Cole looked startled for a second. “Didn’t Lucin tell you? I was demoted after the Tchung simulation. I graduated with the navigators based on my scores from the previous year. I mean, I get to keep my simulator hours if I ever want to be one of those guys.” Cole tossed his head up toward the nose of the plane, “But no Navy ships for me.”
“Oh.” Molly looked back to the folder’s contents.
“Hey, I’m not upset, so don’t get all pitiful on me. Hell, you always wanted to be a pilot more than I did. I love the math and the tactics. And training as a pilot made me one helluva navigator, so I have no problem with the decision. I’m more worried about this conspiracy. Our simulator was taken off-line almost before you were out of the building.”
“That makes sense,” said Molly, “the thing was screwed.”
“No. It was screwed with.”
“That’s right, you thought you saw Jakobs by the control panel of our pod earlier that day.”
Cole corrected her. “I never said it was Jakobs.”
“You said it was someone who reminded you of Jakobs.”
“Right. Same size, same swagger, but it could have been anyone in Navy black. Look at this page right here.”
Molly pulled out the one he indicated. It was a library computer log. “How’d you get this?”
“I had two months left at the Academy to gather this stuff together. And you wanna know what they demoted Riggs’s navigator down to?”
“What?”
“Cryptography.”
They both giggled at this.
“He got me a lot of this stuff. The rest I got through Saunders’s secretary.” Cole’s voice seemed to taper off at the end of this sentence.
“Do I even want to ask how?”
“Yeah, you obviously do. But I don’t kiss and tell.” Cole raised and lowered his eyebrows suggestively. He was obviously lying.
“Yeah, right,” Molly said. “So what do the library records tell us? Oh.” She traced Jakobs’ name. “Lemme guess, this is the time when you thought you saw someone by the simulator?”
“Bingo. Wasn’t him. Besides, he isn’t smart enough to do something like this. And why would they shuffle me around, graduate us early, close down that simulator, any of the other stuff if it was a cadet prank?”
“No way. You’re suggesting this was higher-up?” Molly started flipping through some more pages, wondering what Cole had uncovered.
“I’m not sure. But the people they graduated were not the best cadets. They were the few people close to you, the ones that really interacted with you on a daily basis. Whether it was the people that liked you, which would be me and…” Cole scratched his chin and made a point of looking up at the ceiling of the fuselage.
It took a few seconds for Molly to get the joke. “Ha. Ha,” she said.
Cole beamed in triumph. “Thanks. So it was me and Riggs and the people bullying you all the time. Only six of us were graduated early. And what sense does it make to demote me and then say I’m obviously too capable for another semester?”
“Well, Lucin did confess something to me that day. But you have to promise not to tell.”
He gestured to her lap. “You’re holding crap that can get me thrown in the brig for a very long time. Try and think of those documents as a promise ring, okay?”
Molly smiled. She hoped she twisted her lips enough to make it seem sarcastic. “Saunders had it in for me,” she confided. “Lucin said he and his wife had three daughters and no boys, so he didn’t want me to succeed or something.”
“That seems a bit backwards, but it might be better than what I’ve been working on.”
“Yeah? What’s your big conspiracy?”
“I was starting to think it had something to do with your father.”
The words punched her in the gut, the folder heavy in her lap. Molly chewed on Cole’s suggestion. The idea was ludicrous, yet seductive. She shook her head. It was tempting to have this be about something more significant than schoolyard pranks, but she knew that wasn’t true. It was just a fantasy to want the Tchung simulation and her expulsion to have greater meaning, for the cruelty of life to have some larger purpose.
“That’s ridiculous,” she finally said. “I don’t know the first thing about my father’s disappearance. I haven’t seen him or the ship since I was six years old. And besides, they didn’t find it until after they booted me out.”
“Yeah, but I was thinking your father was connected before I even heard of the Parsona.”
“Why? How could you?”
Cole gestured to the folder. “Because this is too much effort for a bunch of cadets. It has to have something to do with your father. Nothing else makes any sense.”
“Sure it does. Somebody screwed with our simulator because I was in it. Part of that sabotage included getting you killed from a minor scrape and leaving me in charge. The rest of this nonsense is someone cleaning up afterwards.” Cole frowned at her, clearly unhappy with her sound reasoning and its banal conclusions. “Look,” Molly continued, “I agree that this had to be higher up, that it wasn’t a simple prank, but no way does this have to do with my father. Somebody just wanted me out of the Academy. I mean who knows how to program those pods besides the geeks in IT? Saunders not only had access—”
“It wasn’t Saunders, he’s too fat and—”
“Don’t interrupt. I know it wasn’t Saunders you saw, but he could have had any of the IT guys do it. And we know his motive: he didn’t want me in the Navy, and he had the power to pull off the early graduations, so it all fits.”
“None of the IT guys were transferred.”
“What?”
“That yellow slip is the personnel change summation for the end of the year. If they were trying to hush this up, they didn’t move anybody who would’ve been able to do the most illegal part of the job.”
Molly shuffled through the folder, looking for the slip. “What are these thick white bundles stapled together?”
“Heh. I brought those along for your enjoyment. They don’t have anything to do with my theory, though.”
Molly turned to Cole. There was a faint white line where his lip had been busted open. The scar remained invisible unless his full mouth thinned into a smile. “What are they?” she asked.
“Medical files for Jakobs and Dinks. From the day you got kicked out.” He settled back into his chair. “There’s a lot there,” he added, a smirk on his face.
Molly thumbed through the stapled pages and looked back to Cole. The silence in the barracks that day finally made sense. She wasn’t sure she approved, but it was nice to feel him beside her, even across the extra room provided by the first class tickets. She didn’t really appreciate the space, but it was balanced out by them not having to wear their visors, reflecting back the world around them. It was just her and Cole. Their real faces. Scars and all.
7
The best thing about first class, as far as Molly was concerned, was getting to see nearly every single passenger of the ship file by. For an alien-watcher, it was a cross between a parade and a fashion show. Even the humans, who made up a majority of the crowd, were garbed in such splendid regalia that some of them looked stranger than the handful of aliens wearing simpler outfits.
Children bounced past excitedly, chased by nervous parents. There was an air of excitement in the crowd as vacations began, homes were returned to, and business deals still held the potential of not falling apart.
The only morose passengers Molly saw were the handful of Palans who must have been returning home from vacation. She assumed they didn’t like their stay on Earth very much. She was dying to ask them why and find out more about their home planet. In fact, Molly wanted to set up a toll booth in the middle of the aisle, stopping each passenger and demanding answers for passage: