Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

Brade stared at me, her eyes bulging.

Awesome.

“Run, Brade!” I shouted to her. “He knows we’ve been working together!”

“Shut her up!” Brade snapped, and one of her tenasi grabbed me and shoved a gag toward my mouth.

Winzik stepped forward. “No, no,” he said, waving his hands. “Leave her alone; I will hear her. Human, you’ve been working with Brade, have you?”

The tenasi pilots reluctantly backed away. Most importantly, the doctor joined them.

“Yes,” I said, trying to sound reluctant. “Ever since Starsight. We thought maybe…maybe we could make you free the humans in the preserves. Find a way we could be warriors again, serving you.”

Was that too obvious a lie? I couldn’t tell if Winzik was buying it or not. His crab face wasn’t exactly capable of the expressions I found common. I did think the way he waved his arms next was a sign of agitation though.

“My, my,” he said.

“She’s lying, Winzik,” Brade said, rolling her eyes. “Very clearly.”

“Yes, perhaps she is,” Winzik said, turning to Brade. “Perhaps. But what is it I have found you doing? The soldiers in these docks reassigned? A crack team of pilots commandeered? You went and had your little duel with her, didn’t you? The one I expressly told you was foolish?”

“I needed to know which of us was better,” Brade said.

“You grow unruly,” Winzik said, tapping his exosuit’s hands together. “You no longer give me the deference you once did. You think that because you are cytonic, I need you.”

“I—”

“You do not speak now,” Winzik said. “You will be confined to quarters.”

Brade deflated visibly. Fine. Now, so long as that doctor stayed away…I could feel my powers seeping back. I was so close. Chet was growing increasingly clear, his soul vibrating with mine. I strained and felt something in the distance. A familiar mind. M-Bot? He seemed to perk up, and I felt his excitement at sensing me. But I couldn’t get any words through. I tried to send him panic, a feeling that I was captured.

I got the slightest impression of something in return. An acknowledgment. And a sense of something powerful.

Defiance.

Just a few more minutes! I kept my own head bowed, barely daring to look up to watch.

“Confined to quarters?” Brade said. “Fine. I’ll do it.”

“Now, I think this entire fiasco needs to change direction,” Winzik said. “My, my. I should not have listened to your aggressive instincts, Brade. We leave our worlds undefended by gathering this force of ships as you have suggested.”

Brade looked up sharply.

“We should be waiting out the humans, not preparing to confront them,” Winzik continued. “I have control of the entire Superiority, and all of its strength. We will disperse this fleet and send the ships back to maintain control on the most important planets. Then we will wait for the humans to starve themselves. Yes. Yes, this is the proper way.”

“Winzik,” Brade said, “don’t ruin—”

“Ah, but you don’t speak right now,” he chided her. “Remember? You are too like these other humans. They are of lesser intelligence, as are you. I see that they will chew themselves up, just as you have been unable to resist fighting this human. We can let them be, in turmoil, then clean up the mess and document it, so that all will see that I have defeated them. Yes. Let us begin.”

He turned and started toward the door. Brade let out a long, annoyed sigh. Then she raised her sidearm pistol and blasted a hole in Winzik’s head.

Shocked, I watched his exosuit fall to the ground with a calamitous crash. I stared, then looked up, expecting the soldiers in the room to immediately attack Brade.

No one moved. Even the other varvax aides who had entered with Winzik just waved their hands in faint agitation.

“Well, that’s over,” Brade said, sliding her gun back into her holster. “What are the latest reports on Detritus’s troop movements?”

A varvax hurried over, holding up a datapad for Brade. “Continued consolidation from the planets Evershore and ReDawn, sir. They’re building up their own fleet.”

“And our troops?” she asked.

“Winzik’s orders have produced…lethargic responses,” the aide admitted. “It could—should—be going much more quickly.”

Brade sighed. “Probably should have shot him sooner.”

“Perhaps, sir,” the varvax admitted.

“Wait,” I said—my utter confusion breaking through my good sense. “Wait. You’re just going to let her get away with shooting your leader?”

The reptilian tenasi next to me chuckled. “What?” he asked. “You think we would band together behind that?” He gestured to Winzik’s fallen husk. Horrifyingly, I realized that the crab-thing inside the helmet wasn’t dead.

The liquid was leaking from the shattered faceplate all over the floor, and the much smaller creature that was Winzik was crawling out of its remnants, moving in jerks. His crustacean mouth gasped for breath. He was…suffocating in the air.

“A bureaucrat?” another of the soldiers asked. “You really think a bureaucrat orchestrated the conquest of the entire Superiority? We weren’t going to follow a leader who couldn’t tell a flanking maneuver from a feint.”

“We needed a military leader,” one of the varvax aides said.

“We needed,” the tenasi next to me growled, “a human.”

Stars and Saints above. Everyone in this room had…had been working behind the scenes with Brade for years. Each of them knowing, all along, that Winzik was a puppet. I looked back to Brade, who was going over battle reports and quietly giving orders. Scud, this was the real Brade, wasn’t it? All this time, all these false faces, and this was who she was.

A conqueror. Hiding in plain sight among her enemies. Despite everything, I couldn’t help but be impressed.

“Give the order to gather our forces,” she said to the aide. “Quickly this time. Inform the command staff that I’ve finally executed our contingency. I suspect a lot of them will be happy to hear it.”

“Yes, sir,” the aide said, tucking away his datapad. “We’ll need to start the propaganda machine immediately. The planets could accept Winzik as their war minister, but a human is going to be more difficult to spin.”

“I’ll wear the hologram in public until you manage the situation,” Brade said, waving them off. As the aides left, she strolled over to a workstation and picked up a large crowbar that she—to my surprise—absently handed to me.

I took it, feeling the heavy weight of the steel in my hands.

“For him,” she said, nodding to where Winzik was crawling across the floor.

He was trailing what I guessed was blood from several sections of his carapace. It looked like he had been connected to the exosuit biologically. I’d never known if those things were entirely tech or natural growths. I thought maybe they were something in between.

“The final blow belongs to you, Spensa,” Brade said. “For what his people did to yours. An honor I give you, one soldier to another.”

He was slowly making for the door. Probably deranged by the lack of liquid to breathe, and bleeding out. I gripped the crowbar, then hesitated.

“You’re just going to record this,” I realized. “And as soon as you need an excuse for why you’re in charge, you’ll plaster the video all over the news, showing me—a human assassin—killing Winzik.”

“Damn,” Brade said. “For once you figured it out.” She slapped her arm, and an illusion snapped into place around her—like the one I’d worn to imitate Alanik. They’d stolen that tech from M-Bot.

The illusion made her look like me.

“Fortunately,” she said, “few know about this tech. Modern holovideos have encrypted metadata to prevent tampering—but it’s perfectly easy to fool them if they’re genuinely recording what they see.”

I had no idea what some of those words meant, but as a guard handed Brade another crowbar, I stepped forward. I figured I could milk this for a few minutes of extra time…but as I saw Winzik suffering, I actually felt a little sorry for him. Despite it all. So, I slammed my crowbar down on Winzik’s carapace, crushing the life out of him.

With that, I finally ended the tyrant who had kept my people imprisoned for years, who had gotten my father killed, who was responsible for so much death. At least a member of the DDF had delivered the final blow, instead of Brade in a disguise.

I felt…unfulfilled. Not because I felt bad killing him. It had been a mercy, and he certainly deserved an execution if only for the death of poor Comfort earlier. Winzik had been a thoroughly evil creature.

But I couldn’t pin the suffering of my people entirely on him. The oppression was systemic in the Superiority, not the result of one person’s schemes. I’d gotten vengeance on one little part of the machine that had ruined my people’s lives, but this wasn’t the solution. The solution had to be much, much bigger than one girl with a crowbar.

“What now?” I asked Brade, looking up from the dead Winzik.

“Now,” she said, “I’m afraid we’re going to have to crush your rebellion. Nothing personal. Can’t have a rival faction of humans challenging me for control. Our military is proud to have a human at their head, but an entire fleet of them would be problematic.”

“We could work together,” I said, stepping toward her. “You don’t have to do this.”

“Of course I don’t,” Brade said, frowning. “Spensa, do you have any idea how long I’ve been working toward this? I’ve been planning it ever since they took me from my family. Putting things in place. Positioning myself.

“The Superiority is an enormous mess. The military understands how tenuous it all is. We lack the strength to control what we have, and need to rule through access to hyperslugs. Yet one slipup, and the secrets of hyperdrives would spread through the entire galaxy. The Superiority is a stone balanced on a single point, and it’s going to fall.

“We had to take action, and they needed a leader who understands aggression on a level that hasn’t been forcibly bred out of her.” She waved to herself. “I’m poised to rule everything, and your people could upset all of that.”

“Our people.”

“What, because we’re the same race, we should work together?” She smiled. “Have you read any human history, Spensa? We never got along. That’s part of what differentiates us from some of the other species. They had world governments early—achieved through excluding those who didn’t agree, yes, but they unified. We’re simply not good at that.”

“So it all just continues,” I said, mostly to keep her talking at this point, “the way it has been?”

“Spensa, I created this situation,” Brade said. “And by crushing your rebellion, I’m going to prove that the military was right to support me. Sorry. But I have read human history. I’ve studied it, learned from the master tacticians of the past. I…”

She frowned, then put her hand on a pouch she wore on her belt. She was looking past me, toward…

Well, scud. Toward the doctor still standing back there with my dose. My powers fluttered and stuttered, like a person trying to come awake in the morning. I could almost access them. I strained, and felt the delver inside me churning. The air started to warp around me, which made me curse softly.

It would give me away. Can’t you stop that? I thought in anger at the delver.

No, the thought came back from Chet. No. I…I need you. Can you control it?

Could I?

“Hell,” Brade said. “Did we give her the full dose?”

“No dose at all,” the doctor said. “We were ordered not to touch her—”

“Give it now!” Brade said, scrambling forward and waving toward the troops. Several of them grabbed me by the arms, and one pulled the crowbar from my hands. The doctor hurried up, preparing the syringe. But before she reached me, klaxons started going off throughout the station. Along with red lights, flashing with a panicked urgency.

“What?” Brade asked.

“Major incursion into the local space,” one of the tenasi soldiers said, reading from an alert monitor on the wall. “An entire planet has hyperjumped into the region…” She trailed off, then looked toward us. “It’s Detritus.”