Cytonic (The Skyward Series Book 3)

Roughly twelve hours later, I flew on a direct course toward the arena, anxious for my duel—and holding a book in my hand.

The arena was a location in the Jolly Rogers’ territory—Peg said the anomalies near it made the fighting more interesting. They’d be waiting there for us with the other pirate factions, who would come to watch. Indeed, we’d brought the entire Broadsiders Faction: ground crews flying double or in shuttles. Chet was flying with Nuluba today, in a noncombat tug that had comfortable seats.

I still felt a sense of dread from what I’d experienced the night before. The deal had been made; the delvers would work with Winzik. I needed to find answers, and quickly.

Fortunately, I seemed to be on the best path for that. Win this duel; help Peg take Surehold. Unfortunately, the trip to the arena would take a few hours. When I’d complained in the hangar about the flying time, Maksim had tossed me the book.

A real book, made of paper and everything. I hadn’t been intending to read it, but as the flight stretched long—and I let M-Bot take over steering for a little while—I found myself poking into it as a distraction.

It was slow reading, as I had to use my translation pin with its optics on to read the sentences to me in English. At the same time, it was fascinating. Not only was physical media like this almost nonexistent on my planet, information from our old ship archives was fragmented. The biggest chunk that had survived until my time was about the plants and animals of Old Earth, so my schooling had covered that in detail.

But I’d never heard of a “trashy romance novel,” as Maksim had named this one. It was written from the perspective of the cambrian species, who had a lot of tentacles and stuff. Their courtship rituals were surprisingly similar to human ones—if way, way more sappy. Or maybe that was the genre.

I didn’t really care about the plot; I was more intrigued by this book’s nature. It was just…so fluffy. The protagonist spent her time romancing three different guys, and her most urgent question was deciding which one to bring with her on vacation.

Like, that was the entire conflict. Not the quest to win this vacation, but the stress of choosing between the guys. This was what they read, what they enjoyed, in the Superiority? It contained no fighting. I wasn’t so ignorant as to think everything had to involve battle. There were plenty of great stories about heroes like clever Coyote escaping trouble using his wits instead of his brawn. There were even stories about people building up to a war, then making peace.

Gran-Gran hadn’t ever told me a story about people taking a vacation. Part of me thought it was ridiculous. But another part understood. It whispered, “This is what people can focus their attention on if they aren’t constantly at war. You learned something living among them: your life is not normal.”

This aspect of the characters made them so much more alien than the tentacles. I wanted peace for my people, yes. But to imagine a world without flight training, without the military complex being society’s central and most demanding need…

Scud. I couldn’t understand it, but I needed to. So I read their romance novel and tried to comprehend.

We flew for some time, and I dug a good quarter of the way through the book, when M-Bot spoke. “You see that fragment?”

I glanced out of the canopy. We had to move slowly for the benefit of the tugs, so we made a leisurely pace through the belt, passing fragments with a variety of terrain. One down below was a rare ocean fragment. Not the one we’d traversed earlier, but similar.

“I feel something seeing that one,” M-Bot said. “I remembered sailing with you and Chet, and it felt…pleasant. Like I was meeting an old friend. Is it strange to feel this now? It’s not even the same fragment.”

“It’s not strange,” I said. “Humans often associate feelings with locations. The caverns beneath Detritus sometimes feel more like home to me than the neighborhood where I grew up—and each time I see a cave, I think of them.”

“This feeling is…nice,” M-Bot said.

“Not going to ask this time what the emotions are for?”

“I’m still wondering that,” he said. “But today I just…like these feelings. That’s all right. Isn’t it?”

I smiled. “Yes.”

“I used to try to imagine why you liked stories so much,” M-Bot said. “At first I thought it was a purely logical response—education through the story as a mnemonic device. Yet your strange reactions baffled me. You didn’t treat them as mere education, but as something more.

“I think I understand now. Hearing those stories, being with your grandmother, felt good. And thinking of them again… Well, you remember her voice, don’t you? That’s like me seeing that fragment and remembering the fun of sailing. It’s…warm to me. A machine shouldn’t be able to feel warm, but I do.”

I shifted in my seat, trying to remember Gran-Gran’s voice, as he said. And…I couldn’t. I remembered the stories, but her voice was lost to me.

Needing to be distracted, I turned back to my book, and we flew for more…time. I’ll admit, I kind of liked the book. I didn’t find it trashy at all. Indeed, I actually found myself engaged, almost excited to find out who got to go on the vacation. Granted, it helped to imagine the heroine was planning to feed the failed suitors to her pet shark.

It would have been easier if M-Bot hadn’t piped up with some observation or another every five minutes. “Hey, Spensa! That fragment is black and purple, with crystals growing in the ground! I think it comes from a planet like where Shiver lived. What do you think?”

“Don’t know, M-Bot,” I said, turning the page. “Why don’t you scan your databases to find out?”

“Done!” he said. “I think it does!”

“Great,” I said. “Maybe you should catalog the fragments we’ve passed, and see if you can discover what kind of planets they came from.”

“Will do!” he said.

That should take him a while. I smiled fondly, but Saints, this must be what it was like to have a toddler. I probably owed my mother a nice rat sandwich or something—because I’m pretty sure I’d had lots of questions for her. Often about how to perform a decapitation.

“Hey,” M-Bot said after a few more minutes of silence, “why am I doing this scan again? Is this busywork, Spensa?”

I smiled. “Made you look.”

“You humans,” he said. “That is not a joke! There’s no punchline!”

“Oh, hush,” I said. “This part is good.”

“I guess you don’t want to hear about Peg’s secret communication then,” he said.

I glanced up. “Secret communication?”

“She’s receiving an encrypted direct call—I assume from a pirate in the Jolly Rogers, judging by the origin of the databurst. Peg obviously doesn’t want anyone to know about the call; it came in on a band that the other Broadsider receivers aren’t attuned to pick up. Her ship apparently has some special equipment. I can only see because of, you know…”

“Espionage AI?”

“Mushroom-locating AI. With supplementary espionage additions.”

A secret call? That was odd. Peg tended to be very open about everything she did—she always let the Broadsiders listen in on the negotiations she made, for example.

“Can we eavesdrop?” I asked.

“If I had my old ship’s hardware, that would be easy,” he said. “But I can’t manage it from this ship. Best I can do is tell you the length of the conversation—and maybe pinpoint the person Peg is talking to.”

“Okay,” I said, a little frustrated. I almost wished he hadn’t said anything at all, rather than teasing me. I was distracted enough that it was hard to get through the rest of the book. I put it down, about halfway done, as long-range sensors showed that we were coming up on a large gathering of starfighters.

“She just ended the call,” M-Bot said. “But I’m certain which ship it came from: the starfighter that belongs to her son Gremm.”

“So Peg had an extended secret call with her supposedly estranged son,” I said, “leader of a rival pirate faction. Something about all this doesn’t add up, M-Bot. What kind of game is she playing?”

“I couldn’t possibly guess,” M-Bot said. “I barely understand myself these days, let alone you organics.”

The “arena” turned out to be a large open-air region of the belt, populated by building-size floating chunks of rock. Though most of the fragments were on the same plane, here in this pocket the landscape was more uneven. It seemed like a fragment might have shattered, its pieces coming to rest at different elevations.

Well, I’d trained as a pilot in debris showers. I could handle this. However, a more distinctive feature of this region was the patches of strange glowing white light amid the chunks of rock. They were like mini lightbursts, but weren’t much larger than my ship. Actually, they reminded me of the little white hole I’d seen in the vision, the one that had eventually become a fragment.

Those holes made me uncomfortable. The others had told me about them, but still… Those were patches of pure nowhere, somehow breaking through into the belt. And I was going to have to fly among them.