The door behind him swishes open, and whoever is coming through clears his throat really loudly.
Even though I feel as though I’m about to explode with need, I immediately break contact and push back from Beltz … Gunter… falling to my feet as he releases me from his embrace.
“Yeah, so thanks for the parts,” I say, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. Now I feel like Alana and her crew, trading engine parts for kisses and passion. My face is on fire, and I swear I’m about to piss my pants. Sweat beads out of every pore on my body.
“You are welcome for the parts. Good luck with your mission. I am sure I will see you when you return. At the next Alliance meeting, of course.”
“Of course.” My heart clenches painfully over his statement that he won’t be meeting me alone. How are we supposed to finish that kiss at an Alliance meeting? Dammit. Rejection sucks. I have the most insane urge to talk to Alana about this game he’s playing. I’m definitely out of my league, but she could eat him for breakfast. I won’t do it, of course. I will suffer in silence and pretend it never happened.
He salutes and executes a military-esque one-eighty before striding from the room and nearly knocking Baebong over in his haste to leave.
Baebong stares at me as he rights himself, half of his mouth lifted in a grin. “Well, well, well … what do we have here? Did I stumble upon my captain being a girl?”
“Oh, go stick your head in a thruster.” I walk back up the stairs and sit in my chair, turning it around and firing the simulator up again. Holy shitflakes, I can’t believe Baebong caught me kissing Gunter! How embarrassing! I’m so confused. I’m sad that it had to end and yet hate myself for allowing it to start in the first place.
He comes up the steps and stands next to me. “Whatcha doin’?”
I can tell he’s holding in laughter, but I ignore it. “Sim time.” I clear my throat to get it working right again. “Practicing. Gunter says he can get me a sim card for the Centurion 4 station.”
“Gunter, is it?” He nods silently, acting like he isn’t giving me a huge ration of shit.
I punch him in the leg. “Say anything about what you think you saw, and I’ll make you wish you were a brownshins.” I can’t believe how embarrassed I am. What the hell. It was only a kiss. I’ve kissed guys before. Lots of times. Like, five times.
“Hey, what’s up with the threats? I’m happy for you.” He points at his head and waits, forcing me to look up at him. “This is my happy face, see?”
“I can never tell with you slant-eyes.”
He kicks me gently in the leg. “Watch it, woman. Don’t make me unleash on you.” Walking over to his station, he collapses into it, spinning the chair around to face mine. “So we’re leaving soon, eh?”
“Yep.”
“Gonna go on a secret mission? Do some recon? Kick some ass? Take some names? Blow some shit up?”
I laugh as I maneuver my simulated ship into the bay that’s been designated as my arrival point. “Let’s not blow anything up on this mission, okay?”
He sighs, turning back around. “You’re no fun.”
“So you keep telling me.” I glide the ship into the dock and a number flashes up on the simulator set. “Boom!” I yell, flicking the sim off and sitting back in my chair. “Perfect score.”
Baebong is busy with his array.
“What are you doing?” I sit forward, trying to see what he’s up to.
“Juuuust wait a secoooond …” He looks up at the clearpanel and out of the corner of my eye, I see something enter the screen.
My focus leaves Baebong and shifts over to the clearpanel, specifically the piece of the Dark located just in front of my ship that it’s displaying. Something is floating past, approximately thirty meters away.
“What in the hell is that?” I squint. “It looks like …”
Baebong slaps his hand on the array and a blue laser light flies out from somewhere above us and hits it dead in the center.
“… my hair drying rig?”
There’s a flash of blue light that beams out toward my dryer, a cloud of white debris when it makes contact, and then nothing.
Baebong turns around, stands up, and bows. “Actually, it’s toast now. It was your hair drying rig, but it is now vaporized space junk.” He pumps his fist in the air as he goes back to admiring his handiwork. “Yeah, baby, yeah!”
My jaw drops open as I realize what he’s saying. He totally just killed my only hope of ever having decent hair on this ship.
He turns around to share his joy with me, but when he takes in my expression, he stills and his smile drops away a little. “What? You love it, right?”
I can’t believe him. “Love that you killed my hair dryer to test your weapon?”
He shrugs. “Yeah. You never use it. It was wasted in your chamber, just taking up valuable space.”
“I use that thing every day!” I bellow. I feel like my head is going to explode. I used to not care about looking ugly, but I find myself caring a lot right now. A lot, lot.
He steps back. “Whoa, sorry.” He gestures weakly at my hair. “We all thought …”
I drop my head into my hands and shake it slowly. I don’t trust myself to say the right thing here, so I choose to say nothing at all.
“I’m … uh … going to go down to the airlock. For a second …” He runs off the flightdeck just as another item floats into the clearpanel’s range.
He’s gone and I’m all alone, watching an old flightsuit, stuffed with what looks like straw, floating in the Dark, ready to be blown to bits.
I walk over to Baebong’s station and drop my gaze to his array. The smaller screen shows a close-up of the stuffed flightsuit dummy that my crewmates have made —made with my old flightsuit, of course— and there are words scrawled across the front of it. My heart seizes up in pain as I expect to see the letters C-A-S-S there, but as the effigy comes into focus, I almost vomit with happiness and relief.
My fingers jump over the keys of the array, knowing exactly what I need to do to make things right with my world. Of course the twins have made the control of this weapons system totally intuitive and easy to use, so in no time I have that ray charged up and ready to fire. When I hear the staccato beeps of the target tracker system shorten in duration and then the one long beep telling me my weapon is locked onto its target, I hit the button that will send out a short burst from the ray.
I watch as a stuffed dummy with the word D-R-A-K-E scrawled across its chest gets vaporized and snuffed out of existence.
Booyah. Watch out OSG, here we come.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
OUR DINNER WITH BELTZ’S CREW was pretty much a bust. Beltz reported that he was too busy to attend, and it ruined my appetite to think that he might be purposely avoiding me. I lied to Jeffers and told him it was a stomachache, so I was sent to my bunk with a cup of tea and a slice of ginger root to chew on. Bleck. At least I got the Centurion 4 station simulator card from Jens so I could practice my approaches and docking procedures.
Baebong and Jeffers find me up on the flightdeck as I execute my third approach into one of the station bays. I started with the largest one and did well enough. I’m about to fire up another round with a smaller bay when Baebong interrupts me.
“Is that the Centurion 4 card?” He sits down in his chair and stares up at the clearpanel.
“Yep.”
“Is that all it has on it?” Jeffers asks, pointing at the screen. “Docking approaches?”
I pause as I’m about to select my bay. “I don’t know. I didn’t check.”
“Sometimes they have the layouts of the public areas.” He looks over at me. “Could be handy for the mission to see that.”
I shrug, not convinced it will be all that helpful, but willing to take a look. I stayed at that station for a few weeks before I left, but I never bothered wandering the entire footprint. Most of it would have been closed off to me anyway. OSG contact points and private residences at
stations are never accessible except to the people who have a need to be there.
“Check it out,” Baebong says, taking control of my program. The main menu is floating as a hologram in front of him, and it has at least ten selections there for us to choose from. “This thing has everything.” His voice drops to hushed tones as he uses a laser pointer to hover over words that make my heart stop beating for a few seconds. “All access. Dude. What is up?”
It’s right there at the bottom of the menu list. All access. I walk over, staring at the menu with him. “That can’t be right. The only one with all-access is the OSG.” I’m not even sure that the station manager has this much sight on the station. The OSG is really weird about letting non-OSG see the details of their organization, especially their presence at any of the facilities.
“That’s just a simulation,” Jeffers says, coming over to stand at my side.
“Yeah, but it’s a simulation of the real thing,” Baebong says, looking over his shoulder at me. “Should I open it?”
I shrug, not convinced it’s what he thinks it is. Jeffers is probably correct; this is a simulation of what someone imagines that place is like. The only important thing one would need a simulator for is the dock, the bays, and the few places the public is welcome in, so it makes sense that this would be the only true-to-life parts of the layout.
Baebong selects the first option, which is the first level of the station. Another menu appears asking him which section he’s interested in viewing. Baebong touches the first one on the list.
The entire space in front of us is suddenly taken up by the simulation window. We’re standing in the entrance to Section One, Area One, Quadrant One. The sign on the door tells us this and one other thing: Blackwater Disposal. We are standing on the bottom-most floor of the station where the dirtiest of jobs is done.
“What the hell?” I look at my crewmates. “Is this for real? Who’d put the blackwater disposal unit on a sim card?”
Baebong answers by selecting it. The door opens in virtual reality, and suddenly we’re inside, staring at a workroom very much like one you’d expect in a sector that’s responsible for ensuring the purity of the water at a station. There’s a bank of computers behind a small desk and lights are blinking. The sound of water churning and big machinery at work fills the room.
“Try and manipulate the system,” I say at almost a whisper.
Baebong makes a humanoid appear in the virtual world and walks it over to the mainframe. “Which button?”
I point. “That red one right there.”
“System shut-down?” He looks at me again. “You sure you want to do that?”
I laugh. “It’s not like I’m actually doing it, dumbass. I just want to see how deep the programming goes.” I gesture at the hologram. “It’s just for show, right? The rooms are probably just something the programmer thought might be there, but I’m sure they’re not laid out how they really are. It’s not going to actually function.”
Baebong shrugs and does as instructed. His humanoid representative selects the red button, reaching out and pressing it in, even though the small tag above it says System Shut-Down. Emergency Use Only.
All three of us are startled by the alarms that ring out all over the flightdeck. It’s not our systems alerting us, but the simulated space station. It’s going nuts. My heart is beating rapidly, even while my brain knows this is all just a game. It’s creepy watching the humanoid stand there like a robot awaiting its next instruction as the simulator’s compubot alerts him to the fact that failure to re-initiate the blackwater filtration system will result in total station breakdown.
“Okay, that’s enough.” I reach up and flick away the trickle of sweat that had started to gather at my temple.
Baebong exits the program and brings it back to the main menu. “What now, boss?”
I chew my lip. This could be a complete waste of time, but then again, maybe it’s not. I’ve never seen anything like this outside of my OSG training. When that thought crosses my mind, I’m suddenly chilled. It can’t be.
“It’s very strange that a simulation card would have something like this on it,” Jeffers says. He’s staring at the menu. “Who needs to practice working on the blackwater system?”
Baebong looks up at us. “Someone who works there?”
Jeffers’ eyes go wide. “You think this is a sim card for the station personnel?”
“Could be.”
I nod, hoping he’s right. That would be way better than it being an OSG training module that we could be killed for having. “That makes sense. Maybe it’s a training tool.” I point, my finger shaking, but my mind made up. “Bring us into the OSG’s section. Then we’ll know.”
“How will we know?” Jeffers asks.
Baebong answers before I can. “Because. No one has authorization to go in there. Not even station personnel. No one would dare put that in a training module, not even for a station master.”
I’m holding my breath as Baebong selects the section I mentioned. The hologram blinks and then suddenly we’re standing outside a large double-door. The simulator identifies it as Section Three, Area Ten, Quadrant Six. I’m almost disappointed to find us standing there, locked out. A little piece of me was almost believing we had the key to the entire station in our hands.
A red light flashes in front of the door. “Access code required for entry.” My brain is short-circuiting. Why put that warning there if there is no point? If there is no access at all? Was it a really anally retentive programmer at the helm, trying to make this simulation as real-to-life as possible, or is this something more?
I have trouble swallowing while Baebong hisses out a disappointed breath. “Oh well,” he says, “so much for getting inside.”
I place my hand on his shoulder as I stare at the vision of that door. “Try this one,” I say, my throat tightening as I speak. “Delta, Echo, Sierra, Tango, India, November, Yankee, Eight, six, one, two, four, four.”
Baebong types in each letter and number as I say them, but then he turns around, his finger hovering over the key that will actually enter the data. “What in the hell is this? Are you just making it up or is this for real?”
I shake my head, not willing to say anything more until I see if that door is going to open or not.
“Fuck me,” he whispers, as he turns back around, presses the key, and waits.
We all gasp in shock as a message comes up in green letters and the door opens to reveal the interior of the OSG’s command on Centurion 4.
“Access granted. Welcome to Centurion 4, First Major General Valemar Kennedy.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
MY BODY FEELS LIKE IT’S carved out of stone. I can’t move, I can’t think, I can’t even react.
Baebong, on the other hand, has no problem with any of that. He flips his chair around and grabs my arm. “Dude! You have OSG all-access?! Holy shitflakes!”
Jeffers throws his hand up in Baebong’s face. “No!”
Baebong and I both look at him in shock. Whatever my friend was going to say to me next is frozen in his mouth.
“Don’t!”
“What’s your problem, old man?” Baebong says, his attitude doing a one-eighty. Where he was previously excited beyond reason, now he’s ready to throw insults.
“You can never use that code again,” Jeffers says sternly. “Forget you even heard it.”
“Kind of hard to do that.” Baebong snorts, turning his attention to me. “That’s the worst passcode I’ve ever heard in my life. Completely and totally hackable. Your father should know better.”
I finally find my voice. “Everyone has their faults.” My ears are ringing for some reason. After all these years … he still hasn’t changed it. Why? Why? Why?
“But why destiny? That’s a weird word.” Baebong laughs. “Does he think it’s his destiny to be everywhere all the time?” He nudges my leg. “Get it? All access? Like a god?”
“No.” I work hard to control
my emotions. “Destiny was my mother’s name. Eight, six, one, two, four, four was the date she disappeared.”
Nobody says anything for what feels like a long time.
“I’m sorry, Cass,” Baebong says, very subdued. “That wasn’t cool of me to joke like that.”
I shake my head. “You didn’t know. Don’t worry about it.” My mind is spinning. I have no idea what any of this means, but it can’t be good. Why would Beltz have access to a sim card that has real data entered into it, including classified access codes?
“It has to be an OSG training module,” I say, kind of in a trance. “No training module I ever saw had this in it, though.”
“Just because it works in this simulator, doesn’t mean it’s real,” Jeffers says. “It could be a dummy program. It could work with anything.” He points at the screen. “Back out and try a different code. Just make something up.”
Baebong’s fingers fly over the screen. The green access code disappears and a new message comes up: “Access code required for entry.” We’re back to the start of my nightmare.
I can feel my face heating up as Baebong enters in a random string of letters and numbers. Less than a second after the last one is delivered, a red warning appears.
Access denied.
“Maybe it has to be the same amounts of letters and numbers,” Baebong says, entering in a new code that has seven letters and six numbers.
“Access denied.” The message has a voice component to it this time. “Warning. This site is restricted to OSG personnel only. Attempts to enter restricted areas without proper authorization will be considered acts of aggression against the OSG, punishable by death.”
I’ve heard versions of that threat over a thousand times in my life. For that reason and because this is just a sim card talking, it probably shouldn’t scare me; but it does. I think it’s because I’m on the opposite side of the fence this time.
“Get out of there,” I say in a whisper. I feel like I’m choking.
Baebong doesn’t argue; he quickly brings us back to the main menu.