Sunreach (Skyward Flight: Novella 1)

Jorgen managed to get the slug to hyperjump us within a few kilometers of Platform Prime, which was several layers below the shield—a crackling, glowing net that stretched across the spaces between the platforms over our heads. We were greeted in the landing bay by Cobb and Jorgen’s mother, who looked happy for once. She ushered Jorgen off, telling him they needed to debrief.

“I can handle getting the slugs into their crates,” I told Rig. “I’m guessing you want to go talk to your friends in engineering about the shield.”

“You sure?” he asked.

“Yeah, I’ve got it.” The rest of my flight headed to the mess hall to wind down from the battle, but I waved them off too.

Usually I liked companionship after a battle, but today I wanted to be alone.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I said to Gill, who rode on my shoulder while I toted the rest of the slugs toward Engineering in a box. “I should be happy.”

“Happy!” Happy said from the box.

“Yeah, exactly,” I said. No one in my flight had been hurt, despite several close calls. Rig and I were…something, though I didn’t know exactly what. I didn’t regret holding his hand—I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to regret that. We’d gotten the hyperdrives to work, sort of. Not enough to change the outcome of the battle, but enough to give us some hope.

But that was exactly it, I realized. I wasn’t sure what came next. We didn’t have a cytonic to teach Jorgen how to give coordinates to the slugs. We had a shield that was working for now, but there was no way it would hold up indefinitely. We had potential allies we still couldn’t reach, and a whole lot of enemies sitting on our doorstep.

We’d survived, but we were just as trapped on Detritus as we’d ever been—maybe more so. For a while we’d been able to reach into the expanse of space—and if our freedom had been measured in kilometers rather than light-years, it had been ours.

Now we’d lost all that, and the only way out was to rely on the whims of creatures who, while adorable, weren’t easy to control. Jorgen could only do so much by himself. Even if engineering could replicate the holographic technology to outfit every ship with a functional box, there had to be a limit to how many hyperjumps he could track at once. The slugs had generally gone where he’d asked them to, but on that one jump he’d sent me in the opposite direction. That had worked out fine, but we couldn’t guarantee that it always would.

And it would only be a matter of time before the Superiority figured out how to target and kill Jorgen. Without him we’d be lost.

We had to do better. I had to do better.

When I reached Engineering, I found Cobb in a meeting with Ziming and several of the other engineers. Rig waved to me, but one of Cobb’s aides ushered me out, showing me to the room next door.

“We’ve decided to give the taynix their own space,” she said. “We’ve been using this room to build boxes for the ships, but Rig said you wanted to start keeping the slugs in those full-time. You can start with the ones we have, and we’ll build more as we go.”

I stepped into the room, finding it filled with metal boxes the size of the one installed in the Dulo. The crates of slugs and mushrooms had been left in the middle of the floor, with the tools and materials for box building spread out around them. We were probably going to need to find a way to hold the boxes down so we weren’t picking them up from all over the platform, but this would work for now.

“Thanks,” I told the aide, and then I set the box of taynix on top of their crate and closed the door behind me.

“Thanks,” Gill trilled on my shoulder.

“Thank you,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my tin of caviar. It was almost gone, but I’d put in a requisition request to Cobb for more, and he’d said he would speed that along. I wished I had enough to reward every taynix who helped us today, but I felt like I should conserve what I had left until the requisition order arrived.

What I could do, however, was feed them. I opened the crates and offered Happy, Twist, and the others some mushrooms. More of those were also supposed to arrive with the requisition order, though the mess hall had sent over a box of algae strips to try in the meantime.

I pulled one out of the package. “What do you think?” I asked Gill. He nudged the strip with his face, but didn’t open his mouth, instead nuzzling my finger for more caviar. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” I offered Gill a mushroom and then sat down, watching the slugs happily eat, prolonging the time before I had to shove them each into a dark box to become comfortable in hard, cubic containers.

Trapped until they were useful to us, without even an apparatus to build spacecraft to fight back.

I sat down and leaned against the side of the crate, the tears I’d held back before burning at my eyes.

It was stupid to worry about the plight of the slugs. There were human beings who would continue to die—people I knew, people I loved. Unless we figured out a better way to use the hyperdrives, they would all be lost, the slugs taken away by the Superiority to be used in their ships.

The tears escaped from the corners of my eyes.

Maybe that was the problem. I wasn’t only worried about the slugs, or only about my people. I was worried about all of us.

“I’m sorry about your part in this,” I said to Gill.

“This!” he repeated enthusiastically.

The door opened, and I startled, wiping my face with the back of my hand. Rig saw though, and he came in and closed the door behind him.

“You okay?” he asked, sitting down on the edge of a table near the crate.

“Sure,” I said. “Fine. Great.”

“Fine!” one of the red slugs piped up with its deeper trill from the crate behind me.

“My team took Fine up to the communicator,” Rig said. “Cobb wants to try scaring the slugs into sending a message to Cuna, now that we know how it should work. They’re prepping Jorgen for it now.”

“Fantastic,” I said. It didn’t sound like I meant it, and I wasn’t sure I did.

Rig looked at me sympathetically, which I should have appreciated, but instead it made me want to hide. That was what I was doing in here originally, I realized. Hiding from my friends, from Command, from everyone.

“Want to talk about it?” he asked.

I shrugged. “I don’t know what there is to say.”

“I’ll start,” he said. “That was terrifying today. The hyperdrives worked, and the politicians are thrilled about that, but that’s because they weren’t in a ship being teleported right to the heart of the battle. That was scudding scary.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean for you to get caught up in that.”

“We’re all caught up in it,” Rig said. “And I’m not sorry I was there.” His cheeks went pink, so I didn’t think that was merely because he wanted to help with the war effort.

“It was scary,” I said softly. That wasn’t something I would usually admit after a battle. The flight liked to gather together and reenact our successes with dinner rolls and algae strips as stand-ins for ships. Except on missions when we lost someone, we all put on a brave face, mocked each other, and laughed about it until our nerves faded away.

That was probably what I should be doing now. So why didn’t I want to?

“Do you need me to keep going?” Rig asked. “I can list a lot of things I think are scary.”

“Is that supposed to help?” I asked. “Making a list?”

“Talking about it might help. If you’re not ready, I’ll continue. I’m terrified for Spensa. Being stuck in the nowhere seems like a really bad thing, and even though we all say Spensa will get out, can we guarantee that, really?”

“No,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “And a few days ago there was a delver on our doorstep, and I’m still not sure why it didn’t kill us all or when it will be back.”

Rig had insisted it wouldn’t be back if Spensa could help it. I wasn’t surprised that was mostly bravado. “Did the delver look as freaky on the monitors down here as it did out there?” I asked. “Because I have never seen anything like that, and I hope that I never do again.”

“It was horrifying!” Rig said. “I nearly crapped my pants.”

I laughed.

“Okay, your turn,” Rig said. “What are you afraid of?”

“Not coming back,” I said. I hadn’t realized how deep that fear went until I said it out loud. I felt it in my bones. “Dying in battle. Ceasing to exist. Being the scar my friends won’t acknowledge or talk about.” I paused. “And the opposite of that, being the last one left.”

“Yeah, that’s enough to give you nightmares.”

I nodded. “No wonder it’s so hard to keep it together.”

“Seriously?” Rig asked. “You seem like you always have it together.”

“Is that what you like about me?” I asked. “Because I don’t have it together. I just don’t talk about it.”

“Clearly you should,” he said.

That wasn’t an answer to the question, and I found myself suddenly self-conscious. I crossed my arms, leaning back against the crate.

Why did I care what Rig liked about me? I didn’t usually give much thought to anyone’s impression. I showed up and did my job and tried to protect my friends; if people didn’t like me personally, so be it. Maybe it was better that way. The closer I got to people, the worse it felt when I lost them.

Had I always felt that way? No, not before flight school. Not even after. This was recent. A defense mechanism, I guessed.

It wasn’t one I particularly liked.

“Is that why I like you?” Rig said. “I don’t know. Maybe a little. I like how steady you are, how confident. I’m always so anxious about everything. I’ve wondered what it’s like to be, well, not.”

“Are you disappointed to realize I’m not really like that?”

“No,” Rig said. “More relieved.”

I stared at him.

“What?” he said. “You think I want you to be some emotionless robot? It’s good to have feelings, FM. It’s good to express them. And it’s kind of nice to know that I’m not the only one who’s terrified.”

“You’re not,” I said.

“I know. But we all show it in different ways. Spensa picks fights and threatens to murder you. Jorgen gets all tangled up in his rulebook. You pretend to be fine.”

“Fine!” Gill trilled.

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “What about you?”

“I stress,” Rig said. “And I work on hard problems and try to fix them. When Spensa disappeared the first time, I spent a full week trying to deconstruct a navigation system we found in the planetary defenses. I think it’s supposed to interface with the ship nav systems so everyone can coordinate better during flight.”

“But you didn’t figure it out?” I asked.

“No,” Rig said. “There are too many pieces we don’t understand yet. It kept me sane for a while, but then I just felt like a failure.”

“You’re clearly not a failure. You figured out how to improve our ships based on M-Bot’s design. You’re the main reason we were able to use the hyperdrives at all, even if they aren’t perfect yet.”

“We all worked on that,” Rig said.

“Still. Not a failure.”

“I know,” Rig said. “I just always feel like I should be doing more. If I could figure everything out faster, more lives would be saved. Every time someone dies in combat, there was more I could have done to prevent it.”

Huh. I felt that way, but I hadn’t thought about the people who stayed here on the ground feeling responsible for our deaths. “You’re doing the best you can though. No one can ask more than that.”

“Right. Does that make you feel better when your friends don’t come back?”

“No,” I said.

“Exactly.”

“Exactly,” Gill agreed.

“You’re certainly being chatty today,” I said, offering him another mushroom. I looked up at Rig. I wished he’d sit closer, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to suggest it.

He was right. It was good to talk. But the more I did, the more exposed I felt, like he could see right through me.

I didn’t like anyone seeing what a mess I really was, least of all him.

“Did you feel like a failure when you dropped out of flight school?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said. “It was Spensa’s dream, not mine. I felt more…directionless. Like I wasn’t sure what I wanted to be, but I knew it wasn’t a pilot.”

“Today probably reaffirmed that.”

“Yes and no,” he said. “It was more like a window into everything I gave up, you know? The engineering crew is a team, but it’s not the same. You guys…you depend on each other to survive. And everyone is still nice to me, though I’m not part of the flight. It was nice to experience that again, even if I know I did the right thing by dropping out.”

“We depend on you to survive,” I said. “It was engineering that saved us all today, not the pilots. But I know what you mean.”

The slugs were slowly wandering out of the crate, since I’d left it open. Twist perched on the edge and trilled until Rig reached out to pick her up.

“For what it’s worth,” I said, “I don’t think the rest of the flight sees you as a dropout. Most of them dropped out of flight school too. Jorgen and I were the only ones who graduated.”

“How did that feel?” Rig asked.

“Lonely,” I admitted. “Cobb told us on our first day that most of us wouldn’t make it. I felt guilty that I did and the others didn’t.”

“Didn’t stop the rest of them from flying though,” Rig said. “Just me.”

“Do you regret it?” I looked up at him, and was surprised to see him considering the question. He’d said he knew he’d done the right thing, and it was clear to me that his calling was in engineering.

I also didn’t hate that on a normal day he wouldn’t be in nearly as much danger as the rest of us.

“No,” he said. “Doesn’t stop it from hurting sometimes.” He looked down at me. “If you had it to do over, would you still become a pilot?”

“Yes,” I said. I was surprised at how easily that answer came, even after all we’d been through. “If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be able to protect my friends, you know? They’d still be up there flying, but I wouldn’t be there.”

Rig nodded. “Is that why you became a pilot? To protect people?”

“Ultimately, yeah,” I said. “I didn’t intend to stay in the DDF forever. I don’t like the way the Defiant League acts like war is the most glorious thing ever, the way they make violence seem wonderful, when really it causes so much pain. But I thought if I was a pilot, I’d have the authority and respect to talk about that, you know? That I could stand up for people no one else would defend, and people would have to listen to me.”

“People do listen to you,” Rig said. “I’ve always respected that about you. When you talk, everyone listens. Not because you’re a pilot. You command respect by being who you are.”

My face got warm. “I don’t feel like that,” I said.

“Yeah,” Rig said. “I guess none of us really believe the good things about ourselves, do we?”

“Spensa maybe,” I said. But no, that wasn’t true. Even Spensa was insecure sometimes. It just made her louder and more threatening.

“She wishes,” Rig said. Gill butted up against my elbow until I rested my hand on his head, petting him gently.

“What I wish,” I said, “is that I could guarantee these guys a life where the primary goal isn’t for us to be able to scare them as many times as possible. I wish there was another way.”

“It would be good if we could find something,” Rig said. “Because if it takes longer and longer between scares, we’re going to need more slugs, or be really limited in how often we can use the hyperdrives. The Superiority has a galaxy worth of planets they could have mined for slugs. They probably have breeding programs. So far, we have the population of one cave.”

“If we figure out how to use them more efficiently, we might be able to get an edge on the Superiority.” I cringed. Now I was the one talking about the slugs like a resource. “It would improve quality of life for the taynix as well. If they could be convinced to hyperjump, even though it’s scary, then we wouldn’t have to rely on their primal impulses.”

“It’s a good goal,” Rig said. “We could design an experiment, see if we can find anything.”

I looked up into his eyes, which were a deep and clear blue, and had some primal impulses of my own. “Fine by me,” I said.

Rig stood off the table and offered me his hand to help me up. When I stood, I didn’t let go.

We were about the same height, so our faces were close without either of us having to lean. I clearly surprised Rig, because he stuttered a bit, but he didn’t move away.

I took that as a good sign. The slug on my shoulder, on the other hand, appeared incapable of reading the room. “Fine!” Gill said.

“Hush,” I told him. And then I leaned forward and brushed my lips against Rig’s.

“Fine!” Gill yelped, and then teleported away. Another escapee I was going to have to track down. Later.

I smiled against Rig’s mouth. “Better than fine,” I said.

Rig laughed. “So much better.”

Maybe the slug could read the mood after all.