Evershore(Skyward #3.1)(3)

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.