No. I couldn’t stop. This wasn’t about me. It wasn’t even about my parents. It was about what we were going to do for Detritus.
“Now,” I said.
The UrDail were expecting us back to finalize our alliance. That was more important now than ever. The war went on, and we were losing badly. We had to get back on track, and the only way to do that was to find Admiral Cobb and return power to the DDF.
The assembly’d had their chance. We were looking at the remains of it.
“I’m sorry, Alanik,” I said. “We’ll be a little late returning to ReDawn. There are some things we need to take care of first.”
“Jorgen,” FM said, “I think you should sit down for a minute.”
I couldn’t. “Put Gill in the hyperdrive,” I said to FM, mostly so she’d have to stop talking. “I’ll give him instructions to take us into the airspace beneath Platform Prime.”
FM hesitated long enough that I looked back at her.
It was a mistake. She was watching me with so much concern that I wanted to shout at her. Scream at the sky. Break things.
But I was the flightleader. It was my job to stay in control, at least until Cobb was back. He’d probably try to send me on leave then.
I’d tell him I didn’t want to go. We needed every person to face what was coming. Maybe Cobb would see that. Maybe he’d let me stay.
“Do it, FM,” Arturo said.
“Yeah, okay,” she said. She headed to the control room, and Rig went with her.
I turned to Alanik. “I need to know where Cobb is,” I said. “Where did Gran-Gran take them?”
“I don’t know,” Alanik said. “I’m looking for them, but I can’t find them.” I closed my eyes, reaching out toward the planet. It would make sense for Gran-Gran to take them somewhere beneath the surface—to her home maybe—but I couldn’t sense her mind. Not on Platform Prime, not on the surface, not in the caverns below.
“Keep trying,” I said. “Once you find Gran-Gran, we can go pick them up.”
I strode toward my ship, turning my back on the glowing wreckage. I didn’t need to see it again. The spiraling shape was already fixed in my mind, expanding outward forever.
“Boom,” Boomslug said.
“Boom,” I agreed with him.
“Jorgen,” FM called. “We’re ready.”
I reached out to Gill, giving him a clear impression of the airspace below Platform Prime. Wandering Leaf was an abandoned battle platform with hyperdrive technology, and its autofire could tear other platforms to pieces, so we’d need to park it far enough down in the upper atmosphere that the other platforms would be out of range.
Go, I told him.
And then I floated beneath the vast starscape of white eyes. They didn’t focus on me—we were invisible to them as long as we used the slugs to hyperjump. But I didn’t like the eyes any better when they couldn’t see me. I always felt as if they could see through me, like I was made of something flimsy and superficial with nothing substantial underneath. This time though, I felt something different, something new.
I hated them.
It was irrational; they weren’t the ones who’d spent the last eighty years raining down death on my people. They hadn’t trapped my parents in a ship and blown the thing to pieces. I didn’t know if they were responsible for these strange powers I had neither asked for nor wanted. As far as I knew, they weren’t even responsible for taking Spensa away. She’d done that herself.
But I still couldn’t smother the sudden startling feeling that at its core, everything bad that had happened to us was all their fault.
Wandering Leaf emerged far below the vast metal underside of Platform Prime, the current DDF headquarters. “Flight,” I said, “take your ships up to the landing bay.”
“What are you going to do?” Nedd asked.
The raw hatred I’d felt for the eyes was still hot in my veins. It felt good, better than the icy chill of shock or the raging terror of grief.
“I’m going to make sure no one else does anything stupid until Cobb gets back,” I said. I climbed into my ship. I’d already given my orders to the flight, so I left my radio off.
“Cobb gets back,” Snuggles said, settling on the floor of the cockpit by the side of my seat.
“Let’s hope it happens soon,” I said. And then I directed Snuggles to hyperjump my ship out of Wandering Leaf and up to the landing bay of Platform Prime.
The ground crew looked shocked when we appeared. They wouldn’t have been able to see the explosion from here, not with the platforms forming the shield above them.
But word spread fast when half your government was annihilated.
I left the slugs in my ship as I disembarked. “We’re under orders to arrest you for desertion,” Dobsi, one of the ground crew members, said. She looked at me uncertainly, like she didn’t want to be the one to carry out that particular arrest.
A good call on her part. “Admiral Cobb gave us orders to leave,” I said. “He’ll clear everything up when he returns.”
Dobsi hesitated. “Where did he go?”
“It’s classified,” I said. It wasn’t a great answer, but it was the only one I had.
My flight hyperjumped into the hangar, their ships all connected by light-lances. FM and Alanik jumped out first, and the ground crew looked suspiciously at Alanik like she might be the cause of all the trouble.
Alanik stared them down, but she did move quickly over to me. FM looked at me with that terrible sympathy in her eyes again.
Before she could open her mouth, I turned on my heels and headed toward the command center. There wasn’t time to stop, not now. I had to make sure that my flight wasn’t going to be scudding arrested. The assembly’s plan had blown up in all of our faces—literally.
We were going to do this Cobb’s way now, whether they liked it or not.
I walked in, Alanik and FM on my heels and the rest of the flight trailing behind, to find the command center in shambles. Cobb’s aides were all staring at monitors and talking over the radio to various DDF departments on the platform and on the ground. Commander Ulan and Ziming from Engineering were having an argument near the hypercomm, while Rikolfr from the admiral’s staff kept trying to page Cobb, but to no avail.
They couldn’t find him either. Without him, the explosion of the Superiority ship had sent the staff into disarray.
Enough.
“Admiral Cobb is alive,” I said loudly. Most of the room turned to look at me. “The person who’s been giving you orders since last night was a Superiority plant using a holographic disguise.”