Rebellion in the Shadows

Tomma watched me pace my room. He had given up following me after the second hour. There was no relaxing after reading something like that.

Arwago wasn’t answering my comms. All I could do was wait. He was the one that would know the most. He had been in the Flying Force the longest, either him or Tesser, but she wasn’t the kind of person that I would ask questions. Not just because she wasn’t as friendly as Arwago, but because her answer would be difficult to understand.

It had to be about my mom. Everything fit. She was in the Flying Force. There was even a day before she died that fit the story. Four angry Flying Force men in strange uniforms came to our house and left with armfuls of my mother’s things. My father was much more upset about everything than my mother was. She shrugged it off with the same attitude as everything else in her life.

“As long as they don’t take my pin, I could care less about the rank,” she had said to him. It was the same golden pin that I wore on my uniform. The time added up too. She had died twenty years ago. My father had never told me what happened, neighbors had told me she was killed.

There was a time when he tried. My father had taken me to my favorite place, a wonderful little park near our home. The other children had seen me arrive and all I could think about was going down the biggest curly slide. He had carried me down to the park. It was strange to be carried then. I was four and he never really held me like that anymore. Instead of taking me to the play structure right away, he set me down, gently on a bench.

Several times I tried to get up and leave. My friends weren’t very patient. It was ridiculous to have to sit there. The bench was for the old people, the grandparents watching kids, but my fidgeting stopped when I saw his face.

He had never looked like that before. Silent tears dripped down his cheeks as he watched the other families start to leave. Tau Ceti had just started to fall below the horizon, casting a glow around the park that made everything look heavenly. Lower and lower the bright ball in the sky dropped until the darkness settled around me. I pulled my knees to my chin trying to keep warm, and, still he didn’t move. Our community was small, and everyone knew us. My neighbor, Suttah came over, picked me up without a word or any protest from my dad, and carried me home.

“Don’t worry. Talaya, he will come home soon,” she said.

“What about Lala?” I asked. My mother and I called each other the same nickname, much to the confusion of my father.

“She’s not coming home sweetie.” Even at four years old, I understood. There was no explanation, no words of comfort, there was just… no more mom. Suttah took care of me for the next several weeks while my father disappeared randomly and slept through the days. I never went back to that park, and neither did he. Even flying over it was painful. It was years before Suttah told me that Mom was killed by a purthis. My father never spoke about it.

My mom was an amazing person. A beautiful, tall woman whose face was stuck in a constant smile. It wasn’t strange to me until after she died. Not many people were that happy, but she made it seem normal. I had been born into a loving happy household. My parents never fought with each other. Chances were, I romanticized things after she died. She couldn’t have been so perfect, but I would forever think of her that way.

I yanked my hand away from my mouth, I had been chewing on my fingernails while I daydreamed about the past. 25:32, less than two hours until I needed to be at my drone. Tomma started howling at the door.

“Hush! You just went out!” Instead of giving up, he walked to me and growled louder.

“Fine you spoiled beast, let’s go out again then!” My door slid open. The sound of loud chewing caught my attention. Arwago was leaning against the curved wall next to my door munching on some sort of snack.

“Headed out?” he asked.

“Tomma needs to go out, but I wouldn’t say no to company. I have a lot of questions.”

“I would be concerned if you didn’t.” He rubbed his hands together to get the crumbs off. “Come one, we have some time to talk.”

When we got to the lab, Arwago went straight to the blue room.

“Where’s Tesser?” I asked when he closed the door.

“She isn’t on duty tonight, but she sent you a comm.” He was typing on the screen again, ignoring me.

I opened my communication sheet and saw the message. All it said was, ‘Busy, no results.’

“Is she always like this?” I asked.

Arwago smiled. “Pretty much.” He stood up to the holo-keyboard and went through the screens, zooming in on the hangar bay.

“Nothing on my dad yet?” He looked over his shoulder.

“Sorry, no.” His eyebrows raised in the middle and his lips formed a small frown.

“Figured as much.” We were silent as he looked through the surveillance screens.

He was focused in on one of the T550s.

“That’s your drone. You got the comm?” he asked. I nodded.

“Is Kirtis coming, too?”

“No idea, Tesser set up the other side. Why?”

“He got the same comm a few seconds after me,” I said. He shrugged like it was nothing.

“You wanna see the mission plan?” He asked as he panned the camera out to view the entire hangar bay.

“Maybe in a minute, there’s something else I wanted to talk about.” He let out a long sigh. He knew what I was going to ask. “There was a story on the encrypted server. It seemed like maybe it was about my mom.”

“Your mom, Lalota? You know she was my mentor when I was first in the Flying Force? Man, she was a good pilot. Dunno if she could have held a T-150 inverted for three minutes though.”

“Two-point-six minutes,” I said. There was that smile again, a beautiful flash of perfect tefeeth.

“She probably could have,” he said.

“Was it her?”

“Yes.” He looked into my eyes. His were glassed over.

“Were you guys close?” His reaction to my question, certainly suggested it.

“You couldn’t help but be close with Lala. She was a mom to everyone, didn’t matter their age. She always made sure I ate and got enough sleep. One of those irritatingly happy people that you are drawn to, you know?” He sniffed. “When she didn’t show up for work, I knew right away. That bastard came to me later in the day with a new mentor and some lame excuse about a her being ‘reassigned.’ But I could see it on his smug little face, he took her.” His eyes had lost their glassy appearance, replaced by fire.

“I sneaked out right away. I had never met Dutom before, but for some reason, I wanted him to hear it from me. No way would I give Sidarc that pleasure. I didn’t even say a word. I walked up to the porch, and he said, ‘They took her, didn’t they?’ The look on his face will be burned into my brain until the day I die.” His eyes went blank: no more fire, no more tears and he sighed.

Her disappearance has left a mark on him, he was still upset by it and it made me trust him more now than I did before, more than I could possibly trust anyone. He didn’t seem crazy. The reality was far more upsetting. The World Flying Force wasn’t the great, amazing government organization that kept the peace. They were a bunch of cowards. Stealing people in the middle of the night so that they didn’t have to deal with actual conflict. I wasn’t going to be a part of it anymore.

“Whatever you guys need, I’m there,” I said. Arwago’s face got serious, lines formed over his eyes and the fire in his eyes came back. This was a change that I did not like. I wanted to shove some ridiculous food into his mouth just to get away from whatever he was about to say.

“We need good pilots to stay in the Space Academy. We don’t know what the Master Guardian is planning, but it’s something huge. Only the Collaboration of Science and Engineers really know the plan. Right now, it’s all about preparing. This will inevitably come to blows, but no way will they get away with everything they’ve done.”

“Is that what tonight is about?” His passion had my heart racing, it was contagious.

“We need to know if a certain supply of a certain thing can be interrupted at a certain point,” he said, with a small twinkle in his eye.

“Woah! Calm down with the details!”

“We have to be cryptic. Just go where we say, when we say it. If anyone catches you, it’s a case of plausible deniability.” My glance to the clock wasn’t ignored.

“Yeah, its late, I know, get going. Don’t come back here without talking to me or Tesser. Use the rebellion comm sheet, not regular comms.” He didn’t turn to leave, he was waiting for something else. The real question that I hadn’t asked yet. My courage almost failed me, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

“Will he be ok?” I asked.

“Once a person has gone missing like this, they are never found, not in the entire history of our rebellion.” It wasn’t a surprising answer, after all my mom had gone missing in the same way twenty years ago. The news should have destroyed me. Arwago had basically told me that my father was dead. He didn’t give me a chance to react.

He took one step closer and placed his hand on my shoulder.

“We won’t stop looking until we find answers, I can promise you that.” He turned back to his work but didn’t start typing. The sigh he let out said everything. I understood that I was supposed to leave after that. As I walked out, Arwago said, “Be safe tonight.”

With that I left the room in an even worse state than the last time I had been there, but with a newfound determination. One that had me anxious to do something, and a drone was waiting to oblige.