Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

Days passed.

I think.

Without a clock—without the visible changing of worker shifts, or something like the forges back home going from fabrication to the softer simmering of reclamation…well, it was tough to tell time. Almost like I was in the nowhere again.

The only way I had of tracking it was when my drugs were administered. Every twelve hours, using Old Earth time…maybe. I was relying on an unpracticed interpretation of a vague representation that Comfort had given me. And if I were holding a captive, I would have mixed up the length of time between doses—often coming when one wasn’t needed—just to keep the captive disoriented. So I felt I couldn’t rely on that, or feeding times—the arrival of fresh ration bars.

I quickly came to understand why solitude, in the stories, was often considered as terrible a punishment as physical torture. When I’d been captured by the Broadsiders, I’d been able to learn about them. Spend time around them. That had helped me formulate an escape. Here…any plan was just a way to temporarily distract myself from my mounting despair.

And that despair was acute.

I’d been outthought at each point. Brade had weaponized my tantrums—and the way they broke through inhibitors—almost before I’d realized what was happening. They’d anticipated each of my ploys to escape, and had been waiting for me. They’d been ready to kill Comfort.

I was supposed to have been able to save her.

Damn it, I was supposed to be the hero.

Save my friends.

Her dying plea vibrated my soul. Haunting me. But the drugs, whatever they were, cut me off from Chet. That meant no tantrum, no matter how painful for me, made the air around me warp. All along, that ability hadn’t been mine, it seemed, but his—and this drug prevented our melding from functioning as it once had.

The only useful thing I could do was watch the guards. They were my lone viable access to the outside world. I hoped that listening to their conversations would give me some kind of intel. But unfortunately, intel was easier to get from people who were actually intelligent. These guards didn’t seem to know anything relevant, and mostly talked about how bored they were. Still, I made notations about their shift changes, tying knots in my bedsheet to mark each one. I watched carefully, through the slot on the door, for any opportunities I could use.

They rotated in shifts of five—but two overlapping shifts of five. That meant ten were watching me most of the time. Occasionally five, but never zero.

By what I thought was the fourth day of my imprisonment, I’d started identifying individuals. One set in particular tended to go off shift a little early, consistently leaving only the other five watching. Maybe I could…

Maybe I could what? I pulled away from the door, feeling like an utter fool. It didn’t matter. I’d tried every trick I could to get that door to open. The only time it did, it was followed by weapons fire. I’d tried hiding at the side of the room before they entered, but that time they’d tossed a gas grenade in, which nearly knocked me out, then they’d stunned me anyway and stuck me with the needle.

I was trapped, well and truly. With a sinking feeling, I finally understood how someone could spend decades in a prison and never escape, like in the stories. I’d always thought I would be clever, strong, or perceptive enough to get myself out of such a situation. Yet here I was, completely powerless. They could keep me in this cell until I died of old age. I slumped down on my bunk and bit into one of my rations.

My teeth clinked against something inside.

I pulled the ration bar back, staring at the shining bit of metal in the mashed-up protein paste. Scud. I had no idea what that was, but I suspected that they had a camera watching me somewhere in here, so I pretended nothing had happened. I flopped down on the bunk, rolled to my side, and there feigned nibbling on the bar. While secretly I figured out what was inside it.

A key. Not an old-fashioned one like in the stories, but an electronic one. You pressed it to the door, and the mechanism unlocked. I’d seen them on the guards’ belts.

How in Genghis’s bloody name had someone snuck me a key? And who would do such a thing?

The guard shift, I thought, listening to the movements outside. Those five have left. Early, as normal.

Could I take out the five who remained? One woman against five armed soldiers?

I knew I might never have another chance to find out. Maybe this was a trap, but either I tried to escape now, or I’d ride out the rest of the war in this little room. So I heaved a sigh, palmed the key, and sauntered over to the door. There, I pretended to be watching the guards like I usually did. I didn’t open the door immediately. I waited, hoping that anyone watching via camera would grow lax.

I waited until the guards were chatting together, complaining about those other guards, who were so negligent they always left early. Then, guessing this was as distracted as they’d ever be, I pressed the key to the door—and felt the mechanism unlock.

Unfortunately, one of the guards noticed. So I revised my plan and waited until that one wandered over to look at the door, head cocked. Then I slammed the door open, shoving it right into their face.

The clank of metal on bone was one of the most satisfying sounds I’d ever heard. I was on the guard a second later, counting on the others to be too shocked to respond immediately. A part of me envied the relaxing lives they led, where even on guard duty they were distracted enough that they could be taken by surprise. My life—full of explosions, sudden attacks, and dread—served me better that day.

As a few of them got their first shots off, spraying weapons fire erratically through the hallway, I knelt with the fallen guard’s stun gun and laid into the remaining four. A barrage of tightly focused fire dropped them all in a single sweep. Even Veska, my firing range sergeant, wouldn’t have complained about my form and precision.

Then I knelt there, heart pounding, holding my weapon and waiting for the inevitable alarm to sound. Surely a guard was watching remotely somewhere. They wouldn’t solely rely on soldiers at the door, would they?

Silence.

Scud, what was happening? I couldn’t trust this, could I? It was far too convenient.

But what else was I supposed to do? Sit in my bunk? Maybe the slugs had somehow managed to get me this key. I couldn’t stew and worry it was a trap.

Move, dummy!

I grabbed the first guard—the one I’d hit in the face with the metal door—and hauled them up by their jacket. They were a dione, with blue skin and face tattoos, one of which had been split right down the middle by the edge of the door.

They were dazed, but coming to. So I pulled their face up close to mine and growled, “Hangar bay. Starfighters.”

Their eyes widened and they smiled, an expression that on a dione did not mean amusement. They were terrified. Good.

“I’m not a patient woman,” I hissed at them. “Tell me where the fighter bays are, or I’ll have to get creative. How many pieces can a dione lose before they go into shock? Any ideas?”

“I…Please,” the dione whispered.

“Hangar bay,” I hissed. “Starfighters.”

“Delm fourteen!”

Delm was one of their letters. Good enough. I shot the dione with the stun gun, then whipped the jacket off one of the smaller guards. I threw it on and strung my stun rifle across it by the strap in a guard carry. Maybe I wouldn’t strike as suspicious a silhouette this way. I identified the NCO of the fallen group by their uniform, then stole their ID—it looked a lot like the key my phantom helper had sent me.

I took off at an even stride, and after a few turns through the empty hallways I found a monitor on the wall that seemed like it was there to help with navigation. After all this time, I still didn’t know much about the Superiority alphabets, but I managed—using the access key I’d stolen—to get “delm 14” typed in. To my relief, a map appeared, showing me the way.

I’d thought I was in some kind of space station, not a ground facility, and that was proven correct when a few turns later I found some portholes looking out at the silent expanse of space.

I continued down hallway after hallway, and fortunately didn’t run into many people. The ones I spotted were at a distance, and my makeshift disguise seemed to work. I got the feeling that it was the station’s main sleep cycle, which certainly made it easier to sneak around.

I was more than halfway to my destination before the alarm sounded. Those five guards who had left their shift early were likely going to have a very bad day.

I ran, praying I’d gotten the location correct—and came upon a tenasi, a female carrying a tray of food and humming to herself. I stunned her and she fell to the ground, then I leaped over the splattered mess of her meal, ran the final distance, and slammed my stolen guard’s key to the pad beside a metal door. But it didn’t open immediately. Scud, I hoped they hadn’t already locked me out. I stood there in a panic, red lights flashing in the hallway and a distant alarm sounding.

At last the door opened. I leaped through to find a large hangar bay, Superiority-standard starships of a variety of designs sitting in a row. Despite the flashing lights and sounds of alarm, there was nobody in here. Wouldn’t a hangar lockdown be one of their first moves after a security breach?

I hesitated, again worried this was a trap. As I did, I heard a click to the side.

Scud. I turned and raised my rifle, realizing I’d failed to check my corners after entering the room. Veska would have had something to complain about after all.

Brade lounged at an operator’s seat by the wall just to my right, her booted feet up on a desk, stopwatch raised.

My stomach sank and I was hit by a wave of anger at seeing Brade with that scudding stopwatch yet again.

So I tried to shoot her. My weapon fire hit a shield that, until intercepting something, was invisible. It flashed blue before fading again.

“Protective feature,” she said. “Shielded ops station as a safety protocol during weapons checks. The Superiority is big on safety protocols.” She peered at the stopwatch. “Wow. Did you really defeat ten guards and run all the way here in under five minutes?”

I fired again. And again. Just to see if I could bring the shield down. When it didn’t work, I sighed. “I only had to beat five guards,” I admitted. “I waited for a shift change, and there’s a group of them that tends to leave early.”

Brade sighed loudly. “You’re kidding me. Look, I promise we have some competent soldiers. They just don’t usually get assigned to guard duty, even on important installations.” She sounded like she thought I’d be offended by lazy guards.

Then again, I had no idea how to read Brade. She seemed to swap personalities like FM changed shoes. I kept my rifle up.

“You sent me the key,” I said. “You let me escape.”

“Had to empty the hangar bay too,” she said. “Not easy to do, mind you, even during the night watch.”

“Why?”

“Have you forgotten our duel?” she asked. “You can lower the gun, Spensa. It doesn’t have the juice to punch through the ops station’s shield.”

The alarms were still blaring. I glanced at the ships. Were they a way out?

“You get to go first,” Brade said to me. “Pick a ship. They’re unlocked. Head on out, and I’ll follow.”

“Why are you doing this?” I demanded. “Back on Starsight, you were all too eager to work against me. Now you let me go?”

“We needed you to be our scapegoat then,” Brade said. “Thanks for that, by the way. The footage we took of you being a ‘scary human’ helped Winzik persuade entire planets to overlook his military coup.” She spun a handgun on the desk table, displaying absolutely atrocious muzzle control. “They’re so docile. A lot about the Superiority will need to change if they want to hold on to all they’ve achieved.”

She looked at me, and seemed to sense my hesitance. I hadn’t run for a ship. I didn’t like this; it smelled off.

“They don’t deserve it,” she said to me. “This empire they’ve built. The diones, the tenasi, the varvax? They were just the ones who figured out cytonics first; then they were the first to be able to isolate and control the slugs. They think it’s their grand philosophy that made them dominant, when in reality it was mere luck.”

“I don’t get you, Brade,” I said, stepping closer. “Why do you follow him? Why do you want to duel me? Why do you do anything you do?”

“For kicks,” she said.

I almost believed it. If her simple motivation was to do what seemed fun at the time, that would explain letting me go. It would explain a lot. But there were easier ways to have fun. She had committed to flying with me at Starsight, keeping up her persona even when it was difficult.

Whatever her reasons, this was her game. If I was going to escape, I’d need to play by her rules at first, until I found a way to break them.

“Are you just going to stand there?” she asked. “Soon this place will be swarming with troops. But if you’re out there with me, Winzik will be slower to act. I’ve got a message typed up saying I caught you escaping and am giving chase. He’ll still send others to help, but knowing I’m chasing you should calm him a little. Buy us time for a real fight. Your choice though. Do you want to stand here and be caught?”

I went running for one of the ships, fully aware that I was dancing to her tune. But maybe she would actually fly out and duel me. Maybe she really did want to know which of us was better. In that case, I had an opportunity to escape. A far better one than I had locked in that cell.

I located a sleek interceptor model I knew had a familiar control scheme and threw myself into the cockpit, still expecting some kind of last-minute trap. Nothing stopped me as I raised the ship up on its acclivity ring, then boosted straight out the bay doors through the shield and into the vacuum of space.

Brade followed moments later in her own ship. Scud, we were really going to do this. I still couldn’t hyperjump, with the drugs in my system, but I’d picked a good time to try my escape. I usually got a dose about an hour after shift change, so I figured my powers should start returning shortly.

I had a chance, a real one. I just had to beat Brade, then elude capture for long enough to hyperjump. As Brade dove for me, unloading with her destructors, my instincts kicked in. I still didn’t know for sure why she was doing this.

But I knew, sure as the stars themselves, that she was going to regret toying with me.