CHAPTER 31 KAT
KAT STARED out the star-flecked window of the training room they’d configured to mirror one of their cruisers for today’s exercise, while her former muse blinked back at her.
The stars had always been her compass. Her pacesetter.
Her guide. Even when they’d pulled and hastened her along, she’d always felt like they were watching out for her. Shining for her.
She used to get excited, staring out these windows and imagining all of the adventures she would have with Lee. The star systems they would visit and the lives they would bless.
She was helping to prepare her cadets—in this very room, at this exact moment with the pre-raid crash course—to go out one day on raids of their own. Simulating real raid scenarios with borrowed parameters and missions and emotions. They were learning to protect the galaxy. To preserve life.
Only now, like her stars, this mission felt tainted. A betrayal. Like her midnight galaxy was more representative of a shadowed and creeping destruction than one of hope or aspirations.
She’d been content, having long ago come to terms with the fact that being a raider and serving the AMG meant sometimes compromising her personal beliefs.
It meant following orders, even when she didn’t agree with them, for the greater good.
Because it also meant security. It meant not having to squabble for basic human necessities in a tiny cramped apartment with her aunt while the rest of the galaxy closed in on them.
Sure, she’d entertained the hope that they could be that difference and change lives.
In the heat of a couple of hours, she’d believed they alone had uncovered this great secret in the galaxy.
That this strange, rogue operation could be the saving grace for them all, a galaxy free of dark rays, with plentiful resources to go around.
In that moment she’d have stopped at nothing, done whatever it took to make that belief a reality.
But all of that had gone up in flames. Literally. She’d watched those hopes die, ash and rubble lost in the asteroid field of Argos. She’d been reliving it ever since in mini altercations that kept her up at night.
Their visit to Nolan yesterday had raised questions.
So many questions. And she meant what she told Lee.
She was in it, she would follow this thing with him to the end.
One more mystery to unravel. She would choose him, always.
But she’d be lying to herself if she didn’t admit this latest turn scared her.
That she was terrified about where this new road she and Lee now sauntered towards might lead.
She gazed out over the pond of cadets staring back at Flyn, their eyes grazing over her and Ness as Flyn led them through the overview and expectations of the course.
How many of them were still stargazing, staring out to the heavens with big dreams in their peripherals?
When she’d signed up weeks ago to help, she’d still been of that mindset that they could still scramble their way out of this and right things.
But the more she learned about the order of their galaxy, the less sure she became. Were they even trying anymore?
“Every time you don your helmet, you represent the Academy, and the AMG,” Flyn was explaining.
“As raiders, it is our job to operate under that banner. Our mission is black and white. We protect life. You complete your mission, and you win. Complete your missions, and you may, if you’re lucky, find yourself at the top of the Academy.
” Dipping his head towards Kat, he offered her a nod that was of equal parts respect and jealousy.
But she could care less about the jealousy. Or her status, honestly. It was the black and white part she had a problem with.
These cadets had never been out on a raid. They’d never been off the ship, where danger was concerned. And to picture one of their naive faces next year, standing where they had stood—like Levy had stood, barely a VL—
This wouldn’t cut it.
When it came time to divvy up into groups and initiate the simulation parameters of the holograms lining the various walls of the room, Kat conveniently bumped a handful of keys moderating the extremities.
She could show the cadets black and white.
Or she could show them real.
Alarms pealed from every corner. Warning lights triggered along each life-support system. Sparks flashed outside one of the simulated ship “windows.” And someone really needed to stop yelling.
Kat would be having flashback trauma from the stress of watching each raid crash and burn, were she not too busy playing daft as she, Ness, and Flyn hopped between projections scrambling to keep the cadets’ “ships” online and understand how this could have gone wrong.
“What happened to the oxygen suit ratios?” Flyn bellowed over the sounds of their groaning cadets and the seemingly obvious choice between fulfilling their mission and saving their dying companions.
“I can’t get this alert to turn off. Hanneman, you’ve got entry point 3?” Ness yelled, the pseudo-reality as vivid from their point of view as to the cadets they were training.
Wordlessly, Kat slid back into the fray.
Black and white. She’d turned their lesson grey.
And an exciting couple hours later, Kat departed the crash-course, bidding a harried-looking Ness and a more-than cranky Flyn that they go grab lunch to cool down.
But as she rounded the training level, it was her heart that still hammered—to a beat that had nothing to do with the chaos she’d just unleashed—and everything to do with the chaos that lay dormant. A potential energy ready to explode.
She was searching for something to push her, somewhere to channel that wobbling, off-kilter feeling when she ended inside the door she’d been subconsciously searching for. As it closed behind her, she was met with near-pitch darkness.
Kat almost smiled as the familiarity settled over her.
She hadn’t been down here much as of late.
And she’d missed it. She’d missed hiding.
It felt like she’d had no control of the spotlights the past several months.
It wasn’t until she had crossed over to the base of the track before she realized that someone was already in here.
His boots rested way too still, and his breathing was near-silent as he straightened.
Kat couldn’t rein in the huff of annoyance that coursed from her as she joined him on the lightning track. “Of course.”
She swore Zane also laughed in the darkness. But she could share—for now.
They stretched in silence, loosening up their muscles for what would and had always been a break-neck, lung-bursting, exhilaration awaiting each of them.
Then, without a signal, she took off, sprinting out onto the track. The thick darkness wound around her, an old friend welcoming her home. And as it pulled her in close, she ran faster.
She focused on her breathing, on the steady pounding of her feet beneath her.
And only after he had passed her, after his footsteps had disappeared in the distance, did her mind begin to unspool.
Like it had been aware of that second presence, that limitation.
A past from which she was desperate to break free.
She’d had different goals in that past life.
And different limitations. Ones she’d probably set for herself back when she was just grateful to have a room for herself and money in the bank.
Back when all she’d dreamed about was getting out.
Before she’d even realized there could be more. That she could be more.
She hurdled over a dip in the path, landing with a soft spring as she kept on going. Like even her legs had found that new energy, new freedom.
Her application had been weighing on her for weeks now as she watched the window to apply growing smaller and smaller.
As the panic had set in and she’d tried to force herself through that opening.
But maybe it was just that. A window. When what she should have been looking for—what she owed it to herself to uncover—was a door.
Maybe there was more than one way to make that dream come true.
Because she wasn’t just Kat, anymore. She was Kat with Lee. A shiny new version of herself. A version that although yet to be tried, felt ancient as her aunt’s ship she’d once dreamed of fixing up and flying off to a distant galaxy for a fresh start…
And whether they found a door, or another window, they would do it together. There had to be a place for dreamers like her and Lee. A place where they could be safe. A place without dark radiation. She just had to find it.
Her lungs held out for longer than she’d thought they would. She really had taken things easy lately. She needed to kick her butt into shape again. But the muscle memory? Her mind remembered this. And it seemed her body was cool to follow.
They were running on borrowed time, now. Not much of it. But there was enough, and they would make it work.
When she turned off the track, it took longer than usual for her heart rate to settle. But eventually it got there, about the time Zane caught back up to her once more.
“You were always good at pushing me,” she murmured when they’d reached the base of the track once more.
“At least we had that,” Zane said, a gleam of white in the darkness. He stopped a half-meter away from her, and she could feel the heat rippling off him. His own pain and tension he’d been working off. And the air was charged between them once again—a different sort of charge this time.
It was a camaraderie. And an understanding. And when neither of them made any move to tease that, or speak on it, he tipped his head towards her, an unspoken acknowledgement. That understanding. Well done, Hanneman, he seemed to say.
She nodded back. “Bye Zane.”
He turned and headed for the door before stopping himself, glancing back and seeming to linger.
“Keep pushing him, Hanneman.”
And then he left the room.
Lee claimed a table near the railing with his holoblock when she finally caught up to him in the Hideaway, freshly showered and dry again.
“Hey—” he said, looking up, eyes tracing over her, and probably noting the fresh flyaways as she joined him. “How did the course go?”
“Fine,” she said as she sank down in her chair and Lee slid his green juice over to her.
“You guys ran long,” Lee said.
“I had somewhere to be,” she said, a soft smile on her face.
“You know, Flyn crashed through here not long ago…” Lee mused, eyes flashing up to hers. “Your doing, I’m guessing?”
Kat fidgeted with his straw. “I may have upped the stakes on them just a bit,” she said when he continued to peer back at her. “These young cadets need to be prepared. They have no idea what it’s like to be out there.”
“I agree,” he said.
Kat balked, accidentally flicking some juice at him with the straw. “What?”
“Nothing,” Lee said, straight-faced, even as he brushed some of the green juice composite from his chin. “I agree. It sounds like it was a bold stroke, and probably a shockwave to their systems. But I think they’ll be that much more prepared when they do get their turn out there.”
“You agree,” she repeated. “No lectures? No, ‘You ought to go easier on them, you went a little overboard and probably scarred them for life, they’re just IRs, Kat’?”
“Nope. I think you make an amazing raider.”
“Oh. Thank you.”
Kat wasn’t sure why his directness threw her.
Or why she’d expected a different response this time.
But she couldn’t help steal glances back over at the handsome Gamma across from her.
With his boyish face, and the years spent down around the Academy’s training levels, earning each bulge and ripple in his arms and back.
And with the intelligence of any high-ranking AMG leader or Lieutenant.
He leaned back in his chair, arms clasped behind his head, as if he could ever be so carefree as he let on.
When had he grown into such a man? She’d blinked and he’d transformed from the anxious kid on the transports.
She wondered what people saw when they blinked back at her.
Could they see that transformation in her as well?
Could they see that she had learned a few things of her own, even if it had taken her a while?
Or did she need to work on projecting that change?
She supposed everyone had to start somewhere.
She’d settled back in with a fresh green juice before she motioned to Lee’s holoblock and the holograms he’d drawn up before him. “Anything new?”
“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 labeled AX27-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.”