Filling up with enough fuel to reach Earth, and the safety of the Academy seemed an intractable problem. One Molly struggled to solve while everyone cleaned and recharged their spirits.
But it was Cole who came up with an idea. It happened as he was poring over the astral charts in Parsona’s nav computer, logging in potential jump routes to Earth.
“This makes no sense,” Cole said, his voice tinny and subdued by the bilge. Molly had her head under a floor panel in the cockpit, tightening some hydraulic lines. It made communicating difficult, so naturally Cole was being unusually chatty. “Hey, Molly, you ever heard of Glemots?”
“Glemots,” she repeated. “Why does that sound familiar?” She raised her head to hear him better and banged it on a floor truss. She nearly dropped her wrench.
“Be careful,” Cole cautioned. “And Glemots aren’t a that, they’re a them. Remember the race that left the Galactic Union all those years ago? They completely shut out the rest of the universe. You can’t even get near their home planet.”
Rubbing her head, Molly pulled herself out of the bilge. She could see grease on her own cheeks, black smudges in the edge of her peripheral. She had her hair tied back under a triangle of white cloth and figured Cole had already seen her at her worst after the Palan rains. “Are they the ones Unity Now tried to help out after a supernova irradiated their corner of the galaxy?”
“Bingo. The UN sent a few supply and refugee ships, and not a one of them was ever heard from again.”
“And what makes you want to go and say ‘hello’? Was that dinner you cooked last night some attempt to fatten me up for the savages?”
“They aren’t savages. Or weren’t, anyway. Look, there’s a log in the nav computer about them. The Navy first encountered these guys back in the frontier expansion, so it must’ve been over two hundred years ago. Smart race, roughly humanoid—”
“That is such an offensive term, Cole. You’re supposed to say bilaterally symmetric quadruped.” Molly sang the term with the cadence of something memorized but not completely understood.
“Gimme a break, I’m just skimming what it says here.” Cole gestured to the nav screen. “As I was saying, let’s see here… oh, so the Glemots had no technology when the Navy found them, so they put the Meln Imperative in place.”
“Watch, but don’t interfere,” Molly recited. She felt like they were back in classes at the Academy.
“Right. But get this, the Glemots were flying ships out of orbit just four years later.”
“So the Navy had it wrong. They had technology.”
“Not according to this. Supposedly they worked out the principles of space flight from their limited contact with the Navy.”
“From nothing?” Molly got up from the floor and gaped in disbelief over Cole’s shoulder. “That’s impossible. Someone made a mistake, or the Navy broke the Meln Imperative or something.”
Walter poked his head into the cockpit. “What are you guyss getting sso loud about? Can I look?”
“Pilot stuff.” Cole and Molly said in unison. They smirked at each other.
“Well, I’m going to go do more Officser sstuff,” Walter said haughtily. “The sstorage lockerss in the bilge are almosst done,” he added with pride.
While she waited for Walter to pad away, Molly noticed how close her face was to Cole’s. The nav screens were hard to see clearly from an angle. She could’ve pulled up the display on her own computer, but she’d just leaned over to read his. She hadn’t noted their proximity to one another while they were talking, but now, in silence, she could feel the heat from his cheek radiating out to hers. The warmth made her want to pull away sharply, or douse it with a kiss.
She did neither.
Instead, she reached over him and pointed to the monitor, trying to focus on something else. “An observation satellite?”
Cole nodded. “That’s the theory the Navy settled on. They lost a planetary probe during the reconnaissance phase. A faulty thruster sent it crashing to the surface. They probably decided a recovery would risk direct contact. Must’ve figured nothing useful could survive atmospheric entry and an impact like that.”
Molly moved to the Captain’s chair and pulled up the same star chart on her screen. She just couldn’t concentrate while hovering so close to him. It felt like flying next to a canyon wall in a stiff breeze.
Cole continued talking, seemingly unaware of Molly’s struggles. “And once the cat was out of the bag,” he said, “the Meln Imperative no longer applied. In fact, according to this, the Glemots made first contact themselves. And they had a rough grasp of English… oh, wait. You are so not going to believe this.”
“What is it?” she asked, trying to scan down the report to find it for herself.
“This is how the Navy figured out the satellite may have caused the sudden spike in technology. The English spoken by the first Glemot astronauts was heavy in engineering jargon. They had pulled their vocabulary straight from the satellite computers.”
“You’re right,” Molly agreed. “I don’t believe it. For once I’m thinking one of your conspiracy theories would make more sense. And what’s the point of this lesson?”
Cole glared at her. “The reason this star system matters to us is that the Navy built a small Orbital Station there before the Glemots kicked them out. The station’s still there. If the Navy left in a hurry, there might be some stuff we could use. Maybe some fusion fuel or a Bell radio that still works.”
Molly shook her head. Bell radios were the key to instantaneous communication across long distances, but they wouldn’t find one operational. The devices employed Bell’s Theorem, a bizarre 20th century discovery in quantum mechanics. The theorem hypothesized the ability to entangle two particles so a change on one resulted in a change in the other, no matter how far apart they were. Molly knew her quantum mechanics. Entangled particles are kept in magnetic storage units; they’d decay without anyone around to keep them up.
But the fusion fuel? That was a real possibility. Worth checking out. “It is close by,” Molly noted. She traced a finger across her pilot screen. “Twenty thousand light years, and in the right direction. Let’s call it six percent from the hyperdrive. We would still have enough for another small jump or two if nothing panned out. We could make the Navy station at Cephus as a bailout.”
Cole agreed. “I can’t think of anything else to try. Unless you want to go turn ourselves in to the Navy straight away. Hope the Palan office was an anomaly.”
“What do you think?”
“I think the behavior there was part of a larger pattern. The simulator sabotage, the early graduations, the way you were run out of the school. Nothing makes sense to me right now except the Navy acting screwy—”
“More screwy,” Molly corrected him.
“Yeah, more screwy.” Cole laughed. “Or screwier. Anyway, I’d feel safer with you and some backwoods savages than I would with the authorities right now.”
“Okay, but if we’re gonna do this, it has to be stealth-like. Jump in behind this moon, here, and use the thrusters to head to the Orbital Station. No spooking the natives.”