Evershore (Skyward Flight: Novella 3)

Seven months later

Enough.

I stood in the landing bay on Wandering Leaf, staring through the windows at the exploding Superiority ship as the wreckage spiraled out into the blackness of space. The eerie blue shield of Detritus loomed in the distance. My flight stood around me, all watching the remains of the explosion, the tomb that had claimed my parents and half of our National Assembly.

We were supposed to have saved them. We were supposed to have won. Instead we’d barely gotten ourselves out alive.

I could have died in there. I almost did. I should thank Alanik for pulling me out, but I felt frozen, like something inside of me had died after all.

“Did Gran-Gran—” Rig asked.

“She escaped,” Alanik said. “So did Cobb. I saw them.” I could feel her reaching out through the nowhere, searching for them. “But…I don’t know where they are.”

“At least they weren’t here,” FM said. She put a hand on my shoulder, but I shook her off.

“Boom,” Boomslug said mournfully, looking at the wreckage. I didn’t know what to do with his sympathy, let alone everyone else’s. They were all staring at me, waiting to see what I was going to do. This was the moment a good commander should give an inspiring speech. Maintain morale. Treat this as a setback.

It wasn’t a setback. It was a scudding disaster. I didn’t have anything inspiring to say. I wasn’t even sure how I was staying on my feet.

I had to though. They were all looking to me. Or at me. I couldn’t really tell.

I wasn’t going to fall apart. Not here, not where my entire flight could see.

Fragments of the ship spun out into space, while others careened toward the planet. One hit the shield around Detritus and bounced off.

In my mind, my mother looked directly at me.

Do better than we did, she said.

Enough.

In the distance, the Superiority station that monitored Detritus blinked out of existence, hyperjumping away.

They wouldn’t even give us the dignity of revenge. They’d run like cowards. There was no one left for us to attack, just the terrible wreckage floating ever outward, a monument to our diplomatic failures.

“We’re going down to Platform Prime,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the others looking at each other, not sure what to make of that.

“Okay,” FM said. “But I think you need to stop for a minute—”

No. I couldn’t stop. This wasn’t about me. It wasn’t even about my parents. It was about what we were going to do for Detritus.

“Now,” I said.

The UrDail were expecting us back to finalize our alliance. That was more important now than ever. The war went on, and we were losing badly. We had to get back on track, and the only way to do that was to find Admiral Cobb and return power to the DDF.

The assembly’d had their chance. We were looking at the remains of it.

“I’m sorry, Alanik,” I said. “We’ll be a little late returning to ReDawn. There are some things we need to take care of first.”

“Jorgen,” FM said, “I think you should sit down for a minute.”

I couldn’t. “Put Gill in the hyperdrive,” I said to FM, mostly so she’d have to stop talking. “I’ll give him instructions to take us into the airspace beneath Platform Prime.”

FM hesitated long enough that I looked back at her.

It was a mistake. She was watching me with so much concern that I wanted to shout at her. Scream at the sky. Break things.

But I was the flightleader. It was my job to stay in control, at least until Cobb was back. He’d probably try to send me on leave then.

I’d tell him I didn’t want to go. We needed every person to face what was coming. Maybe Cobb would see that. Maybe he’d let me stay.

“Do it, FM,” Arturo said.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. She headed to the control room, and Rig went with her.

I turned to Alanik. “I need to know where Cobb is,” I said. “Where did Gran-Gran take them?”

“I don’t know,” Alanik said. “I’m looking for them, but I can’t find them.” I closed my eyes, reaching out toward the planet. It would make sense for Gran-Gran to take them somewhere beneath the surface—to her home maybe—but I couldn’t sense her mind. Not on Platform Prime, not on the surface, not in the caverns below.

“Keep trying,” I said. “Once you find Gran-Gran, we can go pick them up.”

I strode toward my ship, turning my back on the glowing wreckage. I didn’t need to see it again. The spiraling shape was already fixed in my mind, expanding outward forever.

“Boom,” Boomslug said.

“Boom,” I agreed with him.

“Jorgen,” FM called. “We’re ready.”

I reached out to Gill, giving him a clear impression of the airspace below Platform Prime. Wandering Leaf was an abandoned battle platform with hyperdrive technology, and its autofire could tear other platforms to pieces, so we’d need to park it far enough down in the upper atmosphere that the other platforms would be out of range.

Go, I told him.

And then I floated beneath the vast starscape of white eyes. They didn’t focus on me—we were invisible to them as long as we used the slugs to hyperjump. But I didn’t like the eyes any better when they couldn’t see me. I always felt as if they could see through me, like I was made of something flimsy and superficial with nothing substantial underneath. This time though, I felt something different, something new.

I hated them.

It was irrational; they weren’t the ones who’d spent the last eighty years raining down death on my people. They hadn’t trapped my parents in a ship and blown the thing to pieces. I didn’t know if they were responsible for these strange powers I had neither asked for nor wanted. As far as I knew, they weren’t even responsible for taking Spensa away. She’d done that herself.

But I still couldn’t smother the sudden startling feeling that at its core, everything bad that had happened to us was all their fault.

Wandering Leaf emerged far below the vast metal underside of Platform Prime, the current DDF headquarters. “Flight,” I said, “take your ships up to the landing bay.”

“What are you going to do?” Nedd asked.

The raw hatred I’d felt for the eyes was still hot in my veins. It felt good, better than the icy chill of shock or the raging terror of grief.

“I’m going to make sure no one else does anything stupid until Cobb gets back,” I said. I climbed into my ship. I’d already given my orders to the flight, so I left my radio off.

“Cobb gets back,” Snuggles said, settling on the floor of the cockpit by the side of my seat.

“Let’s hope it happens soon,” I said. And then I directed Snuggles to hyperjump my ship out of Wandering Leaf and up to the landing bay of Platform Prime.

The ground crew looked shocked when we appeared. They wouldn’t have been able to see the explosion from here, not with the platforms forming the shield above them.

But word spread fast when half your government was annihilated.

I left the slugs in my ship as I disembarked. “We’re under orders to arrest you for desertion,” Dobsi, one of the ground crew members, said. She looked at me uncertainly, like she didn’t want to be the one to carry out that particular arrest.

A good call on her part. “Admiral Cobb gave us orders to leave,” I said. “He’ll clear everything up when he returns.”

Dobsi hesitated. “Where did he go?”

“It’s classified,” I said. It wasn’t a great answer, but it was the only one I had.

My flight hyperjumped into the hangar, their ships all connected by light-lances. FM and Alanik jumped out first, and the ground crew looked suspiciously at Alanik like she might be the cause of all the trouble.

Alanik stared them down, but she did move quickly over to me. FM looked at me with that terrible sympathy in her eyes again.

Before she could open her mouth, I turned on my heels and headed toward the command center. There wasn’t time to stop, not now. I had to make sure that my flight wasn’t going to be scudding arrested. The assembly’s plan had blown up in all of our faces—literally.

We were going to do this Cobb’s way now, whether they liked it or not.

I walked in, Alanik and FM on my heels and the rest of the flight trailing behind, to find the command center in shambles. Cobb’s aides were all staring at monitors and talking over the radio to various DDF departments on the platform and on the ground. Commander Ulan and Ziming from Engineering were having an argument near the hypercomm, while Rikolfr from the admiral’s staff kept trying to page Cobb, but to no avail.

They couldn’t find him either. Without him, the explosion of the Superiority ship had sent the staff into disarray.

Enough.

“Admiral Cobb is alive,” I said loudly. Most of the room turned to look at me. “The person who’s been giving you orders since last night was a Superiority plant using a holographic disguise.”

Not how I would have started, Alanik said in my mind. You don’t have proof of that, do you?

“Anyone who doesn’t believe me,” I said, “is invited to find Cobb so he can confirm. He was kidnapped and taken to the Superiority ship.”

“The one that blew up?” Commander Ulan said.

“That’s the one,” I said. “He and Mrs. Becca Nightshade escaped together. They’ll be making their way here soon, and until they get here, no one else is going to do anything stupid. Do you think you can all handle that?”

“You’re back,” a voice said from behind me, and I turned to see Vice Admiral Stoff striding toward me. He was one of three vice admirals who served under Cobb. My flightmates stepped aside to let him pass. Rig followed behind him. He hadn’t had a ship, so he’d probably asked Drape to hyperjump him to the slugs’ home location in Engineering. “Flightleader Weight, you’re under arrest for—”

Not this again. I wasn’t going to sit in the brig and watch while more people I cared about got hurt.

“The charges were a sham,” I said. “Either they were issued by my mother—who didn’t have the authority—or they were given by the false Admiral Cobb, who was actually an alien wearing a hologram.”

Vice Admiral Stoff blinked at me. This was definitely not the attitude I was supposed to take with my superior officer. On a normal day, I would have been horrified with myself.

Today I had met my capacity to experience horror. I wasn’t looking forward to the moment it all caught up to me.

“An alien wearing a hologram,” Stoff repeated.

“Yes!” I said. “You know, the hologram the Superiority learned how to construct by disassembling the remains of Spensa’s starship—the one we handed to them?”

Stoff looked around the room, but no one spoke. “How do we know that’s true if Cobb’s no longer here?”

“It’s true,” Alanik said.

Stoff sighed. “We’ll take you to the debriefing room,” he allowed, like he was doing me a great service. “We can make a determination about the court-martial proceedings after—”

“No,” I said.

Stoff stared at me. “What was that?”

“No,” I said. “We have an alliance to formalize with the UrDail on ReDawn, and my flight and I are expected to be there.” Stars, I didn’t know how I was going to get through that kind of political meeting. I lacked diplomatic finesse at the best of times. Just look at how this was going.

“Flightleader,” Stoff said, “that alliance hasn’t been authorized by the assembly—”

“The assembly got blown to bits!” I said. “Do you have footage on the monitors? Should we replay it for you?”

“I’m aware,” Stoff said. “But you don’t have the authority to—”

Saints, if we were going to talk about authority, I could talk about authority. “Section 1809 of the DDF Command Protocol says that the chain of command can be temporarily interrupted in the event that the commanding officers are unaware of intelligence that would change their orders beyond reasonable doubt if they were aware.”

“In this case,” Stoff said, “there is no such intelligence.”

“You have been taking orders from a Superiority plant!” I shouted at him. “You couldn’t tell the difference between Admiral Cobb and the alien who took his place. And he wasn’t even all that good at pretending.”

Vice Admiral Stoff’s mouth opened like he wanted to defend himself, but then he shut it again.

“Meanwhile,” I said, “my flight and I have been off on another planet trying to secure an alliance so that all of you might live to see another day. Cobb ordered us to find allies, and we did. We have a military full of UrDail fighters ready to challenge the Superiority with us. Meanwhile, you all were trying to bargain with them. How did that turn out?”

Stoff stared at me with his mouth hanging open. I was only a flightleader, but because of my parents everyone in the DDF knew who I was. Despite the recent charges, I still had a reputation for being a rule follower. This outburst was the last thing he expected from me.

“You know what?” I said before he could respond. “Maybe we should call my mother and ask her.”

Stoff looked up at the ceiling. I waited for him to cuff me and take me to the brig, but instead he nodded. “We need to have that debriefing.”

“Stars, yes, we do,” I said. “But in the meantime, no one is doing anything until Admiral Cobb is back.”

“Technically, sir,” Rikolfr said, “Vice Admiral Stoff is in charge in Cobb’s absence—”

“He would be in command if Cobb was indisposed,” I said. “But Cobb isn’t indisposed. He will be back soon. And my flight and I are the last people to whom he gave orders and direction before he was kidnapped.” I didn’t technically know if that was true, but none of them could contradict me, given that they hadn’t even realized Cobb had been replaced. “If Cobb were here, he would agree with me because you people are a mess without him. If you want proof, look at what happened to the delegation you sent!”

“Fine,” Stoff said. “Until we can get all the information to the assembly—”

“No,” I said. “No more talking to the assembly.”

Stoff stuttered at me.

You should point out that their peace deal turned out to be a sham, Alanik said in my head. They have no hope of securing an alliance with my people without you, and they desperately need one.

Good point, I said to her. “All hope of securing a treaty with the Superiority is dead. Our only path forward is to ally ourselves with the other peoples the Superiority is trying to oppress. And you’re going to need cytonics for that. Unless the assembly has found a way to get themselves across the expanse of space without us.”

“We’ll see what Admiral Cobb has to say when he returns,” Stoff said, and then he spun and strode out of the room again, with the air of a man who had lost an argument but didn’t want to admit it.

I reminded myself to breathe. Stoff wasn’t going to let me get away with this forever. He was giving me some leeway because I had information he didn’t, and more because of what had happened to my parents.

“We need to find Cobb immediately,” I said, mostly to myself.

“Where is the admiral now?” Rikolfr asked.

I looked over to Alanik, and she shook her head. I couldn’t pull off telling this crowd it was classified. A lot of them had security clearance higher than mine. “We don’t know exactly where he went, but he’ll be back soon.”

He’d better. There was only so long I’d be able to hold things together in his name before people started questioning why they should listen to me.

I was questioning it already.

“Sir?” Ashwin from the Communications Corps held a radio out to me. “National Assembly Leader Winter is on the radio. She wants to talk to you.”

To me? I wondered if any of what I’d just said had been broadcast over the radio. There were several people who’d been in the middle of conversations when I’d walked in, and it wasn’t a complicated procedure to switch from headset to ambient reception.

I wondered if NAL Winter wanted to yell at me for what I’d said to Stoff, or give her condolences about my parents.

Either way, I didn’t want to hear it. And while I had some things to say about what I thought of the assembly, none of them would be productive. “Take a message,” I said.

“Sir?” Ashwin said. “Under the circumstances—”

“Take. A. Message,” I said. “In detail. And then tell her that according to Section 57 of the DDF Communications Policy, the DDF has three days to respond.”

Ashwin blinked at me. “Three days, sir?”

“Yes,” I said. This fiasco had been the assembly’s idea. All of it. It was their fault, and I wasn’t going to listen to a word they had to say even one second before I had to. “And then make yourself a memo to remind us two days and twenty-three and a half hours from now that we need to draft a response. Or better yet, make a note to tell Cobb to do it, because he will be back by then. Is that clear?”

“Um, yes, sir,” Ashwin said.

“Good.”

I turned around and found FM watching me nervously. “Are you going to tell me I should talk to the assembly?” I asked.

“No way,” FM said. “Not a chance. You’re absolutely right. That disaster was their fault. Being made to wait is the least of what they deserve. But Jorgen, you need to talk about what happened—”

“You want to talk about something?” I said to FM. “Let’s talk about how we’re going to find Cobb.”

We both looked at Alanik, who held up her hands. “I’m trying,” she said. “It’s a big universe, Jorgen, and I don’t know where Gran-Gran tried to take them.”

“She’d never been off this planet, had she?” FM asked. “Where else would she go?”

“She was born on the Defiant,” Rig said. “She used to travel the stars as a little girl, but she said she didn’t remember much about it. I can’t imagine she’d try to take them anywhere else.”

“They aren’t here,” Alanik said. “I’m sure of that.”

FM looked to me for confirmation. I closed my eyes, reaching down beneath the surface of the planet again. There were more slugs down there—I could feel their vibrations.

But no cytonic people, and definitely no Gran-Gran.

“I think she’s right,” I said. “But Spensa managed to contact me from the nowhere. If she could do that, we should be able to find Gran-Gran wherever she is, right?”

“I’ll keep trying,” Alanik said.

Arturo stood behind her in the doorway. “Come on,” he said. “I’ll find you someplace quiet where you can concentrate.”

Alanik nodded and turned to follow Arturo out.

I was being too hard on her, probably. It wasn’t her fault Cobb disappeared.

I’d apologize after we found him.

“Jorgen,” FM said. I knew what she was going to say. She’d said it several times.

“What I need,” I said, “is to find Cobb. Are any of the slugs familiar enough with the admiral to hyperjump to him?”

“I don’t know,” FM said. “We haven’t tried to get them to recognize him, but some of them might…” She looked like she was going to go back to arguing that I should sit down and stop for a minute, but I didn’t want to stop. I was outrunning the storm right now, and I was going to keep running as long as I could.

“Find out,” I said. “Get Rig on it too.” I turned and strode down the hall into Cobb’s office, closing the door behind me.

I didn’t know what to say to any of them, not about what happened, not about what had to happen now. Cobb would know what to do with all of this.

But he wasn’t the one I missed most at the moment. In my mind, I watched the Superiority ship explode over and over again. Some of that image must have leaked into the nowhere, because Snuggles and Boomslug appeared on my shoulders, and Boomslug slid down my arm into the crook of my elbow and softly trilled, “Boom.”

“Can you find Cobb?” I asked Snuggles.

She responded by nuzzling my ear, but she didn’t take us anywhere. I pressed my back against the door, closing my eyes.

More than anything, I wished Spensa were here.