he recognized the look of fear on her face. His body stiffened with apprehension as he tapped the table to get her attention. “What did you find?”
Her head popped up, and she stared at him wide-eyed. “What is today’s date?”
He adjusted his glasses and drew a blank. Normally, he could answer that question without thinking. On the run and hopping through space, he had lost track of time. He lifted his watch and showed her the time and date.
She read the watch’s display and blanched. “Shit.”
Defecate. Urgent. He ignored the incorrect translation projected on the lenses. At any other time, it would have been amusing, but this wasn’t the time for humor. “Tell me.”
“I thought these were glitches in the files,” she explained, shifting closer to him and showing him scribbled columns of numbers in her notebook. She took the tablet from him and scrolled until she found what she needed. She pointed out the font change in various numbers.
After the first few, he recognized the pattern she had discovered in four- and five-digit numbers that all started with 700. He didn’t see a number higher than 26 tacked onto the end. “They correspond to the alphabet.”
She nodded. “It’s the first code Devious ever taught me. Really basic.” She waved her hand as if it didn’t matter. “Before we went out last night, I started writing these down, thinking it might not actually be a glitch. It starts in the very first file and keeps going, looping over and over with the same message.”
“What does it say?”
Maisie turned the page littered with columns of numbers to show him the deciphered code. “Look.”
“Jubilee. Cenotaphs. Coordinated. Slaughter.” Terror read the words, and his blood ran cold. Every year, every Harcos male and their families, if they had them, gathered at the closest memorial to honor their dead. It was a holiday that was observed without fail, year after year. The pieces fell into place, and his gaze snapped to Maisie’s. “A coordinated attack on Valor Day?”
She nodded. “It has to be, right? The Jubilee Celebration is tomorrow. Every ship and base will have a memorial ceremony at their Cenotaph of Valor.”
“Shit.” Awash in horror, Terror shot to his feet. They had less than twenty hours to avert absolute carnage. “Shit.”
Maisie stepped in front of him. “How close is the nearest Alliance ship? Or base?”
“Too far,” he grumbled, already thinking about that option. “We’ve crossed a least four sectors by now.”
Maisie held up a hand, silently telling him to wait, and then she hurried to the information console mounted near the door of the suite. He followed her and watched as she navigated to the ship’s itinerary. There was a stop coming up in seven hours on a planet that catered to tourists seeking a romantic escape. The surface of the bitterly cold planet glistened like gemstones, and the nearest stars created multiple sunrises and sunsets that were hailed as some of the most beautiful in the universe.
“Is there anything near here?” she asked hopefully.
At first glance, there wasn’t. It was a sector of the galaxy that offered nothing to the Alliance or the Splinters. No minerals or metals. No agriculture. There weren’t enough women there to fill even a single Grab.
From the far recesses of his mind, he dredged up a memory of an outpost planet nearby. “There used to be an outpost here. A long, long time ago,” he added while tapping at the screen. “It had been abandoned before I even started at the Academy, but it was on the maps. They finally scrubbed it a few years ago during an update.”
He scanned the star chart until he found it. There! That tiny insignificant blip of a planet.
“This one,” he said, tapping the screen to enlarge the planet. It didn’t have a real name, just a few letters and numbers for identification. “4S-8KN. It’s been abandoned a long time, but even if the base was decommissioned, there is still equipment there we can use to broadcast a signal. We always leave communications equipment behind, just in case.”
“4S-8KN?” Maisie visibly recoiled. “Are you sure?”
“That’s what it says,” he replied, wondering why she was so upset.
“My mother,” she said. “My father. They were there. That’s what she called the orphanage where she grew up!”
Terror frowned with confusion. “That doesn’t make sense. Why would she have been sent to an outpost planet?”
“I don’t know, but I wouldn’t forget a detail like that. She told me numerous times about her time there, about meeting