Chapter Text
It probably would have been better for security if they kept the lights on, Katie thinks, hunched over the keyboard. But it’s better for her that they aren’t.
Images flash across the screen. Reams of drone logs, pictures of space rocks, and encrypted emails slam against Katie’s irises so hard it makes her squint, but she won’t look away. She’s so close now. She can taste the truth like old coffee on her tongue--cold and bitter but necessary to make it through another day.
There have been hints, before. The flight program’s press releases were too vague, officers never willing to answer questions. “Pilot error” is all they ever said, and Katie grew to hate those words as much as she hated the resigned looks of pity she got every day from the people who thought they were being sympathetic by humoring her claims that something else had gone on. They think she is a distraught child, stuck in grieving.
They are wrong.
She scrolls through the data, and rather than seeing wreckage and the associated correspondence she finds… nothing. Videos show the Kerberos landing site as pristine, and all the surrounding areas are similarly devoid of destruction. She keeps going, spiraling out from the site in case they’d gone off course to crash. Still nothing.
Something yellow appears at the edge of one of the images. Katie hisses out a breath and zooms in on it, deftly manipulating the program to produce a clearer image. Her recognition comes in a delay, because she’s so surprised at what she sees.
Surely that’s not an ice drill. Those things take days to set up, because they have to be put together piece by piece and then anchored in place on the surface. If something went wrong with their landing, then it would be impossible for the drill to be out there. So that means--
The lights in the office flip on.
“Huh?” Katie stumbles away from the keyboard, temporarily blinded.
Commander Iverson’s single eye is filled with rage. “You again? Get off my computer!”
He crosses the room in three steps.
“You said the spacecraft went down due to pilot error,” Katie accuses, her own anger bubbling over. She spread her hands to the computers. “I saw the video feeds from your probes, there’s no evidence of a crash anywhere on Kerberos!”
Iverson is to her now, towering above her. “Those feeds are classified!” he snarls, and grabs her arm. His hand fits entirely around her arm, an iron vice grip that Katie couldn’t pry loose if she tried. She tries anyway. “I could charge you with treason for hacking into them.”
He drags her to the door and throws her into the hall. Katie whirls on him. “Where is my family?” she demands, but Iverson talks over her.
“Escort Ms. Holt off the premises,” he commands of the nearest guard. Hands wrap around her arms again, this time settling uncomfortably under her armpits and dragging her shoulder blades together. “And make sure every guard knows she’s never allowed on Garrison property ever again!”
Katie glares at Commander Iverson with total hatred as he turns away. “You can’t keep me out!” she promises. Her hands ball into fists. “I’ll find the truth, I’ll never stop!”
Iverson retreats into his office without a backward glance.
The guard half-carries her down the hall. She kicks and fights, but his grip on her arms doesn’t loosen. “Let me go!” she demands.
“I’m sorry, Miss,” he says in a quiet, tired voice. “But I’m under orders. I can’t.”
She turns her head over her shoulder, making her side ponytail swing. “Then at least change your grip or something before you tear my arms off.”
“Oh.” The guard releases one of her arms and moves to an overhand hold on the other. “Is that better?”
Katie can’t see the man’s face beneath his uniform helmet, but she knows he’s watching her closely to make sure she doesn’t try to attack him or escape. “Better.”
They walk toward the front gate.
“Miss, I’m not sure what you were doing in here that made the Commander so mad,” the guards says, walking slowly enough that she doesn’t have to take two steps for each of his. “But the Garrison is no place for little girls. You’ve got to stay away from here.”
Katie rolls her eyes. This man knows nothing.
They walk out the main doors and across the courtyard to the gate. It’s not dark out yet, but clouds are gathering. The guard nods to his comrade at the entrance, and the bars slither back into the walls.
Once they’re outside, the guard releases her. Katie rubs her sore arm.
“Do you need a ride home, Miss?” he asks.
“No,” she snaps. Her mother would have an aneurysm. “I need answers.”
The man’s posture shifts to one of defeat. “I’m sorry, Miss, but there’s nothing more I can do for you. Have a nice evening.”
The gate closes behind him.
Katie waits until she gets to her bike a quarter mile down the road to start crying. They’re tears of anger, of frustration, of guilt, of loss. None of it makes sense. What is the government hiding from the public? It’s more apparent than ever that the crash landing story was falsified. So what actually happened out there? What could have been so bad that they have to lie to everyone about it--even the crew’s own families?
Her bike tires crunch over gravel and pavement, kicking up dust and making her legs burn. Rain speckles the road around her, barely enough to darken the ground. She’s surprised at the precipitation, because rain is rare in a desert summer.
The memories drip into her head of another time it rained.
Back then, it had been winter. Rain was more common then but still not common enough to warrant the regular carrying of an umbrella. The officers that showed up at their door had been soaking wet.
They sent Katie upstairs while they talked to her mother. She knew something was wrong then, because she’d always been allowed to listen to Garrison news and mission updates. Many of the officer’s families had come over for dinner before. Then she heard the crying through the floorboards of her room and she’d known. One of them had come upstairs to talk to her, tell her what had happened, but it was only the last few lines of a connect-the-dots. She’d seen what the full picture was long before it was finished.
The officers had stayed for a few hours, making sure she and Mom were cared for. But later that night, when they were finally alone, Katie found her mom watching the news in the basement. Seeing those pictures of them, empty and smiling with the words “pilot error” now forever associated with them, left an itch in the back of Katie’s mind. She knew her brother and father too well, knew what they’d said about their pilot--Takashi Shirogane--too vividly to believe that any of them could have made a mistake that cost them their lives.
It took two more nights of Katie listening to her mother cry herself to sleep for Katie to begin her hunt for the truth. For the first few months, it was exhaustive internet searches, some basic hacking into the Garrison servers, and anything she could cram in around the edges of her schoolwork. But with the freedom of summer, her mission had gotten more intense and she’d found herself sneaking onto Garrison property half a dozen times--she’d been caught twice. Any answers she uncovered only raised more questions.
And now this.
She is wet with rain and sweat when she gets home forty minutes later. She parks her bike in the back of the house, fishes out her key and goes inside. Mom’s already asleep by now, so she climbs upstairs quietly. The pajamas stick to her skin like the images in her mind. It will be a long night of tossing and turning in the new information.
She needs to find the truth now more than ever.