The seconds sprinted by. “Three minutes,” Kat murmured, eyes darting from her hyperband to the security camera mounted by the doorframe in the corner of the room.
“Switching over.” Lee ran a quick search for Segura’s mainframe, using everything he could think of. Key terms. File names. Loose snippets from the formulas they’d discovered in the Commander’s notes. It was a shot in the dark, but if they could find anything else that might be helpful to them…
But each of them were coming up blank. Not even an encrypted file of her notes was apparent.
“She really has rinsed her hands of everything,” Kat groaned, flicking down through the folder’s contents.
Switching gears one more time, Lee’s fingers hesitated over the holo-keys as they drew up the Commander’s messages.
“What are you waiting for?” Kat demanded, eyes darting back down to her hyperband.
“Feels too invasive.” Lee blew out a breath, the stray hairs fluttering over her ear.
“It is,” Kat agreed, meeting his gaze. She reached over to lay her own hands overtop the backs of his. “And that is why you are you.”
He squinted, trying to see what she was getting at.
“But I am me. And we are in this together. A team. And invasive or not, we have lives on the line. Futures—our futures. And our galaxy. We need to know if she has any secrets up her sleeve.”
Swiftly, but not roughly, she pulled his hands away from the keys and began sifting through the Commander’s messages.
She paused when she landed on a copy of a project proposal from General Narron for QIII: “a more sustainable future.”
“There they are again, the BPLM,” Lee murmured, tracing over their signature in the corner.
Kat’s eyes darted once more to the plaques on the wall. Except with QIII… “The land’s already dead…”
They didn’t have time to mull over it before they were also copying it into their too-light shared folder.
They’d already seen the thread between Commander Blanche and General Narron with her formal admittance of their faults. But lower down, they found another thread—a separate thread. An earlier thread.
“Who was that message directed to?” Kat asked.
Lee expanded the hologram. “From Commander Blanche to Secretary Nolan. Dated back to the day of our initial post-raid meeting. The one held solely between us and the Commander…” He trailed off, but Kat’s eyes traced along the body of the message. A splice of communication that was never meant to be seen by outside eyes.
Keep digging, there has to be something here we can use. I know my cadets, allegiances don’t shift like that. This could be it, this could be the answers we are looking for. We can’t afford to lose this one, but we also can’t act on belief alone, he already has the council in his pocket.
Find me something tangible, Nolan.
Kat’s hands had stopped moving long before her eyes glazed over. The words rolling through her head came this time from the stern voice of a woman with pristine red hair and a gorgeous set of power suits.
I know my cadets.
Find me something tangible, Nolan…
The phrasing threw her, so at odds with the previous communication they had read from their Commander.
Not personally accountable.
Their faults.
I know my cadets.
We can’t afford to lose this one.
The words slapped around and around in her head, a punch to the gut. A wrench in the heart. Each making less sense than the other.
They were the best. They wereherbest. The Commander should have requested her squadron again. Her team. They could have conducted another internal review. A dozen.Void,she could have thought of something—anything. There had to be something in here that they could have found, if she’d only tried a little harder.
