by Hugh Howey
“What’s the plan?” Cole asked.
“I don’t have one,” she admitted.
“You had better encrypt me if you guys are planning on getting caught,” Parsona suggested. “If anyone searches the computer while I’m active, they’ll see this isn’t nav data, and your father went through a lot of effort to hide me from the Navy.”
Molly looked at Cole. “I guess the plan is to be caught,” she groaned.
“Thank you for complying, Parsona,” the first voice said. “Hold position and prepare to enter hangar bay four.”
“Roger. Hangar bay four,” she radioed back to the Navy. She flipped off the mic and turned to Cole. “Get the Wadi plenty of food and water. Enough for a few weeks. Put it in the lazarrette under one of the thruster panels. Make sure the door’s sealed to keep the atmosphere in there.”
“It’s in your quarters?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure it won’t bite me?”
“I’m sure. While you’re in there, grab the two red bands in the top drawer of my dresser. Hide them with the Wadi.”
“Gotcha.”
“Oh, and tell Walter to go along with whatever happens and to keep his mouth shut.”
“With pleasure.”
Cole shook himself out of the tall spacesuit and headed back to lecture Walter. Molly pulled up the nav screen and sighed.
“Tell me what I need to do to encrypt you,” she said to her ship.
To her mother.
••••
The balcony inside the Pinnacle stood thick with spectators, far more than Anlyn could remember in any of her childhood visits. She and Edison pushed through them, out onto the clockwise landing that overlooked the gathered Circle members below. A low murmur rippled through the crowded seats, and heads—even those around the Circle—turned to survey the source of the distraction.
Anlyn led Edison down the flight of steps between the rows of seated onlookers. Below lay the large circular table around which the council manipulated an entire empire. Anlyn noted grimly that several seats stood empty, draped with white mourning cloths. She forced herself to look straight ahead, ignoring the legion of onlookers filling the seats to either side of the aisle and stretching out through the darkness all the way around the Pinnacle.
The timing of their arrival, she saw, couldn’t have been better. Bodi stood in the bright light that shone down within the circle, the table before his empty seat illuminated by a second shaft of harsh rays, signifying his turn to speak. She nodded to her former fiancé, baiting him, as she walked around the back of the Circle members and approached one of the empty seats.
“Anlyn,” Bodi murmured, a hint of false surprise in his voice. He stood in full Royal regalia, some layers of which he hadn’t actually earned, only borrowed thanks to their supposed engagement.
Several members turned to him before looking back to Anlyn, following her with curious gazes. She took her place behind Bedder’s empty seat, and waited while a council page hurried forward, confused, to remove the mourning cloths.
Anlyn rested her hands on the high back of the stone chair, the old petrified tree cool to the touch. Her eyes traveled up from the empty seat to meet Bodi’s. “I am assuming Bedder Dooo’s position within the Circle.” She turned slowly to sweep the words across the entire gathering. Edison took his place beside her at Muder Dooo’s chair. The page hesitated, not sure what to do.
Bodi broke the tense silence from the Light of Speak: “Lady Hooo, you have been through much these past few months—”
“And I have learned much from these ordeals.” The words contained a coo of sarcasm. Anlyn tilted her head slightly and used a wry smile to punctuate her bitterness. Everyone present knew full well Anlyn had fled Drenard to get away from Bodi. And his role in the recent ambush on her and her friends was assumed by all present.
Bodi smiled back at her, defusing the barb by pretending her warmness contained sincerity. “One of your high measure must also know that war planning is a lowly endeavor. Beneath your station and—”
Anlyn interrupted again, ignoring the Center of Speak and causing expensive tunics to shift uneasily. “Nonsense,” she said. “The fate of our empire means more to me as a result of my position.”
Bodi switched tactics. “Then perhaps I may appeal to your fairer sex and caution against getting dirt on—”
“Counselors.” Anlyn looked at each of the dozen or more members. “I will—”
“You violate the Center of Speak!”
It was Tottor, the Navy Counselor, a distant cousin of Anlyn’s. He’d won his high post over several other candidates whose Wadi were larger in every way—but those counselors did not have Royal blood within them.
Anlyn turned to address his outburst. “No, Counselor, it is you who violates the Center of Speak.” Tunics fluttered at this. “When I entered the Circle, as is my right, I was addressed by Lord Thooo, who holds the Center. This conversation is his choosing, and it is over when he says it is over.”
Anlyn turned back to Bodi while Totter seethed, his blue skin purpling with rage. Several members of the Circle who had won their posts due to merit attempted to cover their panting chuckles.
“Lord Thooo,” Anlyn continued, “you call my gender to attention in an attempt to discredit me while pretending to honor me.” All eyes turned to her again at this accusation. Anlyn once more addressed the entire room. “Many sun cycles ago—long before the threat we face today ever made itself known—female Drenards not only served on the War Circle, they served in the General Assembly and on every Planetary Board—”
“Enough,” said Bodi, both palms held up to Anlyn.
Anlyn took this to mean that he had no further complaints. She stepped around and climbed up in her seat, kneeling on her shins to rest her arms comfortably on the male-sized table. She turned to Edison and gestured to the empty chair beside her. The pup nodded solemnly as the page hurriedly swiped away the mourning cloth. Edison held up his lance, as he’d been taught, and laid it lengthwise across the table.
Bodi complained immediately. “That is Lord Muder’s chair. Your pet will not be allowed—”
“Lord Edison Campton is my betrothed. He is not my pet, and I am no longer yours,” Anlyn laced her words with cold venom. “Lord Muder is the second uncle I have lost this week, and his widow has granted Lord Campton—”
“Lord?” snorted Bodi.
Anlyn smiled. “Ninth degree, Lord Thooo. And as you are an eighth-degree Lord, you will not be permitted to use his first name unless he permits it, a protocol I’m sure I need not remind you of again, lest you desire to leave these proceedings.”
Bodi purpled at this. The entire Circle could surely see the hem of his tunics vibrating with frustration. “No alien, Lady Hooo, has ever—”
Anlyn cut him off again, each jab to her ex-fiancé’s ego like a blow to a fighter’s belly, sapping his endurance. “Lord Campton is a Drenard. If such a thing may be measured, he is more a Drenard than you. He will be my husband. He has been given this seat by Widow Muder. He will go before the election board during the next cycle to retain his seat.”
“With all respect, Lady Hooo, his seat holds the Chair of Alien Relations, how will a nonlinguist—”
Anlyn smiled as Edison rose to respond. She spread her pale blue hands across the ancient table, its ten-meter diameter cut from a single petrified tree, the largest ever found on the cold side of Drenard. She rubbed the polished grain and watched each Counselor’s reaction as Edison spoke.
“Distinguished Counselors,” he said in a perfect Drenard coo, “the subject being discussed from the Center is my qualifications as Lord Muder’s replacement.” He swept his face across the circle, wide teeth flashing. “While my dialect has the lilt of upper Drenard, a result of my association with Anlyn,” he stressed her common name as he met Bodi’s gaze, a brilliant blow, “it might interest you to know that my race has a long history of rapid language acquisition. I am fluent in Engli
sh, and I am already conversational in Bern.”
Bodi seemed more stunned than the rest to see him speaking—with the accent of Drenard royalty, no less. The full implications of this creature’s presence on the Circle appeared to finally settle through his thick skull. With Edison’s status as Anlyn’s betrothed, and the recent death of two members of the royal family, Bodi was looking at a potential Drenard king!
Anlyn saw him sway forward as it sank in, ready to pass out, or perhaps considering a mad rush to kill his rival with bare hands.
Were he not so blasted timorous, Anlyn thought, he’d surely attempt himself what others failed to do in cowardly ambush.
Bodi glared at Edison. He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped, closing it. Anlyn hoped it wouldn’t be the last time she tripped him up; one misstep on either side could result in expulsion.
“I call for a formal Vote of Protest—” Bodi began, his voice shaking.
“Bodi—,” Edison began, cutting him off once more, but this time in a blatant breach of protocol. Anlyn spun in her seat to warn him, fearing all would be lost.
“—I would like to issue a Citation for violating the Light of Turn.”
The Circle grumbled, dozens of spectators in the packed house panting with laughter. All heads turned to the second shaft of light being reflected through the hole in the roof. Eight minutes ago, those photons had left Hori II, Drenard’s smaller sun. They travelled through space—across millions of kilometers of vacuum—before reaching a series of occluding disks stationed in orbit. Those clockwork orbital machinations continually shifted, directing the narrow shafts of light down through the windy Drenard atmosphere, piercing the roof of the Pinnacle. One shaft remained stationary in the center, where all speeches of importance must be made. The other shaft slowly orbited the surface of the giant, petrified tree, indicating whose turn it was to speak.
Everyone in attendance—thousands of Drenards—focused on that spot of illuminated marble.
The Light of Turn no longer stood before Bodi’s empty seat; it now rested before Lord Mede. He rose, purple with so many eyes turning his way, and nodded apologetically at Bodi.
“I forgive the transgression,” he said meekly.
Anlyn let out her held breath and settled back against her seat. In the Center of Speak, on the symbolic highest point of the planet Drenard, Lord Bodi Yooo shivered with rage. Otherwise, he did not budge. His eyes focused on Edison.
His imagination concocted murder.
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 acro
ss 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.