Page 221 of Every Almost

"How long has that channel been open?" Cael whispered to those around him. When no one answered, his voice got quiet as he addressed the console. "Captain. My apologies. I did not know you were on the line."

"That is very evident, Rask," Reyna said. Charlie heard the name land in Reyna's voice like an onslaught.

"Captain—" Cael started.

"Charlie," Reyna said, interrupting Cael and his probable intention to sidestep his misgivings.

"Here, Captain," Charlie responded, walking up to the console. Cael moved away the moment Charlie was in the space.

"Talk me through the failure mode. If your frequency is wrong, what happens?"

Charlie didn’t miss a beat. "The field wobbles instead of collapsing cleanly. Worst case, it destabilizes and the net drops before it lets go. That's the risk Cael's describing, and he's right that it's real. If I'm wrong about the frequency, I've got about two seconds to cut power before it drops them, and I will, but it won't come to that, because I'm not wrong."

A brief pause. "Stubborn," Reyna said softly so only Charlie could hear. She couldn't help the smirk that stretched across her lips.

"I ran the composite three times on the way down, Captain," Charlie began, offering more to convince Reyna. "The resonant frequency is a property of the material, not a guess, and I have the confirmed number sitting on my datapad. If anyone in this shuttle or aboard the Emberkind wants to check my math, I understand. But I will say the number of Gliders stuck is increasing." She kept her eyes on the console, her entire focus on the voice coming from the speaker. "It's a number, Captain. It doesn't care how it feels about me."

Another pause came through the console, the length of a captain making a decision she'd probably already made.

"Do it," Reyna said.

Cael turned toward the console as if it had bitten him. "Captain, with respect, as Chief Engineer, this is my operation, and my professional recommendation is the sectional approach. If we deviate to an untested method and it fails, the responsibility is?—"

"The responsibility is mine, Rask. It always was." Reyna's voice didn't rise, but it didn't need to. The authority oozed from the speaker. "You've given me your recommendation, and I've heard it. I've also heard the reasoning youcouldn'tprovide when Charlie asked you for it."

Cael's mouth opened. Whatever he wanted to come out of it did not.

"You have your instructions, Chief. Run Charlie's approach and get those animals out of that net. I'll want the comm log the moment you're back aboard."

The channel closed.

Cael said nothing. Instead, he turned tight on his heel and made his way back to the shuttle. Nothing more was said.

"Go for pulse, Wickett," came Torvax's voice through the team's comms.

Charlie pulsed the field. Four hundred meters of composite netting shuddered, went slack, and slid off the canopy like mist disappearing in the presence of the sun.

The net let go, and the whole canopy took off at once. Gliders dropped out of the mesh, caught air, and launched. Dozens of them, petal membranes snapping open like stained glass catching light. Even the chirping changed, all twelve patterns of it. Though Charlie had never learned the twelve patterns Selowen had told her about, she knew they had changed, for every sound was joyous. It was something Charlie was going to be hearing in her sleep for a week.

For a moment, the channel remained silent. Then Reyna's voice came through it one more time, and the edge she'd used on Cael was gone.

"Good work, Wickett." A pause. "I know they weren't space potatoes, but I'm glad you didn't put yourself in front of flying squirrels to die over either."

The channel closed.

Charlie laughed to herself. But then her chest tightened, more than before, more than it ever had.

Cael calledthe debrief for the ground team an hour after they were back aboard, and he called it from Reyna’s office.

Charlie found that part odd, being in Reyna’s office and not the briefing room, or Engineering. Instead, they were in the Captain’s office, with the Captain’s wall display, and the Captain nowhere in it.

Cael stood at the center of the room with Maren and Tavi and the two assistants arranged behind him while Charlie leaned against the back wall as the dark water of Admiral Vondra’s chamber filled the display on the wall, the stone shape of her sitting motionless, geode eyes catching what little light the water had left.

“Admiral,” Cael said. “Thank you for making time for the operational report.”

Charlie had been in rooms like this her whole life. She knew what was coming before Cael even said a word of it, the way you know a storm from the pressure before the first cloud. She’d stood in conference rooms at JPL while a man she’d handed a solution walked the room through it as if he’d dreamed it in the shower. She’d learned to keep her face flat, her hands still, and to tell herself it didn’t matter, that the work was done, and it was good. That it didn’t matter who said it out loud because it didn’t change the science, the solution, and the way it could change the world.

Even though what happened on the mission today wasn’t going to change the world, she’d originally told herself the Emberkind was different. But now she sat in the Captain’s office, prepared to find out she’d been wrong about that too.