“I can think of dozens of scenarios,” I said, lying underneath M-Bot beside him.
Five days had passed since the event. Since we’d lost Bim and Morningtide. Working with Rig off-hours, repairing the ship, had been a welcome solace from my own thoughts—even if it was taxing to get up early like I had today, work on the ship, then go to class and endure Cobb’s instructions all day.
Today, we were unhooking wires from M-Bot’s belly and replacing them with new ones. Some of the old ones seemed good, but Rig figured we should replace them all just in case, and I wasn’t going to argue with his expertise.
I plugged in another wire and threaded it according to the instructions Rig had drawn out earlier. My light-line glowed from within the ship, wound through the innards to give us light, itself like a glowing wire.
“There are literally hundreds of reasons the DDF would lie about my father,” I said as I worked. “Maybe my father was in conflict with Ironsides about leadership, and she decided to make him have an ‘accident.’ ”
“In the middle of the most important battle the DDF had ever flown?” Rig said. “That’s fanciful, even for you, Spin.”
“Fanciful?” I demanded. “Me? I’m a realist, Rig.”
“Realist. Like all the times you made me go pretend to slay stardragons with you as kids.”
“That was battle training.”
He grunted as he worked on a particularly stubborn wire, and Doomslug helpfully imitated him. She sat on the stone ground near my head. M-Bot was “running diagnostics”—whatever that meant. It mostly involved him saying things like “Hmmmmm . . .” or “Carry the one . . .” to “give indication that the process is continuing, as humans quickly grow bored without auditory stimulation.”
“Are you sure you aren’t misinterpreting Cobb?” Rig said from beside me. “You’re sure he nodded?”
“I am. The official story is a lie, Rig. I’ve got proof.”
“More like a vague, possible confirmation.”
“I can push Cobb until he spills the entire truth.”
“Good luck with that. Besides, even if he did talk, the higher powers at the DDF aren’t going to admit to lying. You stir up too much trouble, and all you’ll do is get yourself and Cobb removed from your positions.”
“I will clear my father’s name, Rig.”
“I’m not saying you shouldn’t. I’m just pointing out that your original plan—learning to fly—is still the best way to do that. First become a great, famous pilot. Improve your family’s reputation and become someone who can’t be ignored. Then use your influence to clear your father’s name.”
“We’ll see.”
Rig twisted—using the little space we had between M-Bot and the ground—and pulled over his notebook to make some notations. “These are his GravCaps,” he said, tapping his pencil at a mechanism. “But I don’t recognize the design, and he has them in an odd location. This black box over here—which is the only part I don’t recognize—must be what houses his artificial intelligence. I don’t dare try to break that apart, although it’s obviously malfunctioning.”
“How do you know?”
“Can you imagine anyone intentionally creating him to act like he does?”
A valid point.
“What I’m most interested in,” Rig said, “is his joints, his seals, and his atmospheric scoop. It’s hard to explain, but they all feel . . . tighter, more finely constructed than what we’re using. It’s only by a small increment, but Spensa, I think if we do get this thing flying, it’s going to be fast. Faster than even our scout ships.”
That gave me a shiver to imagine. Rig grinned, holding up his notebook, then put it aside and dug in with his wrench to carefully begin disassembling the atmospheric scoop.
I watched for a moment, holding a wire in the cramped confines, amazed. Rig seemed happy.
We’d been friends for over a decade, and I was sure I’d seen him happy before. It was just that no moments stood out. My memories of Rig were always of him being anxious, or nervous for me, or—occasionally—resigned to some terrible fate.
Today though, he was actively smiling as he worked, his face smeared with the grease we’d been applying between wire replacements. And that . . . that did something to help me push through the loss that still hung over me, the feelings of having failed my flightmates.
“Where did you get all these wires anyway?” I said, getting back to work. “I thought I was the one who was going to be performing the petty theft.”
“No theft required,” he said. “Ziming—that’s the woman supervising my internship—gave me an entire bundle of them and some machinery to work on for practicing wire replacements. I figure, what better practice than to use it all on a real ship?”
“Nice. So it’s going well?”
Rig, oddly, blushed—though the color was difficult to pick out through the grease, and by the glow of my reddish-orange light-line. I knew him well enough to see it.
“What?” I demanded.
“You know M-Bot’s cockpit design?” he said.
“What part?”
“The pilot’s seat and controls are on their own frame,” Rig said. “It’s complicated, but it reminds me of a gyroscope. I think the seat is made to be able to rotate with the direction of g-forces. You know how it’s really hard on a human to take g-forces that push the blood into the head or the feet?”
“Uh, yeah. Trust me. I know.”
“Well, what if your seat rotated during difficult and extended burns? So that the force was always in the direction easiest on the body—directly backward? That could really help with high-speed maneuvers.”
“Huh,” I said, interested—but more interested by the way Rig lit up as he talked.
“Well, I drew some schematics of that in my notebook, and . . . and well, Ziming might have seen them and assumed they were my own designs. She might . . . she might think I’m a genius.”
“You are!”
“Not really,” he said, blushing again. “I just copied what I saw. Whoever built M-Bot is the genius.”
“You figured it out!” I said. “That takes as much genius.”
“It really doesn’t,” he said, then twisted off a nut with his wrench. “But . . . well, lie or not, I think this is a way we can get this technology to the DDF. Maybe I can figure out how this atmospheric scoop works and take that in as well. If I’m careful, and don’t make my discoveries look too suspicious, we’ll be able to help the fight against the Krell without exposing M-Bot.”
“And you get to be a hero!” I said.
“A fake one,” he said. “But . . . it did feel nice . . .”
I grinned, then got back to work on my wires. Maybe we could bring this all to the DDF, and prevent more pilots from dying. Thinking of that immediately put a damper on my mood. No matter what I could do for future pilots, I would still carry my feelings of frustration and pain for the flightmates I’d already lost.
I redirected my thoughts back to the secret of what had really happened to my father, trying to think of every reason why the DDF would cover it up. That kept me occupied for a half hour or so until a ding rang up from the cockpit.