Stanton sighed and looked down at his hands in his lap. “I didn’t crash.”
“I was wondering about that,” Stacia said. “You’re well known for your piloting skills. It never sat right with me that you would crash during what was, for you, a routine publicity opportunity.”
“It wasn’t a publicity opportunity! There are people on this planet who are suffering. The existence of the Skins has been speculated for years.”
“Sure, by the same wacko conspiracy theorists who think the Galactic Marines are run by a group of secret lizard people from the Earth’s core.”
“Except this conspiracy theory turned out to be real, didn’t it?” Stanton asked, pointing at Skin. Skin stared at his outstretched finger as though she wasn’t sure if he was offering it to her or not.
“You’re right,” Stacia said quietly. “Your concerns were valid after all. But back to the crash. What happened?”
“Sabotage, as far as I can tell,” Stanton said. “After the people at Roo-Soh nursed me back to health from my injuries, I went back to the wreck of my ship to try to investigate. I thought I saw evidence that a few major regulators in the engine had been removed prior to take-off. You know, from scorch marks where there shouldn’t have been any scorch marks. But I could never be sure, because the Roo-Soh people had already begun to strip it for parts by then.”
“Interesting,” Stacia said. “Why would someone sabotage your ship?” But Stanton didn’t need to answer that one. It was obvious. He had rubbed some people the wrong way with his meddling and revealing that there was anything less than perfect with the Galactic Marine’s inescapable prison planet. Again, it all came back to corruption somewhere in the upper echelons.
“So does this mean you really are still a Galactic Marine after all?” Skin asked her.
“No,” Stacia said quietly. “If it ever becomes public knowledge that this was all an escape attempt orchestrated by General Borealis, then she will be seen as guilty. She would probably end up down here right beside us. I really was stripped of my rank and dishonorably discharged. As much as being a Galactic Marine was part of me, it will never be a part of me again.”
There was a long period of silence between all three of them before Stanton spoke again. “No offense, but so far it looks to me like your rescue plan is seriously flawed.”
“How so?” Stacia asked.
“How about the fact that we’re still here? A rescue would imply that we’d be able to get off Leviathan.”
“Except nobody leaves Leviathan,” Skin said.
“Nobody ever,” Stanton agreed. “All you’ve managed to do by coming down here is make Lexton even more angry at me for trying to organize people against her than she was before.”
“That might be true otherwise,” Stacia said, allowing a twinkle to appear in her eye. “Except haven’t either of you noticed that, ever since we escaped Roo-Soh, we’re not exactly moving at random?”
Both of Stacia’s companions sat up straighter. “So you do have something else up your sleeve?”
“I don’t have sleeves,” Stacia said, pointing at the armor on her arm.
“You know what I mean.”
“I do. Finding you was just phase one. Phase two is to reach our spaceship.”
Skin’s mouth dropped open. “A spaceship? An actual, working ship?”
“No, that can’t be possible,” Stanton said.
“It shouldn’t be, but we figured out a way.”
“How? It’s not like we have the materials to build one, and the security platforms wouldn’t let one just land on the surface.”
“Of course not. Anything that got close would be shot down with extreme prejudice. So we let them.”
“Explain,” Stanton demanded.
“That was the hardest part of all this to plan, even more so than shooting your mother in such a way to let her live but still make it look like I’d actually tried. About two days before I was discharged, an unidentified ship appeared in orbit. All attempts to hail it were ignored, even as it got closer. So it was shot down, obliterated, and crashed to Leviathan’s surface where it exploded in a spectacular, very visible fireball.”
“Okay, still not seeing where this helps us.”
“The outside of the ship was shot. The outside of the ship exploded. The reason the security platforms would never be able to identify its make and model is because all they saw was a cobbled together shell. If it looked like some kind of makeshift, pirate craft to them, that’s because it essentially was. But inside, hidden from view, was the real ship, a luxury craft heavily modified just for this occasion. If everything went as it should, the real ship should still be safe and in a place far enough from any settlement that no one would have come to salvage from it.”
“If,” Stanton said. “There are a lot of things that could go wrong with that if.”
“Yes, there are, the first being that someone else might have already found it, and the second being the possibility that the landing didn’t happen the way we wanted and something got damaged. We’re not going to know until we get there. And we’ll get there tomorrow, at this pace.”
“Not exactly the most elegant plan,” Stanton said.
“We had to come up with it on the fly. Satellite scans of the surface implied that your ship was intact enough for you to have survived the crash, but any more thorough scans are blocked by the security platforms, so we had no idea how long you were going to remain in one piece.”
“But… what happens to me when you leave?” Skin asked.
Stacia was surprised she even had to ask. “Skin, you’re coming with us, assuming we don’t die on the way out. That is, if you want to.”
“I… I get to leave the planet? But nobody…”
“Nobody leaves Leviathan,” Stacia said. “Yes, I know. That’s the rule. But in case you haven’t figured it out yet, my track record of adhering to rules is a bit spotty.”
“I can go into space? I can see other worlds? I… I can live?”
“Yes. Hopefully. Again, there are a lot of things that could go wrong.”
But Skin didn’t seem to hear this last part. “I get to leave Leviathan!” She stood up and jumped up and down with a vigor and energy Stacia hadn’t thought possible from someone so malnourished and scrawny. “I get to leave! I get to live! I get to…” She stopped, suddenly serious. “I have no idea what I’m supposed to do out there.”
Stacia smiled. “I’m sure we’ll think of something.”
“There’s still a major problem that I see with this,” Stanton said. “The security platforms aren’t going to let anything launched from the surface outside of the atmosphere. We’ll take off in this ship and get blown out of the sky within a minute.”
“There’s a plan for that, too. It’ll be tricky, but we can make it work.”
She gave them a rough idea of what they would do, and Stanton agreed that was risky as hell but could still work. Skin didn’t seem to understand a word they said, but none of it tempered her enthusiasm. When they finally settled in for the night, Stacia took the first watch and told her companions to sleep. While she stood at the edge of the camp, however, she could hear Skin still moving around behind her even as Stanton snored lightly.
“Stacia?” Skin asked quietly.
“Yes?” Stacia didn’t even turn around to see her. She had no doubt that Lexton and her people would come for them, and she had no idea when it might be. The last thing she wanted was for it to happen at the one moment when she had her back turned.
“You’re serious that I can leave with you?”
“Assuming we don’t all die in the attempt, yes, of course. Why would I lie to you about this?”