I held the salute.

“Bah,” the admiral said, turning from me and sitting down hard. She grabbed her coffee and drank, as if I weren’t there.

I took it as a dismissal. I turned and let myself out, and the MP, still standing outside the door, let me go.

Nobody came for me as I walked to the classroom. I went straight to my mockpit and sat down, then greeted the others as they arrived. When Cobb hobbled in, I realized I was excited for class. It felt as if I’d maybe, finally, escaped the shadow that had been hovering over me since Bim and Morningtide had died.

The girls and their kindness were part of that, but my conversation with Ironsides was a bigger part. She’d given me what I needed to keep fighting. She’d invigorated me. In a strange way, she’d brought me back to life.

I would fight. I would find the answers to what had really happened to my father. And Ironsides would regret forcing me to do both.

PART FOUR

INTERLUDE

Admiral Judy “Ironsides” Ivans always watched the battle replays. She used the main control room, which had a large holographic projector in the center of the circular floor. She preferred to stand in its center, light shining up across her, the rest of the room dark.

She watched them fight. She watched them die. She forced herself to listen to the audio, if there was any, of each pilot’s last words.

She tried to read the enemy’s goals in the pattern of red and blue ships—red for the DDF, blue for the Krell. It had been years since she’d been a pilot, yet as she stood with headphones on—ships swirling around her—the feel of it returned to her. The hum of the booster, the rush of a banking ship, the rattle of destructor fire. The pulse of the battlefield.

Some days, she entertained fancies of climbing into a ship and joining the fray again. Then she banished those idiot dreams. The DDF was too low on ships to waste one on an old woman with shriveled reaction times. Fragmented tales—and some old print history books—spoke of great generals who took up a weapon and joined their soldiers on the front lines. Judy, however, knew she was no Julius Caesar. She was barely a Nero.

Still, Judy Ivans was dangerous in other ways.

She watched the battle spin and fly beneath the shadow of the slowly dropping shipyard. The Krell had committed almost sixty ships to this fight—two-thirds of their maximum, a major investment for them. It was clear they knew that if that wreckage had fallen into DDF hands intact, it would have been a huge boon. There had been hundreds of acclivity rings on that massive ship/station.

Now, salvage reported that fewer than a dozen so far were recoverable—and Judy had lost fourteen ships in the engagement. She saw, in their deaths, her own faults. She hadn’t been willing to truly commit. If she’d raised all of their reserve ships and pilots, then thrown them at the battle, she might have earned hundreds of acclivity rings. Instead she’d wavered, worried about a trap, until it was too late.