“What in the world is going on in here?” Scottie asked, squeezing into the back of the cockpit.
“More girl talk?” Ryn hollered from the galley, followed by snorts of laughter.
“Shut it,” Scottie told him. He turned to Cat, all the levity drained from his face at the sight of her. “What’s going on, Cat?”
“Molly’s gone.”
Ryke tapped the SADAR. “Jumped into orbit,” he said.
“Do what?”
Ryn squeezed in behind Scottie. “Who’s gone where?”
“Why would she do that?” Scottie asked.
“She wouldn’t,” Parsona said again. “She’s been abducted.”
“So what do we do?” Cat asked the others.
“We need to tell the Underground,” Ryke said.
“And what? Have them put out a missing persons report?”
“No, but they have all our translators. They can at least keep an ear out. Besides, they need to know she’s in that big ship.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Ryn said.
“I’ll be damned,” said Cat. “Don’t you start on—”
“No, he’s right,” Scottie said. “How many hours before the pilots jump back? At dawn, right? If that monster is still in the sky, and if the Navy geeks are right that it’s what sent them crashing down, then we need to get to the StarCarrier’s missiles—”
“Flank that,” Cat said.
“Cat, be reasonable for just a second. We need to—”
“You wanna send bombs in after her? You wanna blow up the thing she just jumped into? Flank you, Scottie.”
Everyone fell quiet. Old friends looked down at each other’s boots.
“I’m sorry,” Cat whispered. “It’s just—”
“No, I’m sorry, too,” Scottie said. “But we started a war tonight, Cat. We’ve all been here before. Hell, you especially. And look, we’re friends and all, but we knew the chances going into this, right? We know what happens to friends in war—”
“Yeah,” said Cat, finishing his thought for him. “Friends die.”
31 · Near Darrin
The hijacked ships jumped into the rendezvous point near Darrin, one after another. Each successful arrival was celebrated, and they held out hope for the others. But after three hours, the gathering fleet realized two of the crews wouldn’t be joining them. There weren’t any reliable reports to explain what went wrong, but one of the squads saw an asteroid base explode as they were leaving the system, which accounted for one group. Anlyn gave the other missing group as much time as she could while the rest of the ships locked up, swapped engineers, made modifications to the drives, tended to small wounds, and distributed the fuel and supplies evenly.
The newly trained mechanics moved from one engine room to another, following Ryke’s wiring schematics and uploading the new firmware he’d provided. They were short one Callite engineer, who had been in a group gone missing, which meant extra work for Edison. Anlyn ferried him from one ship to another while his dexterous claws made quick work of the modifications. She looked for any sign of trauma in him, any hint that he had been affected by Albert’s death the way she had, but it was either missing or very well hidden.
The third ship they locked up to in their queue of modifications was Lady Liberty, which had been retrieved from its hidden orbit deep within Darrin II’s asteroid belt. As Anlyn and Edison switched ships with the crew, she noted a hint of guilty relief from the others at having gotten the safer assignment. Little was said between the two groups as they filed past each other in the cramped airlocks.
Anlyn hadn’t expected it, but walking through Lady’s cargo bay and entering the cockpit felt nearly as bad as her first flight in that Bern craft, back at the Great Rift so many seeming sleeps ago. Gone were the slave chain and the eyebolt that had held her for so many years, removed by Edison prior to Molly’s and Cole’s trip to Earth. But everything else was intimately familiar: the controls and readouts, the screens and portholes, all the walls of her old prison that somehow seemed to contain an entire other life she’d known. It was like walking back into some prior existence that had been stolen, that she could never get back, even after the death of the man who had taken it from her.
As she settled into the worn seat, Anlyn was thankful for the task of locking with more ships while Edison performed modifications on the remaining hyperdrives. She needed to do something rote with her body while her mind scrambled for purchase. Looking down at her hands, how they trembled so, Anlyn couldn’t imagine going into battle in such a state, much less attempting to lead so many others. The sudden lack of confidence was unsettling. For countless years, she had flown into combat knowing she would win, and she had been able to do so almost on autopilot. She had formed a habit of warfare in order to avoid punishment and pain. She had fought without caring, and so fought without fear—without fear of failure.
As she went over the weapons systems, each powerful device a trophy from her days as the best customer-wrangler in either Darrin, she confronted the awful taste of preparing herself for a different kind of fight: A fight she cared deeply about. A fight she would be crushed to lose.
The difference was light years apart.
“Gloria leader, wing two.”
Anlyn snapped out of her cold thoughts and keyed the radio on her helmet. “Wing two—” Her words came out as whispers; she swallowed and tried to find her voice. “Wing two, go ahead.”
“Requesting permission to assume command of one of wing three’s ships,” the pilot said. “The two missing flight crews were both in our wing, leaving us with eight.”
Anlyn hesitated. She didn’t know any of the pilots and only knew what a few of their ships were armed with. As skilled as she had been in a cockpit, she had always flown into battle solo, never with even so much as a wingman. Her stomach sank; she could feel the back of her neck thrum as her heart raced and pounded.
Molly was meant to do this, she realized. My thirst for revenge has cursed everything. This has all been a mistake.
Lady Liberty seemed to do a barrel roll as her mind reeled. She even wondered if she’d upset the prophecy somehow. She was no Human, just a Drenard. Did that mean anything?
“Gloria leader?”
Anlyn keyed her mic. “Uh, negative wing two. I’m transferring two of my squadron to you. Wings two through four will go in with a full complement of ten. All wing leaders copy?”
“Four copy.”
“Three copy. And we have just one drive left to modify over here.”
“Wing two, here.”
“Two, go ahead.”
“Gloria leader, that leaves you with just eight ships.”
“Copy that,” Anlyn said.
She silently wished she could give up even more.
•• Lok ••
“We could just as easily argue about this on our way to the Carrier,” Scottie told the others. “We need to get a move-on before the fleet from Darrin gets back and finds that big ship still up there.”
Ryn grunted. “Hell, they can argue about it all they want. We’ll be climbing down to the armory.”
Ryke stared up at the ceiling and scratched the thick, white tangle of beard below his chin.
“What’s on your mind, doc?”
“Nothing. Just . . . theoreticals.”
“Well let’s hear ’em,” said Cat.
“It doesn’t apply, sorry. It’s just a problem Arthur and I were working on. This would’ve been one of its uses if we’d ever gotten it to work.”
Cat took a step closer. “Do I have to throttle it out of you?”
Ryke shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand half of it. Besides, it ain’t workable.”
A look from Cat, and he held up his hands, preparing to explain.
Scottie and Ryn must’ve seen the look as well—they stopped their impatient shuffling and crossed their arms, hugging themselves still.
“We were working on a way to bring people back from raids instead of using the skimmers.” Ryke turned to Cat, who had been on her fair share of raids in hyperspace. “We had just lost another lad due to a frozen locator, so we started thinking outside the box in a big way. The idea we came up with was to create a small rift, like the kind I made back in my house, the very kind the Bern are using now—”
“What, and you would just step through that rift and grab someone from the other side?”
“Theoretically. Problem is, we never figured out how to make a rift that isn’t grounded to hyperspace on one side, but not the other. When one object is scurryin’ about—like the surface of Lok for instance—you can compute the blasted equations and link up between here and hyperspace. But between two moving objects, like Lok and that ship up there, it just can’t be done. It’s like in physics, going from a two body solution to a three body—” Ryke frowned and narrowed his eyes. He rubbed his whiskers. “See? I’m losing ya, right?”
“Well, what was your idea, then?”
“It’s useless, really. The idea was you could open a rift from your location to hyperspace, jump someone to the other point and have them open a rift to the same spot in hyperspace.” Ryke meshed his fingers together. “Basically, you would try and sandwich the two rifts together, allowing you to step right through.”
“Like the two rifts we used in your house that one time?”
Ryke nodded. “Only, the rifts would be far apart over here and near together in hyperspace, the opposite of what we did back then.”
Cat ran her hands up over her face. “But you’d need a console on both sides, right?”
Ryke nodded.
“So this helps us none.”
“That’s what I tried to tell you!”
Ryke scanned their faces. There was no sound in the cockpit for a long while. He scratched his beard.
“We need to try something,” Parsona said, her voice cutting through the tense silence.
“I know,” said Cat.
“But what?” Ryn asked, shrugging. “Wouldn’t Molly just want us to continue on? I mean, this was her plan.”
“I know what we need to do,” Cat said.
Everyone turned to her.
“You guys need to go ahead to the Carrier. Take out as many ships as you can with the missiles. Try to wound the big ship, maybe send some bombs up, but away from where Molly jumped.”
“And what’re you gonna do?” Ryn asked.
“You guys are gonna send me up first. Right now. With the platform.”
“Where?” Scottie asked. “To that big ass ship? You want us to send you up after them?”
Cat nodded. “A meter or two from their coordinates, to the side and up.” She turned to Ryke. “I’ll radio back her condition and coordinates. Maybe it’ll be something you can use.”
“No,” Ryke said. “No way. It won’t do any good, and we’ll just be tossing your life after hers. Besides, you’re the only one of us who can fly this ship, so even if you have a death wish, you aren’t as expendable as you like to pretend.”
“Actually,” Parsona said, “that’s not true.”
The gathering looked toward the dash, as if meeting the ship’s gaze.
“What’s not true?” Scottie asked.
“That Cat’s not expendable?” Ryn laughed.
“No, that Cat’s the only person here who can fly me,” Parsona said.
“I can.”
32 · Final Betrayal
Molly stomped toward Walter in the black of wooded night, preparing to grill him for why he’d lied about her mom needing her—and then the world vanished in a flash of light. She suddenly found herself floating, her legs pedaling for the forest floor, but finding nothing but air.
Bright air.
Her brain rebelled from the jarring assault, from the sudden and drastic change in environment. Her vision seemed off; the pungent odor of the forrest was gone; even the feeling of the cool and damp air on her skin had gone away. Her every sense lurched, groping for what wasn’t there, recoiling away from the new things that were.
And then that discombobulated instant, that frozen moment of unfeeling confusion, was shattered as Molly’s toe caught steel decking. Her knee crashed down, her palms smacking cold steel, her body sprawling clumsily after.
The air went out of her lungs. Molly rolled over, clutching her knee, a small cluster of dried leaves crackling at her back. Her startled Wadi bolted out of its pocket-cave and shook its head, its scent tongue whipping through the air.
Above her own groans, Molly heard a muted pop of air followed by the thud of another body crashing into steel. Lifting her head and squinting in a harsh light her nighttime eyes had not yet adjusted to, she saw another form through a glass partition:
Walter.
Molly sat up, her head still spinning from the jarring relocation. She cupped one hand above her eyes, shielding them from the overhead lights while they adjusted. Three walls of glass and one of steel surrounded her. Walter looked at her through one of the clear walls; he was in an adjoining holding cell of sorts. By his side he held a towel with a thin arm—one of Byrne’s arms. With the other, he slapped at his prison walls, his complexion shiny with confusion.
“What have you done?” Molly yelled at him through the glass.
He seemed as clueless as she. He glanced around himself as if he expected to see something or someone. Then his face lit up; he patted frantically at his flightsuit, reached into one pocket, and extracted a red bit of fabric.
