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  Urch came in over the comm. “That was the most messed-up landing I’ve ever seen!” I could tell he meant that in a good way.

  “You’ve got weapons,” Captain Qwlessl told me. “I’m turning the ship. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  “He does,” Tamret said.

  I hit my console and pulled up the weapons screen. It was time to win this.

  The Dependable was already reducing its forward speed and pivoting to face our pursuers. It was exactly like that moment at Ganar when the gravity had cut out. It was like when we dropped to the planet’s surface. We were thrown back, hard and fast. I felt my stomach drop, and my head buzzed. I thought I would vomit, I thought I would black out, but I stared at the console and forced myself to concentrate.

  Then, suddenly, there was no spin, no loss of gravity, no nausea. I was in the moment, clear and precise, seeing exactly what I had to do. I tapped the screen, focused on the engines, and locked in. There was, just for a second, a moment of hesitation. I thought of giving Ms. Price exactly what she had promised me, death and destruction, but that wasn’t the person I wanted to be. It wasn’t the person Tamret wanted me to be. Or my father. I was better than that. I’d destroyed a ship once before, but I hadn’t known what I was doing. Now I knew exactly what I wanted to do and exactly how to do it.

  I chose my target, locked on to their weapons array, and fired a single missile. Once it was away, I refocused and targeted the engines with PPBs. Those I kept on firing. The missiles were slower than energy weapons, and the particle beams struck first, and there was a flash as the enemy saucer’s engines burst into flame. Chunks of metal and exploding fuel plumed from the cruiser. Atmosphere hissed into the void. And then the missile struck, and there was another explosion, this one near the primary weapons array.

  In an instant the ship lay dead in space, an overturned saucer, bobbing like a dead fish in the water. Air and fuel bubbled out into space. The cracked hull of the cruiser spit fire and vented plasma. In places the hull was so hot it glowed red. In other places I watched the metal warp and wave like a flag in the wind. The saucer was damaged beyond repair, and I knew beings had died—they were dead because of my decisions, and I hated that. I was still alive, however, and so were my father and Tamret and my friends and the beings we’d rescued. I never asked for that bargain, but I would happily take it.

  Captain Qwlessl’s voice came over the speaker. “Mr. Reynolds, the Phandic cruiser is signaling surrender. Your recommendation?”

  I let out a sigh. I felt something warm and wonderful. It was Tamret, taking my hand. Only then did I realize that I was shaking.

  I swallowed, not quite sure I was up for speaking, but when I tried, my voice sounded almost calm. “Ma’am, it’s your command. I’m just along for the ride.”

  “Let’s treat it like a training exercise. Recommended course of action?”

  I closed my eyes and thought for a moment. “Accept surrender. Secure ship with lances and tow it back to Confederation Central?” I ventured. “Send boarding parties via shuttle and secure personnel in the brig. I assume a Phandic cruiser has a brig.”

  “It does, indeed,” the captain said. “Well done, Mr. Reynolds.”

  I looked at Tamret. She was beaming at me. “You did it. You rescued your father. You captured a ship. You got us out of there alive. You did everything.”

  “We did everything.” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “And don’t you forget it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  * * *

  When all the excitement was over, I checked my HUD and leveled. Apparently daring rescues and space battles score well. My hacked skills aside, the number of experience points I had logged brought me to level twenty-four. We’d all racked up experience: Mi Sun was twenty-one, Charles nineteen, and Nayana eighteen. With most of our year yet before us, the human delegation had already exceeded eighty levels. Together, Steve and Tamret and the humans had rescued my father, the members of the selection committee, and the crew of the Dependable, whom everyone had thought dead. We had uncovered a traitor to Earth and the Confederation. We were also returning to Confederation Central with not one but two captured Phandic ships, prizes that would turn the tide of the war, maybe even end it. I hated to be so self-congratulatory, but there was no getting around it. We were heroes.

  As soon as we were safely aboard Dependable and the captain had thoroughly debriefed us, we all retreated to separate cabins. Having not washed in many days, I was relieved to discover that the Phands, despite their habit of public vomiting, believed in cleanliness, and there was something like a shower in the bathroom. The water shot upward, and in streams hard enough to poke out your eye, but I wasn’t complaining. I no longer stank, and that was a relief to me. It would have been a relief to others if I’d been around anyone, but as soon as I was out of the shower/torture device, I plopped down on the bed and slept ten hours.

  When I emerged, we were still the better part of a day out from Confederation Central. My head was clearer, but I was starving. I checked my bracelet and saw that someone had thoughtfully already uploaded a limited schematic for the Phandic ship, so I followed the directions to the mess. No one else was in there, but I soon discovered that the Dependable’s crew had again shown great wisdom, this time in converting the food production units to Confederation-standard fare. I was never so happy to have bland grain porridge.

  I’d finished my first bowl and was seriously considering a second when Tamret came into the room and sat down across from me. She had also changed and showered, but her clothes had obviously been ruined. She wore some kind of workman’s coveralls, and while they were not the most flattering clothes in the world, Tamret made them look stylish.

  “How did you know I’d be in here?” I asked.

  She placed her elbow on the table and rested her chin on her palm. “I programmed my bracelet to let me know when you woke up and to keep me updated about your movements.”

  “Are you supposed to do that?” I asked.

  She shook her head very slowly and smiled.

  Thoughts of bland porridge now vanished. My heart pounded, and I could feel my face growing hot. All this time I had wanted to say something to Tamret, to tell her how I felt about her, but I’d always been afraid, or I’d decided that there was too much going on to risk it. Now we were alone, and the danger was behind us. I had nothing to lose, because I had already gained so much. I had taken on soldiers, outwitted my enemies, broken into a prison, and bested a flying saucer in a space battle, but none of that felt to me as terrifying as the prospect of telling Tamret just how much I liked her.

  She breathed in deeply and sat up. “I need to tell you something.”

  No conversation that began that way ever ended well. My heart felt like it was ready to explode. She was going to tell me that she liked me, but not in that way, that she knew I wanted something else, but she only wanted to be friends. I could feel it. I closed my eyes and braced myself.

  She looked down and away, as if ashamed. Tamret was always so brash, so confident, but not now. “On my world, there are illustrated stories, both books and moving images—do you know what I mean?”

  Comics and anime. She had definitely come to the right person with this. “Sure,” I told her, thinking this was a strange way to begin the I like you but . . . talk.

  “There’s a kind of character,” she said, her voice trembling. “A regular Rarel boy, but with [monkey] features too. They’re always really attractive, and, I guess, what I’m trying to say is that that’s what you look like to me.”

  I sat in stunned silence, knowing I should say something, but I was too blindsided by this revelation to remember how to communicate. I was her version of a neko. That was what she was telling me. I was some kind of animated, romanticized object. I felt a little insulted and objectified, but I also figured that if it worked in my favor,
I could live with it.

  She was looking down now, unable to meet my eye. “When I first saw you, that night in the restaurant with Steve, I couldn’t believe it. I’d always had a thing for [monkey] boys, and I knew it was stupid, because you are what your species looks like and it didn’t seem right to like you because of that. But I know now that I like you because of you, Zeke. After everything we’ve been through, I thought it was important that you know that you’re more to me than some weird space creature who looks like he’s from an illustrated book.”

  “Thank you for telling me,” I said, reaching out and taking her hand. “I wanted to talk to you, too. I didn’t know if you liked me the way I like you.”

  “That’s because you’re not so bright.”

  She was looking at me, smiling, and she appeared as happy as I’d ever seen her. I felt like I would do anything to keep her looking that way.

  Ever since I’d arrived on the station I had been circling around in Tamret’s orbit, and now I understood that she had been circling in mine. We had been bound together from the beginning. We were entangled, and I was not going to wait or to think or to wonder. I’d once told myself that I had a year to try to make sense of things, but I had far less time than that, and the time for waiting was over.

  Tamret leaned toward me. “I should probably warn you that I can be a little intense.”

  “There may have been hints of that,” I told her. “No one’s perfect.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “No, but you’re pretty good.”

  I looked at her, really looked at her, and saw her in all her incredible alien and slightly insane beauty. She was the most confounding and beguiling girl I had ever met, and all it had taken to find her was crossing vast expanses of space. All I’d had to do to keep her was fend off an evil empire that wanted me dead. No one had ever said these things would be easy.

  Tamret and I walked out into the hall, holding hands, and nearly bumped into my father. He had changed his clothes and now wore one of the same utility outfits as Tamret. He looked like a green bodybuilder.

  Tamret immediately let go of my hand and stood nervously.

  “Dang, Dad,” I said. “You’ve been hitting the iron.”

  “It’s all for show,” he said with an embarrassed grin. “Part of the conversion process. I’m not actually any stronger than I was before, but I figured if I was going to make myself look like a superhero, I might as well go all the way.”

  “I can’t argue with that,” I said.

  He now turned to Tamret. “I don’t think I ever thanked you for helping me to escape.”

  “It was my honor, sir,” she said.

  Tamret seemed nervous, and she was actually showing respect for my father. I’d never seen her be deferent with anyone. I felt so touched I wanted to hug her.

  “I should go,” she said. “Let you two catch up.”

  She hurried down the hallway, and we watched her leave.

  “I like her,” my father said, “but you need to be careful.”

  “She can be a little out there,” I said, “but she’s not dangerous.” As soon as I said that, I knew it was a flat-out lie. She was probably the most dangerous being I’d ever known. Or was that Steve? She was easily top two, but they were both on my side, so that made it okay.

  “I don’t mean that,” he said. “I mean your feelings. You two are only on the station for the year. It’s probably not a good idea to get too attached.”

  I did not want to think about that. “But Earth’s admission is a lock,” I said.

  “It will be a long time before Earth citizens are going to be traveling throughout the Confederation.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You seem to have managed.”

  It came out more cruelly than I’d intended. I wanted to take it back, but I let it hang there.

  My father glanced away, embarrassed. “I know we have a lot to talk about. I know you’re angry with me for leaving, and I don’t blame you.”

  “I’m not angry,” I said, and I found, as I spoke the words, that they were true. Maybe I would have been if he hadn’t been right there, next to me, looking impossibly green, but we were back together. I understood what he had told me in the prison, and I believed him. He had been faced with an impossible choice, and he’d made the better decision.

  “It’s just that it was hard without you,” I told him.

  “I know it was,” he said. “But that’s done. We’re going to have to figure out what comes next.”

  “Do you think you’ll be coming back to Earth?”

  He looked down at himself. “I’ll need to be converted again, but yeah. The truth is, I’m not going to get such a warm reception back at the station. I broke a lot of laws to do what I did.”

  I gestured all around us. “But you did it for a good reason. You’re bringing this ship back. You’ve saved the Confederation.”

  He shrugged. “I think that was you and your friends. And yes, things worked out about as well as I could have hoped, but that doesn’t change the basic fact that I’m now a criminal. That’s okay, though. I did what I had to do. If the Confederation is no longer in danger, then Earth is also safe, and I don’t need to be here anymore. As long as no one is too angry, they’ll go for exile rather than imprisonment, and I can go back to you and your mom.”

  At some point I’d have to tell him about Mom being sick, but I didn’t want to upset him now. Besides, it didn’t matter. With our eighty levels in the bag, we would enter into the Confederation, which would begin with their giving us the technology that would cure my mother. She was only a few months away from being disease-free. The whole world was. I couldn’t believe that I’d played a role in changing everyone’s lives, in making the entire world a better place, but there was no denying it, and there was no denying that my father had made it all possible. The quality of life of every single person on Earth was going to improve because of what my father had set in motion. I was proud to be his son.

  “Listen,” he said, “would you like to come with me?”

  “To do what?”

  “To talk to your friend Nora Price. I have some questions, and I thought you might too.”

  I nodded. “I’m game.”

  • • •

  She sat on her cot, the only piece of furniture in the brig, behind a blue force field. She still wore her tight skirt suit, but her hair had been mussed and her face had been cut in the attack on her ship. Her hands were dirty, and her eyes were red, but she didn’t look like she’d admitted defeat. Not quite yet.

  “What do you want?” she asked neither of us in particular.

  “Where’s the tech?” my father asked.

  She almost smiled at that. “What tech is that?”

  “I know what your friends were looking for on that planet,” my father said, “and I have a pretty good idea that they found it, or found part of it.”

  “You know I’m not going to tell you. I don’t want to, and your Confederation friends aren’t as good at getting information out of prisoners. Do you think I’m going to experience anything like what you did?”

  My father’s face darkened. “You deserve it. You deserve worse.”

  She shrugged. “Oh well.”

  My father tried several more times to get her to talk, but she wasn’t going to say anything, and he left in frustration. I stayed.

  “How long have you been working for the Phands?” I asked.

  She smiled. “Years. They helped me rise to my position in the State Department. They wanted me on the station, but when you went rogue and threatened the security of the empire, they decided it was more important that I stop you. There are other well-placed agents throughout the Confederation, and on Earth, for that matter. While idiots like Dr. Roop were trying to influence TV shows, the Phands were exerting real influence. You can’
t change how things are going to turn out, Zeke.”

  “I think these captured ships will make a difference.”

  “We’ll see,” she said smugly.

  “Why would you do it?” I asked. “Why would you betray your home world?”

  “I’m not betraying anything,” she said. “I’m trying to put Earth in the best possible position to succeed in the bigger galaxy. You’re just too brainwashed by Confederation propaganda to see that.”

  “Are you honestly saying you think the Phandic Empire is good for Earth?”

  “Do you think the Confederation is? Zeke, you and I have had some rough history, but I respect you, and I know you’re not as clueless as people think.”

  “Thanks?” I proposed.

  “I’m sure you’ve done some digging around. You’ve at least looked at a map. You know what these worlds are—they’re all border planets. The Confederation is recruiting expendable soldiers for their losing war.”

  “And why do the Phands want us?”

  “To fight,” she admitted. “But humans would have the same chance as any non-Phands to rise within the empire. They don’t want to bring in species as second-class citizens so their privileged, nonviolent members can continue to stick their heads in the sand.”

  “I’d rather be on the side that doesn’t go around conquering planets,” I said. “And I know we can prove our value to the Confederation. I think maybe we just did.”

  “Don’t be so sure about that,” she said. “You may not get the reception you imagine.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  “You think the Confederation is like the United States but with much more diversity. It’s not. Where we come from, when you go out and risk everything for your country and come back a hero, you expect the people, the government you serve, to honor your courage and sacrifice. You may not like how you’re treated when you return to the station.”