Defiant (The Skyward Series Book 4)

Brade cursed softly, standing in her ripped-apart command room. Near her, the hologram map showed the thirteen planet-size delvers—dwarfing even the largest carrier—suddenly motionless in space, no longer advancing on the rebellious forces. What was wrong?

She looked at Spensa. The woman’s mind was fully in the nowhere, though her body remained behind. She wasn’t hyperjumping; she was communing with the creatures in the other dimension. But could one person stand up to the entire might of the delvers? That seemed impossible, even for Spensa.

Scrud. And yet, Brade didn’t dare try to touch her. Not with the power Spensa had radiated. That delver combined with her…it could destroy Brade.

“Sir,” an aide said, rushing over with a datapad. “It’s the inhibitors and the communicators. Their disobedience is growing and growing. They’re expending a cytonic effort into the nowhere! The moment they started, those delvers you called stopped.”

Scrud again. The slugs were involved in this somehow? Brade took another shot at Spensa with her sidearm, just to be certain. It still didn’t work—the blast was hyperjumped away before hitting her. Helpless though she seemed, Spensa was untouchable.

Fortunately, the slugs were not.

“Execute them,” she said.

“Which ones?” the aide asked.

Brade surveyed the battlefield. Her last fighters, which had no carrier support. The few capital ships she’d been able to convince to come as emergency reinforcements. This was a disaster, but not an unrecoverable one. She would need to spread propaganda of Winzik’s death and the fall of the Defiant carefully to maintain power.

“Can we maintain the Superiority without the slugs here?” she asked.

“Yes,” an aide said, “but barely. I’ve been running the numbers, as you asked. We’ll need to set up a new communications hub.”

“No,” Brade said. “No more hubs. We organize in a way that ensures we can’t be hit like this ever again.” Scrud. If the slugs here were disobeying en masse, then she’d already lost these ones. They had spread the idea among themselves that they could disobey. She needed to get her ships out of here, the ones that—hopefully—had hyperslugs who hadn’t been corrupted by rebellion. But she couldn’t leave such a wealth of resources behind.

Time to cut her losses. “Kill them,” she said.

“All of them?” the aide asked.

“Yes. Every slug on this station, every slug in their inhibitor pods, and every single slug on Evensong.” She looked to her generals, who seemed shocked, but then several nodded at her grimly. If the delvers wouldn’t fight for them, it was time to pull out—and they couldn’t leave their hyperdrives and other tools in the hands of their enemies.

Just as you burned your supplies when you left a fortress, they needed to burn the slugs to keep them from falling into enemy hands.

“Kill them,” she said. “Now.”