Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

I boosted away from Brade on overburn, but focused primarily on defensive flying. I needed the lay of this region before I got serious.

We’d left a newer-looking space station, flat and rectangular with bays along the sides. It looked a little like a…well, a giant space harmonica. The sort our pathleader had played back in my nomadic childhood. My monitors labeled this station “Brez Observation Platform.”

My monitor picked out smaller structures in the distance—hundreds of them. Mines, maybe? They did seem to be arrayed in a pattern, creating a large field around the region. There were kilometers between each one, but viewing this as a battlefield, I could see an intentionality to the way they were placed.

In the area closest to me was a lot of space junk, drifting far more haphazardly. The main showpiece, though, was an old space platform—much, much larger than Brez, the station where I’d been captive. The behemoth floated a short distance away, by starship terms.

This was Evensong, my proximity monitor said: an ancient platform that resembled Starsight. It looked mostly derelict, though its surface was encrusted with hundreds, maybe thousands of skyscrapers. No lights came from any of them, but somewhere on that platform would be the hub where all the commslugs were housed.

I punched my ship in that direction to get a closer look, while Brade swept outward. Evensong seemed to have a bubble of air around it like Starsight, but my proximity monitor didn’t warn of a shield. Vast swaths of brown ground marked dead gardens. The buildings hadn’t corroded—modern metals resisted that, no matter how long they sat—but I saw broken windows. Streets that seemed to have been stripped of metal for use elsewhere.

A part of me found it incredible. The platforms around Detritus had remained functional for hundreds of years without intervention. What had happened here to make this place so derelict?

“It was a human installation once,” Brade said over my comm.

I hesitated. She hadn’t pressed her attack. I felt an urgency to be on with the contest, before Winzik found out what we were doing. At the same time, if Brade was willing to talk, maybe I could get some information out of her?

“What happened?” I asked, careful not to get complacent, staying out of her direct line of fire. Talking to me could be a ploy to get me to let my guard down.

“War,” she said. “It got annexed by one of the many human factions trying to claim the galaxy. After that group collapsed, it became a pirate hub. Then another group took it, and they fell too. On and off over hundreds of years.”

“Makes sense, I suppose,” I said, flying down around one of the larger skyscrapers. “But why did it fall into disrepair like this? It’s got to be cheaper to fix it up than build another station.”

We flew out over the side of the station, lit by a distant sun that provided some twilight illumination. It left Evensong with deep shadow along one face, pooling like ink. We crested the edge of the station and headed toward the underside of the platform—which was covered in its own buildings, since up and down were matters of choice in a place with artificial gravity.

Here I was met with a daunting sight. Giant creatures, like tube worms each at least a couple of kilometers long, undulating through the vacuum. They’d been sheltered from my sight by the platform, but each of these things was as large as a capital ship. There were dozens of them here, moving slowly through space.

I veered away with a jerk of my ship, and suddenly—now that I knew what to look for—I realized I’d been mistaken earlier. The space junk I’d seen upon leaving Brez…it included more of these things. Hundreds of them, swimming through the void of space.

“Scud,” I whispered. “What are those?” Space worms existed? Why hadn’t M-Bot told me about them when he’d dashed my hopes of finding sand worms!

“Damn, you’re sheltered,” Brade replied. “You’ve really never seen a vastworm before?”

“No.”

“An infestation like this is dangerous,” Brade said. “They can swallow ships. In a more populated region, the government would dedicate huge resources to exterminating them before they grew into what we have here. But out here…well, Evensong is old, abandoned. Nobody comes here. It’s basically just a blip on interstellar maps, with a warning attached. Jump in here, and you risk getting swallowed.”

Scud! The worm I’d turned away from had noticed me, and it was undulating after us. The thing didn’t seem fast, but it was huge. I doubted it could swallow a ship that was aware and alert, but it was still unnerving with that wide circular mouth the size of giant bay doors. Brade, of course, took some shots at me while I was distracted. One hit my shield before I managed to execute some decent dodges.

She chuckled softly, the sound coming in over the line.

“Why?” I demanded. “Why would the Superiority build a central hub here? I expected something as vibrant and populated as Starsight.”

“Yeah, well, that would be on everyone’s maps. Hard to keep quiet. The Superiority is all about making people ignore things that are secretly important.”

That was true. Warships pretended to be merchant vessels. Slugs were labeled as dangerous to ensure people were afraid to pick one up if they saw one. It was an understandable methodology, when you didn’t rule by military might but by the control of information. So, they’d situated their central communications hub in a place nobody would visit.

I found the view intimidating. All those worms out there, like maggots in a stew, floating and moving through space. Serene, yet deadly. Worse, as I outpaced the worm behind us, I saw another dangerous sight in the near distance: the Superiority fleet that Winzik had been gathering. Three huge carriers, the largest of the capital ships, along with two battleships and a half dozen smaller gunships and destroyers.

That wasn’t much in the context of a large-scale galaxy, but it was already a fleet that dwarfed our own. The enemy fleet hung in its own space with a number of dead worms, blown in half, floating nearby. The others seemed to be keeping their distance, as if they could sense where some of their kind had been killed.

“So, are we actually going to do this?” Brade asked. “Or are you going to just continue sightseeing? I have Winzik stalled for now. But that won’t last forever.”

“Brade—”

“You should know,” she added, “that I have a remote control device on your ship to let me take it over. Try to escape, and I’ll lock you down. Need proof?” She flipped my overburn on and off.

I gritted my teeth. I hated the idea of my ship being controlled by someone else.

“So you can just lock me down?” I snapped. “You’ve already won, then.”

“I won’t use it,” she said. “Not unless you try to run or are otherwise defeated. No cytonics on my part either. Come on. Destroy me, and you can fly away—but as long as I’m here, you’re captive. Ready?”

“Get a little closer, and I’ll show you how ready I am.”

A protracted fight favored me, giving time for the drugs in my system to run out—so I probably should have been looking for a way to accomplish that. But as Brade approached, firing with twin destructors, I found myself not caring. Here was a fight. Despite everything I’d been through, everything I’d learned, I was still a warrior at my core. I had to prove that I was better than Brade. The opportunity to get some measure of vengeance on one of my captors was all-consuming.

I dodged away from her weapons fire and soared alongside the ancient platform, passing abandoned rooms with tiny windows and cavernous docking bays, like eyeholes in a skull. Brade thought she could toy with me? Let me out of my prison to have some fun, then lock me back up when she was done?

She’d see.

When we had flown together at Starsight, I’d sometimes held back so as to not seem too skilled; that would have been suspicious. Brade had seen me fly—we’d even faced off—but I figured she would probably still underestimate me.

Evensong’s sides didn’t have any buildings, just windows and docking bays, so I wove around to the bottom of the station. There I entered an ancient street, diving in among the buildings to see what Brade would do.

And scud, she was too smart to get pulled into such a tight chase. She stayed up above, where she could watch or outrun me. If I flew up and out, she’d have a good line of sight to shoot me down. So I flipped my ship around, nearly overloading the GravCaps—then boosted backward and stopped. Up above, she continued onward for a second, while I darted between buildings to my right. Being down this low might confuse her proximity sensors, making her lose track of me in the mess of ancient steel buildings.

“Not bad,” Brade said to me a short time later. “Where did you go?”

“Better watch your tail,” I said.

She chuckled. “Do you ever wish it could go back to this? Pilots struggling one-on-one? Rather than sweeping galactic domination and political nonsense?”

I didn’t respond. Because I still didn’t know how to read Brade. Of course I wanted something like that—but she was playing off my desires.

“What happened to you, Spensa?” she asked me. “In the nowhere? What did you do in there?”

“I learned who I was,” I said. “And where I came from.”

“You think it could help me? Find the same answers?”

Scud, she sounded sincere. But I’d been played too many times to fall for it. Instead I wove through some streets at a very slow speed, then pulled to a stop near some abandoned hovercars. I had Brade tracked on my proximity monitor as she flew around up above, trying to see where I’d gone. Sitting still felt wrong—dangerous—but I knew it was the right thing to do. Her sensors would have way more trouble tracking me this way.

The ploy worked. Brade went into a large sweeping pattern, flying “upside down” and using visuals to try to find me. Not a bad move, as my ship would stand out to human eyes against all this wreckage. But she started in the wrong location, which gave me the perfect opportunity. As she swung out, I turned my nose upward, put full power to my acclivity ring, and boosted straight up along the side of a skyscraper.

I popped out in a perfect position to fall in on her tail, and though she spotted me mid-maneuver and broke off her search, I still managed to stay on her. She wove and dodged, but I drew inevitably closer and started taking careful shots. Anticipating her dodges, I managed to score two hits on her ship—which should have put her shield at around half power. She’d need to stop flying to reignite it, which you never wanted to do while in combat.

I could hear her grunting through the line as she tried to outfly me. I leaned forward, smiling, enjoying the simple focus of the duel. For the moment, I allowed myself to pretend this was all that mattered. I let myself enjoy the fight as Brade led me out from the shadow of Evensong into open space, flying dangerously close to one of those enormous space worms. The thing undulated in the vacuum, its enormous body rippling as Brade used it for cover, coming in close to its wrinkled pink-orange skin.

I took my thumb off the firing button. Judging by the corpses around the Superiority fleet, these things were susceptible to our weapons, but I couldn’t imagine that the small destructors on my ship would do much harm to it. I decided to stick to her and hold off on firing for now, just in case stray shots enraged it or something. She gave me quite the run, soaring in a spiral along the worm’s body, moving toward the head—and the thing noticed us as we flew, twisting and looking our direction, though I couldn’t make out any sort of eyes on the gargantuan beast.

“What are these things?” I asked. “Like, really?”

“Vastworms feed off cytonic energy,” Brade said. “Any place where you collect too many taynix, you’re likely to draw them, unless you do a lot of work to shield the minds.”

Detritus had never drawn any that I knew about. But then, we also had a pretty extensive shielding system. I was about to ask for more info, but Brade—still trying to shake me from her tail—boosted up along the worm’s head. She spun in a perfectly executed Ahlstrom loop.

Then dove straight into the worm’s gaping mouth.

Um…

Maybe I was the one who had underestimated her.

“Brade?” I said. “Are you insane?”

“Maybe,” she replied, the comm fuzzing. “You think you’re better than me? See if you can chase me in here. Remember, until you bring me down, you’re as good as in prison.”

Scud. I took a long deep breath.

Then I followed her in.