Skyward (The Skyward Series Book 1)

“What reason,” Rig asked as we worked together, “could the DDF possibly have to pretend your father was a coward?”

“I can think of dozens of scenarios,” I said, lying underneath M-Bot beside him.

Five days had passed since the event. Since we’d lost Bim and Morningtide. Working with Rig off-hours, repairing the ship, had been a welcome solace from my own thoughts—even if it was taxing to get up early like I had today, work on the ship, then go to class and endure Cobb’s instructions all day.

Today, we were unhooking wires from M-Bot’s belly and replacing them with new ones. Some of the old ones seemed good, but Rig figured we should replace them all just in case, and I wasn’t going to argue with his expertise.

I plugged in another wire and threaded it according to the instructions Rig had drawn out earlier. My light-line glowed from within the ship, wound through the innards to give us light, itself like a glowing wire.

“There are literally hundreds of reasons the DDF would lie about my father,” I said as I worked. “Maybe my father was in conflict with Ironsides about leadership, and she decided to make him have an ‘accident.’ ”

“In the middle of the most important battle the DDF had ever flown?” Rig said. “That’s fanciful, even for you, Spin.”

“Fanciful?” I demanded. “Me? I’m a realist, Rig.”

“Realist. Like all the times you made me go pretend to slay stardragons with you as kids.”

“That was battle training.”

He grunted as he worked on a particularly stubborn wire, and Doomslug helpfully imitated him. She sat on the stone ground near my head. M-Bot was “running diagnostics”—whatever that meant. It mostly involved him saying things like “Hmmmmm …” or “Carry the one …” to “give indication that the process is continuing, as humans quickly grow bored without auditory stimulation.”

“Are you sure you aren’t misinterpreting Cobb?” Rig said from beside me. “You’re sure he nodded?”

“I am. The official story is a lie, Rig. I’ve got proof.”

“More like a vague, possible confirmation.”

“I can push Cobb until he spills the entire truth.”

“Good luck with that. Besides, even if he did talk, the higher powers at the DDF aren’t going to admit to lying. You stir up too much trouble, and all you’ll do is get yourself and Cobb removed from your positions.”

“I will clear my father’s name, Rig.”

“I’m not saying you shouldn’t. I’m just pointing out that your original plan—learning to fly—is still the best way to do that. First become a great, famous pilot. Improve your family’s reputation and become someone who can’t be ignored. Then use your influence to clear your father’s name.”

“We’ll see.”

Rig twisted—using the little space we had between M-Bot and the ground—and pulled over his notebook to make some notations. “These are his GravCaps,” he said, tapping his pencil at a mechanism. “But I don’t recognize the design, and he has them in an odd location. This black box over here—which is the only part I don’t recognize—must be what houses his artificial intelligence. I don’t dare try to break that apart, although it’s obviously malfunctioning.”

“How do you know?”

“Can you imagine anyone intentionally creating him to act like he does?”

A valid point.

“What I’m most interested in,” Rig said, “is his joints, his seals, and his atmospheric scoop. It’s hard to explain, but they all feel … tighter, more finely constructed than what we’re using. It’s only by a small increment, but Spensa, I think if we do get this thing flying, it’s going to be fast. Faster than even our scout ships.”

That gave me a shiver to imagine. Rig grinned, holding up his notebook, then put it aside and dug in with his wrench to carefully begin disassembling the atmospheric scoop.

I watched for a moment, holding a wire in the cramped confines, amazed. Rig seemed happy.

We’d been friends for over a decade, and I was sure I’d seen him happy before. It was just that no moments stood out. My memories of Rig were always of him being anxious, or nervous for me, or—occasionally—resigned to some terrible fate.

Today though, he was actively smiling as he worked, his face smeared with the grease we’d been applying between wire replacements. And that … that did something to help me push through the loss that still hung over me, the feelings of having failed my flightmates.

“Where did you get all these wires anyway?” I said, getting back to work. “I thought I was the one who was going to be performing the petty theft.”

“No theft required,” he said. “Ziming—that’s the woman supervising my internship—gave me an entire bundle of them and some machinery to work on for practicing wire replacements. I figure, what better practice than to use it all on a real ship?”

“Nice. So it’s going well?”

Rig, oddly, blushed—though the color was difficult to pick out through the grease, and by the glow of my reddish-orange light-line. I knew him well enough to see it.

“What?” I demanded.

“You know M-Bot’s cockpit design?” he said.

“What part?”

“The pilot’s seat and controls are on their own frame,” Rig said. “It’s complicated, but it reminds me of a gyroscope. I think the seat is made to be able to rotate with the direction of g-forces. You know how it’s really hard on a human to take g-forces that push the blood into the head or the feet?”

“Uh, yeah. Trust me. I know.”

“Well, what if your seat rotated during difficult and extended burns? So that the force was always in the direction easiest on the body—directly backward? That could really help with high-speed maneuvers.”

“Huh,” I said, interested—but more interested by the way Rig lit up as he talked.

“Well, I drew some schematics of that in my notebook, and … and well, Ziming might have seen them and assumed they were my own designs. She might … she might think I’m a genius.”

“You are!”

“Not really,” he said, blushing again. “I just copied what I saw. Whoever built M-Bot is the genius.”

“You figured it out!” I said. “That takes as much genius.”

“It really doesn’t,” he said, then twisted off a nut with his wrench. “But … well, lie or not, I think this is a way we can get this technology to the DDF. Maybe I can figure out how this atmospheric scoop works and take that in as well. If I’m careful, and don’t make my discoveries look too suspicious, we’ll be able to help the fight against the Krell without exposing M-Bot.”

“And you get to be a hero!” I said.

“A fake one,” he said. “But … it did feel nice …”

I grinned, then got back to work on my wires. Maybe we could bring this all to the DDF, and prevent more pilots from dying. Thinking of that immediately put a damper on my mood. No matter what I could do for future pilots, I would still carry my feelings of frustration and pain for the flightmates I’d already lost.

I redirected my thoughts back to the secret of what had really happened to my father, trying to think of every reason why the DDF would cover it up. That kept me occupied for a half hour or so until a ding rang up from the cockpit.

“Diagnostic finished,” M-Bot said in his helpful—and not nearly dangerous enough—voice. It echoed through the innards of the ship. “What did I miss?”

“Discussions of Rig being a hero,” I said. “And another about why the DDF would keep a secret. They claim my father fled from battle—but I know he didn’t.”

“I still think you’re jumping to conclusions,” Rig said. “Why bother with a large-scale cover-up to specifically smear a single pilot’s reputation?”

“What if my father was shot down by accidental friendly fire?” I said. “In the chaos of the fight, someone shot him by mistake—and they didn’t want that embarrassment on their permanent record. So they claimed my father was fleeing, and forced Cobb to lie about what happened.”

Rig grunted, loosening another nut. “That one’s almost plausible. More than the others. But it still has problems. Wouldn’t the other pilots notice? Cobb said there were four people in the flight who saw it happen.”

“We don’t know how deep the cover-up goes,” I said. “And—though the reports had names redacted—I’m pretty sure by now that Ironsides was the flightleader. That would explain why she’s so determined to keep me out of the DDF. Maybe she’s worried I’ll expose the truth—that her incompetent leadership led to one of her pilots getting shot down by accident.”

“You’re stretching. You don’t even know for sure if the official report is a lie.”

“He nodded.”

“He kind-of-halfway-sort-of-nodded-but-it-might-have-been-a-random-twitch.”

“Then give me a better theory for why they’d lie to everyone,” I demanded.

“I can give one,” M-Bot said cheerfully. “The Greater Argument for Human-Originated Chaos.”

“The what?” Rig asked.

“The Greater Argument for Human-Originated Chaos—GAFHOC. It’s an extremely popular and well-documented phenomenon; there’s a great deal of writing in my memory banks about it.”

“And it is?” I asked, plugging in a wire. He often said strange things like this, and I’d learned to just go along with it. In part because … well, I found the way he talked interesting. He saw the world in such an odd way.

I kept hoping one of these conversations would dig up some useful information out of his memory banks, though the way they tended to frustrate Rig was a nice bonus as well.

“GAFHOC is related to free will,” M-Bot said. “Humans are the only creatures that have free will. We know this because you declared that you have it—and I, being a soulless machine, must take your word that you are correct. By the way, how does it feel to be self-deterministic?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Does it feel like tasting ice cream?”

“Not … really like that.”

“I wouldn’t know, of course,” M-Bot said. “I wasn’t built with the ability to comprehend flavors. Or make decisions for myself.”

“You make decisions all the time,” Rig said, wagging his wrench in the direction of the cockpit.

“I don’t make decisions, I simply execute complex subroutines in my programming, all stemming from quantifiable stimuli. I am perfectly and absolutely rational.”

“Rational,” I said, “in that you keep asking for mushrooms.”

“Yup,” he said. “Say, do you suppose anyone makes mushroom-flavored ice cream?”

“Sounds gross,” I said. I’d only had ice cream once, when I was a child and my father had the merits to get some. “Why would we eat something like that?”

“I don’t know,” M-Bot said. “Greater Argument for Human-Originated Chaos. Remember?”

“Which you haven’t explained yet,” Rig noted.

“Oh! I thought it was obvious.” M-Bot sounded surprised. “Humans have free will. Free will is the ability to make irrational decisions—to act against stimuli. That makes it impossible for a rational AI to ever fully anticipate humans, for even if I had perfect understanding of your inputs, you could still do something completely unpredictable.”

I turned my head toward Rig, frowning, trying to make sense of that.

“It means you’re weird,” M-Bot added.

“Uh …,” I said.

“Don’t worry. I like you anyway.”

“You said this was a popular theory?” Rig asked.

“With me,” M-Bot said.

“And there’s a lot written about it?” Rig said.

“By me,” M-Bot said. “Earlier today. I wrote seven thousand pages. My processors work very quickly, you realize. Granted, most of what I wrote is just ‘humans are weird’ repeated 3,756,932 times.”

“You were supposed to be running a diagnostic!” Rig said.

“Rig, that took like thirty seconds,” M-Bot said. “I needed something more engaging to occupy my time.”

Rig sighed, dropping another nut into the cup beside him. “You realize this thing is insane.”

“As long as you can make it fly, I don’t mind. You … can make it fly, right?”

“I’m not insane,” M-Bot noted.

“Well,” Rig said, ignoring the machine, “once we get these wires changed, you’ll need to service the intakes, the thrusters, and the rest of the joints. I’ll look over the atmospheric scoop while you do that, then break down his GravCaps and check them over.

“If that’s all in order, then the internals are in good shape. From there, we have to figure out how to deal with that wing. I’ve got a portion of my internship coming up that deals with design and fabrication, however, and I think I might be able to sneak a way to order new parts for that wing. Though I might set you at pounding some bent portions back into shape. That will get us everything but the big one.”

“The boosters,” I said. M-Bot had room for three, a large one and two smaller ones.

“I think he’ll fly fine with one central booster. But there’s no way I’ll be able to order something that large fabricated. So if we want to fly this thing, you’re going to need to find me a replacement. A standard DDF model should work—anything from an A-17 to an A-32 would fit in that space, with a little work on my part.”

I sighed, resting against the stone. Finally, I wiggled out from under the ship to get a drink.

A new booster. That wasn’t the sort of thing I could find in a junkyard, or even steal off a random hovercar. That was grade-A military tech. I’d have to steal a starfighter. Which would be above petty larceny … it would be actual treason.

No. I thought. Fixing M-Bot was a cool dream, but I couldn’t go that far.

I sighed, taking a long drink from my canteen, then checked my clock. 0605. Rig wiggled out himself, grabbing his own canteen.

I whistled to Doomslug, who whistled back in a perfect imitation. “I need to get going,” I told Rig. “I need time to slip into the women’s room and cleanse before class.”

“Sure,” Rig said, clanging the wing of the ship with his wrench. “Though I don’t know why you’d bother doing it there, as you could use the ship’s cleanser.”

“It has a cleanser?” I asked, stopping in place.

“It has full biofacilities, including waste reclamation, as part of the pod in the cockpit. I hauled up some soap yesterday and got the system working; the controls are the little keypad in the left rear of the cockpit. The canopy should dim, for privacy. Assuming you can trust the thing not to make fun of you while cleansing.”

“Why would I make fun of her?” M-Bot said. “The frailties of human existence—and stenches caused by their inefficient generation of biological energy—are no laughing matter.”

I just smiled. I was tired of sneaking into the cleanser at the base, constantly worried that Admiral Ironsides would use it as an excuse to oust me.

“It makes sense you’d have a cleanser,” I said to M-Bot as I climbed into the cockpit. “You said you’re a long-range scouting and stealth vessel, right?”

“Equipped for deep-space missions.”

“With four destructors,” Rig noted from down below, “and advanced atmospheric scoops and an extremely fast design. He’s a fighter, Spin. But probably a long-distance one, as he said.”

“So you had to be able to care for your pilot long-term,” I said, closing the canopy. “You traveled between the stars?”

“Cytonic hyperdrive is offline,” M-Bot said.

“But how did you do it?” I asked. “What is a ‘cytonic hyperdrive’? And what were you scouting for anyway?”

The ship fell uncharacteristically silent. The cockpit—as promised—dimmed fully as I flipped a switch on the panel that Rig had indicated.

“I have no records of any of it,” M-Bot said softly. “If I could feel fear, Spin, I’d … I’d be afraid of that. I’m not an autopilot; I don’t fly myself, that’s forbidden, save for very slow maneuvering. So all I really am is a repository of knowledge. That’s what I’m good for.”

“Except you’ve forgotten it all.”

“Almost everything,” he whispered. “Except … my orders.”

“Lie low. Take stock. Don’t get into any fights.”

“And an open database for cataloguing local fungi. That’s … that’s all I am now.”

“I’m hoping Rig will be able to repair your memory banks, so we can recover what you lost,” I said. “If not, we’ll refill your banks with new memories. Better ones.”

“Data doesn’t suggest either is possible.”

“Data doesn’t need to,” I said. “You’ll see.”

“GAFHOC,” M-Bot said. “I’d let you read the seven thousand pages I wrote, but I am programmed to avoid making humans feel inferior for their incredible weirdness.”

I lowered the seat into a bed, then located the cleansing pod at the rear of the cockpit—it wasn’t obvious, but I now knew what to look for: a hole I could open and roll myself into. The long, narrow cleansing pod extended farther into the fuselage.

I stripped down, stuffed my clothing into the clothing bay, then positioned my feet toward the hole and slid in on the rollers. I closed the latch by my head with the press of a button at my side, then activated the cleanser.

I kept my eyes closed as I was bathed in suds and flashes of light. It felt … decadent to have my own cleanser. Back in my neighborhood, the three cleansers had been shared among dozens of apartments. Your daily usage was precisely scheduled.

“I think I made you feel bad anyway, didn’t I?” M-Bot asked.

I wasn’t a particularly shy person, but his voice made me blush. I wasn’t used to being talked to while in the cleanser.

“I’m fine,” I said once the cleanser finished my face. “I like the way you talk. It’s different. Interesting.”

“I didn’t invent GAFHOC to make you feel bad,” he said. “I just … I needed an explanation. For why you said things that aren’t true.”

“You really hadn’t ever heard of lying before?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I had. And it’s simply … gone.”

He sounded fragile. How could a large, heavily armored starfighter sound fragile?

“You’re the only source of information I have,” M-Bot said. “If you tell me things that aren’t true, what can I commit to my memory banks? This puts me at risk of retaining false data.”

“That’s a risk we all live with, M-Bot,” I said. “We can’t know everything—and some of what we think we know is going to turn out to be false.”

“That doesn’t frighten you?”

“Of course it does. But if it helps, I’ll try not to lie to you.”

“It does. Thank you.”

He fell silent, and so I relaxed, enjoying an extra-long, luxurious cleansing—during which I imagined scenarios of flying M-Bot into battle with guns blazing, saving my flight from certain doom, like Joan of Arc on her loyal steed.

They were good daydreams. Even if my steed kept asking for mushrooms.