* * *
—
The meeting ends, mercifully, after nearly an hour of Gal tiptoeing around information the resistance likely already knows. It’s enough to establish good faith, but not enough to get Archon birds in the sky.
Yet.
When we leave the conference room, we’re greeted by Sims fumbling with his earpiece and trying not to look caught off-guard by our sudden reappearance. “Your schedule’s clear for the rest of the day,” he tells us. “I switch off to my other shift in a few hours, but I can show you around in the meantime. You guys are pilots, right?”
Gal grimaces, I nod, and Wen nods even more enthusiastically.
Sims grins. “I’ll take you down to the hangars. Personally I couldn’t fly if you put a gun to my head—my nerves can’t take the pressure—but I think we’ve got a few things you might get a kick out of.”
“What is your specialization?” Gal asks as we’re escorted into the elevators.
“Demolitions,” Sims replies with a shrug.
We emerge from the administrative building to find the summer heat and the base operations in full swing. The air is thick with humidity, and the familiar noise of firing engines rumbles toward us from a distant runway.
We follow Sims on a long, meandering path, nodding along as he points out landmarks, until we reach the hangars at the outer edge of the base’s cluster of buildings. The tarmac boils under my boots, and the trickle of sweat down my spine only fuels my anxiety as a line of Cygnets—sleek fighter craft twice the size of a Viper—taxis past. I wish for a cockpit. In the cockpit, I’m always sure of myself, of where I stand, of what I’m doing. Or maybe it’s that in a cockpit, I just follow orders.
Out here, I have to choose my own path, and it’s growing more and more difficult by the day.
I’m so caught up in the sight of the Cygnets maneuvering into their launch positions that I miss the moment Gal’s hand slips around my waist. Suddenly he’s tugging me into the shade beneath a stack of cargo containers, his back colliding with one of them as he loops his arm up around my neck. Language drops out from under my feet, leaving to meet him with nothing but a soft, confused warble as his lips stop inches from mine.
He tips his head, peering over my shoulder. A sly grin cracks across his face, and my racing heart stills. I turn to follow the line of his gaze and find Wen and Sims sauntering purposefully away, glancing back at us with equally mischievous smiles.
I try to step back, but Gal keeps his grip tight. “We’re in the clear,” he says. “We ditched the extra eyes, and there’s no way there are any bugs out here. We can talk.”
I let out a shaky breath. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
I lift my eyebrows, nodding at the lack of space between us.
“Hey, it worked.”
His hold on me loosens, but I can’t bring myself to pull out of it. “I know it worked, just…Y’know, if you’re gonna try to kiss me, I want you to mean it.”
Gal’s face falls, and he slumps back against the container. “Look, I don’t know when our next chance to strategize will be, or when we’ll need a plan in place. And we need a plan fast.”
“The dreadnoughts,” I mumble, closing my eyes.
“The dreadnoughts,” he agrees. “There’s no way into that system that doesn’t involve going up against cityships. But we can’t…I can’t…If Maxo Iral knows how to beat the Imperial Fleet, the galaxy is doomed.”
A sudden roar from the runway startles us so badly that we both jolt, clutching each other tighter. I crane my neck back in time to catch the Cygnets streaking overhead. A vicious thread of envy seeps into my bloodstream—not at the sight of them, but at the speed with which they disappear. My feet have been on the ground for an entire day, and it’s already too long.
“It would be easier if we could let the dreadnoughts take care of all those ships they just flashed in front of us,” Gal says, bringing me out of the sky. “But they’re never going to buy a plan that would walk them into their path. They don’t trust us enough.”
“So how do we get their trust?”
Gal shrugs, glancing overhead. The darker smudges beneath his eyes have grown. “We have to figure out how to beat a dreadnought without actually beating a dreadnought. We give them a way through, they trust us, and then we walk them into the system defenses.”
I nod. “And how the rut are we supposed to figure out how to take down a ’nottie?”
Gal’s nose wrinkles. “Gods, you’re talking like them already.”
I bristle, pulling back out of his grip. General Iral used the old Archon slang for dreadnoughts in the meeting, and the word got under my skin. Or maybe it was under my skin to begin with, and hearing Iral pulled it to the surface. I don’t know how to justify using it without sounding overly defensive, and I don’t know how to defend how right it felt to use it.
Gal reaches out like he’s going to reel me back in, then thinks better of it. “Hey, I didn’t mean…I know it’s weird for you.”
Weird doesn’t even begin to cover it, but I want to get us back on track. “Dreadnoughts. Only way to beat dreadnoughts is with dreadnoughts, and there’s no way any of the ships in the Archon fleet can cut it.” I take a step forward and turn, slumping shoulder to shoulder with Gal against the cargo container.
“Even if we did have dreadnoughts of our own, our generous Corinthian hosts would have strong objections to using them in an assault launching from Corinth. That starts a whole new war.” His eyes focus on something in the distance. “Speaking of Corinthians…”
Farther down the runway, Wen’s chattering animatedly with Sims—about blowing things up, if I had to guess. I sigh.
“She needs something to do,” Gal mutters, and I throw him a sharp glare. “Don’t start with that utility stuff—I just mean that she spent the whole meeting this morning sitting on her hands. She doesn’t have anything to contribute—Ettian, I’m trying to be nice about this, but it’s true,” he says, crossing his arms as I throw up my hands. “If we don’t find something to occupy her, she’s going to start making trouble. She probably already has.”
“When you say we—”
“I mean you.”
I roll my eyes. “I’ll figure something out.”
“You always do.”
Silence settles over us, punctuated only by the noises of the base in motion—soldiers drilling, machinery humming, and a gentle wind blowing in from the south. I can’t shake the unsteadiness that keeps on threatening to knock me over. Ever since we got to the base, there’s been an inescapable sour note in every conversation between me and Gal. I don’t know what to blame—this place, where we come from, or worst of all, some sort of fundamental disconnect between us that’s only surfacing now. I can’t lose him. We’ve come too far for this.