Cole automatically sat to Molly’s left again, beside the window. Molly assumed it was more so he’d have a place to rest his head than any attempt to pull rank. He nudged Molly and she turned to see him pointing out the glass. There was nothing out there but stars.
“What am I looking at?” she asked.
“That!” he said, rubbing his finger on the glass with a squeaking sound.
Molly loosened her shoulder straps and leaned over Cole, focusing on his finger. There was a faint crack in the carboglass running the length of the window! Molly felt the airlocks decouple and the shuttle slide sideways in space, preparing for its descent.
“Should we tell somebody?” she asked, cinching her harness up tight.
Cole craned his neck to inspect the porthole one row back. “That one’s even worse,” he marveled. “There’s no way this ship passed inspections.”
Molly felt like they should warn somebody, but the shuttle was already accelerating, pinning her to her seat.
“Wow. That’s a few Gs,” Cole said. “Somebody’s in a hurry.”
If he was trying to lighten the mood, it wasn’t working. A few minutes later, the shuttle hit the atmosphere and started taking a beating. None of the passengers spoke, they just looked ahead or out to the steel wings, which seemed to be flapping up and down like a bird’s. The sounds of grinding metal and bending trusses groaned throughout the ship, reverberating over the roar of air knocking against the hull.
After a few minutes, the heat inside the shuttle became intolerable. There was no air coming out of the vents overhead. Molly reached up, straining against the Gs, to twist the nozzle open. The plastic unit came off in her hand. She held the broken piece in her lap, beads of sweat streaking back from her forehead as the friction of reentry blasted the fuselage, heat radiating through the insulation and into the cabin. Molly sweated profusely, partly from the rise in temperature, but mostly out of fear.
She couldn’t remember being this scared in all her life. She needed to be in control, or at least be up in the cockpit so she could see what was going on. As they stopped accelerating, switching to a glide against the atmosphere, Molly considered unbuckling her harness and going forward where she could at least know how they were going to die. All she could see through Cole’s window was the glare of a bright sun and glowing-red steel.
They hit a pocket of turbulence and the shuttle lurched upwards, pressed Molly violently into her seat. She decided to stay put and cope with someone else being in control, but not at all comfortable with it being anyone other than Cole. After a few minutes of frightful shuddering, the mad plummet ended and the pilot smoothed out into another glide. The sun disappeared behind gathering clouds, revealing a vast ocean spread out below. A hiss filled the shuttle—the sound of air leaking in through cracks or maybe passengers heaving a sigh of relief.
Molly released Cole’s arm; she couldn’t even remember grabbing it. She looked down at his tan skin and saw small white frowns of indented flesh where her fingernails had been.
The landing felt like another bout of turbulence as the shuttle rebounded off the tarmac several times. When they came to a halt, Molly felt the urge to applaud the pilot. In fact, the murmurs of relief washing through the shuttle made her expect a standing ovation at any moment. Instead, the passengers collected their bundles and hurried toward the exit, the sense of urgency palpable, as if the shuttle still posed some sort of threat. Molly moved eagerly as well, but for a different reason. She was dying to get out and explore her first new planet in ten years.
The landing ramp descended and the first thing Molly noted about Palan was the heat. It assaulted her before she even got to the exit. It felt like a wall of water flooding the aisle. Molly took a deep breath against it, but the humidity was so high, it felt like she could drown. The wetness stuck to her, transferring heat straight to her bones and making her loose shirt cling to her stomach.
She and Cole swam with the others through the thick air, down the boarding ramp, and into a half-circle tunnel of corrugated steel. They were pressing toward a cacophony of clanging and yelling—poverty’s soundtrack. This was a tune Molly recognized from her childhood on a frontier planet. It was a chorus of competitive complaining, a group with very little yet wanting much. The sounds were as thick as the atmosphere; Molly could feel it all driving her back like the force of acceleration, back into the shuttle and out of there.
As they exited the tunnel into the Shuttle Terminal, Molly’s architectural tastes gagged. Even after a steady diet of what the Navy considered “spatially pleasing,” she couldn’t believe how rough this place was. Everything in the Terminal had the appearance of a temporary structure, something that could be packed up and moved when trouble arose. Palans conducted business in crowded clusters around rickety stalls and tents stretched with patchwork quilts. Molly noted they needed yet more patching—little of the original fabric remained. Frayed edges hung in long rows of tatters and thread.
No two things looked the same, preventing the collection of oddities from taking on a quaint, cultural aspect. Instead, it was just a noisy, hot, wet, crowded mess.
Cole studied the photograph of their contact one last time and seemed able to ignore it all. Molly wiped the back of her hand across her brow and new sweat leapt out to replace the departed. She watched Cole tuck the printed picture inside his jacket pocket and wondered how he could possibly wear that thing in this heat.
Then she realized he probably had a stun gun or something Navy-issue underneath. She preferred not to know, assuming this was going to go as smoothly as cutting butter would be in this heat. One night on Palan, max, while they sorted out customs and ownership, and she and Cole would be out amongst the stars in her very own spaceship.
Chaperoned, of course.
A man in a brown robe approached them. Large holes in the thick fabric were spanned by strips of colorful cloth, straining valiantly to hold everything together. The man’s hood was up, shading a face the color of stainless steel. Copper-colored hair hung from the shadows above his bright eyes. He looked right at Molly. “Cole Mendonça?”
“Does she look like a Cole to you?”
The man with the metal-colored face seemed reluctant, but finally pulled his gaze to Cole’s. “Jusst becausse I wass looking at her doessn’t mean I wassn’t assking you.” He looked back at Molly, leering. “Better get ussed to it with her around.” A purplish tongue came out and ran itself along the man’s lips.
“Who in hyperspace are you?” Cole demanded. He moved between the stranger and Molly to steal his gaze back.
Molly looked away nervously. Several people were watching the exchange, but maybe they’d just never seen Humans before.
“Drummond ssent me. For my good Englissh. No? Come, I take you.” He stared at Molly over Cole’s shoulder. Cole glanced back at her, his eyes raised and looking for a consensus.
She shrugged. “Do we have a choice?”
“Fine,” Cole told the stranger. “Lead the way.”
“Ssoon Palan be a firsst classs world, eh?” Their guide walked ahead of them, his arms spread out to indicate the activity on either side of what really couldn’t be considered a terminal. Instead of organizing travelers into queues and providing them a place to rest, the building didn’t have lines or chairs. The shuttle just deposited everyone right into some sort of disorganized market designed to remove any cash brought onto the planet—all legal tender recognized, and some that might be questionable.