30
Molly surveyed her prison cell aboard the Navy StarCarrier. Due to a spate of recent events, she’d begun to consider herself somewhat a connoisseur of incarceration.
With its riveted metal plating, functioning sink with hot and cold water, flushable toilet, and padded double bunks, she gave it three stars. It couldn’t match the filth and squalor on Palan—and it lacked the extra, decadent touches of a Drenard prison. In a Navy known for operating along one extreme or the other, she’d discovered the one thing they do in moderation: lock people up.
In a strategy right out of the Navy manual of torture techniques, her captors had left her alone for an hour. The idea was to marinate a prisoner’s brain in their own guilt to prepare them for the grilling ahead. Molly knew all about the tactic, but that didn’t prevent it from working. She had a lot to feel bad about: the Wadi locked up in the laz, just waiting to be discovered; the multiple failures on Dakura; the fact that she was no closer to discovering what her parents had been up to on Lok; and the utter lack of progress on helping rescue her father.
She felt positive that whatever Lucin thought could end the war, was somehow connected to her parents, but she couldn’t see it. And now she’d be court-martialed and airlocked for what had happened at the Academy, dead before she could unravel the mystery.
As the hour of guilt wrapped up, she half expected Saunders himself to arrive and begin the softening process, but her first visitor in Navy black didn’t fit the profile. Too thin. The mysterious figure strode by the bars slowly, his fingers rapping against the cold steel.
Molly remained seated but leaned forward as the face centered itself between two bars.
“Riggs?”
“Hello, Fyde.”
She couldn’t believe it. Riggs had been one of her classmates at the Academy. He and Cole took turns flying as each other’s wingman. He had graduated early during Lucin’s cover-up of the Tchung Affair, and Molly had never found out where he’d been stationed. Now she knew: he’d been assigned to Saunders. She rose from her bunk and approached the bars.
Riggs took two steps back.
“Gods, Riggs. It is you!”
“Don’t try anything.” He looked at her warily. “I shouldn’t even be down here, I—I just had to see for myself.”
“See what? Riggs, this is just a misunderstanding.”
“Misunderstanding?” His face contorted with rage. “You killed Lucin! You armed your spaceship, a spaceship you stole from the Navy, and I heard about your fight with Delta Patrol—”
“That wasn’t a fight! We ran away!”
“So you don’t deny the other stuff?”
Molly could see tears filming over Riggs’s eyes.
“Lucin was about to kill me!” she said. “And I didn’t steal that ship, it’s mine!”
Riggs shook his head. He backed up and leaned on the wall across from her cell. “Not anymore,” he said. “And they’re getting everything from your little alien friend. You and Cole are gonna be tried as traitors.”
“Who—?”
“The Drenards, Molly? Are you serious?”
Molly cursed under her breath, “Walter, you flanker.” She saw Riggs’s body stiffen and feared he might take her anger as a confession. “It’s not like that, Riggs. We had a Drenard friend that needed—”
“You have Drenard friends?” He shook his head and crossed his arms. “I used to stick up for you. I treated you like a little sister. Me and Cole. I don’t know what you did to him, but you aren’t gonna sweet talk me into buying your bull. Ha! I guess I’m safe ’cause I always saw you as a sister.”
“Riggs, I—”
“Save it for Saunders,” he said. “We all know you killed Lucin, and we know how you left Saunders behind. You’re just lucky the CO made sure the boarding party was full of the oldest marines, the people who don’t understand what you did; otherwise, you probably wouldn’t have made it to this cell alive.” He leaned forward, the tears on his cheeks caught in the light overhead. “I can’t promise you I wouldn’t have joined in,” he added.
With that, Riggs spun away from the wall and marched out of sight.
Molly clung to the bars, speechless.
????
They gave her another hour to steep. Molly couldn’t help but admire the plan. Even if the Navy had nothing on any of them, she knew they were all receiving the same line from their grillers: your friends are flipping, and he who flips last gets burned worst.
She also knew the best course of action was to think about something else, but it was impossible not to focus on the very thing she concentrated on avoiding. And she knew Walter. She had little doubt the traitorous bastard was spilling his guts. It wouldn’t be the first time he turned them in to the Navy expecting some sort of reward.
Molly looked up through the bars and pictured Riggs leaning on the far wall, his arms folded, his eyes down. It was crazy how young he’d looked. He shouldn’t even be out of the Academy. Neither should she nor Cole, for that matter. They were all little, nubile pawns staggering around a board that Lucin had set up and left unfinished.
She tried to mentally study that board, to determine which opening he’d used and which gambits to ignore. Once again, his tragic death at Cole’s hands haunted her. The only person who could help her understand what was going on had been murdered—adding one more unpardonable deed to her growing list of sins.
She sat on the edge of her bunk, gazing down at the long, straight shadows the bars cast across the floor. It occurred to her once again that jail cells provided her with her only opportunities to calmly sit and ponder her mistakes.
How fitting.
A wide shadow slid over the lines at her feet, interrupting her thoughts. She didn’t need to look up to know who it was.
“Admiral, huh?”
She meant it as small talk, a compliment, even. It came out snide and rude.
“Interrogation room B,” he barked to someone else.
Molly looked over, but he was gone. Two guards in Navy black had taken his place. The bars of her cell descended into the floor, and the two men came at her with cruel smiles.
Rumors of her exploits had likely thinned the herd of people who could be trusted to handle her. They cinched the cuffs behind her back and wrenched them up high as they marched her down the hall. Molly walked on her toes, grunting from the pain in her shoulders, but that just brought sniffles of laughter—and the guy holding the cuffs responded by pulling them up higher.
Just like being back at the Academy, she thought, only these are larger and stronger boys.
Interrogation room B consisted of a metal-plated box broken up by a door on one wall and a mirror on an adjoining one. A metal table in the center had been welded to the floor, as had the wide benches on both sides. A precaution, Molly knew, in the event of gravity malfunctions. The guards cuffed Molly to one of the benches, nodded to the mirror, then walked out.
Saunders entered soon after with a reader and a glass of water. He slid his bulk between the table and the bench, took a sip of the water, then set it down with a clack of glass on metal. He stared at the reader for a moment before setting it aside.
Molly watched the condensation on the surface of the glass drip down, forming a ring of wetness around the base. The entire scene was so cliché, so much like every Navy drama on holovid, it was all she could do not to laugh. Just thinking about how awful and crazy she would seem if she did break out in a giggle-fit made it even harder to contain.
“You keep interesting company, Ms. Fyde.” Saunders leaned forward, both his forearms resting on the table in front of him, his fingers interlocked into one meaty fist.
“I’m sorry,” Molly told him. She looked him right in the eyes. “I’m sorry for attacking you that day.”
Saunders smirked. “Oh? But not sorry for killing my friend, eh?” He grabbed the reader for a reference. “Are you sorry for Corporal Timothy Reed? Or Special Agent David Rowling? Or how about Staff Sergeant Jim McCleary? Aren’t sorry about any of them?”
“Are those the guys from Palan?” Molly asked.
“The men you killed, yeah.”
“I am very sorry for them. And I’m sorry for Lucin. But they were all in self-defense. You were the exception. You were the only person I attacked in anger, and I’m sorry—”
“I don’t want your apology, Fyde. I’m actually glad you attacked me. I was going to spend the rest of my life at that Academy. I would have been happy, sure, but I turned down dozens of promotions out of love for that place. I needed a kick in the ass to get me out here fighting the good fight.”
Molly was dying to point out that it wasn’t a kick in the ass that she’d given him. Her desire to laugh returned—she swallowed it down, afraid she might be losing her senses.
“What about the fourth guy on Palan?” she asked. “Was he okay?”
Saunders looked at the reader again. “Agent Simmons? No, we know who killed him. Not that it’s going to save your butt. We’ve got more than enough to jettison you into space. I’m just here to make sure we have it all.”
That wasn’t the person Molly was thinking about, but she ignored the discrepancy.
“I’ll answer everything honestly, Captain—I’m sorry, Admiral. I’ve been hunting for answers for over a month, and you’re welcome to the few I’ve found.”
He smiled at this. “You sound as eager as your Palan friend. Boy had so much to say, we couldn’t get it down fast enough. Horrible English with that kid. Turns out he is a fast typist, though. We put him in front of a computer, and the lad is writing a book on what you guys’ve been up to.” Saunders set down the reader. “Now I want to hear it from you.”
Been up to? Molly wondered how much Walter knew of the disaster on Glemot and just what kind of trouble he could really get them in.
As if they could airlock her twice.
“What do you want to hear?” she asked Saunders. She tensed up, afraid of his answer.
But, as it turned out, not quite afraid enough . . .
Saunders smiled at her and unclasped his hands.
“Why don’t we start with who we’re talking to on your ship’s nav computer.”