Cole nodded.
“Good,” Mortimor said. “I’m sorry you had to clean up one of my mistakes, but we wanted that done years ago. We all agreed.”
Cole bobbed his head again, unsure of what to say.
“So, you never made it to Lok, and you don’t know if Molly did.”
Cole shook his head. “Do you think she’s okay?”
“I don’t know,” Mortimor told him. “I’m worried about all of us, to be honest.”
“So what’s the plan?”
“For you? Some rehab with that new hand and some rest. What’s done is done. But first, there’s someone who’s dying to meet you.”
Cole looked out across the rooftop. The sideways rain made it feel like his feet were glued to a wall and the water was falling straight down. “Who would want to meet me?” he asked.
“I want you to listen and listen carefully, okay? This person’s name isn’t to be spoken where anyone can overhear.”
“Who is it?”
“As far as anyone knows, she works more for the enemy than us, okay?”
Cole swallowed. “Who wants to see me?” he asked.
Arthur squeezed his shoulder and leaned in close.
“Have you ever heard of the Bern Seer?”
32
Parsona wasn’t the only ship leaving the stables in a hurry, or Bekkie, for that matter. Dozens of craft lifted up from all around town as crewmembers ran across Pete’s dirt lot in panic, trying to get back to their ships. Through the carboglass, Molly could hear improperly warmed thrusters screaming as neighboring starships lifted off cold. In the distance, a Navy cruiser fell through the atmosphere, glowing bright red—a sign of breached reentry panels. It disappeared over the horizon, followed by a flash of light.
“Why’re they in atmo?” Cat asked. She leaned forward from the nav chair while Scottie hovered behind, his hands on the backs of their seats.
“I don’t know,” Molly admitted. “Maybe they were trying to land, or something.”
“A cruiser?” Cat asked incredulously.
“They don’t want debris,” Scottie said. “That explains the shuttles.”
Molly avoided the crush of departing traffic and flew low, skirting the prairie as she headed out of town. There weren’t many more blips falling, but a few big ones were still in orbit.
“No debris?” Cat asked, turning to Scottie.
“For the rift. They’re shooting them down intact.”
“I think you’re right,” Molly said. “They’re somehow disabling them and knocking them out of orbit. And they’re making it look easy.”
“Poor Ryn,” Scottie said.
“I’m sure he’s fine. Probably just as safe wherever he is.”
Scottie didn’t say anything. Behind them, Molly could hear Walter arguing with Urg about which dishes went where.
“Where should we go?” Molly asked. She looked at their current course and realized she had subconsciously begun flying back toward her home village and the rift—the very last place they needed to be.
“Mount Jeffers?” Cat asked Scottie.
“Probably what everyone else is thinking. So, no.”
“We could hide out in the woods beyond Ashron,” Cat said. “There’s tons of clearings big enough to set down in. Maybe we should wait there and see if things calm back down.”
“Which way is that?” Molly asked, turning to the others.
Cat pointed through the carboglass, her face rigid. Molly followed her trembling arm, adjusting course to match the direction she was pointing, mistaking the gesture for an answer to her question.
“What the flank?” Scottie muttered, leaning forward between the two seats.
Ahead of them, descending through the atmosphere nose-down like a dropped dart, was a Navy StarCarrier.
“Holy shit,” Cat whispered.
Molly pulled back into a hover, sinking down toward the grasses.
Cowering.
The almighty bulk of the greatest class of starship ever built was descending from the heavens. Tilted slightly—falling slower than gravity warranted—the thing seemed to be straining against the inevitable, its forward thrusters raging to slow its impact. The great ship’s nose disappeared over the horizon, and then the rest of the monstrosity came to a sudden, sickening halt.
They all waited, breathless, for some cataclysmic noise to accompany the horrific fall. They watched for the ship to crumble, tip over, or maybe even explode.
It did none of those things.
Impossibly, the tail of the great StarCarrier remained in the same position. Askance. Aloft. Thrusters pointing up to the sky from which it had plummeted.
It just stood there, perfectly still. Terrible and lifeless.
33
Anlyn wrapped her hand in Edison’s and squeezed one of his large fingers. “How confident do you feel about this?” she asked.
“Ninety-two percent,” he said. “Rounding down, of course.”
Anlyn frowned; she let go of his finger and hovered her own over the hyperdrive button. The coordinates for a class V star were locked in the computer, a sight that ran counter to everything she knew about astral navigation. Red lights flashed and alarms sounded, warning her of the poor choice of arrival coordinates. Only once before had she ever jumped while overriding a hyperdrive’s alarms, and she was pretty sure that decision, for better or for worse, had been the most momentous of her entire life. This decision, however, seemed to rival that other one.
She closed her eyes, said, “I love you,” and then pressed the switch.
Her stomach dropped. More warning alarms went off.
Edison screamed beside her.
Anlyn opened her eyes and caught a wave of harsh light across her face right before the windshield darkened, returning things to normal. A thousand white dots crawled across her vision like albino ants. She blinked rapidly, trying to sort out the foreign alarms and worrying about Edison.
“Are you okay?” she yelled. She applied thrust, then gripped the steering column with both hands. Her stomach had dropped because they were in free-fall. And the spots of light seemed to be flurries of snow.
“Zero optical functioning!” Edison roared in English.
“Great Hori, we’re in atmosphere! I’ve got targets everywhere. Trying to get lift!”
A voice interrupted in a language she recognized, just as she knew the general look of their script: Bern. The words rattled for a few seconds, then stopped.
“Did you hear that?” Anlyn asked.
“Affirmitive,” Edison said, fumbling for the radio, “They find our arrival vector non-optimal.”
Anlyn grabbed the mic and pressed it into his groping paw. She had the ship leveled off and rejoining the other SADAR targets at altitude. She heard Edison grunt, clearing his throat; he launched into a conversation in Bern.
“That didn’t sound like our speech,” she said, once he was done.
Edison sat back in his seat, dabbing at his eyes with the back of his paws. “I’m ignoring our prior schematics,” he said.
“What?” Anlyn settled into formation, flying by the instruments, the outside world shrouded in white. “What did you say to them?”
“I said flight eight twelve four, Exponent, falling into line, apologies for the fright.”
“Why would you do that?” Anlyn glanced over at Edison. “We came here to talk!”
He shook his head. “Our surviving the jump obviates the need for talk,” he said. “Assumptions have been validated: there’s an invasion underway. By extension, the Bern are little interested in nonmilitant communications.”
Anlyn settled down, the shaking in her arms subsiding as the rush of jumping into the center of a star and surviving gradually faded away. She looked at the grid-like pattern of targets spread out over thousands of kilometers, the blips flickering and sporadic from some sort of interference. Still, there was no doubting what she was seeing. A massive invasion force was assembled all around her—in fact she was now a part of it. Edison had been right about everything.
The voice on the radio returned and carried on for half a minute.
“What did he say?”
“He expressed grievances with our flight commander followed by orientation procedurals for us. We are presently queued up for the rift, number four hundred eighteen. Maintain velocity and minimize chatter. Resume three hour shifts.”
Anlyn laughed, her voice shaking with all things but humor. “Three hour shifts? Great. Who’s gonna take over for us so we can get some sleep?”
Edison shrugged. “Such logistics normally fall upon the commander, Commander.”
Anlyn turned to frown at Edison and saw his furry cheeks peeled back—his teeth flashing.
Anlyn laughed at him. Once more, without humor.
34
As Parsona crept toward the horizon, the full bulk of the Star-Carrier came into view. It seemed to rise out of the ground like a geological formation—an obelisk defying time and gravity. While the majority of the ship appeared intact, the forward twenty percent had been crushed, or perhaps driven into the ground. Smoke streaked off the massive wreck in dozens of places, emanating from glowing-orange fires. Other than that, the hulking tower stood as a quiet memorial to a battle lost.
“Dang,” Urg muttered.
Molly looked over her shoulder to see that the large Callite had squeezed in beside Scottie. The two of them were leaning forward, peering out through the carboglass at the gigantic ship ahead. Behind them, she could hear Walter continuing to put things away in the cargo bay. She turned back around and concentrated on keeping low to Lok’s grasslands, rising now and then only to clear strips of straggly trees. She couldn’t help but notice the way Cat strained forward in her seat, taking in the view. The Wadi did the same beside her, its neck stretched out, tongue flicking.
“Crazy to see something so invincible look . . . dead,” Scottie said.
“I was just thinking the same thing,” Cat said. She tore her gaze away and glanced around at the dash. “You got any ’scopes in this thing?”
“Like binoculars?” Molly shook her head. “No.”
“I think they set down in the lake,” Scottie said. “That’s a shame.”
As they got closer to the wreck, Molly saw he was right. Lok had no oceans, just a few puddles the locals exaggerated by calling them “lakes.” The StarCarrier had landed right in the middle of one; the nose of the great ship was buried in a muddy crater and surrounded by pools of water covered in oil and fuel—some of them on fire. A wall of mud and dirt had been thrown up by the force of entry, forming a berm on the perimeter. The resulting barrier and moat looked purposefully built, like a warning to interlopers saying: “Stay out.”
Molly flew over the glistening brown wall and felt sad for the flashes of light twinkling on dry ground—the flapping of displaced swimming things. As she banked around to perform a full circuit of the ship, keeping Parsona low enough to feel safe from the fleet in orbit, she couldn’t help but see the once-powerful craft in the same light as the fish: an animal out of its element with no way of putting it back. A thing dying, if not already dead.
As they rounded the port side, the stenceling on the side of the ship came into view, and Molly lost what little breath she’d been holding.
ZEBRA-9200 “Gloria”
This wasn’t just any StarCarrier, it was the very one she and Cole had escaped from two weeks ago. The realization made her feel like thrusting away from it, as if it still posed some threat to her. She read the hull designation several times, the surge of adrenaline passing as she forced herself to remain calm.
“So big,” someone whispered.
Molly nodded. Up close, the ship seemed even more massive than it had in space, perhaps because the enormity of an entire cosmos wasn’t swallowing it up, providing some sense of scale. It took almost fifteen minutes to do a slow lap around the mountain of metal. There were no signs of life, no lights or movement from survivors. Everywhere along the ground, the ship’s hull was a twisted mess of shrapnel and torn plasteel, entire decks of the carrier crushed and impassible.
“There’s no way in,” Cat said.
“And no safe place to land and walk in from. I don’t know what we were thinking to come out here.”
“Curiosity,” Scottie said. He leaned over the control console to peer up at the metal cliff looming ahead of them. “And didn’t that kill the cat?” he asked.
“What about the hangar bay?” Cat asked, ignoring Scottie.
“We can look,” Molly said, “but I’d think they’d have shut it before reentry.”
She took Parsona up and spiraled around toward the ship’s belly, remembering the last time she had flown along that very section of the massive carrier. Four Firehawks had been escorting her—their missiles armed and locked. The size and shape of the hull hanging in space had filled her with fear. She’d been convinced the Navy was about to airlock her and her friends for a string of tragic events.
Now, despite the unease she felt from recognizing the craft, it leaned sadly in the dry atmosphere of her backwoods home planet. Unmoving. Harmless. It didn’t seem right that such a large creation could meet its end in such a short period of time, or end up somewhere as inconsequential as Lok.
“Damn thing’s open,” Scottie said, pointing to one of the carrier’s airlock bays. “Can we fly in?”
Molly pulled up opposite the airlock. The StarCarrier was leaning to one side, the open hangar pointing up to the sky, which meant she had to angle Parsona’s nose down so they could see inside. She reached for the spotlight controls before noticing the lights inside the bay were still functional.