Neither Hwan or Sujin showed signs that they’d heard the ghost. If only I had Jang’s memories, I could respond to the captain with more confidence. Charm didn’t work that way, though.
Cautiously, I said, “I figured mercenaries were looking for easy prey with that unlucky freighter, sir.”
“There has been a lot of mercenary activity lately,” Hwan acknowledged. “And the raids are becoming bolder. Those pirates knew we were in the area and yet they still went after the Red Azalea.” His mouth compressed as his eyes bored into me. “They’re looking for something specific, and they’re getting desperate. They seek the Dragon Pearl. It’s important that we keep it out of their hands.”
The Dragon Pearl. A snippet of the investigator’s conversation with Mom came back to me: According to his captain’s report, your son left to go in search of the Dragon Pearl.
Hwan was that captain. He knew when my brother had gone missing, and he thought he knew why. I was getting so close to finding out the truth!
I couldn’t speak without the captain’s permission, so I just nodded again to indicate Jang’s understanding. If I wanted Hwan to trust me, I had to convince him that I remained a reliable member of the crew, despite my screwups.
“At least it doesn’t seem that the Pearl has been found yet—the Space Forces’ shamans would have detected its reappearance,” the captain said, continuing to look at me to gauge my reaction.
I wondered why the captain was telling me all this. Had he known Jang well? As for Sujin, they were still frozen in place.
Then I realized what was going on. Hwan was concerned that Jang had been shaken up by his encounter with the mercs.
“The pirates who attacked that freighter might have been able to tell us more, but unfortunately, none of them survived our skirmish,” Hwan said. “Sooner or later we’ll capture someone and force them to tell us what they know. In the meantime, I’m hoping to get intel from the sole survivor of the freighter’s crew.”
My breath caught. By sole survivor, he meant Byung-Ho. The girl, “Bora,” was dead. Even though I’d wanted everyone to think that, hearing him confirm it made me feel odd. Thankfully, it didn’t sound like the captain thought Byung-Ho was going to die. I hoped my pilot friend would wake from his healing sleep soon.
I was allowing myself to get distracted. I hated taking the risk, but I had to ask, and Hwan seemed to be in a talking mood. “Permission to speak, sir?” I ventured.
“Yes, Cadet?”
“Sir, does any of this relate to the cadet who vanished with his comrades? Cadet Jun?”
His eyes turned to slits, and I knew I’d made a mistake. “Have you been listening to gossip, Cadet?”
“I’m worried about him,” I said.
Beside me, Sujin groaned slightly.
“The whole group of them went AWOL,” Hwan said curtly. “It’s none of your affair.”
I gulped. “Yes, sir,” I said hastily.
Something was wrong. When I’d mentioned Jun’s name, I’d caught the distinct stink of alarm. Hwan was definitely hiding something.
“Carry on with your duties, Cadets,” Hwan said, and he moved on, leaving me wondering how a mere cadet could get information out of their captain.
“Whew,” Sujin said once the captain was out of earshot. “I’m glad he didn’t detain us for long. You should have known better than to bring up the deserters, though. Captain Hwan’s been furious about them ever since they vanished.”
“You’re right,” I conceded. “That was stupid of me.”
“Why do you care about Jun, anyway?” Sujin asked.
“Just curious,” I said, shrugging and throwing a little Charm Sujin’s way to make them believe me.
I was torn. On the one hand, maybe, if I hadn’t choked, I could have come up with a way to salvage the conversation with Hwan. On the other hand, I was relieved he was gone. Having a tiger stare at me with those amber eyes made me nervous. There was no higher predator, after all. I was grateful he thought of me as his crew member and not his prey.
Our next duty was a shift in the robot maintenance room. The senior cadet in charge looked bored as he pointed to a gleaming laundry robot standing against the wall. It had a head like an overturned wash bucket, two long arms as well as a scrub-brush extension, and a ridged washboard surface on its torso.
Sujin grimaced as they ran through the diagnostics in the robot’s rear control panel. Despite its shiny metal exterior, the robot refused to move or respond to any of the test commands. Instead, a single red light blinked wanly from its forehead area.
“This one’s no good,” Sujin said, banging on the robot in frustration. A front panel fell open to reveal a fold-down ironing board.
“Don’t do that,” I said automatically, although sometimes giving a machine a good thump was exactly what you needed to do to get it working again. “Here, let me try.”
It didn’t look too different from the household robots I’d occasionally had to repair back home—it was just a newer model. Sujin watched while I pulled out the battery pack. I counted to sixty, then put it back in. The robot chimed, its lights cycling back to blue. “See?” I said. “Always try a reboot first.”
“I’ll remember that,” Sujin said. “The more robots we fix, the less laundry we’ll have to do the old-fashioned way!” The goblin smiled at me, and I smiled back, relieved that my asking about Jun hadn’t made them suspicious.
We rushed to lessons and made it just in time. Haneul was already there, tapping her foot impatiently. Lieutenant Hyosu hadn’t assigned us seats—another nice thing about her class—which meant I could sit near Sujin and Haneul, the cadets I knew best. I felt bad about deceiving them by pretending to be Jang. The more I got to know them, the more I liked them.
That day, Hyosu was instructing us on the ship’s internal security system. She called on one of the older cadets and asked him, “What can you tell us about the ship’s meridians?”
“They’re lines of mystic energy that run throughout the ship,” he said. “If they get blocked, the ship will malfunction, just like a person gets sick when their gi is disrupted.”
I remembered the physician examining me, checking my gi—life force—for any signs of blockage.
“Correct,” said Hyosu. “When an engineer interfaces with the ship’s energies, we call that Engineer’s Trance. If the meridians are compromised, engineers can get injured because their gi is synced with that of the ship.”
Gyeong-Ja raised her hand. “How would a meridian get compromised in the first place?”
“Good question,” said Hyosu. “We have external shields to protect us from regular attacks—missiles and lasers and so on. Most of the meridians are inside the ship, but sabotage is still a possibility—from hackers overloading the systems or subverting the maintenance robots. Mercenaries are getting more and more clever.”
The mood in the room turned somber as the lieutenant continued. “Normally a battle cruiser like the Pale Lightning is more than a match for mercs. But in the Ghost Sector, things have become more dangerous. It has always been a base of operations for raiders, because sensible people don’t want to go anywhere near the Fourth Colony. Lately, though, violence has escalated. High Command wants us to intimidate the mercs, and the pirates are striking back any way they know how.”
Another cadet raised her hand. “Why are mercenaries tolerated at all?” she asked.
“It’s complicated.” Hyosu sighed. “They serve a convenient role for the Thousand Worlds’ major factions. Individual worlds and space stations aren’t allowed to have private armies—that would threaten the peace. But planets and factions get into feuds anyway. Since they can’t declare war outright, they raid each other instead, and the mercenaries are the ones paid to do the dirty work.”
I couldn’t help asking a question of my own. “Don’t the mercenaries have to get their supplies from somewhere, though? Couldn’t people shut them down from that end?”
“They could,” Hyosu said, “if enough people worked together. Unfortunately for us, a lot of planetary governments find the mercenaries so useful, they look the other way when the mercs come around for repairs or resupply.”
“Excuse me, Lieutenant,” I said, “but why haven’t the Space Forces cleaned out the Ghost Sector earlier? Why leave it until now?”
Someone behind me snickered, and I flushed.
Lieutenant Hyosu spoke sternly to the rude offender. “Don’t be so quick to laugh, Cadet. All questions are valid.” Then she turned to me. “The short answer is that the Space Forces rely on all the Thousand Worlds for funding. The mercs use the Ghost Sector as a base of operations. If we offended individual planets by shutting off their access to mercs, they would hit us in the budget. Battle cruisers aren’t cheap, you know.”
Hyosu looked around seriously at all of us. “Space Forces Command believes that the Dragon Pearl has surfaced in the Ghost Sector. That’s why we’re breaking the status quo. The mercenaries are all looking for it. We have to get to it first.”