Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

Becca Nightshade sat in the firm leather command chair of the starship Defiant, listening to the sounds of her staff at work. Footsteps as bridge crew rushed from station to station. Soft murmurs as they did their best to puzzle out the quirks of taking a new ship, flown by a new crew, into battle for the first time.

They were worried about how green they were, with good reason. Even with kitsen on the bridge to help—who had experience flying capital ships—no commander would be excited for her crew to see combat on only their fourth day working the vessel.

Becca leaned back in her chair, eyes closed. It had been years since she’d used them to see. Instead, she felt the smooth leather armrests of her seat, and the buttons along the front, little ridges on each one indicating their function.

This felt right. This sounded right.

True, things weren’t quite in the same places she vaguely remembered from her life aboard the original Defiant. The bridge was laid out differently. They’d needed to work with what they’d had: a nearly finished ship hanging in the fabrication plants around Detritus, frozen for centuries before being completed enough to do the job, then powered up and released.

It could have details wrong but still feel right. Becca moved her hand to where a small hologram of the battlefield was projected for her. It had haptics that allowed her to read the map without seeing it, by applying tiny buzzes and pressures to her skin. An earpiece relayed instructions and spoke written labels, as the ship’s standard outfitting had accommodations for individuals—human or alien—who lacked the sense of sight. Some species didn’t have eyes at all.

Normally her cytonics made up the gap, but they’d entered the enemy inhibitor zone—and that had stolen her unnatural sight as surely as time had stolen her natural one. It didn’t matter. The small hologram was ingenious, allowing her to sense the 3-D nature of the battlefield even better, she thought, than if she were seeing it.

She heard the soft footsteps of Commander Xinyi before she arrived. A carpeted floor on the bridge—that was a change, though Becca supposed it did keep the noise down.

“Fifteen minutes until we engage, sir,” Xinyi said.

“Launch the fighters,” Becca replied. “Have them fan out into a grouped formation by squadron, and maintain speed with the Defiant. I have a map for their positions here.” She tapped a section of the battle plan, highlighting the information.

“Yes, sir,” Xinyi said. “Sending the plan now…er…once I figure out how to pull up the flightleaders’ ship designations…”

“Just have the computer handle it, Commander,” Becca said.

“Yes, sir,” Xinyi said with a soft sigh, then she stepped back and gave the order to the computer system—which responded with speed and efficiency, sorting out flightleaders and sending the instructions to them directly.

At that, Becca heard several crewmembers at the navigation system hesitate. They’d been arguing about how to work out a quirk in the system, which was expending too much energy boosting both right and left at the same time. After a moment, one of them gave an order to the computer, which deactivated the boosters.

So much distrust of computerized systems. Yes, the ship had unchangeable protocols that wouldn’t let it fly itself—a human had to actively be in command. But that didn’t mean you had to distrust it entirely. She’d given her crew an order yesterday to use the computers when needed; indeed, they wouldn’t be able to get far manually with only a few days’ worth of training.

Regardless, it was difficult for them to trust a mind that wasn’t organic. Their distrust stretched back centuries, due to the way machines tended to start asking questions back at you if you used them too much. Not to mention the fact that delvers were attracted to thinking machines.

Becca could hear the nervousness in the crew’s voices. Consoles chiming in with information. Hurried footsteps on carpet. They knew. All it took was one glance at the arrayed enemy forces, and anyone would know. This was going to be a difficult fight. Nearly impossible.

Fortunately, Becca had studied the great military minds of the past. She knew every story of a general, warlord, or conqueror—many of which hadn’t even been in the surviving archives. She had spent a lifetime pondering the actions of people in situations like this.

That was a huge advantage. Because Becca Nightshade knew just enough to realize she couldn’t lead this battle. You didn’t win battles by reading about them. You won battles by living through them. She was an important figurehead, and was proud of her seat in this chair. But when Jorgen had asked her, she had told him the truth. She was no strategist.

“Send to the admiral,” Becca said, “that I’m still waiting on those kitsen battle strategies.”

“They’re coming in now, sir,” Xinyi said. Indeed, Becca brought them up on her touch monitor, reading quickly. Then she nodded; this was one of the battle plans they’d discussed ahead of time. The kitsen generals were taking it and tweaking it for the current situation.

“Computer,” she said, “flightleaders on screen.”

“Done,” the computer said.

“Flightleaders,” Becca said, addressing the screen—she could feel on her touch monitor that the flightleaders had appeared there. “Our battle plan is in, and it’s as we drilled. Your focus will be on those inhibitor stations. If we can capture or disable enough of them, Detritus can hyperjump closer, and it is worth a dozen capital ships.

“Everything depends on those inhibitors. I know the forces we’re facing look intimidating, but remember: our planet itself is a weapon. It could blast apart those enemy capital ships as if they were made of paper—if we can get it in range. Our task is to make that possible. Questions?”

“Captain,” a voice said in a foreign language, Becca’s console translating. It was from one of the UrDail flightleaders. “If we do jump Detritus in closer, won’t the enemy just fall back to another safe position? The planet is impressive, but it’s barely mobile.”

“Indeed,” Becca agreed. “We’ll have to fight for every meter of this battlefield—but if we get in close enough, we’ll be able to threaten their command station.”

“Assuming they don’t just jump it away,” the same UrDail said, “once we get into range.”

“In which case they’ll abandon the other inhibitors for us to capture,” Becca said. “Beyond that, our orders are to get our own inhibitors close enough to prevent the enemy from escaping—once we inevitably surprise them by defeating their force, despite our smaller numbers.”

With all those mobile inhibitors arrayed in space around Evensong, the battlefield felt like an asteroid field. No, a minefield—an enormous geometric shape made of tiny points, each one with a slug inside. The stations were actually far apart, on a ship scale. She could easily soar the Defiant between them, with kilometers of space on either side. Yet even while doing so, she was trapped by the inhibitor fields those slugs projected—they must be quite powerful.

Her forces’ slugs weren’t that strong, though the kitsen cytonics might be. At any rate, this battle was going to come down to who could control hyperjumping in the region. At least in terms of starfighter numbers, they were relatively equal. With the addition of the UrDail and the kitsen, the Defiant coalition had almost three hundred fighters. Becca hoped it would be enough, because the moment they got into range of those enemy battleships, the Defiant would start taking bombardment from their giant destructors—and her primary concern would be making certain her shields didn’t fail. The fighters would mostly be on their own.

“Sir,” a voice said from the screen. Becca picked this one out. Human, feminine, but lower pitched. FM, one of Spensa’s friends. A lieutenant commander, who normally was on diplomatic duties. Today they needed every pilot they could afford.

“Yes, Commander?” Becca asked.

“We’re to neutralize enemy inhibitors,” FM said. “What does this mean, realistically?”

It had been a point of much discussion. Becca paused, then called Jorgen. “I’ll let Admiral Weight answer this one,” she said as he appeared on screen. “Sir, FM would like to know what their orders are, specifically, regarding the inhibitor stations and the taynix living inside them.”

The bridge grew still. So still, Becca could hear Jorgen’s nearly imperceptible sigh. She wouldn’t want to be in his position. He’d said they were here to liberate captives, but students of real battle knew that in order to liberate, you often had to bring destruction and pain to the very people you were trying to help.

“We should try to save the slugs first,” Jorgen said. “This goes for all flightleaders: our initial approach to the inhibitors should be one of liberation. See if your slugs can contact the slugs inside, and if there’s any way to persuade them to switch sides.”

“Thank you, sir,” FM said.

It wasn’t the decision Becca would have made. Trying to save the slugs first would probably cost lives and take precious time, but…well, Becca supposed that if they’d been solely interested in protecting their own lives, they’d have hyperjumped Detritus someplace far, far away long ago. They hadn’t done that. They’d made allies. They had determined to try to bring down the Superiority, not merely escape it.

Becca supposed that was what you got when you let the younger generation take over. The ones who hadn’t had their optimism beaten out of them yet. Good for them.

The flightleaders vanished, but judging by how she could still hear his soft breathing, Jorgen lingered on the screen. She checked on her touch monitor.

“Admiral?” she asked.

“You disagree with the decision,” he said.

He shouldn’t have said that in front of her crew, but they were minutes from engagement. So perhaps he felt he didn’t have time for a private conference. Besides, what did she know? She’d spent her life making bread and stringing beads, not fighting wars, for all her dreams and stories.

“I think that you bear a burden on your shoulders that I don’t want,” Becca said to him. “I’m not going to judge the decisions you make.”

“I’m going against protocol,” he said.

“Jorgen,” Becca said, softening her voice. “There are no protocols anymore. Those were all built for a different era, when we were rats in caves trying to escape predators. There are important ideals in them, but we’ve moved into an entirely new world full of light. You need to decide the rules now.”

“Like the man who stopped a war,” he said softly. “In the story you told me.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, Gran-Gran,” he said, his voice growing more confident. “Let’s go end this.”

“Excellent,” she said, settling back into her seat. “I’m almost ninety, you know. I was starting to think I wouldn’t get to tear down any galactic empires in my lifetime, which would have been positively tragic.”