He was a big man, but still not fat enough to fill his skin. It hung down around his face, sagging in leathery flaps, as if he’d spent most of his career on a large planet. His white uniform, so immaculate and crisp it seemed to glow, squeezed folds of flesh from his collar. A wall of small, rectangular medals stood bricked up over his left breast—accolades from a lifetime of service.
He didn’t begin by yelling at them the way he had the others, which worried Molly even more.
“What in the hell am I going to do with you two?” he asked. He sounded sad. Confused. Molly wondered if he really wanted their input, but she wasn’t going to say anything unless she was addressed. Cole stayed mum as well.
“There were enough targets up there that you could’ve fired blindly and hit something.” He looked at Cole. “Mendonça, I’m disappointed in how quickly you were knocked out of action. I blame you for that—but everything else falls on this young lady.”
Saunders turned to Molly and looked her straight in the eye. His disappointment was worse than the anger she’d been expecting. She felt her mouth go dry and knew if she spoke—her voice would sound unnatural. Broken.
Saunders listed her offenses, referencing a report projected onto his desk. “You misfired a missile, you went into hyperspace during a battle—” At this, he glanced up to ensure his disgust registered. After a pause, he went on. “You pulled over 40 Gs in battle. You deployed your landing gear?” He shook his head. “But the worst is that it appears you released your full ration of chaff at once, which is a tactical mistake, you didn’t even arm them first, which is inexcusable, and you did this with the worst timing possible—taking out the rear half of your bird in the explosion.”
He looked up at Molly. “Navigators go through flight school for a reason, Cadet Fyde. The basics are expected out of you in the event your lesser talents are needed from the nav chair. I didn’t expect you to shoot down any enemy, but you did everything you could today to get yourself killed and the Navy’s equipment destroyed.
“I’m not certain this is a problem we can fix, to tell you the truth. You’ve had a hard time fitting in here, and I’m sure you know I was against your enrollment from the beginning. I never cared that the Admiral and your old man were close. I have a lot of respect for both of them, but I will not be held responsible for graduating someone who might get my boys killed in a real battle.”
Cole raised his hand. “Sir, I—”
“Can it, Mendonça!” Saunders pushed his bulk up from the chair and rose slowly. His jowls were still moving from the outburst, and he jabbed a meaty finger in Cole’s direction. “If you spent less time sticking up for her and more time getting her up to speed, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. I’ve had it with you putting her ahead of the rest of the fleet, son. You’re dismissed. Now get out of my office.”
At this, tears drizzled out of Molly’s eyes and started rolling toward the corners of her mouth. She licked away the salt, ashamed her partner might see her like this.
Cole stepped forward to salute Saunders. He clicked his heels together and jerked his arm down to his side. As he spun around, his eyes met Molly’s tear-filled ones, and she saw his cheeks twitch. Water had already formed a reflective barrier on his brown eyes. For a brief moment, they were looking into each other’s visors again. Molly’s lips trembled at the sight, and with the thought of being expelled and never seeing him again.
He brushed against her as he moved to the door, leaving her alone with Captain Saunders.
“Are you crying, now? My goodness, girl, what made you think to join the Navy? Did you really dream of being like your father one day? Did you think you could bring him back from the dead?” He stopped himself, but had already gone too far. He looked down at his desk.
“Dismissed,” he said. It was like the last bit of air went out of him to say it. Molly forgot every bit of Navy protocol and flung herself out the door and after Cole.
But her pilot was already gone.
3
Molly wiped the wetness from her cheeks and set off for her bunk. If she skipped a shower, she might be asleep before the boys came back to rag on her. There was certainly no point in writing up her battle report if Captain Saunders’s hints of expulsion were true.
For once in her life, she didn’t care about the Academy or becoming a pilot. She didn’t look forward to post-battle reports and tactical analyses. There’d be no fantasizing tonight about what she’d have done differently had she been at the stick. Instead, an overpowering sense of disgust and shame propelled her down the empty halls. She just wanted an escape from the abuse.
“Cadet Fyde?”
Molly turned to see Rear Admiral Lucin standing in the doorway of his office. His customary hat was off, his weathered head streaked with extra wrinkles of worry. Molly felt one weight come off her chest and a different one take its place. She longed to run and wrap her arms around the old man, but she hadn’t done that for years. She wondered what it would feel like to be comforted like that again.
She snapped to attention, instead. As much attention as her body could muster. “Sir.”
“Could you step into my office, please?” Lucin vanished into the pool of light pouring out of his doorway.
Molly fought the constriction in her chest as she followed him inside. Lucin was the reason she was in the Academy. He had fought alongside her father against the Drenards. She knew it was a cliché—the military student doted on by the old general—but the stereotype existed for a reason. When children followed their fallen parents into battle, they were inevitably surrounded by the survivors who had promised to look after them. She wasn’t even the only one in the Academy with ties, just the only girl.
After her father left, Lucin had taken her in and enrolled her in the Junior Academy. It gave her a place to live. More importantly, he let her spend as much time in the simulators as she wanted—which was a lot. As long as she kept her grades up—which was never a problem—she could sit in a full military-spec Firehawk simulator for hours.
Sometimes longer.
At first, Molly would just soar around the simulated vastness of space, pretending to search for her father. Or maybe just trying to recapture her memories of him. One of her earliest recollections was of sitting on his lap in Parsona’s cockpit, her mother’s smell—the only thing she ever knew of her—lingering off to one side. Perhaps it had happened when she was an infant, or maybe the scent of her mom was just infused in the navigator’s seat. Maybe she’d made it all up.
She had clearer memories of flying with her father as she got older. How her eyes would flicker from the stars to the lights and glowing knobs on the dash. She could remember his hands on the flight controls.
During their last trip together, he’d let her do a lot of the steering. She remembered how frightening his trust had been. Instead of holding her hands steady, preventing mistakes, he just turned and peered out at the stars through the glass, talking to Molly in that deep and powerful voice of his. Usually about her mother.
They may have been running away from one life and into a new one, but she didn’t remember either of them having a care in the world.
The first time she fell asleep in the simulator, it was Lucin who found her. She had startled awake, afraid she’d be in trouble. Instead, the old man—so much older than she remembered her father being—scooped her up in his lap and let her fall back asleep. The stars kept drifting by through her eyelids, a little more of the simulated galaxy foolishly searched.
Now they stood in his office, a Navy desk and so much more between them. As soon as she’d entered the Academy, Molly could no longer be his daughter. Favoritism had to be countered with rigidity; love with harshness. Despite this, everyone whispered she was only there because of his string-pulling. So every ounce of love she went without, the affection other cadets were showered with by their families, had been given up for nothing now that she’d never graduate.
“Care to sit?” Lucin gestured to the simple wooden chair across from his desk.
Molly shook her head. She didn’t want to be too comfortable; it would make leaving his office impossible.
He nodded once, and Molly saw how tired he looked. Despite his age, Lucin had a very lithe frame—tall and thin. His youthful gait was a fixture at the Academy, his pride in its operation evident in the bounce of his step and his eternal smile. Perhaps this was why the cadets loved him so much. Captain Saunders could whip them into shape while old Lucin bounced in to tousle their hair or slap them on the back. But all of that was missing from Lucin’s face right then. Molly could see the fatigue in his sad and wrinkled eyes. His undying devotion to the Academy—which was capable of filling his chest with unmatched joy—could also break his heart. It was doing so right then.
“Captain Saunders called.”
Molly nodded.
“Hey, I’m sure when I go over the tapes, I’m going to be impressed with whatever you did out there. You always amaze me with your tricks, maneuvers even this old dog never heard of, but Saunders is in charge of the personnel decisions, and he has it out for you.”
Molly looked at her feet to hide the tears, but one of them plummeted to the blue carpet, sparkling like laser-fire in the harsh rays pouring through the window. Lucin fell silent as the tear winked out of existence in the worn sea at her feet.
“I’m talking to you as your friend now, not as the old geezer who runs this joint. Look at me.”
Molly did.
“I love you.”
A strange bark came out of Molly, something between a gasp and a cough. Her breathing grew rapid and shallow as she started crying in earnest, her shoulders quaking uncontrollably. She hugged her elbows and tried to hold it all in.
Lucin may have been crying as well, but she couldn’t see anything. His voice may have just sounded funny because she was hyperventilating.
“I do, Molly. I love you like my own daughter. But you don’t know what I’ve had to do to protect you from him. I know it isn’t fair, but if you think life has a bad reputation for that, the military puts it to shame. There’s a lot of politics involved. And look, I’m babbling here so don’t repeat any of this, but Saunders and his wife couldn’t have boys. They have three girls, and maybe he’s taking that out on you as well.”
Lucin sighed. “I just don’t know what to do here. He says you’re out. Do you have any idea how hard this is for me?”
Molly bobbed her head and dragged her hands down her cheeks. They came away slick. She wiped them on the front of her flight suit.
“Maybe this is for the best. You can still be a pilot somewhere else, but you’ve seen what it’s like in the Navy. They just aren’t ready for you yet. Listen, I know Commander Stallings, he runs the Orbit Guard Academy, I can get you in there. You’ll have a great career flying planetary patrols. Atmospheric stuff. None of this navigation junk. Don’t you think that would be better?”
Molly kept her head perfectly still. She would never admit that.
“I also have old friends in the commercial sector. With your simulator hours, you could have your 100 Gigaton license in no time. Run freight or ferry, hell, you could get a job driving those rich snobs around in their fancy space yachts.” Lucin laughed.
It wasn’t that funny, but Molly craved the levity. She peered up through her tears and forced a half-smile. She swiped away more tears, her entire face a chapped mess. “Arrgh,” she said, slapping her thighs and bending over to breathe. “Who was I kidding, right? Just because I can fly doesn’t mean I can fly, does it?”
“You can fly like nobody I’ve ever seen. It’s the system that’s screwed up, not you. Give the private sector or Orbit Guard a chance. As soon as they see what you can do, gender won’t matter to them.”
“You said the same thing when I joined the Academy.”
“I was wrong,” Lucin admitted, looking sad again. “But plenty of women make a career out of flying in other ways.”
“Plenty?”
“Okay, some. And none of the ones that made it have your talent. You’ll see.”
“I don’t want to give up, live a boring life, and die young like my mother, Lucin.”
The Admiral’s face twitched and Molly knew she’d slipped. She’d called him by his name. Her body and brain were just in a bad place, and bad things live in that bad place, and her mouth was right there—an easy escape.
Lucin’s face twisted up in a scary mask of rage. Wrinkles bunched up into muscles that weren’t supposed to be there.
Molly didn’t think her slip-up was that bad. But then—she was concentrating on the wrong mistake.
“Don’t you say anything like that about your mother ever again, do you hear me?” Lucin took a deep breath, tried to relax his face. “Listen, you didn’t mean it. You don’t know what your mother was like. She . . . she was a lot like you. She fought some of the same fights. So don’t disrespect her memory, okay?”
Molly nodded.
“Okay. So go get showered up. I’m going to make some vid calls and see what options you have. You can stay in the barracks tonight, or you can bunk at my place. Think on it.”
“I don’t need to,” Molly said. “Just put me in a regular school, Admiral. No more simulators. None of any of this.” She turned without waiting for permission to go. “I mean it,” she added over her shoulder. “A normal school.”
And it was a good thing her back was turned. It kept her from enduring the new expression that spread across Admiral Lucin’s face.