“As expected, we have all of Argos,” Lee said. “Everything. Every flyover statistic. Every raid file. Every pre-truncated report we submitted on Segura. I found a bunch of reports mapping out the natural resources spread throughout our galaxy as well. There’s a lot here,” he said, very carefully lowering his voice.
“But?” she asked.
“But with all the pains Nolan took to get these to us, to risk leaving our clearances—I just expected something extra. I mean there are even files in here I don’t remember having when we went out all those months ago.”
As she watched, he drew up a holofile labeledAX27-AR-DeZolar-DeMyra-EvidentialSupport1529.
Pages and pages of tight script-like font filled the hologram. “It looks like some sort of high-level diagnostics report,” Kat said, reading a line of coding. “But that doesn’t look like it came from any of our systems… What else is in there?” she demanded.
Lee opened up the next file, leaning in beside her. The pages in this hologram appeared to have been manually transcribed, with occasional handwritten notes in the margins, the photon scrawl looping and hasty. She watched as he scrolled down through another page. And another.
“Hang on,” Lee said, running his finger along a value that had been highlighted in the same photon marker. And as Kat leaned in further to look at what he’d found, her heartbeat stuttered.
She knew that radiation signature and those delta-grays.
“These are from their mainframe.”
CHAPTER 32: LEE
HOURS AND files later, Lee sat back in the little synthetic cafe chair of the Hideaway, staring into nothing. He felt as if he’d just peeled back a piece of their universe, only to be bombarded with foreign matter and secrets to which he had no right to know.
After that first set of mainframe notes, they had opened up not one, not two, but seven files. Seven files of carefully documented notes. All manually transcribed, with footnotes and scribbles, random highlighted values, and the occasional variable or formula. If that first hadn’t clued them in that they were looking at Segura, one of these others would have. This information was so far beyond his depth. He was in over his head and he knew it. There was no way he’d be able to make sense of this. Not within a single term, perhaps not in a single raider year. But if there was anything that could point them in the direction of evidence that could save Segura and stop the General, evidence that could explain what Gaia’s people had on him, or prove that what they had been working on with harnessing the dark rays was an option for them, this would be it.
He let his eyes drift, glancing over the late afternoon duos and trios of faceless cadets, wading through the crowd until they fell on the long vanilla-blonde ponytail, bobbing along as it debated between green juice flavors.
What had he hoped they’d find in here? An explanation from their Commander? Some loophole that would magically undo all the damage they’d caused last term? A star map charting the exact route to Gaia and their supposed “base” so they might personally ask her their questions themselves?
He’d let himself get lost in the fairytale. And now reality was hitting again.
He ran his hands down his pant legs to attempt to calm himself.
“Hey,” Kat said, settling into the chair opposite his as she placed two green juices on the table. “I thought we could both use the pick-me-up.”
“Thank you,” Lee said, channeling his energy into his fingers instead as he pulled his drink towards him. He took a drink without thinking. “You picked a good one for me.”
“Classic strawberry-spinach. I figured today wasn’t the day for the hard stuff,” she said, meeting his quiet laughter with a little half smile.
Hands still braced against his drink, Lee re-hashed what they knew about their Commander and the General. “Nolan said they’d lacked evidence, right? So all we have to find is some way to get Segura’s research back on the board. That way we can call off the General and delay whatever it is he’s working on long enough that we have time to find out what they know.”
“Plain and simple,” Kat teased, but he could see that severity in her eyes. The anxiety limning those pale greys. “Round two?” she asked.
“Round two.”
“Do you think it was the Commander who made all of these notes?” Kat asked another hour later.
“I’d wager it had to be. Nolan can be crafty when he wants to be, but this—” Lee didn’t have to exaggerate as he blinked past the technical pages in front of him. Even their holographic glow felt a few lumens beyond his usual perception. It was a wonder the Commander had been able to transcribe as much as she had.
“I wish she’d just looped us in from the start,” Kat murmured, “spared us the hassle.”
Lee couldn’t say he disagreed. But the longer they sat there, flipping through jargon, the eerier the feeling he got. “Nolan—when we met with him—he kept using past tense.”
“What?” Kat asked, brow fluttering as if she was yanking herself from a tangent.
“When he was speaking about the Commander’s efforts—‘she preferred they be left out’—he was speaking in past tense,” Lee said. He knew Nolan had probably had limited options, that it was bad enough he’d risked keeping them on deck, even secretly. But how bad…
“Have we opened everything, checked all the files?” Lee asked.
“I was just going off the order you were using.”
