Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

Part 2

By the next morning, I had a handle on myself again. I knew I couldn’t continue on as before—so I made a decision.

I was a weapon. I’d started on that path by going to the nowhere, and then by allowing a delver’s soul to combine with mine. My purpose was to free my people.

Nothing else mattered. My emotions didn’t matter. The damage to my soul and my psyche? Just part of the payment. I could do this. I was a soldier. It was what I’d signed up for. I could survive long enough to bring down the Superiority. Afterward, who cared?

Making this decision was liberating. Not because I was freed from emotions. But, like a surgical strike, this let me control the worst of them. Fear, anxiety, uncertainty. It took them out, leaving me with the manageable ones. Sadness. Regret. Loss.

Those were emotions I knew; they’d been my companions long before I discovered M-Bot and Doomslug.

I rose, enjoyed the luxury of an actual shower—not just a cleanser—and found a note on my schedule from Jorgen, requesting a meeting.

Jorgen. What would I do about Jorgen? I knew what I wanted: to love him. That wasn’t an emotion I wanted to be free of, and wasn’t one I could ignore.

At the same time, I wasn’t human anymore. I would help bring down the Superiority, and find a way to protect our reality from the delvers. I would find a way, but I was increasingly certain that way would break me.

When that happened, I had to somehow protect Jorgen from the shrapnel. I didn’t want to think about it though. First, to test my newfound control, I needed to try a baby step: something I’d been avoiding the last few days—breakfast.

Doomslug clinging to my shoulder, we made our way to the mess hall—then froze in the doorway. Inside, long rows of metal tables offered up the latest chef’s delights. Algae mostly, prepared in a variety of ways. But amazingly, our recent collaborations with other species had given us access to more. Alanik’s and Hesho’s worlds contained grains in abundance. Fruits. Meats that weren’t rat. Delivered to us in thanks for our aid in protecting their planets.

Our cooks seemed to be enjoying the variety. If you could prepare algae in a hundred different ways, imagine what you could do with rice. Sure, we’d had some of these luxuries in the past—grown in specialized caverns in very small amounts for the wealthy. For that reason, I’d always felt guilty partaking. But this new style of dining—a feast of flavors in every meal—was the way things should be. If we succeeded, this was what everyone would eat.

It wasn’t the food itself that stopped me in the doorway. It was the sheer cacophony. Dozens of pilots chattering. And slugs. There were several varieties, though some of the newest ones we’d discovered were still being studied, and hadn’t been authorized for active duty yet. Of those at breakfast, the bulk were yellow and blue like Doomslug. Those were hyperslugs, who could help us teleport. Almost as common were the purple-and-orange slugs, who let us communicate via cytonics.

Surprisingly, there were more than a few red-and-black slugs, capable of releasing blasts of cytonic energy. We had started calling them boomslugs. Most rare were the blue-and-green slugs, capable of inhibiting cytonics, letting only friends and allies use their powers. I steeled myself against the guilt of allowing one to be killed at the facility. At least I’d rescued the other one.

Besides, I was a weapon. Weapons didn’t cry over the things they killed.

Doomslug fluted softly on my shoulder. She felt…as intimidated as I did. She didn’t want to go into the room either. Because…well, scud. She was shy.

I’d always assumed she had been with M-Bot because she’d gotten lost, or maybe she’d been the descendant of his original hyperdrive. But recently I was getting the feeling that she was the slug equivalent of an introvert. She hadn’t wanted to be completely alone, which was why she’d sought out M-Bot and his dormant cytonic processor. But she wasn’t the type who enjoyed hanging out in a cavern full of fluting slugs.

I tried to send her a sense of peace as we collected food from the counter—a sandwich made with…was that peanut butter? I’d read about that. Wow. And a real slice of some kind of orange fruit. Maybe, well, an orange. Evershore and Earth shared some ecology from their years of trading together in the distant past, and much of the food we had been able to get from them had its roots in Earth flora.

I was feeling pretty good as I settled down at a table near the right side of the room. The real test was still to come though, as my friends gathered around, each one wearing a red piece of felt behind their flight pins. A symbol of remembrance, worn each time we lost someone. Today they wore them for the two soldiers we’d lost, and the two slugs—comrades in arms.

Each one was an indictment of me. I could have saved those people. Who was I to hold this power?

“Hey!” Arturo said. “You came to breakfast, Spensa! Finally starting to feel like yourself, eh?”

“Yeah,” I said, glancing at him. “Nedd…?”

“Awake,” Arturo said, “and ordering me to do things for him, since with one arm, he ‘can’t possibly do it himself.’ ”

I released a long breath. If Nedd was joking already, that was a good sign. That eased my guilt a smidge.

As others set down trays, I looked past Arturo to Alanik, who settled in a few places farther along the table. She ate with Skyward Flight, even if her chosen food was different. She seemed to really like the algae.

The violet-skinned alien studied me quietly, with a certain reserved sensibility. She said she’d been told, by her leaders, to continue “socializing” with the humans. Her species and mine shared suspiciously similar physiology—there might be a common ancestor in our pasts. Certainly the UrDail had slipped into Earth’s mythology and lore, much as the kitsen had.

Regardless, it was odd to see the person whose face I’d stolen joining us for breakfast. And it was odd to not have FM there, as she was helping Rig get a new fabrication project up and running.

T-Stall sat next to me, but he gave me space. Too much space. We’d never been that close, and he and Catnip seemed to have started integrating better with the rest of the flight while I was gone. On my other side, Sadie settled down—and looked to me with an almost divine admiration.

This was ostensibly where I belonged. But I felt more at home with a bunch of aliens these days than I did with my old flight. Fortunately, my newfound mental bulwark was effective. I reminded myself that it was all right—that I didn’t need to belong, since I was just a weapon to be fired. That calmed me, and I settled into my place.

Nothing started rattling. Nobody’s sandwiches vanished.

Doomslug fluted to me sorrowfully, but I scooped her off my shoulders and set her in the line of other slugs, which ran down the center of the wide metal table. They were happily munching on their caviar, offered in special little bowls. The taynix were now members of the flight. They saved the lives of my friends regularly, by hyperjumping them to safety.

They like it here, I thought, feeling their contented minds. They like being appreciated. I think they even enjoy the human companionship.

They were afraid of the delvers though. I’d been able to pick out some of this from Doomslug. The Superiority had manipulated this fear—rather than working with and encouraging the taynix, the Superiority had frightened them into compliance. The ease with which FM and the others had instead coaxed and befriended the slugs was the ultimate recrimination of the Superiority’s so-called primary intelligence. Our enemy claimed to avoid aggression and support peace, but in truth they only did so when convenient.

But Doomslug is not afraid of me, Chet thought from within me. Not any longer.

Doomslug sent an image to us in response: Chet and me with yellow skin and blue tinges. She’d realized we weren’t frightening. Not even delvers were. We were just very strange slugs.

“So,” Kimmalyn said, leaning across the table and drawing my attention back to the conversation. “Your plan worked, Spin. I hear there’s a ton of useful stuff in that data archive. Twelve other human preserves, like Detritus. Detailed schematics for all Superiority ships. And, of course, the location of the supply depots that process the acclivity stone mined in the nowhere.”

“Other human preserves, you say?” T-Stall said. “I wonder if they’re like us. Constantly fighting. On the brink of breaking out.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I get the feeling that Detritus was unique, with our cavern complex and fabricators. The enemy didn’t intend our planet to become a preserve; we were just too persistent to exterminate.”

“Either way,” Kimmalyn said, “could be worth approaching them…”

It wasn’t a terrible idea. From what we’d been able to determine, the Superiority was being forced to pull fighters away from many garrisons to fight us. Some of those preserves might be poorly defended.

“I’ve got some of the data dump here,” Arturo said, opening up his datapad. He started to show us the locations of the human preserves, but I hijacked the pad and instead scrolled to the locations of the five mining stations.

As Jorgen had indicated, our goal wasn’t to hit the mining stations themselves. My friends there, like Peg and the Broadsiders, would be safe. We’d attack the supply depots on this side instead, the ones controlled by the Superiority.

Out of curiosity, though, I looked to see if the data indicated where the mining bases were in the nowhere. And the data was there. Surehold, which I’d attacked with the Broadsiders, was the biggest—but the four others were sprinkled throughout the same region. I had assumed they’d be farther out in the belt, but it appeared they just kept them very well hidden.

“Still can’t believe it,” Sadie said, leaning down low, speaking softly. “The Superiority is so vulnerable.”

“I was there last night when they broke down the data,” Arturo said. “Cuna is right. The Superiority is so paranoid about keeping the slugs a secret that they’ve created a bigger problem for themselves. For example, almost all communications in the Superiority are underpinned by a single network, one location that holds a large batch of commslugs to facilitate comms traffic.”

You didn’t need a slug on each end to make cytonic communications work. With enough practice, and the right technology on the receiving end, a single slug could manage multiple different conversations. A little like an operator on an old-school communications rig.

Yup! M-Bot said in my head. Fun fact. The first recorded Earth cytonic, Jason Write, dedicated only a tiny portion of his brain to the task—but was able to run dozens of communications almost like a background process. With training, the early Earth cytonics were able to facilitate thousands upon thousands of calls, all by themselves.

I jumped despite myself. How long have you been back?

I never left. I just hid. I’ve been watching for a while now. Some…time? Hard to say in here…well, you know how it is.

I did, and I also had a better understanding of why time was so strange in the nowhere. The delvers had an omnipresent effect on the place. They wanted to forget the past, so everyone there started to do the same. The delvers ignored time, and so it was hard for everyone to track.

They did it because they were still searching for a way, even now, to deaden the pain of loss.

Jason Write, M-Bot said. Yes. The delvers, who were only a single individual back then, loved him. When he died, they didn’t know how to respond to their grief so…all of this. The result of one former AI’s emotional constipation.

Ew.

FM finally arrived, carrying three slugs at once. She’d really gotten into the entire slug thing, which I found odd. She was so prim, and slugs didn’t really match her normal fashionable accessorizing.

I immediately felt guilty for that snideness. Yes, FM liked to be fashionable, but she’d never given me reason to think she was vain. I’d just always felt intimidated by how…well, perfect she was at basically everything. Even, it turned out, taking care of slugs.

She set her three down with their own bowls of caviar—we had to ship the stuff in from Evershore in bulk—and started talking, animated. “Coordinated raid on all five mining installations,” she explained. “Tomorrow morning at oh six hundred hours. Orders should be coming to Arturo any minute.”

“They’re here,” he said, scrolling on his datapad. “Five strike forces, all at once.”

“Why five?” I asked. “We know one of those is already locked down on the other side by the Broadsiders.”

“Can you say for certain your friends are still in control?” FM asked. “And that they wouldn’t open up the portal again if properly bribed? Would they sell acclivity stone to the Superiority if the value of the stuff increased a hundredfold?”

Would they? Maybe, maybe not. Life was tough in the nowhere. I wouldn’t blame Peg for making some calculated bargains if the Superiority tried to trade with her. I’d trust her and the others not to do it if I asked, but I could understand Jorgen wanting to remove that option by destroying the Superiority facility.

“It would be pointless to go through all of this and still leave them with a functioning mining station,” FM said. “So we’re striking all five. Tomorrow.”

“That’s good,” Catnip said. “It’s the only shot we have at winning. Stop them making any more starfighters.”

“Still sounds like we’re in for a slog of a war,” Sadie said. “Sure, we can maybe take out their production capacity—but we still have to fight through everything they’ve already built.”

“Do we have any choice?” Kimmalyn asked. “At least this way we have a chance.”

“I suppose,” T-Stall said. He shared a look with Catnip, his wingmate.

Arturo finally spoke. “Anyone else have a problem with the level of destruction we caused on the last raid?”

They didn’t look at me. That was nice of them. Perhaps they knew that nothing was more painful than having my friends be afraid of me. But of course, I was just a weapon now. So that couldn’t bother me the way it once had.

Though they were doing their best not to stare at me, I looked around the group, huddled forward surrounding our long table. FM scratching the head of one of the slugs. Sadie sitting back, as if she’d lost her appetite. Arturo pretending to scroll through the data, though his eyes were distant. Alanik hovering at the edge of the group, aloof as always. Catnip and T-Stall, side by side, staring at their unfinished meals. Kimmalyn still eating her brownie with a small fork, because she never wasted a dessert. “As the Saint said,” she had once noted, “ ‘Throw away something delicious, and you throw away beauty itself.’ ”

“I’ll say it,” Kimmalyn said. “What we did was wrong. At the very least, we should have found a way to save that first slug. I should have found a way. But beyond that…”

“I didn’t expect the information nexus to be so much like…a city,” I told them.

“Yeah,” FM agreed. “I mean, it makes sense that they’d need noncombatants to work it. Researchers, engineers. People like Arturo would be, if he hadn’t fallen in with the wrong crowd.”

“Hey,” Arturo said. “Wait. Was that a dig at me, or at all of you?”

“It was a deliberate ricochet,” FM said. “How many of you felt the last raid was wrong?”

Slowly, everyone raised a hand. Even Alanik, who took a moment to realize that meant agreement.

“We should say something to Jorgen,” Kimmalyn said. “We’re here to fight the Krell. Not become them.”

“He’s aware,” I said. “He’s planning how to ensure that we’ll know in the future if there are civilians in the way or not.”

“And if there are, will he stop us from going in?” FM asked.

He…hadn’t said that, had he? He’d told me he wouldn’t send me in unaware again. But the mission likely would have to continue.

“I do not like the idea of doing that sort of thing again,” Kimmalyn said. “Not at all. I saw…stars, I saw dozens of civilian ships fall in the destruction.”

My stomach turned.

“Do we have a choice though?” Sadie whispered. “We’re warriors, right? We break things. People. That’s the point, right?” She looked to me for support.

I forced myself to nod.

“That’s easy for you to say, Spensa,” FM said, though I hadn’t actually said anything. “You’re…well, you.”

Yeah. I sure was. Me. Mostly.

“It’s more difficult for the rest of us,” Arturo agreed. “We’re not so hardened. Fighting while knowing there were civilians panicking down below…that was horrible. I don’t look forward to doing it again.”

“These supply depots…” Sadie said. “They’re going to be full of civilians. Workers. Even if we don’t hit the mining stations in the nowhere—even if we just hit the portals on this side…well, who do you think is cleaning those stations? Moving the rock around? Refining it into pure acclivity stone. It’s not Winzik’s warriors.”

We all sat there for a while. I reminded myself I was a weapon. That I didn’t care—that I couldn’t afford to care. But then Kimmalyn astonishingly put down her fork and pushed her dessert away, half-finished.

“We need to figure this out,” FM said. “Jorgen’s plan is to hit the stations tomorrow and destroy all of them.”

“Do we need to destroy the installations?” I asked. “Maybe we could just secure and hold them.”

“Holding ground is tough,” Arturo said, “particularly against a superior force. Better to disable the installations.”

“If we do that, won’t we be trapping everyone who’s in the nowhere?” Sadie said. “With no means to return to the somewhere?”

“Not necessarily,” Alanik said, her translated words coming from my pin. “There might be other portals. Places where there aren’t mining stations.”

“There are,” I said. “But most of them are locked somehow. Something odd happened to them years ago.”

“Could we unlock one?” Alanik pressed. “That seems like what Jorgen did, in freeing the kitsen cytonics.”

She was right, but I was reluctant to experiment there. After Gran-Gran and Cobb had gotten stuck in one of those portals…well, it seemed dangerous to toy with them.

At the same time, this felt like an important thing to know. If we destroyed these installations, could the Superiority just send ships in through other locations, then fly a little longer through the belt of the nowhere and recover their supplies anyway?

If I knew the answer, it might change our plans. Might persuade Jorgen not to go through with this attack.

Suddenly, I couldn’t maintain my stoic sense that I was a weapon. I needed another solution. Though it was a betrayal of my warrior forebearers, I wanted nothing more than to just not have to go back into battle tomorrow.

So, without a word to the others, I scooped up Doomslug and hyperjumped away—intent on visiting Detritus. And learning for myself what could be done with the inactive portal hiding in the caverns beneath its surface.