Akawe stared at her for a good half minute. Then he shook his head and sucked his bottom lip against his teeth. “Goddammit, Navárez.”

“Now you know what I’ve been dealing with,” Falconi said.

Akawe pointed a finger at him, as if about to chew him out. Then he seemed to reconsider and folded the finger into his fist. “You may be right, Navárez, but I still have to run this up the chain of command. It’s not the sort of decision I can make on my own.”

Exasperated, Kira let out a sound. “Don’t you see, that’s—”

Akawe pushed back his chair, got to his feet. “I’m not going to sit here arguing with you, ma’am. We have to wait to hear what Command says, and that’s the end of it.”

“Fine,” said Kira. She leaned forward. “But you tell them—you tell your superiors—that if they keep me here in Sixty-One Cygni, the whole system is going to be overrun. The Jellies know where I am now. You saw how they reacted when that signal went out. The only way to stop them from getting this”—she tapped her forearm—“is for me to leave the system. And if the UMC sends me to Sol, that’ll be another two weeks down the drain, and it’ll just lead a lot more Jellies to Earth.”

There. She’d said the magic word: Earth. The semi-mythical Homeworld that everyone in the UMC had sworn to protect. It had the desired effect. Both Akawe and Koyich appeared troubled.

“I’ll tell them, Navárez,” said the captain, “but don’t get your hopes up.” Then he gestured at the Marines. “Get her out of here. Put her in a spare cabin and make sure she doesn’t leave.”

“Sir, yessir!”

As the Marines flanked her, Kira looked at Falconi, feeling helpless. He seemed angry, frustrated by the shape of things, but she could see he wasn’t going to argue with Akawe. “Sorry it worked out like this,” he said.

Kira shrugged as she got to her feet. “Yeah, me too. Thanks for everything. Give Trig my goodbyes, okay?”

“Will do.”

Then the Marines escorted her out of the meeting room, leaving Falconi sitting alone, facing Akawe and his tiger-eyed first officer.

3.

Kira seethed as the Marines escorted her through the cruiser’s interior. They deposited her in a cabin smaller than the one on the Wallfish, and when they left, the door locked behind them.

“Gaaah!” Kira shouted. She paced the length of the room—two and a half steps in each direction—and then dropped onto the bunk and buried her head in her arms.

This was exactly what she hadn’t wanted to happen.

She checked her overlays. Still working, but she was locked out of the Darmstadt’s network, making it impossible to see what was going on in the rest of the system or to message any of the Wallfish crew.

All she could do was wait, so wait she did.

It wasn’t easy.

She went over the conversation with Akawe six different ways, trying to figure out what else she could have said to convince him. Nothing came to mind.