“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?”