He’d better. There was only so long I’d be able to hold things together in his name before people started questioning why they should listen to me.
I was questioning it already.
“Sir?” Ashwin from the Communications Corps held a radio out to me. “National Assembly Leader Winter is on the radio. She wants to talk to you.”
To me? I wondered if any of what I’d just said had been broadcast over the radio. There were several people who’d been in the middle of conversations when I’d walked in, and it wasn’t a complicated procedure to switch from headset to ambient reception.
I wondered if NAL Winter wanted to yell at me for what I’d said to Stoff, or give her condolences about my parents.
Either way, I didn’t want to hear it. And while I had some things to say about what I thought of the assembly, none of them would be productive. “Take a message,” I said.
“Sir?” Ashwin said. “Under the circumstances—”
“Take. A. Message,” I said. “In detail. And then tell her that according to Section 57 of the DDF Communications Policy, the DDF has three days to respond.”
Ashwin blinked at me. “Three days, sir?”
“Yes,” I said. This fiasco had been the assembly’s idea. All of it. It was their fault, and I wasn’t going to listen to a word they had to say even one second before I had to. “And then make yourself a memo to remind us two days and twenty-three and a half hours from now that we need to draft a response. Or better yet, make a note to tell Cobb to do it, because he will be back by then. Is that clear?”
“Um, yes, sir,” Ashwin said.
“Good.”
I turned around and found FM watching me nervously. “Are you going to tell me I should talk to the assembly?” I asked.
“No way,” FM said. “Not a chance. You’re absolutely right. That disaster was their fault. Being made to wait is the least of what they deserve. But Jorgen, you need to talk about what happened—”
“You want to talk about something?” I said to FM. “Let’s talk about how we’re going to find Cobb.”
We both looked at Alanik, who held up her hands. “I’m trying,” she said. “It’s a big universe, Jorgen, and I don’t know where Gran-Gran tried to take them.”
“She’d never been off this planet, had she?” FM asked. “Where else would she go?”
“She was born on the Defiant,” Rig said. “She used to travel the stars as a little girl, but she said she didn’t remember much about it. I can’t imagine she’d try to take them anywhere else.”
“They aren’t here,” Alanik said. “I’m sure of that.”
FM looked to me for confirmation. I closed my eyes, reaching down beneath the surface of the planet again. There were more slugs down there—I could feel their vibrations.
But no cytonic people, and definitely no Gran-Gran.
“I think she’s right,” I said. “But Spensa managed to contact me from the nowhere. If she could do that, we should be able to find Gran-Gran wherever she is, right?”
“I’ll keep trying,” Alanik said.
Arturo stood behind her in the doorway. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll find you someplace quiet where you can concentrate.”
Alanik nodded and turned to follow Arturo out.
I was being too hard on her, probably. It wasn’t her fault Cobb disappeared.
I’d apologize after we found him.
“Jorgen,” FM said. I knew what she was going to say. She’d said it several times.
“What I need,” I said, “is to find Cobb. Are any of the slugs familiar enough with the admiral to hyperjump to him?”
“I don’t know,” FM said. “We haven’t tried to get them to recognize him, but some of them might…” She looked like she was going to go back to arguing that I should sit down and stop for a minute, but I didn’t want to stop. I was outrunning the storm right now, and I was going to keep running as long as I could.
“Find out,” I said. “Get Rig on it too.” I turned and strode down the hall into Cobb’s office, closing the door behind me.
I didn’t know what to say to any of them, not about what happened, not about what had to happen now. Cobb would know what to do with all of this.
But he wasn’t the one I missed most at the moment. In my mind, I watched the Superiority ship explode over and over again. Some of that image must have leaked into the nowhere, because Snuggles and Boomslug appeared on my shoulders, and Boomslug slid down my arm into the crook of my elbow and softly trilled, “Boom.”
“Can you find Cobb?” I asked Snuggles.
She responded by nuzzling my ear, but she didn’t take us anywhere. I pressed my back against the door, closing my eyes.
More than anything, I wished Spensa were here.
Two
Two days later, we still hadn’t heard a word from Cobb. Alanik tried her best, but no matter where she looked she couldn’t find Gran-Gran. They’d simply disappeared, she said.
At this point, I was the only cytonic from Detritus who hadn’t mysteriously disappeared. Spensa was stuck in the nowhere, but she’d at least managed to get in contact with me twice. It had been several days now, and I was anxious to hear from her again.
But from Cobb and Gran-Gran, there was only silence.
I sat at a conference table with Alanik, FM, and Minister Cuna, the dissenter Superiority bureaucrat. Boomslug and Snuggles snuffled around under my chair like they expected someone to have spilled some caviar down there, though the floor was swept twice a day as per Mandate 27 of the Facilities Regulations. Alanik had just returned from ReDawn with half the flight—I’d sent Arturo, Nedd, and Kimmalyn to finish solidifying the alliance.
“Rinakin is prepared to send a flight of ships to Detritus as a symbolic gesture,” Alanik said. “And more, certainly, if there’s a need for them here.”
I struggled to focus on what she was saying. I’d barely been sleeping—every time I closed my eyes, that ship exploded in the darkness. In my dreams, I watched my mother mouth those words at me through the glass: Do better than we did. The ship tore to pieces before my eyes, sometimes while I watched from the platform—sometimes with me still inside it, somehow conscious of everything as it shredded me.
In the very worst nightmares, it was Spensa on the other side of the glass.
“ReDawn is more vulnerable,” I said. “We have the planetary shield to protect us. We should be sending flights to defend you.”