Rebel (Rebel Stars Book 0) (20 page)

A spearpoint of light bulged from the ship. It vanished in an aster of white and blue and orange. The others groaned as if watching a fireworks display. Rada thought she should feel sad—the ship was gone, irreplaceable, its mysteries stolen from human hands forever—but maybe that explained why she felt nothing but relief.

The burst faded, twinkling away into nothing.

"So," Gene said. "Ready to let us in on the rest of your plan?"

"There isn't one." Rada stared after the ship, trying to pick out the IRP escorts from the stars. "But my friends wanted that ship more than anything. We couldn't have fired off a bigger flare."

"Who are these friends of yours, anyway?"

"They won't hurt you. They're with the Hive."

"The Hive?" Gene's mask was back to transparency. He frowned, gray brows knitting together. "I've always wanted to see that place."

Through a lot of trial and error, the four of them gestured themselves into stability, putting an end to their spin. She continued to broadcast, uncertain that her suit had the strength to project her signal across the distance. Even if it did, if the two forces met and started swapping missiles, her signal would be lost in the wash.

But she had to trust they would come.

Forty minutes later, faint specks appeared between the stars. Missiles or the deaths of ships, she couldn't tell.

"Hello," a voice cut through her comm. "You people there, are you alive?"

Rada searched the sky for the source of the voice. "Simm? Is that you?"

"This is Simm," he said, as if there were nothing unusual about being recognized by a random stranger floating around in the abyss. "Wait—
Rada
?"

"It's me," she laughed. "What took you so long?"

~

The
Tine
was among the five-ship fleet, but it was the flagship that scooped them up. As Rada and the three IRP refugees exited the airlock, they were met by four marines pointing rifles at their chests.

"Don't hurt them," Rada said. "They're the only reason I'm alive."

The crewmen were led away. Rada was marched down the hall by two more marines. She stripped off her helmet, grateful for the stale yet circulatory smell of ship air. The marines stopped in front of a blue door and nodded to it.

Rada opened it and shouted, stumbling back. The room wasn't a room: it was vacuum, stars shining to all sides. Two desks and several chairs floated in sync. Bookshelves lined the only wall, the glass cases sealed against the rigors of flight. A man stood across the space gazing outward into the galaxy.

Rada's brain collapsed the scene into sense. It wasn't vacuum; the floor and walls were lined with screenage, displaying the view from outside. She took an exaggerated step over the threshold and toed the floor. Her eyes told her it wasn't there, but her foot insisted it was real. She stepped forward.

At the far wall that didn't look like a wall, Toman didn't turn. "It's gone, isn't it?"

Rada drifted forward. "The ship was taken by Hobart Evans, admiral of the IRP. He was on it today. When I came for him, he set the ship to explode. The crew and I barely made it off in time."

"He blew it up? On purpose?" He turned from the window, palms held out and up as if he were carrying a log. "Why would he do that?"

"Because he was going to lose it."

"In what world is it better to smash a statue than to see it in someone else's foyer? To kill a lost puppy rather than to hand it over to its rightful owner?"

"In the same world where it's better to kill hundreds of workers than to risk one of them talking." She unlatched the device from her suit. "I took this from Evans. His personal device. I don't know what's on it, but it's yours."

He walked across the starry floor and took the glossy square pad from her. "Encrypted to the gills, I'd wager."

"I'm sorry we lost the ship, Toman."

"It's not your fault. Unless it was. How did you get out?"

She explained, starting from the beginning. He'd heard most of the details from Ferri's covert transmissions, however, and she was able to skip to that day, the execution of Plan Red and how she'd snuck onto the alien vessel. He looked equally parts horrified and enthralled by what had happened on the ship.

"Why did you have to go after Evans?" he said once she was done. "You knew we were coming."

"Because I knew I wouldn't have a second chance."

"If you were
that
intent on killing him, you could have assassinated him once he was in our custody. Meanwhile, I would have a priceless alien relic full of advanced technology."

"Sure," Rada said. "Or he would have triggered the countdown as he was being arrested, you wouldn't have known about it, and the explosion would have killed you, too. Because you'd have gone on board, right?"

"Probably." He turned back to the stars. "I don't think they even had a chance to study it. Such a waste."

A moment passed. "Have you heard anything out of Ferri?"

"I don't think she made it. Her last transmission sounded like total anarchy. We're sending in a team to be sure."

"Can you ask them to find out what happened to Sollivan? The man who got me out?"

"We'll find out." He reached out as if to touch the stars, but his fingers were stopped by the screen. "That's the worst of it, isn't it? So many people fought and died, and at the end of the day, we're no closer to answers than we were before."

She wanted to believe he was only talking about the loss of the ship. But looking out at all that nothing, the ocean of vacuum punctuated by gigantic balls of atomic fire, she believed he was talking about more than the events of the last few months.

He was talking about everything.

~

Simm was on the
Tine
. Docking the ships mid-flight would have been an unnecessary risk, so she filled him in over video.

"That," he said, "is easily the most astounding story I've ever heard."

"Really?" Rada laughed. "Because you look like I just told you what I had for breakfast. In detail. Including the toppings on my oatmeal."

He smiled. Over video, he had a much easier time making eye contact. "It's the toppings that make oatmeal."

"If you have any tips on how you stay so calm, I'd like to hear them."

"Oh, it's very easy. First, never do anything half as crazy as you make a habit of doing. Second, come to terms with the fact we're nothing more than accidental consciousness temporarily inhabiting a tube of walking gunk."

"On second thought, keep your tips to yourself."

As soon as they wrapped up, she flopped into her bunk and stayed there for twelve hours.

Two days later, and halfway to the Hive, Toman invited her back to the starry room. There, he told her that Ferri was dead, and so was Sollivan.

"I'm sorry," they both said at once.

Toman laughed with little humor. "Well, they both saved more lives than they took. What more can you do?"

"Not die in a madman's brutal purge?"

"Yeah, there's that."

Rada gazed down through the floor. "How did they know you were coming?"

"Turns out the Hive is home to more than busy bees. We had a mole, too. It's since been dealt with." He leaned against the invisible wall. "You've had a couple days to recover. Given any thought on what you'd like to do next?"

"Aren't we going back to the Hive?"

"I meant in terms of the next phase of your life."

Rada snorted. "Is the genie granting wishes?"

"That ship and all its ensuing properties should have been yours. Matters of cosmic justice aside, I think you're pretty cool. As resourceful as a reef. As sharp as one, too. I can use that." He shrugged. "If you don't want to work for me, I'm happy to dropkick you wherever else you want to go."

"Know what?" She let her fingers touch the star-spangled screen. "I want to be a pilot."

"A pilot? Do you have any training?"

"If I did, I wouldn't need to want to be one, would I?"

"An awful lot of people want to be pilots." Toman pushed off the wall and headed for his desk. "Then again, very few people have just left a trail of kicked asses across the entire system. I'll see what I can do."

She kept herself from breaking down until she got back to her bunk and closed the door. Then she collapsed on the bed. She grieved in part for Stem, who had known nothing but to live roughly and had died doing the same. For Yed, who hadn't figured out what he wanted or what he should become, and for Genner, who had found a niche that wasn't nearly as safe as she believed. For Parson and Sollivan, for wanting to do good against the indifference of physics and politics.

And for herself, too. For witnessing things she didn't want to see and for doing things she wouldn't have believed herself capable of doing.

She had done them, though. Although they weighed on her, they lifted her, too: because it meant she was stronger than she had believed. And she wasn't sure she'd found her limits.

~

They arrived at the Hive. That same day, she was assigned to the piloting sims. She was quietly disappointed that she wasn't allowed to practice on the
Tine
, but it had suffered a few scrapes and dings in the dust-up with the IRP fleet.

She soon found she had nothing to complain about. The sims were mind-blowing. Completely immersive. So real that walking out of them left her disoriented, confused by the dimness of the physical world. She seemed to screw up nonstop, but her instructor, a woman named Val, assured Rada that she had all the talent necessary for the job. The only thing she had to do was practice.

Gene and his two crewmen were processed and sent home. Wary of reprisals from IRP, the Hive stayed on high alert, ships ready on their pads. From what Rada picked up, the IRP was too involved with a massive internal shakeup to have any desire to spark a conflict with one of the system's largest naval magnates.

For several days, she didn't see much of anyone besides Val and Simm, who was on leave but was more than happy to answer all the questions he could about operating a starship. Learning to pilot could be as easy as you wanted to make it—many of the hauling vessels in the Lanes had no crew whatsoever, operating entirely by autopilot—but Rada wanted to do it right. Anyway, focusing on the trade kept her mind from spinning away into the places she didn't want it to go.

One afternoon, Val ejected her from the sim mid-combat.

Rada sat up from the lounger and pulled her headset away in confusion. "What's the deal? I was right about to nail that
Cobra
!"

"Don't worry, I'll mark it on your scorecard, Ace." Val gave her a dry look. "Toman wants to see you."

He awaited her at the shore of the lighthouse, grinning with a childish abandon Rada had never seen on him before.

"Rada!" He squished down to help her from the amphibious cart. "You don't even know what you've done, do you?"

"Most of the time, no." She stepped over the mud bordering the shore. "But for once, it sounds like something good."

"The device you brought back. Hobart Evans'? It turns out they'd done some work on the ship after all."

Electricity shot down her spine. "You've got its tech."

He glanced up at the roof dome with a sigh. "Unfortunately, no. That appears to be lost for good. But Evans' team found a written message. A copy of it is on his device. Get this—it's from one of the Swimmers."

"In Swimmer? So what? We've had a millennium to try to decode their language and no one's come close. There's hardly anything to work with."

He swung his head side to side. "It's not just in Swimmer. The alien made a copy in English, too. Old, archaic—from the era of the Panhandler Virus—but this is our Rosetta Stone. We've already translated it."

"Why would it leave it in English?" Rada said, but she already knew the answer. "Because it wanted us to hear. What does it say?"

He handed her the device. "Read it out loud, will you? I want to hear it told to me. Like its author intended."

She stood in the artificial sunlight and read. It wasn't a long message, but its contents were dense. The ship—the vessel they'd found—was from the time of the invasion. It had been left in reserve to orbit Neptune. After the invasion had come to a stunning, shocking defeat, its crew had decided to nuke Earth. To finish the few scraps of humanity that had survived first the virus and then the war.

One alien had fought to stop them, but it had been beaten down by a rival, left for dead.

"He moved to the controls and gave the command to launch the missiles," Rada read. "But there was nothing to be launched, because when I had woken the ship's defenses, I launched the nukes into the system's star.

"Confused, Tton tried again. With his back turned, I picked up the laser and I shot him until he was dead.

"Somehow, I dragged myself to medical. I did not think it could save me, but I wanted time to leave a record. One that might someday be found by those who would understand. To preserve it, I asked the ship to land on a nearby moon. It will be my tomb.

"Some will say I betrayed my people. That I am a rebel. A traitor. Fit to die on a wasteland of ice. Forsaken. Alone.

"But I know different. I know that I have followed the Way."

Rada looked up from the device, blinking at Toman. "You're sure this is real?"

"I've had the LOTR working on it nonstop." He grinned like a schoolboy. "The paper it's written on—it's not human. And it's ancient. A millennium old, give or take. Do you see, Rada? We lost the ship. The tech. But we got something worth far more."

"A story?" She frowned. "Don't get me wrong. It was a hero. Its story deserves to be told. But you really think that's worth more than what the ship could have taught us?"

"Its story tells us much more than the rebellion." Toman grabbed her by the shoulders, beaming. "It tells us that the Swimmers don't think and march in lockstep. They're individuals. Not all of them agreed with the decision to exterminate us." He tipped back his head to the stars burning endlessly from the darkness. "And on the day we meet again, we may not have to go to war after all."