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?”