Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

The meeting took place on Platform Prime, our center of operations inside Detritus’s shell. This space station flew over the surface of the planet, but was well protected behind many outer layers of other platforms, flying gun emplacements, and shields.

At least Jorgen knew to pick the room with the best seats. I swiveled in my bucket-style chair, which was tight and curved, with high sides, almost like a little cockpit.

I forced myself to listen to what Ironsides was saying. The former DDF leader—now bearing the rank of admiral emeritus—had been dredged up from forced retirement because…well, we needed everyone we had. And Ironsides, for all her faults, had an eye for tactics.

“In a way, you could say we’re lucky,” the silver-haired woman said, gesturing at a star map on the wall that highlighted a wedge of space on the edge of the Milky Way. Our region of the galaxy, territory controlled by the Superiority. We were smack-dab in the middle of it.

“Lucky how?” Jorgen asked from his seat at the head of the long conference table. It was filled with a number of admirals, engineers, and foreign dignitaries, including Cuna, the sole senior dione on our side. A blue-skinned politician who had become a friend of mine during my days hiding as Alanik on Starsight.

“Here, let me explain,” Ironsides said, shuffling through some papers.

Jorgen waited, sitting primly on the edge of his chair. How could he look so uncomfortable? These chairs were comfy and you could even swivel them with your toe. Though you did have to lounge back a little to fit them properly, to melt into the form. That wasn’t a particularly Jorgenesque way of doing things.

I studied him, enjoying the cut of his chin, the intensity of his gaze, the determination of his posture. Yeah, this new job was a good choice for him. It fit Jorgen like a glove—albeit a new one he hadn’t quite broken in yet.

While Ironsides shuffled papers, the back door to the conference room opened and Cobb slipped in. He’d been the DDF head before Jorgen. Cobb had been my mentor, and was one of the wisest people I knew.

He looked like he’d aged twenty years since I’d left seven weeks ago. He leaned heavily on his cane, and his skin seemed to droop on his body. He’d nearly been killed by the bomb that had destroyed the National Assembly, but my grandmother had saved him—hyperjumping them both away. Their time in the strange trap that had held the kitsen cytonics for so long had not been kind to him.

I glanced toward Gran-Gran, sitting at the side of the room. Seeing my aged grandmother at these conferences had surprised me when I’d first returned. I mean, I knew she was a military genius and the oldest living Defiant—having lived on the starship that originally brought us to Detritus when she’d been a girl—but I never thought anyone else would appreciate that.

Jorgen did. And so she came to the meetings. Gran-Gran noticed my attention cytonically, and I sent her a question, something that was easy for me now that I’d fused with Chet.

Is he going to be all right? I asked.

Cobb, you mean? she asked. He’s the one who just came in?

Her cytonic senses had helped her adjust to losing her sight in some ways, but like all cytonics, her powers were duller when applied to regular people.

Yes, I said. He looks so old, Gran-Gran.

I’ll try not to be offended by the sorrow in that thought, Gran-Gran said. Being old isn’t that bad. Except for your body, your eyesight, your sense of balance, and waking up each morning feeling like you’ve been nailed in place. She smiled in my direction, then the expression faded. I don’t know how long it will take Cobb to recover. He didn’t respond to our excursion as well as I did.

Jorgen stood out of respect, which made the rest of us do likewise. Then Jorgen stepped over and conversed softly with Cobb, likely thanking him for coming. Cobb nodded, but looked exhausted by the walk from the infirmary, as Jorgen helped him to a seat reserved for him at the side of the room.

I knew Jorgen wished that Cobb was still in command, though Cobb had made it clear that was impossible in his current state. And so, with the weight of those bars on his shoulders, Jorgen settled back into his seat. I wished I’d been there to see him sweat when he’d finally taken command. He was cute when he went through deep personal crises balancing his belief in the rule of law with the practical need to get things done.

“Should we proceed?” Cuna asked. The dione sat with their palms pressed together, forearms on the tabletop, watching with an air of dignity and…well, a smidge of condescension. That wasn’t entirely Cuna’s fault though. They tried very hard, but had spent their entire life seeing themself as someone who needed to protect and guide the species of “lesser intelligence” in the Superiority. Changing such an entrenched worldview took time.

“Yes, I have my data ready now,” Ironsides said. The older woman turned, tucking her short silver hair behind her ear, and pointed at the wall as the screen changed. I leaned forward, hoping for some interesting shot of a battle—but it was just a slide with a bunch of numbers and statistics.

Great.

Why hadn’t anyone told me how many meetings galactic war would involve? Maybe I would have surrendered. Torture couldn’t possibly be worse than this. We spent longer sitting and talking than we did actually fighting anyone. Maybe I could throw something at Jorgen and get him to glare at me?

“The Superiority,” Ironsides said, “was shockingly easy for Winzik to conquer. Unlike a traditional government, it doesn’t rule by force but through control of travel and resources. There are thousands of planets in the Superiority, but almost none of them have active defense forces.”

“That’s because,” said one of the UrDail, a male named Rinakin, “they make people abandon their ‘warlike ways’ to join.”

“Is it so bad,” Cuna replied to him, “that we strive for peace and comfort instead of anger and strife?”

“Well, it left you exposed,” Rinakin said, pointing at the statistics. “No one could resist Winzik. He conquered the entire Superiority with barely a military.”

Yeah, I liked this guy. He made good points.

“I assume that is why you think we’re lucky, Admiral?” Jorgen cut in firmly. “Our enemy controls a great deal of space but not a lot of ships.”

“Exactly,” Ironsides said. “Our victories at ReDawn and Evershore prove that we can stand against Winzik. A lot of his military is needed to patrol, police, and maintain the territory he’s taken. The offensive force left to him isn’t that much bigger than our own. Maybe two or three times our numbers, which is remarkable, all things considered.”

“He thought it would be easy,” I said. “He assumed nobody would fight back. And if they did, he thought he’d have the delvers as the perfect threat to keep everyone under control. Hard to resist a tyrant when he’s the only thing standing between you and a group of interdimensional horrors.”

“Nightshade has the right of it,” Ironsides said. She met my eyes. We had a history, the two of us, but she’d been a worthy foe. Right up until she’d almost gotten everyone blown up, of course.

“So, what does this tell us?” Jorgen said. “How do we proceed?”

“Though we’ve been lucky so far, sir,” Ironsides said, “the admirals and I are worried.” She flipped to a slide that showed what seemed to be production capacity. “Winzik doesn’t have a large military yet—but he has access to an enormous infrastructure. Here we see a list of manufactories capable of spitting out spaceworthy fighters. These numbers here indicate possible production speeds, without accounting for any hidden military fabrication plants.”

We took that all in. And it was daunting. Once Winzik brought all of his resources to bear, he’d be able to create whole fleets faster than we could build a single ship. Yes, he’d have to staff them with raw recruits, but what did that matter when you could flood a battlefield with fighters?

I saw Ironsides’s point immediately. Though we’d been lucky so far, we absolutely could not win an extended war against the Superiority. Once Winzik ramped up production, we were done for.

I glanced around the table to see what the others were thinking. The other junior admirals were nodding. Arturo—current head of Skyward Flight, here representing all the pilots—took it in with a frown. FM—now Jorgen’s right-hand woman and our head diplomat—had put her hand to her lips as she read the numbers, her eyes wide. She looked across the table, meeting my gaze.

I spared a thought for the fact that three members of my flight—all still relatively young—were in high leadership positions in the government. Unfortunately, our planet’s history was such that there just weren’t a lot of older officers. Our desperate fight for survival over the decades had turned that much more deadly near the end; even the junior admirals were all in their twenties. The sad reality of the DDF’s struggle was that by the time we’d “won” and pushed the enemy back, almost everyone with any real battle experience had been killed.

Jorgen was, I thought curiously, the same age as Alexander the Great had been when he’d begun his conquest.

I continued scanning the room, and found it was harder to read the aliens than my friends. Rinakin looked pained, but with their violet skin and impressive bone ridges across the cheeks, his race always appeared intimidating. Made me wish my skeleton stuck out in a few places for a similar effect.

I had more experience reading the kitsen, though I didn’t personally know Itchika, the female kitsen to my right, hovering above the tabletop on her platform. Her fur was greying and her clothing extremely formal, robes in an ancient style.

She was joined by a small group of other kitsen: some of their elected senators, a few newly rescued cytonics, and their head generals. Those used little chairs on the tabletop, as if at a parade. At Itchika’s side stood a nervous younger kitsen. Kauri, one of their ship captains—and a friend of mine.

“So,” Itchika said, gesturing to the numbers on the screen, “our time is limited. Yes, I see.” Like the other aliens, she spoke in her own language, which was translated to English by her translation pin.

Ironsides looked at us, grim. “Based on our intel, he already has all of these plants fabricating for him. In weeks they’ll be able to field thousands of new drone fighters.”

“Drones,” I said. “That’s annoying. You mean I won’t get to feast on the blood of my enemies?” I paused. “I wonder what motor oil tastes like.”

Everyone in the room gaped at me. Except Jorgen, who laughed.

“Oh, don’t look at me like that,” I snapped at the others. “You invited me. This is what you get. Ironsides, what about capital ships?”

“Those will take longer to produce,” she replied. “But they will come. Thousands of battleships—and hundreds of carriers—by the end of the standard year.”

Scud. I’d checked what we had, adding in the kitsen and UrDail fleets. We had starfighters, yes. As many as five hundred if we needed them. But barely any capital ships.

“Spin can handle starfighters,” FM said. “Now that we have her back, we shouldn’t need to worry about drones. The remote ones fall easily to cytonics, and the autonomous ones are no match for a living pilot—at least not with the limited AI that the Superiority dares to use.”

While I appreciated her faith in me, I wasn’t nearly so confident. Maybe once upon a time I’d have boasted I could fight hundreds on my own, but I wasn’t that person any longer. I was a good fighter, but I couldn’t win a war by myself. I had a stark memory of being swarmed by hundreds of enemy ships a week ago, in the nowhere. I’d quickly been overwhelmed.

Jorgen voiced the concern for me. “How many drones could you shoot down in one fight, Spin?” he asked softly. “Twenty? Thirty?”

“Twenty maybe,” I said. “A few more if I’m lucky.”

“See?” FM said.

“And if they send ten thousand?” he asked. “Twenty thousand? Do you have any idea how many ships their industrial complex can churn out, once it spins up?”

FM sat back, disturbed, and the room fell silent.

Finally, a deep voice spoke from my right. “The raging river is never kind to the lone leaf.” A kitsen on a hovering platform moved up to my right. He wore a ceramic mask, white with red stripes. Hesho, once emperor of the kitsen. He’d taken to covering his face and calling himself Darkshadow, the Masked Exile.

Scud, I wished I could get away with something that awesome.

“So we have to move quickly,” Rinakin said. “Win fast. Any chance we can recruit more planets to our cause?”

We looked to FM, who had been leading recruitment efforts.

“We’ve been trying,” she said. “We have a few leads. But…most of them are afraid. Our three planets found one another because we were all in the right position—technologically advanced enough to have our own fighters, but not fully subsumed by the Superiority. Most of the others are either too strongly indoctrinated or not advanced enough to fight back. The burls might join us. And perhaps the tradori—but their planet has seventy different governments!”

Seventy? Different nations, on one planet? I mean, I knew that Earth had once had far more, but it still boggled my mind.

They dug deeper into the details, and the discussion grew more grim. I shuffled in my seat, suddenly finding it less comfortable. Sure, the mighty three hundred Spartans had stood against overwhelming numbers at Thermopylae…but they’d fallen in the end.

I couldn’t help thinking about my friends dying, one at a time, as we were overwhelmed by enemy ships. And as I did, something trembled inside me. A quivering that started at my core, vibrating like a muscle spasm, but bearing with it a sense of power. Panicked, I tried to fight it down.

But I failed.

Cups on the table started to rattle. The wall screen went haywire, flashing on and off. Objects in the room started to vanish, popping in and out of reality. Chet trembled as he felt my emotions. And the voices…my thoughts…my fears…began to radiate and echo through the room.

Dead. All dead.

Lost. All lost.

Failed. All failed.

I gasped, trembling, and slapped my hands on the table, bringing the entirety of my will to bear against the strange outburst. I clawed back control with effort, and the trembling lessened and then ceased. I looked up, sweat streaming down my face.

The room had gone silent, and I knew that they’d heard those words in their minds. I’d broadcast them uncontrollably. Cuna looked up from where they’d been writing on a notepad—which had been teleported away, leaving them holding empty air.

Scud. I felt ashamed. And horrified. I’d done something like this the other day, by accident, but not on this scale. Today’s outburst was far worse.

Whatever I was—whatever we were—it wasn’t human any longer.

“You…all right, Spin?” Jorgen asked.

I nodded, not trusting my voice. His expression was compassionate—bless him—but most of the others looked somewhere between terrified and uncomfortable. Cuna was smiling, showing teeth—a sign of aggression for their people—and the kitsen had pulled back in a huddle. Hesho hovered in beside me, seeming stoic, though he was hard to read behind that mask.

“Perhaps,” Jorgen said, “we should take a short break. There are refreshments in the adjoining room.”

The meeting participants nodded, rising and chatting softly. I huddled down deeper in my pod of a chair, and didn’t look at Ironsides as she walked past. She’d been one of those who had warned against the dangers of cytonics—people with the “defect.” She had stopped after my ability to hyperjump had saved us all from the lifebuster, yet I couldn’t help feeling I had now become the very thing she’d warned us against. A dangerous, uncontrolled entity.

Did I belong in this meeting? Or did I belong in a holding cell somewhere?

Well, that was dramatic! a voice said in my head.

I was getting more and more accustomed to the sensation of another cytonic speaking into my mind. I’d been practicing with Gran-Gran, Jorgen, and even Alanik. But this wasn’t any of them. It was a perky, faintly masculine voice—excitable and…

“M-Bot?” I whispered. “What in the heavens?”

I’m a ghost, he said in my mind. Boo!