31
“Don’t feel bad. He had us fooled for a long time as well.”
Now that they were standing close to one another, Molly could see the faint marks on Jakobs’s face from Cole’s handiwork. Those medical reports were flashing back to her, each entry corresponding to a white line on his young skin.
“You have to be wrong,” she said. “Whatever you think Cole’s doing, he’s not. I can explain why we’re avoiding the Navy. When we got to Palan—”
“We know about Palan,” he interrupted. “We found the three office workers who died in the rain. We found Simmons—you probably knew him as Drummond—and we’re pretty sure Saunders and Cole were behind it all.”
“What?!” Molly had no idea “traitor” implied all this. “No,” she said. “They were trying to kill Cole. He’s working to uncover the whole thing. You have this backwards.”
“I understand what you think, I just need you to look at something with an open mind, okay? Just watch this video, it’s a lot simpler than trying to convince you that the way you remember things was not how they happened.”
He held a small video device out for her. She took it.
“Watch,” he repeated.
She did.
The still image displayed on the screen made her throat constrict with nostalgia: the simulator room. A long line of white pods and a wall of bare block. Someone walked on-screen. It wasn’t a still image; it was a security video. A cadet, walking away from the camera, went straight to her old pod, fourth on the left. He did something by the rear of the simulator. He looked around once.
Molly knew.
When he finished, he returned the plate and fastened it. He turned back the way he’d come, facing the camera. But she didn’t need to see his face to recognize the way Cole walks. Her world shattered.
“Why?” she asked, the question directed more at the boy in the video.
Jakobs took the player back and tucked it away. He motioned to the sofa, but she couldn’t move. “Listen,” Jabobs said, moving closer. “Your father’s ship was discovered almost a year ago, long before you heard about it. The Navy wasn’t too eager to get it back at first; the guys holding it were asking far too much for a civilian craft. Lucin pushed as hard as he could, but there was a lot of resistance. He just didn’t want to get your hopes up before he had the craft in hand. He asked me to tell you that.
“When Saunders realized what was going on, he blew his top. He thought Lucin’s past was destroying his focus, his ability to do his job. He wanted you gone and he?.?.?.?he promised Cole a major promotion to Special Assignments if he helped him out. After the Tchung simulation, he had you expelled, and he thought that’d be the end of it.”
Jakobs shook his head. “But Lucin thinks the world of you. He kept fighting for the Parsona and doting on you during weekends and breaks. When he went over the replays from the Tchung simulation, he suspected Saunders was up to something. The problem was, he went to Cole to help uncover it. He was trusting Saunders’s own agent to uncover his plans. Since then, Cole has been doing everything he can to keep you away from the Navy while he tries to get in touch with his boss. We don’t know what his next move would’ve been. Fortunately for us, when an arms dealer called to report someone traveling with a Glemot, he gave us the name of the ship and someone high up recognized the name Parsona, called the Academy, and luckily, Lucin heard about it first. We’ve been trying to keep all this in-house, of course. Cadets that know you and that Lucin can trust.
“So here we are. And everything’s gonna to be fine, now. We’ll get the prisoners secured aboard Parsona—in your staterooms or the escape pods—and then you and I will follow the Firehawk to Canopus. There, the Navy can take over.”
Molly understood the words, but it didn’t feel as if she heard them. They just appeared, like mysterious wounds after a long battle.
“I know it’s a lot to absorb, but think about this: Lucin will be able to get you back in the Academy once Saunders has been exposed and put on trial. You might even get to fly again. And I know me and some of the cadets were hard on you, but we were all hard on each other, it’s part of the toughening-up process.?.?.”
Molly locked her eyes on his. Jakobs paused, but seemed to take the look the wrong way. He moved closer. “.?.?.and I don’t know about you, but I always thought there was something between us. Something physical that we never—”
She slapped the next words out of Jakobs’s head. As hard as she could. Pain lanced out of her tender wrist and shot up to her shoulder. It felt like electricity. It felt great.
She turned away from him and marched back to the hangar, ready to go wherever they were taking her. As long as it was away from here.
When she entered the hangar, Molly saw Dinks hovering in his Firehawk outside the forcefield. He waved at her through the carboglass; she ignored him and stomped into the cargo bay. Walter sat at the workbench; he looked up from his game.
“Cole iss a bad guy?”
“I don’t know, pal. And I don’t wanna talk about it.” She glanced around. “Where’s Edison?”
“They took him into hiss room. He iss chained up. Awake and very angry.”
“Angry is better than dead.” She hesitated. “And Cole?”
“Locked up too. But I am not in trouble, they ssaid. Navy reward.”
“I’m sure they’ll give you a big reward. Now don’t worry about this Navy stuff, okay?”
“Okay, Molly.” He bent back over his game.
Molly wanted to go and talk to Cole, but she knew her voice wouldn’t work, even to ask him to explain himself. The raw hurt and sense of betrayal she felt at that moment—the ability to be completely crushed by another human being—made her realize something. She had, indeed, been in love with Cole.
And now she hated him for it.
????
“You sure you don’t want to fly us out of here? It is your ship.”
Molly looked over from Cole’s seat where she was nestled in the depression he’d made. She shook her head, her helmet twisting with the momentum.
“Okay,” Jakobs said as the shimmer of light ahead of them vanished. Parsona lifted unevenly from the floor, one of her landing struts scraping loudly across the deck for a few meters, then they punched through the boundary of the hangar and into space.
Dinks took the lead in the Firehawk while Jakobs followed. When both vessels were clear of the asteroid they turned and started out to a safe hyperjump point.
Molly turned to Jakobs, “Are Cole and Edison going to be okay in the staterooms?”
He glanced over, then jerked his head back forward, concentrating on flying. “They’ll be fine. I told Dinks to take it nice and easy out to the jump point. From there it’ll be two short hops to the Orbital Station at Canopus.”
“And then to Earth, right?”
Jakobs looked at her again, longer this time. “Eventually, yeah. But you do realize they’re gonna court-martial Cole, right? The Navy should be able to put a panel together at Canopus in a few days. We’ll probably be there a week or more. You’ll have to testify, of course.”
Testify? Against Cole? The thought had never occurred to her. And testify to what? Sabotaging their simulator, playing dead, and then kidnapping her? Or for saving her life several times since?
Jakobs kept turning to study her face through their open visors. She noticed Parsona’s nose drift down and to the right whenever he did this. The fact that this clown had graduated early and been put on Special Assignments irked her.
“If he was a civilian, he might get life in prison,” said Jakobs. “But he’s Navy. Ship theft and going AWOL are capital crimes. Hell, even if the murders of the Navy men don’t stick, he’s just purchased illegal arms. This is just the stuff we know about. There’s no telling what will come to light once we get you and your crew on the stand.”
Her crew. Walter. The nuke on Glemot. Molly felt sick to her stomach. And Jakobs wasn’t through.
“They’ll airlock him for this, Molly. I hope you realize how serious this is.”
She spun on him. “Airlock him?! Kill him?! Those guys on Palan died in the rains. They were trying to kill us! The jail we broke out of? They were going to kill Cole that very day without a trial! And we bought guns because everywhere we go, the boys in black seem eager to do us harm. Your little ambush is what we’ve been running from.”
Jakobs’ face turned red. “Ambush? This is a rescue mission. The Navy said I could shoot Cole on sight if I needed to. It turns out your hero has a shady past, and now he has a service record to match. So stop defending the guy. He’s the one that screwed you during the Tchung simulation and got you kicked out of school.” Jakobs pointed to the scars on his face. “Look what he did to me!” He took a deep breath and looked ahead, correcting his course.
“You saw the video yourself,” he went on. “And when the Navy Panel sees that and the evidence brought in from Palan, your friend is gonna get what’s coming to him. Now get on the right side of the law before I consider cuffing you up in your stateroom.”
Molly looked down at her palms, resting in her lap. “I need to use the bathroom before we jump,” she said meekly.
What she really needed was to get away from Jakobs and that conversation. But also, a small part of her hoped that just being nearer to Cole would provide some answers. She had so many questions welling up. If she could be wrong about him, she didn’t think her brain could ever again be trusted to draw a correct conclusion.
Walter hissed at her as she entered the cargo bay, trying once more to show her his videogame. It had become a little contest between them: him eager to show off his work and her hunting for an excuse. Right now, she didn’t have the energy to play, so she leaned over and pretended to be interested in his computer.
Even in her funk, she had to admit: the game was impressive. She’d seen enough of them around the Academy to appreciate the graphics. Surely he hadn’t programmed the whole thing. “You made this?” she asked.
“Yesss,” Walter hissed, his voice dripping with pride.
“It’s amazing,” she told him. And it was. Running across the surface of a detailed planet, a space cadet waved blasters in both hands. There were all kinds of things to shoot and kill—typical boy stuff—but done realistically enough that even she might get into it. She handed it back to Walter, who beamed at her.
“Keep it up,” she said, patting his head. Walter resumed control of the figure, destroying things for points, while Molly retreated to her stateroom. She closed the door and hoped that small ounce of attention would keep him satisfied all the way to Canopus. She didn’t have enough energy to take care of herself, much less someone else.
She sat in the bathroom for a few minutes, pretending to use it, then got up and flushed the air chamber, capping the pointless ruse. After another pause, waiting for answers that should’ve been forming, she gave up and walked out of her room.
Instead of going to the cockpit, though, she snuck back to Cole’s quarters. His door was locked—sealed with her Captian’s codes. She could key it open and demand answers, but how would Jakobs and the Navy see that?
She took off her helmet and pressed her cheek to the door. The thrumming of the thrusters vibrated through the metal, singing along the length of the ship. Molly could hear her pulse racing through her ear.
She pulled herself away and went to Edison’s door, pressing a hand to the cool metal. She wondered what the Navy would do with him. Especially when they found out he was one of the last of his kind. The pain of what happened on Glemot piled on top of her new miseries, crushing her. She didn’t know what would come out in a trial, but it would be difficult to explain the things she didn’t understand herself.
She headed toward the cockpit and noticed that Walter’s door was open. She stepped inside, looking for any excuse to stay close to the two prisoners. Surveying herself in the mirror over Walter’s dresser, she hardly recognized the person looking back. The girl’s brown hair was too long—matted and unkempt. Her eyes appeared too old for the rest of her. Her mouth was sad. The poor thing’s shoulders drooped like someone who had worked for years under a heavy burden.
Molly took a deep breath and tried to hold it in. Her eyes wandered to a few of the pictures Walter had taken and printed out with the ship’s computer. They were tucked in the frame of the mirror, their edges curling.
One showed a group of Glemots working on Parsona. She didn’t even know he’d snapped any photos back then. The lush greenness in the background didn’t do the planet justice, but Molly reached up to brush her fingers across the image—the image of a land she’d helped destroy.
Another photo he had on display must have been pulled from one of the security feeds. It showed her patting Walter on the head. She didn’t even remember when it had taken place, and before she could be upset at him for hacking into the ship’s computers, she saw another picture behind it. Hidden. She pulled it out. It didn’t make any sense. She stared at it, as if it eventually would.
The picture showed the simulator room at the Academy, taken from eye level. A few cadets milled about that she didn’t recognize. Rows of simulator pods faced the familiar block wall.
Why in the galaxy would Walter have a picture of this? She turned the photo over and looked at the back. Nothing was written there, but it wasn’t the photo paper the ship used. Where had he found this?
She put it back in its place and reminded herself to ask him about both pictures. The one he hacked from the computer upset her, almost as much as the hidden one confused. Molly put her helmet back on and stepped back into the cargo bay. Walter looked up at her, sneering. He was playing his game and obviously having the time of his life.
She thought about the video game.
And the picture of the simulators.
Her vision squeezed in from the edges until only the center was visible, like looking through a straw. She nearly fainted to the ground, staggered forward, steadied herself on one of the large crates, then sank to her knees.
Molly looked up to the cockpit and spotted Jakobs’s video player on the panel by his seat. Past Jakobs, and through the carboglass, she could see the Firehawk ahead of them. Dinks was slowly pulling away for the jump through hyperspace. Beyond that, glints of a fleet winked in the starlight, dashing about in a cluster. The ships of Darrin I were chasing down another customer.
Molly took all of it in—and none of it. Her brain raced and reeled, assembling pieces like a planet coalescing out of dust, all of them orbiting Walter’s video game. How realistic it looked. The little cadet running around with his pistols—she recognized that figure. Knew his artificial gait from somewhere. She realized how easily that alien world could be substituted for a room full of simulator pods.
For a Navy reward, of course.
????
Jakobs turned to look back at her, his visor up. He must’ve been yelling at her to return to her chair so they could prep for the jump. Molly knew this, but she couldn’t hear him—her head pounded with depression and rage. She pulled the lower half of her helmet closed, sealing it tight. If anything, the pounding just got louder.
She dug her gloves under one side of the crate, tossed the lid off and peered down at the gleaming metal contraption inside.
Molly thought about them killing Cole. For what? For protecting her? And they would do it with bad information. Dirty information. It reminded her of that day in Saunders’s office. Of being berated after having done everything right. And now an innocent man, a good man, was going to be killed by liars and cheats.
Over her dead body.
Over all of their dead bodies.
She sighted down the length of the crated laser cannon, eyeing Jakobs. He froze in the act of unbuckling his harness, his mouth and eyes wide open. Molly allowed herself to sink down—down into the well of dark thoughts rising up within her. Part of her, some sliver of sanity, yelled. It pleaded for a return to her senses. But it was a small girl—lost in a nightmare—unable to find her voice. The rest of Molly flared with anger. Betrayal after betrayal had finally worn her down. Eaten to her core. Her thin crust of hope had been ablated off by a galaxy of cruelness.
She peered into the crate. Her head roared. She ignored the consequences and hit the lever Edison had shown her.
Hit it and held it.