to look for.”

Molly kept nodding.

“Second, you bring the ship straight back with minimal jumps and she goes into my hangar for a few weeks. We need to make sure we haven’t missed anything and perform a deeper safety inspection than you’ll be able to do on Palan.”

Her neck started to hurt.

“Finally, I want you to have someone you trust accompany you to Palan—I don’t want anything to happen to you on the way there.”

Molly froze. “Who?”

“Someone who can navigate, even help pilot if you end up needing to do shifts.” He ticked requirements off his fingers, but Molly felt like he was describing someone in particular. “Someone you know and trust who will stick his neck out for you if you get in a jam.”

“Cole?” It escaped as a whisper.

Lucin nodded. “He graduated at the end of last year. Several of your classmates did. The war with the Drenards has gotten nasty. I’m sure you’ve been following it. Saunders felt another semester would be wasted on some of them. Cole, Dinks, Riggs, Jakobs, some of the others you knew.”

“Jakobs? Jakobs is out there flying an actual ship with loaded weapons?” Molly was horrified. She knew that’s what the Academy was for, but it never seemed real until right then. They were all still kids in her mind.

“Most of them aren’t doing front-line stuff. Support. Recon. Patrols. It’s the final stage in the learning process. Hell, if things… if things had been a little different, you’d be out there right now.”

“No, you’re right. I wasn’t thinking about ability. I was thinking about—never mind.” Her thoughts returned to Cole. “Do you think he’d want to go? What about his duties?”

“We have one of our best agents dedicated to this mission. I think it’d be a good training exercise for Cole if he went and worked with the guy. A bit of escort duty—”

Molly bristled.

“Not that you need it, of course, just that Cole could use the experience.”

“Better,” she said, nodding once.

“If you’re serious about this, I can make it work. It’ll actually make the paperwork easier on both ends since you’re the legal owner of the ship. And nobody’s going to suspect you and Cole are working for the Navy’s interests. That could help with the pirates on Palan.”

Lucin scratched his chin. “I’ll get detailed instructions to our agent, make sure he understands who you are and what needs to be done before you arrive. The Navy will pick up the tab for the flight out and the jumps back, all you’ll have to worry about is being safe.”

“No problem.” Her head felt light. The idea of going on a trip with Cole made her stomach flutter. Even with a Navy chaperone.

“All right, then.” Lucin placed his hand on Molly’s knee and used it to press himself up. “Pack some clothes and your book reader and get ready for the longest week of school in your entire life.”

Hyperspace! She’d forgotten about that. She didn’t even want the weekend to get in the way. For once Molly wished Monday would hurry up and come.

6

From her meeting with Lucin to her arrival on Earth’s Orbital Station, it felt more like a month than a week. Especially with all the lazy scheduling teachers do prior to spring break at Avalon. She tried to concoct busywork for herself, doing all the problems her teachers said to skip, but it barely dented her anticipation.

There was so much to look forward to, she couldn’t decide which part of the trip tortured her the most. Was it seeing her father’s old ship? She wondered if any of his stuff would still be aboard, the old tools scented with oil and the clothes smelling of his hard work.

Or was she giddy at the prospect of owning her own ship? Gods, that thing, even as old as it was, it must be worth a fortune. Molly could start a shuttle agency right out of school. Or be a freelance courier. The opportunities were endless.

To a small degree, it was both those things. But mainly, and it made her feel silly to admit it, she was ecstatic about seeing Cole. She would be sitting beside him on a twenty-hour pan-galactic flight to Palan. Hearing what he’d been up to. Joking with him without the other boys around.

Part of Molly’s preparation for the trip had been to go through her reader and delete a lot of required reading material. Now it was loaded with more adventurous fare, most of it meant for boys. These books were typified by their shallow, male protagonists and the author’s poor grasp of space tactics, but she’d also found a little gem. A series of books about a woman on a frontier planet forging a life for herself. It was the closest thing to a female’s adventures away from Earth that Molly could find, and the setting sounded a lot like her birth planet: Lok.

She was tempted to pull her reader out and start one of the action books, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to take her eyes off the arrival gate. She’d chosen a seat in the Orbital Station, facing the security entrance. Cole’s shuttle should be docking at any minute. Once he arrived and they boarded the passenger ship, their adventure would officially begin.

Molly was glad she’d gotten there first and on a separate flight. Thrusting out of Earth’s gravity well would have been nerve-wracking if Cole had been there. She would’ve been torn between acting cool and nonchalant and wanting to geek out over the experience. It also allowed her to be a tourist. She got to alien-watch a little without him berating her for being a gossip, and she was able to explore some of the shops with all their strange trinkets from various planets.

She’d chosen a foreign snack (the one that smelled least-likely to ruin her breath) and eaten it in the observation bubble, gazing at Earth as it spun below. She felt impatient for Cole’s arrival the entire time, but these were great experiences she probably wouldn’t have thought to do if he’d been there. The alien-watching and the shopping because he might think Avalon had changed her. The Earth-gazing because she feared it would come across as too romantic.

So she sat, chewing minty gum, and stalking Cole’s arrival point. Was she being transparently desperate? She was over-thinking everything.

There weren’t any windows on the airlock side of the Station, so the first hint at his arrival was the stampede of passengers pouring out of security. A man with Cole’s build was near the front—Molly perked up. Then she settled back, trying to look non-committal. It wasn’t him, anyway. Two young men in Navy blacks got her heart pounding, but she knew he’d be wearing civvies.

Molly double-checked her own garb. She had tried on several dresses at the mall before realizing how overtly stupid this would look. Cole probably wouldn’t even like it. So she’d gotten a new pair of khaki pants with these great pockets running down both sides. They kept her legs from looking too skinny, and she fantasized about the things she could organize in them. If she’d actually owned any of those things, of course.

The top was a yellow short-sleeved thing, blousy up top and puffy around the sleeves. It had a slight lace around the collar and hem, and pale blue flowers dotted across the yellow. It looked simple, but Molly liked the way it made the starburst in her eyes stand out. Casual and lovely. Practical and girly. Perfect.

She’d almost bought two of them. Instead, she’d packed some comfortable shorts, a few nice T-shirts and tops, plenty of underwear and socks, and a scarf to tie around her hair. Thinking of this made her reach up and tuck her brown locks behind her ears. Her hair was almost down to her shoulders and she worried Cole would find it too “girly.” She considered cutting it close to Navy regulations, but figured he’d find that too “boyish.”

She was miserable with excitement.

Besides her clothes, Molly had packed her book reader, her portable computer, a new journal she swore she’d be faithful to this time, a flashlight, a small medical kit, and some toiletries. It was more than she figured she’d need, but the panicky sensation she’d forgotten something started washing over her again—then a familiar shape pulled out of the herd and dissipated all her worries.

Cole.

She almost yelled out to him like the schoolgirl she was (but didn’t want to be). Instead, she watched him scan the crowd for her and tried to deduce what emotions were on his face.

He just looked annoyed, she finally decided.

When his eyes finally found hers, she waved and widened her own, as if they’d just seen each other at the exact same moment. His white teeth stood out on his tan face in a friendly smile. He strolled up to her with long, relaxed strides.

“Hey, girl.” He stopped a meter from where she’d risen from her seat. The last time they’d seen each other, it was in an embrace that felt wonderful, yet awkward.

Molly wasn’t sure what to do.

“Hello.” She waved a little, as if he was much further away. “You packed light.” She nodded at the backpack over his shoulder.

“Yeah, you too. Is that your only bag?”

“Yup. It’s only a few days, right? I figure most of our time will be on the trip out and the trip back, stuck in one outfit forever. It saved me from thinking too much on what to wear.”

“Well, you look great. You look like you’re getting more sun.”

She hoped enough to hide the blushing. “They let us go outside.”

“No way!” And they both laughed. “I like the hair.”

Molly instinctively put a hand up to brush some of it behind her ear. “Thanks.”

“So,” he said, “You wanna go ahead and get on the ship and get comfortable?”

“They aren’t boarding for another half-hour, I don’t think.”

Cole pulled a Navy badge from under his collar. “You sure?”

“Gods, Cole.” Molly glanced around nervously. “Don’t be such a Drenard, we’re supposed to be undercover.”

“Forget about it. We’re stellar until we jump into Palan. C’mon, let’s go check out our seats.”

Molly grabbed her bag and hurried after him. It was amazing how natural this felt already. Five seconds of nervousness after a week of dread, and it already felt like they’d grown up together in a civilian world. Acting normal. Just being friends.

Molly suspected her time at Avalon, training to be a regular kid, made this a stronger feeling for her than it was for Cole. But so far, he led the way. Maybe he was really good at this undercover thing after all.

The pass worked wonders on the gate security and boarding stewards. The scrutiny might have lasted a bit longer than for two adults, but the handheld scanners beeped their consent, and this seemed to be enough for their wielders.

Once they got onto the ship itself, they were treated like royalty. First-class tickets meant sleeper chairs with pillows, blankets, and divider screens. The flight attendants delivered juice and then busied themselves putting their bags away.

Molly had mixed feelings about the treatment. She was used to doing things for herself. And the way the pretty women were doting on Cole was probably no different from the way she was being treated, but it still made her feel possessive. She tried to wrestle this jealousy aside so she could enjoy some luxuries her parents would never have been able to afford her. Part of her inwardly resented the Navy for pulling strings and doing something nice for once.

Just as she was thinking this, Cole launched out of his seat and started for the nose of the ship. Molly guessed he was going to the restroom, but he passed the sign and continued toward the cockpit door. She couldn’t believe his gall; she leapt up and set off after him. He was already smooth-talking the navigator by the time she got there.

“—same instructor.” Molly caught the end of what the navigator was saying. She poked her head into the cramped cockpit and was struck with how young the speaker looked. He couldn’t be much older than twenty.

Cole squeezed himself into a smaller pocket of the room and let Molly in. “This is my girlfriend Molly.” The navigator nodded his head and the pilot raised one hand, his back to Molly as he fiddled with a radio set.

There wasn’t enough room in the cockpit for all of them and this new “girlfriend” term as well, so Molly tried to push the word back into coach.

“Jeremy here went to the Academy. He had Rogers for Basic Flight.”

How had they already shared this information? Cole was in his element, and Molly had a sudden pang of doubt about whether or not his being nice to her had anything to do with how he felt or whether it was just a product of his ever-present charm.

“Is that a Grumin 4200?” She leaned into the space between their two chairs and pointed at the SADAR screen.

The navigator smiled. “Now I know they don’t have those at the Academy. But, yeah, that’s the latest and greatest. If we turned it on, we could see the shuttles attached to various gates of the Station.”

The pilot quickly pressed a button near the SADAR, taking it off standby mode and down to a black screen. He made it quite clear to the little gathering that the devices on the dash was his and his alone. Molly took the hint and leaned back toward the door. Her arm pressed up against Cole’s. It started feeling really hot in there.

“Well, gentlemen, thanks for letting us look around,” Cole said. “We’re going to go settle in before the stampede begins.”

“Good thinking,” said the navigator. “You kids enjoy the trip.”

“Bye,” Molly said with a little wave.

Back at their seats, Molly arranged her belongings as if she were in a simulator. Her computer went in front, creating a miniature dashboard. She tucked her document reader by her right leg. As she buckled herself in, she noticed Cole performing the same ritual. To her left, she noticed. In the pilot’s position. They hadn’t even checked their seat assignments, they’d automatically taken their usual positions. It made her wonder how hard it would be to assume command on the Parsona. Or if he was even expecting she would.

Cole dropped a tan folder in Molly’s lap, interrupting her thoughts. “Reading material,” he said.

It wasn’t heavy, but it bulged slightly as creased paper tried to spring back into shape. She gave their depositor a sarcastic smirk. “I brought my own, thanks.”

“Not as good as this, girlfriend.” He drew out the last word, already sensing that their cover annoyed her. But Molly wasn’t sure if he realized why that was. For now, it seemed to be playful banter.

“What is it, sweetie?” She opened the folder.

“Everything I have on the sabotage.” He made quotation marks with his fingers as he said the word. “Did Lucin tell you why we were graduated early?”

“Yeah, he said some of you didn’t need the extra semester.”

Cole laughed at this. “Well, that’s crap. You remember that last mission? The one with the Tchung having a few extra ships?”

“Hmmm. No.” She gave him a withering look. “Doesn’t ring any bells, sorry.”

“You’re hilarious. Now look, there’s something serious going on here. We never did another full-scale mission after that one. And even though our class did better than some others, there wasn’t anything particularly inspiring about individual performances that day. Well, except for yours, and you got expelled for it. But get this, our simulator was never used again. Ever. Right up to the day some of us were graduated. Check the maintenance log.”

Molly thumbed through some reports and maintenance schedules.

“It’s the green one, there.” Cole tapped the edge of a piece of paper and then continued in a lowered voice. Other first-class passengers, mostly humans, were filing onto the shuttle now.

“I was teamed up with Riggs in his simulator, and his navigator got the boot down to Services.”

Molly looked up from the folder. “You were a navigator for Riggs? Not that he isn’t a good pilot, but why weren’t you just given a new navigator?”

Cole looked startled for a second. “Didn’t Lucin tell you? I was demoted after the Tchung simulation. I graduated with the navigators based on my scores from the previous year. I mean, I get to keep my simulator hours if I ever want to be one of those guys.” Cole tossed his head up toward the nose of the plane, “But no Navy ships for me.”

“Oh.” Molly looked back to the folder’s contents.

“Hey, I’m not upset, so don’t get all pitiful on me. Hell, you always wanted to be a pilot more than I did. I love the math and the tactics. And training as a pilot made me one helluva navigator, so I have no problem with the decision. I’m more worried about this conspiracy. Our simulator was taken off-line almost before you were out of the building.”

“That makes sense,” said Molly, “the thing was screwed.”

“No. It was screwed with.”

“That’s right, you thought you saw Jakobs by the control panel of our pod earlier that day.”

Cole corrected her. “I never said it was Jakobs.”

“You said it was someone who reminded you of Jakobs.”

“Right. Same size, same swagger, but it could have been anyone in Navy black. Look at this page right here.”

Molly pulled out the one he indicated. It was a library computer log. “How’d you get this?”

“I had two months left at the Academy to gather this stuff together. And you wanna know what they demoted Riggs’s navigator down to?”

“What?”

“Cryptography.”

They both giggled at this.

“He got me a lot of this stuff. The rest I got through Saunders’s secretary.” Cole’s voice seemed to taper off at the end of this sentence.

“Do I even want to ask how?”

“Yeah, you obviously do. But I don’t kiss and tell.” Cole raised and lowered his eyebrows suggestively. He was obviously lying.

“Yeah, right,” Molly said. “So what do the library records tell us? Oh.” She traced Jakobs’ name. “Lemme guess, this is the time when you thought you saw someone by the simulator?”

“Bingo. Wasn’t him. Besides, he isn’t smart enough to do something like this. And why would they shuffle me around, graduate us early, close down that simulator, any of the other stuff if it was a cadet prank?”

“No way. You’re suggesting this was higher-up?” Molly started flipping through some more pages, wondering what Cole had uncovered.

“I’m not sure. But the people they graduated were not the best cadets. They were the few people close to you, the ones that really interacted with you on a daily basis. Whether it was the people that liked you, which would be me and…” Cole scratched his chin and made a point of looking up at the ceiling of the fuselage.

It took a few seconds for Molly to get the joke. “Ha. Ha,” she said.

Cole beamed in triumph. “Thanks. So it was me and Riggs and the people bullying you all the time. Only six of us were graduated early. And what sense does it make to demote me and then say I’m obviously too capable for another semester?”

“Well, Lucin did confess something to me that day. But you have to promise not to tell.”

He gestured to her lap. “You’re holding crap that can get me thrown in the brig for a very long time. Try and think of those documents as a promise ring, okay?”

Molly smiled. She hoped she twisted her lips enough to make it seem sarcastic. “Saunders had it in for me,” she confided. “Lucin said he and his wife had three daughters and no boys, so he didn’t want me to succeed or something.”

“That seems a bit backwards, but it might be better than what I’ve been working on.”

“Yeah? What’s your big conspiracy?”

“I was starting to think it had something to do with your father.”

The words punched her in the gut, the folder heavy in her lap. Molly chewed on Cole’s suggestion. The idea was ludicrous, yet seductive. She shook her head. It was tempting to have this be about something more significant than schoolyard pranks, but she knew that wasn’t true. It was just a fantasy to want the Tchung simulation and her expulsion to have greater meaning, for the cruelty of life to have some larger purpose.

“That’s ridiculous,” she finally said. “I don’t know the first thing about my father’s disappearance. I haven’t seen him or the ship since I was six years old. And besides, they didn’t find it until after they booted me out.”

“Yeah, but I was thinking your father was connected before I even heard of the Parsona.”

“Why? How could you?”

Cole gestured to the folder. “Because this is too much effort for a bunch of cadets. It has to have something to do with your father. Nothing else makes any sense.”

“Sure it does. Somebody screwed with our simulator because I was in it. Part of that sabotage included getting you killed from a minor scrape and leaving me in charge. The rest of this nonsense is someone cleaning up afterwards.” Cole frowned at her, clearly unhappy with her sound reasoning and its banal conclusions. “Look,” Molly continued, “I agree that this had to be higher up, that it wasn’t a simple prank, but no way does this have to do with my father. Somebody just wanted me out of the Academy. I mean who knows how to program those pods besides the geeks in IT? Saunders not only had access—”

“It wasn’t Saunders, he’s too fat and—”

“Don’t interrupt. I know it wasn’t Saunders you saw, but he could have had any of the IT guys do it. And we know his motive: he didn’t want me in the Navy, and he had the power to pull off the early graduations, so it all fits.”

“None of the IT guys were transferred.”

“What?”

“That yellow slip is the personnel change summation for the end of the year. If they were trying to hush this up, they didn’t move anybody who would’ve been able to do the most illegal part of the job.”

Molly shuffled through the folder, looking for the slip. “What are these thick white bundles stapled together?”

“Heh. I brought those along for your enjoyment. They don’t have anything to do with my theory, though.”

Molly turned to Cole. There was a faint white line where his lip had been busted open. The scar remained invisible unless his full mouth thinned into a smile. “What are they?” she asked.

“Medical files for Jakobs and Dinks. From the day you got kicked out.” He settled back into his chair. “There’s a lot there,” he added, a smirk on his face.

Molly thumbed through the stapled pages and looked back to Cole. The silence in the barracks that day finally made sense. She wasn’t sure she approved, but it was nice to feel him beside her, even across the extra room provided by the first class tickets. She didn’t really appreciate the space, but it was balanced out by them not having to wear their visors, reflecting back the world around them. It was just her and Cole. Their real faces. Scars and all.

7

The best thing about first class, as far as Molly was concerned, was getting to see nearly every single passenger of the ship file by. For an alien-watcher, it was a cross between a parade and a fashion show. Even the humans, who made up a majority of the crowd, were garbed in such splendid regalia that some of them looked stranger than the handful of aliens wearing simpler outfits.

Children bounced past excitedly, chased by nervous parents. There was an air of excitement in the crowd as vacations began, homes were returned to, and business deals still held the potential of not falling apart.

The only morose passengers Molly saw were the handful of Palans who must have been returning home from vacation. She assumed they didn’t like their stay on Earth very much. She was dying to ask them why and find out more about their home planet. In fact, Molly wanted to set up a toll booth in the middle of the aisle, stopping each passenger and demanding answers for passage:

Who are you? Where are you going? What are you going to do there?

She wanted to know everything about everyone. But part of her suspected this urge was only half the story. The other half was her desire to let every single one of them know that she owned a starship, and the cute guy beside her was pretending to be her boyfriend.

When a Delphian in coach had a hard time reaching the luggage bins and wouldn’t accept offers of help, she nearly got her tollbooth. The meter-tall, stubborn little alien wrestled with his bag as the parade slowed to a crawl. Molly smiled and nodded at each person that passed her by, hoping they wouldn’t think her a snob just because she was in first class.

When the procession came to a full stop, a young Palan girl, her eyes fixed on Molly, crashed into the back of her father. She quickly checked to see if Molly had noticed, and then her face flashed with embarrassment. Molly smiled at the child and waved her fingers, which sent the girl’s face into the folds of her father’s coat, hiding from the world. Molly was fascinated by the girl’s skin, the color of dull steel. The ears on her stubbly head were very low, almost pointing downward. Molly wanted to try out the three or four words she knew in Palan, but she couldn’t muster the courage. Neither could the Palan child, who remained hidden until the line lurched into motion. As her father moved away, she peeked out and smiled shyly at Molly, then was carried off by her grip on his coat.

One of the last floats in the parade was a stunner: a Bel Tra couple. They sat in the very front of first class, which provided only a brief glimpse of their tall, thin frames and colorful attire. They both wore traditional Bel Tra lace, the dozens of layers of different transparent colors piling up to create an opaque hue unique to each individual. Molly felt goose bumps ripple up her arms; she nudged Cole to make sure he was looking.

“Huh?”

Molly turned in her seat to start talking his ear off, only to find Cole’s head resting against the window.

“Are you asleep?” Molly asked.

Cole didn’t even open his eyes. “I was,” he complained.

“Do you have any idea what you’re missing?” She hissed.

Cole cracked one lid and gazed at Molly for a second. “My nap?”

“Bel Tra!” Molly whispered.

“Seen ’em before.” His eyelid returned to its state of rest, sealing him off from the sights.

Molly couldn’t believe him. She thought they’d been watching the cultural display together. She leaned out and peered up and down the aisle, wondering if anyone would mind if she took some pictures with her reader.

Beside her, Cole emitted a strange snuffling sound. Molly turned back at the man of her dreams.

Just as he started snoring.

When the passenger ship reached Earth’s primary Lagrange point—the spot in space where the gravity of the planet and its moon cancel each another out—it began its countdown for the jump to Menkar.

Molly leaned across Cole’s sleeping form to gaze through the small porthole. Earlier, she’d been eager to wake him, but now she was glad he wasn’t witness to her nervousness. She hadn’t done this outside of a simulator since she and her father came to Earth. The thought of getting sick, or having her heart race uncontrollably like it often did, had Molly squirming in her seat.

She glanced up at the numbers ticking down by their reading lights. When the counter reached “2,” she looked back through the carboglass, tightening her stomach reflexively. The only visual cue anything had happened was each star shifting to a new place. It was indistinguishable from a simulator display.

But there was no nausea. The hyperdrive in this monster must punch a big enough hole in space to prevent the sensation, Molly thought. She settled back in her chair and slowly released her grip on the armrest. The blood returned to her knuckles, coloring them pink.

So far, the grand adventure was proving to be a dud. Molly hoped all that would change once she took possession of Parsona. As long as their chaperone didn’t get in the way, she’d have Cole to herself and be able to keep him so busy with navigational duties that he couldn’t sleep through the trip back.

The Navy had pulled some strings to make this flight non-stop to Palan, an oddity for a frontier planet, but a measure to reduce the number of things that could go wrong on this mission. As they passed through Canopus, Molly heard several first class travelers express their dismay. Their final destination was Canopus, but they were having to return here via the Palan system?

Once more, the Navy’s thoughtfulness irked Molly. She felt horrible that she was responsible for messing up flight schedules. Even the sole Palan couple in first class seemed upset at the itinerary. Molly couldn’t understand this, unless they, too, were eager for layovers on new and strange Orbital Stations.

What everyone got instead was a direct flight from Earth to Palan. It took almost a full day to make the trip, most of it in a dimly-lit gloom of people trying to sleep half as well as Molly’s companion. By the time they arrived at the Palan system, he must’ve had eighteen hours of uninterrupted rest. No bathroom breaks. No food. No flirting.

Molly couldn’t understand how he contained himself. Even from the last.

Stressing about it prevented her from getting any sleep, herself. It even made it difficult to read or watch a holovid. Then she started worrying he would be a ball of energy on the trip back, while she would be a zombie. And this anxious line of reasoning made any chance of a nap impossible.

Cole finally woke when the Palan shuttle airlocked itself to their giant passenger ship. Palan’s Orbital Station could handle a vessel this size, but with only a few travelers getting off here, a direct shuttle flight made more sense. Molly wondered if this wasn’t just more of Lucin’s protectiveness. What a wreck he would’ve been if she’d gone off to fight in the Navy.

The airlocks on the two ships pressed together, sending a faint vibration through the hull. Cole bolted upright, wide awake. “Where are we?” he asked, completely alert.

“Palan,” she said, as grumpy as everyone else on the ship, but for a different reason.

“Already? Man, that went by fast. Why didn’t you wake me?”

“You seemed pretty out of it. And when you started snoring really loud, I went and sat with some guys back in coach. They taught me this cool card game called Mossfoot. You start off with—”

“I don’t snore that loud,” Cole interrupted.

“Well, I just got back and people were complaining.”

“Hmmm. Record it next time. I don’t believe you.”

Molly stood in the aisle with a few other passengers and reached up to collect her bag. “You’re just jealous I had a great flight and all you did was sleep.” She yawned and stretched, feeling exhausted. She really needed a nap.

And a shower.