Starsight (The Skyward Series Book 2)

She was both hauntingly familiar and strikingly alien, all at once. She had pale violet skin, stark-white hair, and bonelike white growths on her cheeks, underlining her eyes. Despite her alien features though, she had an obvious female shape beneath a snug flight jacket. She almost could have been one of us.

I was surprised—I hadn’t realized there were aliens out there that looked so . . . human. I had always imagined that most of them would be like the Krell, creatures that were so strange they seemed to have more in common with rocks than humans.

I found myself staring at that elfin face, entranced, until I noticed the broken control panel and the blackened scorch marks on the left side of her stomach, which was wet with something darker than human blood. The panel had obviously exploded, and part had impaled her.

I scrambled to search for a manual cockpit release, but it wasn’t where I expected to find it. That made sense—this was alien engineering. Still, it defied reason that there wouldn’t be some kind of release on the outside of the ship. I felt around the canopy, searching for a latch, as Kimmalyn climbed up beside me. She gasped upon seeing the alien woman.

“Saints and stars,” she whispered, touching the canopy glass. “She’s beautiful. Almost . . . almost like a devil from one of the old stories . . .”

“She’s wounded,” I said. “Help me find—”

I cut off as I found it, right at the back of the canopy—a small panel that, when I threw it open, revealed a handle. I yanked it outward, and the canopy let out a hiss as it unsealed.

“Spensa, this is stupid,” Kimmalyn said. “We don’t know what kind of gases she breathes. And we could expose ourselves to alien bacteria or . . . or I don’t know. There are a hundred reasons not to open that.”

She was right. The air that came out did smell distinctly odd. Floral, but also acrid, scents that didn’t go together in my experience. But it didn’t seem to hurt me as I scrambled over and—not knowing what else to do—reached in to feel at the alien woman’s neck for a pulse.

I felt one. Soft, irregular—though who knew if that was actually normal for her.

Suddenly the woman’s eyes fluttered open, and I froze, meeting her violet eyes. I was shocked by how eerily human they were.

She spoke in a quiet voice, alien words with consonants I couldn’t distinguish. Graceful, ephemeral, like the sounds of air rustling pages. It seemed oddly familiar.

“I don’t understand,” I said as she spoke again. “I . . .”

Scud. That dark liquid on her lips had to be blood. I scrambled to pull the emergency bandage from the cargo pocket on my leg. “Hang on!” I said, though Kimmalyn got hers out first and forced it into my hands.

I climbed farther into the cockpit, bracing myself against the broken control panel, and pressed the bandage against the woman’s side. “Help is coming,” I said. “They’re sending . . .”

“Human,” the woman said.

I froze. The word was in English. She seemed to notice my reaction, then tapped a small pin on her collar. When she spoke again in her airy language, the device translated.

“A real human,” she said, then smiled, blood trailing down the side of her lip. “So it’s true. You still exist.”

“Just hang on,” I said, trying to stanch the blood at her side.

She lifted her arm, trembling, and touched my face. Her fingers were covered in blood and felt wet on my cheek. Kimmalyn breathed out a small prayer, but I clung there—half in, half out of the cockpit—meeting the alien woman’s eyes.

“We were allies once,” she said. “They say that you were monsters. But I thought . . . nothing can be more monstrous than they are . . . And if anyone can fight . . . it would be the ones they locked away . . . the terror that once nearly defeated them . . .”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“I opened myself up—I searched for you for so long. And only now did I finally hear you, calling out. Don’t trust . . . their lies. Don’t trust . . . their false peace.”

“Who?” I said. What she was saying was too vague. “Where?”

“There,” she whispered, still touching my face. “Starsight.” I felt something beyond the word, a force that hit my brain like a collision. It stunned me.

Her hand dropped. Her eyes fluttered closed, and I feared she was dead—but I had trouble thinking through the strange impact to my mind.

“Saints and stars above,” Kimmalyn repeated. “Spensa?” She checked the woman for a pulse again. “Not dead, just unconscious. Scud, I hope the troops bring a medical crew.”

Feeling numb, I reached out and took the small pin from the alien’s collar, the one that had translated the words. It was shaped like a stylized star or sunburst. What had that last part been? It felt drilled into my brain—a plea to go to this . . . place. Starsight?

I knew, intimately, that this woman was like me. Not just a cytonic, but a confused one, seeking answers. Answers she’d hoped to find in that place, the one she’d drilled into my brain.

I . . . I could go there, I realized. Somehow I knew that if I wanted, I could use the coordinates she’d placed into my head to teleport directly to the location.

I leaned back as three DDF troop transports landed gracefully on large blue acclivity rings next to the ship. They were accompanied by seven more fighters, the rest of Skyward Flight, scrambled to give backup that I hadn’t ended up needing.

I climbed down from the alien ship and backed away, reaching M-Bot as the alien ship became a hive of activity. Tucking the translator pin into my pocket, I hauled myself up onto his wing. Please live, I thought to the wounded alien. I need to know what you are.

“Hmmm,” M-Bot said. “Fascinating. Fascinating. She is from a small backwater planet that is not part of the Superiority. It seems the Superiority recently sent a message to her people asking for pilots to recruit into their space force. This pilot was a response to that request; she was sent to try out for the Superiority military.”

I blinked, then scuttled over to M-Bot’s open cockpit. “What?” I asked. “How do you know that?”

“Hmmm? Oh, I hacked her onboard computer. Not a very advanced machine, unfortunately. I was hoping to discover another AI, so we could complain about organics together. Wouldn’t that have been a fun time?”

“Fun time!” Doomslug said from where she’d climbed up onto the armrest of my seat.

I slipped into the cockpit. “You really did that?” I asked.

“Complaining about organics? Yes, it’s very easy. Did you know just how many dead cells you shed daily? All of those little pieces of you litter my cockpit.”

“M-Bot, focus. You hacked her computer?”

“Oh! Yes. As I said, it’s not very advanced. I got the entire database about her planet, people, culture, history. What do you want to know? Their planet was allied to the human forces in the last war—though many of their politicians now call the human presence there an authoritarian occupation—and several of their cultures were significantly influenced by human ones. Her language isn’t too different from your own, for example.”

“What is her name?” I asked softly, glancing over at her ship. The buzz of medical technicians around the cockpit gave me hope that she would survive her wound.

“Alanik of the UrDail,” he said, pronouncing her name as “ah-la-NEEK.” “Her flight logs say she was on her way to visit the Superiority’s largest deep-space commerce station. She never arrived though. She seems to have somehow found out where we were, and so came here instead. Oh! Spensa, she’s cytonic, like you! She is the only one of her people who can use the powers.”

I settled back in my seat, feeling numb.

M-Bot didn’t notice how much all this was disturbing me, as he just kept right on talking. “Yup, her log is encrypted, but I cracked that. She hoped to find answers about her powers among the Superiority, though her people don’t think highly of them. Something about the way they rule.”

I can feel where she was planning to go . . . , I thought again. The coordinates were burned into my brain, but they were fading like a dying engine. Sputtering and losing power. I could jump. I could go there. But only if I acted quickly.

I sat frozen in a moment of indecision. Then I stood up in my cockpit and called to Jorgen, who had climbed from his ship to observe the medical staff.

“Jorgen!” I shouted. “I need you to come here right now and talk me out of doing something incredibly stupid.”

He turned toward me, then—with a look of sudden panic—ran over and hauled himself onto M-Bot’s wing. I didn’t know if I should be thankful he responded so quickly, or be embarrassed by how seriously he seemed to take the threat of me doing something stupid.

“What is it, Spin?” he asked, stepping up to my cockpit.

“That alien put coordinates in my brain,” I said, explaining in a rush. “She was going to go try out for the Superiority’s space force, since they’re recruiting, and she wanted to see if they knew anything about cytonics, but I just realized this is the perfect chance to put Rodge’s plan into action. If I went and imitated her, it wouldn’t seem nearly as odd as if we tried to imitate a Krell. M-Bot got her entire log and planetary database, and I can take her place. You need to stop me because, so help me, I’m just about ready to do it because the coordinates are evaporating from my brain.”

He blinked at the flood of words coming from my mouth.

“How long do we have?” he asked.

“I can’t be sure,” I said, anxious as I felt the impression fading. “Not long. Five minutes? Maybe? Yes, and my gut is telling me to go right now. Which is why I need you to talk me out of it!”

“All right, let’s consider.”

“We don’t have time to consider!”

“You said we have five minutes. Five minutes’ consideration is better than none.” Then—like the insufferable rock of protocol he was—he carefully set his helmet on the wing. “Rodge’s plan was for you to imitate a Krell pilot and sneak aboard their station here near Detritus.”

“Yes, but Cobb doesn’t think we could ever imitate one of the Krell.”

“Then what makes you think you could imitate this alien?”

“She is from a backwater world,” M-Bot piped up. “Which is not an official part of the Superiority. Nobody in the Superiority will have met any members of her species, so anything Spensa does will not feel out of character.”

“She might still seem human to them,” Jorgen said.

“Which will be fine,” I said. “Because Alanik—that’s her name—came from a world that was allies with the humans not long ago.”

“Indeed,” M-Bot said, “they had a great deal of cultural exchange.”

“You don’t speak the Superiority languages,” Jorgen said.

I hesitated, then fished in my pocket for the translator pin I’d taken from the alien. The medics had her hooked up to a breathing device and were extracting her—carefully—from her ship. I felt a spike of concern, even though I’d only just met her.

I could still feel her touch in my mind. And her plea. A fading arrow in my brain, pointing into the stars.

I held up the pin for Jorgen to see. “I can use this pin to translate for me, I think.”

“Confirmed,” M-Bot said. “I can set it to output in English so you’ll understand what they’re saying.”

“All right, that’s a start,” Jorgen said. “Now, can you imitate that pilot’s ship with your holograms?”

“I’d need to do a scan of it.”

“Well, I guess we don’t have time—”

“Done,” M-Bot said. Then he shifted to an imitation of the alien’s downed ship. It was a far better fit than the Krell ship had been; M-Bot and Alanik’s ship were much closer in shape and size.

Jorgen nodded.

“You’re thinking I should go,” I said to him. “Scud, you actually think I should go through with this!”

“I think we should consider all of our options before making a decision. How much time left?”

“Not much! A minute or two! It’s not like I have a clock in my brain. The sensation is just fading. Quickly.”

“M-Bot, can you successfully make her look like that alien?”

“If she has the bracelet on,” he said.

I scrambled to pull it off his dash and slap it on.

“Handily,” M-Bot said, “our medics just finished a scan of her for vitals. And . . . There.”

My hands changed color to light purple as he overlaid my face and skin with a hologram of Alanik. M-Bot even changed my flight suit to match hers, and the imitation was perfect.

I stared at my hands, then looked at Jorgen.

“Scud,” he whispered. “That’s uncanny. All right. So what is the plan?”

“There’s no time for a plan!”

“There’s time for a quick outline. You go to the recruitment station in this alien’s place, then claim to be her. You try out for the enemy’s military . . . Wait, why are they recruiting new pilots? They’re probably increasing their troop numbers to come fight us, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. That would make sense.

“That might be useful. If you did this, you could gather valuable intel on their operations. From there, you would try to steal a hyperdrive—or get some pictures of one for the engineers—then you teleport back here. Do you think you can get back on your own?”

I grimaced. “I don’t know. My powers . . . aren’t very consistent. But Alanik’s records said she was going to the Superiority because she hoped to learn about her own abilities from them.”

“So either you’ll have to figure that out, or you’ll have to steal a hyperdrive somehow, then get yourself and M-Bot back to us with the stolen technology.”

“Yeah.” It sounded impossible when he outlined it like that. Yet I looked up toward the stars, and I felt a fire burning within me. “It sounds crazy,” I told him. “But Jorgen, I think I have to go. I have to try this.”

I looked down, meeting his eyes as he stood on the wing beside my cockpit. Then, remarkably, he nodded. “I agree.”

“You do?”

“Spin, you can be reckless—even foolhardy—but I’ve flown with you nearly a year now. I trust your instincts.”

“My instincts get me into trouble.”

He reached over, putting his hand on the side of my face. “You’ve gotten us out of far more trouble than you’ve ever gotten yourself into, Spensa. Scud, I don’t know if this mission is the right thing to do. But I do know our people are in serious danger. We talk optimistically, but the command staff knows the truth. We’re dead here unless we find a way to use hyperdrives ourselves.”

I put my hand on his. The information in my brain was dimming. Only seconds remained.

“Can you do this?” he asked me. “Does your gut say you can?”

“Yes,” I whispered. Then, more firmly—with the strength of a warrior—I repeated it. “Yes. I can do this, Jorgen. I’ll get us a hyperdrive and bring it back. I promise.”

“Then go. I trust you.”

I realized that was what I needed. Not his permission, or even his approval. I needed his trust.

In a moment of impulse I sprang from the cockpit, then grabbed him by his flight suit and pulled him down so I could kiss him. We probably weren’t ready for that, and it probably wasn’t the time, but I did it anyway. Because . . . well, scud. He’d just encouraged me to trust my instincts.

It was wonderful. I felt a strength to him as he kissed me back, an almost electricity coursing through him into me—then back again stronger because of the fire that burned in my chest. I lingered in the kiss as long as I dared, then pulled away.

“I should go with you,” he said.

“Unfortunately,” M-Bot said, “we have only one mobile receptor. You’d be identified as a human immediately.”

Jorgen grunted. “I suppose someone has to explain this to Cobb anyway.”

“He’s going to be mad . . . ,” I said.

“He’ll understand. We made the best decision we could with the limited time and information we had. Saints help us, I think we have to try this. Go.”

I held his eyes for a moment, then broke the gaze and jumped back down into the cockpit.

Jorgen touched his lips with his hand, then shook himself, picked up his helmet, and leaped off M-Bot’s wing. He pulled back to where everyone else was focused on the alien’s ship, oblivious to the powerful moments that had transpired.

“I’m confused at what just happened between the two of you,” M-Bot said. “I thought you insisted to me several times that you had no romantic inclinations toward Jorgen.”

“I lied,” I said, seizing on the compelling sensation the alien had embedded in my brain. It was nearly gone, but it still felt like an arrow into the sky. Just as it threatened to disappear completely, I somehow yanked on it.

“Cytonic hyperdrive online,” M-Bot said. “It actually—”

We vanished.