It flew wide of the running figure. He paused to gather his breath and calmness. Renewed, he turned back to the path. A twig snapped. Zack stopped. A...t a distance, one young woman was slowly stepping through an opening, moving left to right. Zack took his time, carefully lining up an extreme but doable long shot. He squeezed the trigger. He saw the ball arc out and impact on the side of her cotton covered boob. She yelped and clutched her breasts. Zack pumped his arms in the air to celebrate. Just this little project getting to me, I guess. I'll see you soon, okay?" Okay," I said slowly, though I was dying to say more. But I knew Jenny--once she'd made up her mind not to talk, wild horses couldn't drag a thing out of her. She'd talk when she was ready. I hoped. "Merry Christmas, Jenny." Merry Christmas, Mom."The conversation weighed on me as I went through the rest of the afternoon. I thought about calling David, but I wasn't really sure anything was wrong, and I didn't want to go. We did get our invitation to the station. Two troop-carrying spaceships straight off the assembly lines had been stolen only hours after the meeting. They had been scheduled to do final testing of the ships, and then they had not come back on schedule.My team went with Carmel. For some reason, Carmel refused to divulge why Simon, Darla, Hendrik and Nikolai were supposedly already on the station. Aaron, Bindy, Justin and I were told to go annoy the owners and investigate their involvement in the. They just wanted some semblance of control on the Untethered for the foreseeable future, just so the Untethered didn’t suddenly wake up one day and decide they wanted to rule this planet.This paranoia from the mortals’ side wasn’t helping matters when it came to the war efforts of the Council. They were having to exert so much of their resources on the problem that was just in front of them, the mortals, that they couldn’t even properly delegate their responsibilities to the other.