“Do you trust her?” she asks me.
“No,” I say.
“Then why bring her along?” Odette asks.
It’s my turn to frown.
“She convinced me on that first dive into the Dignity Vessel that she knew a lot about stealth tech. I wanted that expertise,” I say.
“And now?”
I shake my head. “I guess I expected more from her. I expected her to find a way to destroy the tech only.”
“She hasn’t done that?” Odette says.
“She won’t, not without experimentation,” I say.
Odette nods. “And you won’t allow the experiments.”
“Would you?”
She studies me for a moment. Then she says, “No.”
We’re both quiet. I’m about to head to my berth—alone—when she says, “I think you should send her back where you found her.”
I sigh. I can feel my own reluctance. I think about it for a moment and realize where it’s coming from.
“No,” I say. “She stays. She’s as determined as I am to destroy the Dignity Vessel.”
“But you can’t trust her,” Odette says.
“I can trust her on that,” I say. I nod to Odette and start down the corridor, thinking the conversation is over.
But Odette follows me and grabs my arm. “You’re giving her too much credit.”
“If I fail, what does it matter?” I ask.
“You haven’t thought about this, have you? Your failure? What’s the best way to guarantee it?”
“Not go to the Dignity Vessel,” I say, half seriously.
“Make sure the bomb doesn’t work at all,” Odette says. “Or make sure it detonates early.”
Which would kill me. I can’t imagine Squishy killing me. But then, I couldn’t imagine Squishy leaving the team years ago either.
I feel cold. “What do you suggest?”
“Let her work on her bomb,” Odette says. “Let her think she’s part of this. But let me get you something big, something that’ll take out the entire ship.”
“You know where to get a bomb like that?” I ask.
“I didn’t always wreck dive,” she says. “I worked salvage in my early days.”
“With Squishy?” I ask.
“Before Squishy,” she says. “But I still have a lot of friends who salvage.”
“You mean full destruction salvage,” I say.
She nods.
Full destruction salvage works like this: The divers go in and strip the ship of its valuables. They also take important parts, like engine parts and computer chips. Sometimes they take things like screens or certain types of exterior material, particularly if the ship is made of expensive components. Then the divers blow the ship up. They don’t just destroy the ship. They obliterate it. Unless you arrive in the area shortly after the explosion, you have no idea anything even happened in that region of space.
I stare at Odette “I didn’t know that about you.”
She shrugs. “I made a lot of money. Then we found a beautiful old ship, one of the loveliest things I’d ever seen. Everything was carved and molded. It was stunning. I tried to buy it from my friends, but they wouldn’t hear of it.”
She looks down the corridor, but this time I know she’s not checking to make sure we’re alone. This time, she’s seeing that old wreck, the one she thought was so lovely.
“I cried when we blew it up,” she says.
She turns back toward me.
“There isn’t a day that goes by without me thinking of that ship.” She gives me a half smile. “I often wonder if I could have done something else to save it. I’ve never seen another one like it. It was someone’s baby, and we destroyed it.”
She shakes her head.
“That’s when you stopped working salvage,” I say.
“Yeah,” she says. “But I’ve kept my connections. I can get us something that will obliterate that Dignity Vessel.”
I study her. She’s serious.
“We’re going to need weapons too,” I say.
“I figured as much,” she says. “Have you ever used a weapon on a dive before?”
“No,” I say. “But I’ve been prepared to.”
Her expression tells me being prepared to use a weapon and using that weapon are not the same thing.
But I know that. And she doesn’t insult my intelligence by reminding me of it.
“You’re going to need guards,” she says.
“Guards?” I ask.
“People to flank you when you go in. You’re going to need a team to watch your back. Preferably someone who has fired a weapon before.”
“Like you,” I say.
“Like me,” she says. “And Hurst.”
“Sounds like a good team to me,” I say.
She can sense that I’m about to leave again. She takes my arm. “There are a lot of logistics, Boss,” she says.
“I know,” I say.
“No, you don’t,” she says. “When you blow a ship, you don’t want to be near it. You don’t want to be caught destroying it.”
I guess I knew that, but I hadn’t thought it through. It makes sense. Still, I taunt her a little. “Even if you obliterate it?”
“Especially if you obliterate it,” she says. “Especially then.”
THIRTY-FOUR
It takes us weeks to put all the pieces together. Odette contacts her friends and suddenly we have weapons. She tells me we have our bomb as well, but I do not ask where it is.
I research everything that I can, from the military vessels Hurst saw (their maximum crew complement is ten) to the command vessel. None of the images of command vessels I show Hurst are the one he saw, but we can’t find an image of that ship. For all we know, it’s a new model. At least we have a general size. I still can’t figure out what its mission was, but I at least know how many people we might be facing.
I even visit the rental ship, The Seeker, and investigate its scanning equipment myself. It’s a primitive version of the Business. We won’t need to get nearly as close to the Dignity Vessel as The Seeker did to do a proper scan. We might even be able to scan the military vessels, particularly before they know we’re there.
Squishy works on her bomb too, something delicate and sophisticated, something—she tells me—that will take out the stealth tech only, leaving the Dignity Vessel intact.
She thinks that pleases me, and it might have, years ago. But I want the Dignity Vessel all gone. I don’t tell her this. I’ve decided to use Odette’s weapon, but I tell no one that.
Not even Odette.
In the last week, I have become obsessed with the actual mission itself. How we’ll get in, how we’ll distract the military, how we’ll buy ourselves enough time.
I also want to make sure we don’t take anyone else out when we obliterate the Dignity Vessel. While I’m okay with a charge of destroying imperial property, I don’t want to be charged with murder.
Hurst becomes my primary tactician. He’s flown combat missions, and as Odette reminded me, this is a combat mission.
In some ways, this is the first step toward war.
All the way along, people remind me of that. Of the huge step I’m taking. Of the risks involved.
I pretend to care. Sometimes I mouth political slogans—the Empire has gotten too big since the Colonnade Wars; too much power in one place creates a great danger; stealth tech doesn’t belong to anyone except the ancients who knew how to use it. But mostly, I’m not thinking of politics.
Mostly, I’m thinking about my father.
I see his face—not just the man who recently betrayed me, the one whose face has become mostly planes and angles accented by silvering hair, but also the face of the man who held me close outside of the Room, who put his hand over the crack in my helmet and urged whoever was with us to get us out of there quickly.