Prologue
“Jorgen, are you ready?” my father asked, standing in the doorway to the parlor. He looked over my graduation uniform—admiring it I thought, but also searching for anything out of place.
“Yes,” I said. I stood in front of the glass case filled with my mother’s medals. She was one of the most decorated pilots the Defiant Defense Force had ever seen. At the center of the case was a pewter figure of a Sigo-class fighter—the ship my mother used to fly. As a kid I used to stand here and stare at that ship for hours, imagining what it would be like to be a pilot someday, fighting the Krell: all thrill and heroics and glory. I never took the figure out of the case—my mother would have killed me—but in my mind I flew in that ship to the stars and back.
I could see my reflection in the glass, my dress uniform crisp and fitted. After today, I’d be a full pilot.
“I hope you know how proud we are of you,” my father said. “So many cadets begin flight school, but graduating is a real accomplishment.”
My father was right. I’d started with what had to have been, in my estimation, the finest flight of pilots the DDF had ever seen. They were incredible people, every one of them. I couldn’t have asked for a better team.
And of all of us, only two remained. We’d lost some amazing people in the months of cadet training.
Rig, Bim, Morningtide, Nedder, Amphi, Quirk, Hurl.
Spin.
We needed them, but none of them were graduating today, and the DDF was poorer for it.
That didn’t feel like an accomplishment. It felt like a tragedy—one that was mostly on me. What worth was I? A leader who couldn’t bring his team with him?
My mother came down the stairs in her own dress uniform. She wasn’t officiating, but she’d still be there in all her regalia. She crossed the room to the case and opened it, pulling down her medals and pinning them on. She looked up at me, taking in my uniform, though it didn’t feel like she was looking for imperfections the way it had with my father.
I felt like she was seeing herself.
“This is an important day,” she said. “You’ve done every bit as well as we hoped you would.”
“Thank you,” I said—because it was the right answer, not because I felt it. I’d earned the pilot’s pin more than I had the cadet’s one—that had been automatic because of my mother’s accomplishments. Still, I couldn’t help wondering. Did I deserve to be here? Would Ironsides ever have kicked me out of cadet training? The son of Algernon and Jeshua Weight? I’d tried my best, done everything I knew how to do. But if I hadn’t, I would probably still be standing here, my whole life laid out before me, predetermined just like my uniform.
“How does it feel to finally make full pilot?” my father asked.
This too had a right answer. “It feels great,” I said. I glanced back at the now-empty medal stands and allowed myself this one admission: “Not that I’ll be flying for long.”
My mother’s lips set into a line. “Thank the stars you won’t have to.”
I’d been told before I started flight school that I’d only fly active duty for six months. I should be grateful for that, but I wasn’t. I wondered if FM would get to keep flying, or if our whole flight had been trained—using DDF resources, all the focus we’d put into it, the lives of my friends—for nothing.
I knew better than to say that aloud. I didn’t need the lecture about how every sacrifice was part of a greater goal. I knew it by heart. I’d occasionally given it myself.
I could never say my mother didn’t understand—she understood better than anyone. She was a decorated pilot. She’d lost friends, flightleaders, wingmates. I could see the heaviness in her eyes, the burden she carried. She pushed on, doing everything she could for our people, because she believed in the cause—because we had to survive.
I was afraid I would never have the stomach for it, that I was soft and weak and would never be able to harden myself to do what needed to be done.
But if I was being honest with myself, I was equally afraid that I would.
One
Seven months later
Enough.
I stood in the landing bay on Wandering Leaf, staring through the windows at the exploding Superiority ship as the wreckage spiraled out into the blackness of space. The eerie blue shield of Detritus loomed in the distance. My flight stood around me, all watching the remains of the explosion, the tomb that had claimed my parents and half of our National Assembly.
We were supposed to have saved them. We were supposed to have won. Instead we’d barely gotten ourselves out alive.
I could have died in there. I almost did. I should thank Alanik for pulling me out, but I felt frozen, like something inside of me had died after all.
“Did Gran-Gran—” Rig asked.
“She escaped,” Alanik said. “So did Cobb. I saw them.” I could feel her reaching out through the nowhere, searching for them. “But…I don’t know where they are.”
“At least they weren’t here,” FM said. She put a hand on my shoulder, but I shook her off.
“Boom,” Boomslug said mournfully, looking at the wreckage. I didn’t know what to do with his sympathy, let alone everyone else’s. They were all staring at me, waiting to see what I was going to do. This was the moment a good commander should give an inspiring speech. Maintain morale. Treat this as a setback.
It wasn’t a setback. It was a scudding disaster. I didn’t have anything inspiring to say. I wasn’t even sure how I was staying on my feet.
I had to though. They were all looking to me. Or at me. I couldn’t really tell.
I wasn’t going to fall apart. Not here, not where my entire flight could see.
Fragments of the ship spun out into space, while others careened toward the planet. One hit the shield around Detritus and bounced off.
In my mind, my mother looked directly at me.
Do better than we did, she said.
Enough.
In the distance, the Superiority station that monitored Detritus blinked out of existence, hyperjumping away.
They wouldn’t even give us the dignity of revenge. They’d run like cowards. There was no one left for us to attack, just the terrible wreckage floating ever outward, a monument to our diplomatic failures.
“We’re going down to Platform Prime,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the others looking at each other, not sure what to make of that.
“Okay,” FM said. “But I think you need to stop for a minute—”
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.”
Not how I would have started, Alanik said in my mind. You don’t have proof of that, do you?
“Anyone who doesn’t believe me,” I said, “is invited to find Cobb so he can confirm. He was kidnapped and taken to the Superiority ship.”
“The one that blew up?” Commander Ulan said.
“That’s the one,” I said. “He and Mrs. Becca Nightshade escaped together. They’ll be making their way here soon, and until they get here, no one else is going to do anything stupid. Do you think you can all handle that?”
“You’re back,” a voice said from behind me, and I turned to see Vice Admiral Stoff striding toward me. He was one of three vice admirals who served under Cobb. My flightmates stepped aside to let him pass. Rig followed behind him. He hadn’t had a ship, so he’d probably asked Drape to hyperjump him to the slugs’ home location in Engineering. “Flightleader Weight, you’re under arrest for—”
Not this again. I wasn’t going to sit in the brig and watch while more people I cared about got hurt.
“The charges were a sham,” I said. “Either they were issued by my mother—who didn’t have the authority—or they were given by the false Admiral Cobb, who was actually an alien wearing a hologram.”
Vice Admiral Stoff blinked at me. This was definitely not the attitude I was supposed to take with my superior officer. ...
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