SKELETON SPHERE
THREE QUARTERS OF an hour pass, and I spend their entirety still as stone in my chair.
Before finally heading to Control, I strip my layers of exhaustion away: my tired, rumpled clothes. The sheen of sweat on my skin. The pins in my hair that haven’t done a thing to keep the flyaways from slipping out.
All I can do is my best. My best will be enough.
No one else has died, not yet, or else I would’ve heard about it. It’s only a matter of time, I’m sure—not if, but when.
Zesi’s already at the panel deck when I arrive at Control. Not trying to murder anyone, I note, which seems promising. Gone are the blueprints, the diagrams—his display screens are mostly black now, save for the overlay of a faint white three-dimensional grid: our radar. It’s like the skeleton of a sphere, bones sprouting out like a starburst from its center. He has a thin headset frame wrapped around the back of his head, and he’s practically shouting into its microphone. I can’t hear what’s in his ears.
He’s oblivious to my presence until I rip the headphones from his head. I press my thumb to the on/off sensor, and immediately, a voice I don’t recognize starts blaring through the main speakers.
It doesn’t take long to realize it’s a recording. A woman’s serene voice, at odds with her words: YOU HAVE NOT BEEN GRANTED ACCESS TO THIS LINE OF COMMUNICATION.
“Zesi... what... ?”
“You left it unlocked,” he says, dipping his head toward the message system. “Thought I’d try to pick up where you left off.”
“I... I could’ve sworn I logged out this morning.” But sure enough, the display screen is open to the secret inbox, my mother’s private one. Perhaps I was more out of it than I realized after so little sleep, under so much pressure. The passcode was difficult enough for even me to crack, so this must have been my own mistake. I scroll through the call log, see ten new attempts at contact since the last time I stopped trying. “And you’ve gotten that message every time?”
“I’m starting to hate her voice,” he replies.
It doesn’t make any sense. Vonn explicitly directed me—well, my mother—to contact him with that handle. At least they’re out of dark space now. In theory, they’re close enough to receive our calls, but in reality... we should probably focus our attention on stopping them. If they’ve blocked us, there will be no getting through unless they are the ones to initiate.
“Any sign of them on the radar?” He’s been swiping at thespherical grid ever since I arrived, spinning and examining it from all angles. I haven’t seen anything unusual on the display, but then again, I am not our resident expert.
He pinches the screen, zooming out to reveal a wider view of the space around us; the skeleton grid from before is so small now it’s just a white circle at the center of an even bigger sphere. He spins the image 180 degrees and a tiny blip flashes against the black.
“There,” he says. “They’ll be here earlier than we thought—I’ve been searching the field for any sign of smaller bees or firebirds they might’ve launched from their main ship. If they’re trying to catch us off guard, that’d be the way to do it.”
I take in the screen, think. “Did you ever figure out if we’re equipped to, uh... defend?”
“Oh, we’re definitely equipped,” he says. He swipes the screen with three fingers, and there are the blueprints again, this time highlighted in yellow in a number of places. Each yellow place has a tag attached to it, like A10 and F3. They’re scattered all over our various decks, with the heaviest concentrations on each of the station’s main faces. “Take your pick.”
“What... do the tags mean?”
“We have tons of A tags—those are the smallest. They do minimal damage, but with maximum output that we can coordinate for large effect,” he says. “H is full blast. There’s only one of those, but it’s on an internal magnetic track between the outermost layers ofLusca’s shell; I can shift it to one of thirty-two positions, easy, in less than fifteen seconds flat.”
“And all of the others?”
“Varying degrees of destruction.”
As relieved as I am that we’ll be able to protect ourselves, if it comes down to it, I don’t want todestroy. I cannot stand Vonn, but these are our own people—they’re on our team. They just don’t know it yet.
A wave of dread hits me. Same team, same strategy: our defense mechanisms are only reassuring until I think of the exact same weapons being turnedagainstus.
“Are they—will they be equally equipped?”
“Depends on the craft, depends on their approach,” Zesi says. “Their main ship will be loaded, for sure. But if they’re sending firebirds out first, the only advantage they’ll have is the advantage of surprise.”
I exhale, pace the room until I’m looking out the huge window where we take our coffee breaks, resting my elbows on the metal ledge. I prefer this view—endless constellations of stars instead of a finite smattering of control panel buttons. What to do? Assuming we are unable to get in touch, since that seems like a lost cause at this point, it would be wise to plan for their attack.
“How devastating wouldfull blastbe, exactly?” I ask, as if Zesi has any way of knowing for certain.
“Could breach an entire segment, if I had to guess. If anything cracks the outermost shell, it’ll trigger automatic airlocks all over the station”—he pauses, and I hear his fingers tapping away at the display—“they’re these giant metal panel sheets,from what I can tell in the prints. Emergency barriers that’ll snap together from the floors and ceiling... probably best not to get caught on the wrong side of them.”
His words trigger a memory long buried: all those years ago, when we were taking precautions against the solar flare, my mother told me something similar. Usually, when I think of that day, I think of sitting with Leo in that gray box of a safe room at the station’s core, our backs together, and Haven talking nonstop. I think of my mother telling meI’m the heartwhen I asked why she couldn’t come with us.
