Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

They dodged.

But I felt them do it.

My time in the nowhere had changed me, given me the ability to reach out and communicate. I’d reached into the past in special circumstances. So it was easy to push through defenses and into minds, and I felt the person in that ship ahead of me. A dione with a family, thinking about their three children as they realized I was on their tail. I felt them plan a feint to the side, then a turn to try to lead me left in a dive, straight into the line of AA fire.

My expanding powers were so wondrous and amazing. Which made it extra horrifying to see how callously my instincts—aware of the enemy’s movements; Sun Tzu would have approved—traced the enemy’s upcoming path perfectly. They ran into each of my shots as they tried to dodge.

Their mind winked out. Like a communication line suddenly cut. The beautiful things I’d learned became, in my terrible hands, just another way to kill.

My soul still vibrating, my mind alight with anger and fire, I hit my overburn and kept on killing. I sliced through the battlefield like a razor blade across a throat. Enemy ships went up in blasts of light as I cut in behind them, offering no sporting chance. This wasn’t sport. This was a cauterization. This was cutting off the hand before the body could die.

I brought down six in the next few minutes. All of the AA guns, reasonably, started firing on me. I swept low through the city, shattering windows with my passing, putting obstacles between me and the guns.

Spensa, M-Bot said softly, I feel you.

I gritted my teeth as my systems highlighted the firing positions of each of the AA guns. I swung up along an apartment building, intending to crest the top and unleash some shots at those emplacements—but in my agony, my soul freaked out. I could feel Chet in there, feel him in pain, an agony that mirrored my own.

Chunks of the building next to me began to vanish. Then—as I darted out over the top—they began to appear in the air between me and the guns, intercepting the barrage of shots that tried to trace my ship. Chunks of steel appeared above the emplacements themselves, crashing down and smashing them one after another—causing explosions that rocked the entire city, debris spraying high into the air. Trailing smoke, spiraling toward the void.

The few remaining enemy ships arrayed to try to stop me. I mopped them up almost unconsciously, shooting down three and then smashing the last two out of the sky with chunks of steel the size of hovercars.

The battlefield fell still. Almost a third of the city was on fire, smoke bleeding from wounds where the AA guns had gone up. The last pieces of the defending ships rained down as sparks, sprinkling the city like molten rain.

The line stayed quiet as I clutched my control sphere and throttle in sweaty hands, my cockpit vibrating, random objects—a cup, a pair of glasses, a child’s stuffed toy—appearing in the air beside me, then dropping to hit my chair or arms. Sweat streamed from my forehead, and I couldn’t blink, couldn’t move. Other than to tremble.

“Sweetest stars,” Kimmalyn whispered over the comm, “and the Lord God that birthed them…”

Jorgen cleared his throat. “Belay the retreat. Enemy defensive position eliminated. Nice work, Spin.”

Shut up, I started to whisper, but bit it off. I was the one who always bragged about killing, about the way of the warrior. All of that nonsense.

Hesho muted the comm. “Take your time,” he said softly. “Breathe. In and out. Focus only on each new breath.”

I nodded, doing as he suggested, and forced myself back under control. My cockpit stopped vibrating.

“Nedd,” I said.

Hesho turned on the comm, putting a direct call in to Jorgen. “Admiral, we would like to know the situation of callsign: Nedder. If it is known.”

“He arrived, burned and unconscious,” Jorgen said. “No sign of his slugs. We think Lucky died in the initial shot that hit the ship, and Chubs sent him back. But…didn’t come himself.”

I got an image in my head from Doomslug, fluting quietly from her sling. Pain. Chubs had been wounded. Sending Nedd had been his final act.

I closed my eyes, feeling Doomslug’s pain as my own.

“He should survive,” Jorgen said. “But…well, he’ll probably never fly again. Not with only one arm. I’m sorry.”

“It’s war,” I whispered, hoarse. “And we’re soldiers.”

“Nevertheless,” Jorgen said, “let’s pull you out to rest. Arturo is ready to come back in and the team can—”

“No,” I said. “I’ll see it through.”

He didn’t contradict me, so I took a deep breath and pointedly didn’t look at the large sections of the city I’d destroyed. “Incursion squad on me,” I said. “Kimmalyn, our target building is still shielded. Get it down. Skyward Flight, provide air support and be ready to pull us out if something goes wrong.”

I got a handful of “affirmative” replies, and not a one called me out on taking command in Arturo’s absence. Technically T-Stall was next in line, but I wasn’t in a mood to pay attention to the chain of command. Honestly, I hadn’t ever been good at it, even when I hadn’t been a one-woman apocalypse with a fruit-flavored delver filling.

Kimmalyn’s ship was equipped with a shield cutter. She led the way to the large black skyscraper at the center of the EDS. She hovered there, rotating her ship with the acclivity ring unhinging, so she could position the bottom of her ship as close as possible to the building. Her vessel let out a bright blue blast, reminiscent of an IMP—but far more concentrated.

That knocked out the building’s shield. I did a long, slow pass along the tower. Starting at the top, flying down in a spiral around the outside, centimeters from the wall. Yes, I could feel what had been reported earlier: this building had a second inhibitor, secret and unexpected. I wondered if I could get a sense of where the thing was, based on the field it projected. Only, with mechanical augmentation, the fields an inhibitor slug made could be various shapes. So…

Floor thirty-seven, Chet said. Directly in the center of the building. I can cut through the inhibitor and see it hiding there.

“Kimmalyn,” I said, “I need a hole in the wall on the thirty-seventh floor. Incursion team, prepare to breach there. We’re going to find the inhibitor. My senses tell me it’s at the direct center of that floor.”

“Roger,” Kimmalyn said, using her specialized destructor to cut a hole in the wall. The chunk of stone and steel from the wall fell free, edges glowing with heat.

I flew my ship over and hit the cockpit release. “Hesho, if something goes wrong, how confident are you in flying this ship?”

“With the minimal controls I have?” he asked. “Not terribly confident. But I shall endeavor to do my best in the event of a disaster.”

Good enough. As I twisted to undo the quick-release on my buckles, Doomslug fluted and appeared on my lap—jumping out of her sling.

“You sure?” I asked her. “We can’t get out until we bring down the inhibitor inside.”

She fluted in the affirmative, so I scooped her up as I climbed out. She went into a holster on my hip, slung across my opposite shoulder. The others called them slings, but that felt…I don’t know. Like the thing a mom would use to bring her baby along. Unnerved—even a little nauseated—by my powers as I was, I still wasn’t going to bring a baby sling into battle. I was bringing a slug holster.

I unclipped a fully automatic assault rifle from its place at the side of the cockpit, and the three remaining ships from Vanir Flight joined me, each carrying three members of our newly christened marine corps. We’d never had much in the way of ground forces, but were rectifying that in the face of the increasing need for assaults like this. Nedd in particular had enjoyed finally being given time on the firing range for…

No. Don’t think about Nedd.

Wolf was the leader of the marine force, and as Junker opened his canopy for her, she stood up and waved to me. Wolf was a tall, hard-faced woman with body armor and one lock of blue hair. Her non-code name was Chono, which was apparently Mongolian. When I’d asked if she was related to the Great Khan, she’d simply said, “Of course.”

I’d tried not to gush too much. It had been difficult.

She and I shared a nod, then leaped off the fronts of our hovering ships into the hole, our guns up. This city had artificial gravity, fortunately, and so we didn’t have trouble walking or moving. We activated flashlights on the front of our muzzles as the other eight marines followed quietly, each of them with their own slug holster.

Unfortunately, I’d just entered a deeper darkness than the physical kind. Because my cytonic senses once again vanished—smothered by the blanket of the inhibitor field.

“I have the description of the building that Cuna provided,” Hesho said through my helmet speaker, “and I am coordinating with command. We are trying to guess the direction you need to go to reach the inhibitor. If that would be of assistance.”

“That would be scudding wonderful,” I whispered back.

A square box appeared in the corner of my helmet’s visor. A red dot indicated I was at the perimeter, and a blinking dot in the center highlighted our target. It didn’t have any of the internal features of the floor, but it was helpful in getting me where I needed to go.

There were some locked doors in the way, but that was why the Saints had made destructors. As soon as we knocked out the first, though, return fire came blasting from the darkness—forcing us back and to the sides.

“Sadie, Kimmalyn,” I said, “we’re pinned down. You have our locations?”

“Sure do,” Sadie said.

“Kindly make us a path.”

Kimmalyn cut another hole in the wall and Sadie filled it with destructor fire, pointed inward. Ship weapons were of an entirely different category than the handheld ones we had, and in moments the shots wound down and we were able to pick through the remnants of the wall and continue forward. Muzzle flashlights lit the remaining pieces of our enemies, something that—as a starfighter pilot—I didn’t often have to confront.

They prop up an evil dictatorship, I reminded myself. This is part of the same force that murdered my father.

I knew the weakness in that reasoning, but it was enough to keep me focused as—after a brief shootout with the last remaining enemy squad—we reached the location of Hesho’s blinking light. I found the box, well locked and disguised as a storage container among many other similar ones. When I popped it open, I found a terrified blue-and-green slug inside.

Doomslug fluted, and the other one stretched out a little, sniffing toward the air.

“That’s right,” I said, scooping her up. “We’re friends.”

Doomslug fluted again, then—brilliantly—awareness returned to me. Doomslug and the rescued slug vanished.

“Wolf,” I said, “inhibitor field is down. This is your mission now.”

“Excellent,” she said. “Data storage is on floor thirty-six. Cuna doesn’t know where; she took an elevator up, and says she got a little turned around.”

I nodded, not correcting Wolf on the use of “she” for a dione. Together the marines had a quick conference, then one placed some explosives on the floor. We took cover, and they blasted it open.

I hyperjumped down, then waited as the marines rappelled through the hole. While they worked, I reached out with my senses.

There are six enemies approaching, I sent to Wolf, implanting the words in her mind.

She jumped, then looked at me and nodded.

They’ve stopped, I sent, pointing through the darkness—lit by some fires on the ceiling—toward a hallway. Down this hall. Probably setting up an ambush.

She tossed a grenade at the wall, bouncing it toward the people farther down. We went in after the explosion, eliminating the soldiers with callous precision, muzzles flaring and destructors lighting the smoke. I blocked the thoughts and emotions of the dying from my mind.

It didn’t take much effort to locate the data storage. We simply moved in a search pattern until we found a metal door, reinforced and protected, with a lot of people on the other side. I picked up some of their emotions. Nervousness. Waiting for help. Scientists. Yeah, this was the place.

Some twenty people working inside, I sent to Wolf. No way to tell how many are civilians. You willing to do this in a way that keeps us from firing on anyone we don’t need to?

She looked to me, then nodded.

Take a deep breath, I sent her. Have your slug ready to get you out if this goes wrong.

Then I hyperjumped the two of us into the room, near one of the minds I could feel—but back behind the rest of them. We immediately raised guns, ignoring the scientists and technicians. Each of us fired twice, drilling through the skulls of the soldiers waiting by the doors, their backs to us.

Scud, I’d never felt so sick to fire a weapon. Was this what I’d signed up for? Fighting the Krell, an unknowable evil force, felt so far removed from what we were doing here. Now…now we were the unknowable force. I was the thing that terrorized these people, possessing powers and abilities they didn’t understand.

We gathered the scientists at the rear of the room, their hands up and trembling. Wolf watched them while I opened the door from the inside, letting the rest of the team in. A few seconds later, Rig and a crew of technicians appeared in the room, sent by Jorgen—he didn’t have much hyperjumping ability, but could persuade the slugs mind-to-mind to do it, if he knew where to tell them to go.

Rig’s team quickly began working on the data storages, grabbing a copy of basically every sensitive and secret piece of information the Superiority owned. All the things that M-Bot and I had wanted to discover on Starsight, but had been locked out of.

As Rig worked on the data, I patrolled the front of the room, near the engineers’ stations. On several of the screens, a familiar varvax stood in front of an official seal. Winzik had a deep green carapace, bipedal and hulking, like a suit of armor to protect the far more fragile crablike being who rode inside. I could see him through the helmet’s faceplate, floating in a liquid solution.

I gestured to one of Rig’s engineers, and the woman helpfully hit a few buttons, rewinding the message and playing it from the beginning. I kept my cytonic senses alert for anyone approaching, then leaned down and let my translator pin feed me Winzik’s words.

“My goodly people of the Superiority’s multitudinous worlds. I am Provisional High General Winzik, as many of you know. It is my burden and regret that I have been forced into the position of temporary commander of the Superiority during this time of grave danger.

“Understand that I take this duty as the most solemn of responsibilities. Those of us of prime intelligence bear a heavy charge—that of protecting and nurturing those who have not yet achieved equivalent status. My words today are thus for the weaker of our wonderful species.

“Your natural inclination might be toward panic, anger, or even violence! My, my. How terrible it must be to live with secondary intelligence. You must resist these shocking emotions. The Superiority is strong, and those of us who lead it will protect you from the human scourge. As the galaxy has survived their horrific attacks in the past, so we will weather them this time.

“Already we have the outbreak partially contained, and the fighting is limited to the outskirts of the Superiority. It might take decades to properly bring the humans down, but I am determined to do the job asked of me. For now, know that there is absolutely no danger to you. It is the duty of those of us who have achieved primary intelligence to fight on your behalf, so you do not have to risk the dangers of aggression and rage. Live your lives as usual, knowing I will protect you.”

On one hand, I was impressed. Winzik could likely milk this for decades, pretending that—even long after we’d been defeated—he needed this power to protect everyone from the terrifying humans. On the other hand, if Winzik actually thought he could contain me, then he would soon find out firsthand how wrong he was.

On the screen, the message started repeating—and rather than hear it again, I shot the monitor a few times. When the others looked at me in shock, I gave them a shrug.

I’m sorry, M-Bot said in my head, perhaps sensing my frustration at the situation. For what you had to do today.

“It’s my job,” I whispered to him, watching the door, my gun at the ready.

It’s not what you dreamed.

“I gave up that dream in the nowhere,” I said to him. “I could have stayed there, fighting battles without consequences. I came back. Because things like this have to happen.”

Do they?

“For now,” I said. “The goal is to stop them from being necessary. Somehow.” That was the difference. It had to be. Winzik was intent on domination, destruction, and even extermination. We fought for something better.

I knew the same justification had been used by virtually every terrorist force in the past. I wasn’t naive. But I also wasn’t so cynical, or so foolish, as to paint them all as equivalent. A woman had to follow her conscience. I believed in what we were doing.

It still felt terrible.

I glanced to Rig. “I think we can pull all of this out,” he whispered to me. “Why copy when we can just take?” He grinned, then pointed to several slugs they’d set up.

Cool. He hyperjumped out with his team—taking multiple large data storages with them. Servers and all.

Seconds later, my strike force—all of us back in our ships—hyperjumped away after him. And to those we’d left alive, I knew we’d be just as mysterious and terrible as the Krell had been to me.