Sunreach (Skyward Flight: Novella 1)

Four days after the battle, I wandered toward the mess hall on the labyrinthine Platform Prime. I didn’t know what this structure had been built for, but whoever constructed it obviously hadn’t felt a powerful need to be able to get anywhere quickly or easily without a very detailed map.

I was still in something of a daze. The battle had been labeled a big success by basically everyone because the delver had not, in fact, wiped us all out of existence. But that merely made us lucky, a whole lot luckier than all the people who’d died the last time a delver visited Detritus—when it had destroyed the entire civilization that had lived here before us. And while we didn’t really know why it had come here or why it had left, we were alive, and hadn’t been completely annihilated by it or the Superiority. I should have been happy.

But we weren’t all alive. Lizard wasn’t the first friend I’d lost in battle, and she wasn’t the first I’d blamed on myself, even though logically I knew neither Bim’s nor Hurl’s death had been my fault. The delver had gone, but it could reappear anytime. The Superiority forces had fled, but they too might come back without warning. And when they did, my friends and I would be out there fighting back. We were pilots. We were the only things standing between the last of our species and total extinction.

I knew the reason for what we did—and I believed in it, much as I hated what it had done to us as a people. It seemed like that should make me feel better.

But I didn’t feel better. All I felt was empty.

After Hurl’s death, our whole flight had been given mandatory leave. No one had been given leave this time—not Nightmare Flight, not us, not anyone. That meant Command was worried that the delver would return, that the Superiority would attack. And yet Jorgen, Nedd, and Arturo were still on their mysterious trip planetside. Spensa had disappeared again when the delver did, and Kimmalyn said even Cobb didn’t know where she’d gone this time.

Which was why, when I first heard the soft trill of Spensa’s pet, Doomslug, I thought I was imagining it.

The sound came from up the corridor, just around the corner in the opposite direction of the mess hall. Before Spensa left on her secret mission, Doomslug used to turn up all over the base here on Platform Prime. I once found her hanging out in the women’s room near the cleansing pods, sleeping on one of the heat vents. She liked to perch on my shoulder to listen to music from my transmitter through my headset, and if I offered her flatfish caviar, she’d stay for over an hour.

My parents probably would have been horrified that I fed their expensive gift to a slug, but Doomslug enjoyed the caviar, I enjoyed sharing, and my parents didn’t know about it—so everybody won.

I turned the corner and there was Doomslug, curled up by the ventilation grate, warm air blowing the bright blue spines that ran down her back.

“Hey, girl,” I said, kneeling down next to her. The slug turned toward the sound of my voice—I wasn’t sure if she could see or only sense—and I pulled my hand back.

This slug had blue markings down the sides of its face that almost looked like gills, while Doomslug’s face was all yellow. It wasn’t Doomslug, but another slug of the same kind.

I blinked down at it. I’d never seen one of these slugs before Spensa brought hers up to Platform Prime. She’d found it in the surface cavern where she’d stayed when she was denied permission to live on Alta Base with the rest of our squad of cadets.

What would another of those slugs be doing here?

“Hey, buddy,” I said, extending my fingers and letting the slug examine them with its bulbous face. The truth was, I had no idea how to determine the sex of a slug, if they indeed had one at all. I wasn’t sure if Spensa had actually discerned Doomslug’s sex, or arbitrarily decided to refer to her as female.

I slipped my fingers down under the slug’s chin—it had more of a fleshy bulb than a head, having no bone structure at all, but it did have a little point of flesh where the chin might be. The flesh withdrew slightly at my touch, and then the slug slid forward, leaning in as I scratched its leathery skin. “What are you doing here?”

“Here,” the slug trilled softly. Doomslug did that too—repeated words and sounds. This one had a quieter voice, or maybe it was in a quieter mood.

The slug flinched slightly as bootsteps pounded down a nearby corridor. The bootsteps came closer, and the slug slipped back against my knees, hugging its body to me, though it was a bit too large to conceal itself entirely. Jorgen Weight, my flightleader, came barreling around the corner. Jorgen and I grew up in the same cavern and went to the same primary school, so we’d known each other tangentially since we were kids. Jorgen had deep brown skin and curly black hair, and right now was sweating like he’d just run laps around the orchard outside Alta Base. He skidded to a halt and put his hands on his knees, breathing hard. “There it is,” he said, looking down at the slug. “That’s the last one. I think.”

“The last one?” The slug huddled against me, and I scooped it up into my arms, keeping my fingers away from its face. Its mouth wasn’t visible, but Doomslug had opened an orifice there when she devoured the caviar. I’d seen her rows of sharp-but-flexible teeth, and while I didn’t know if these things were prone to biting, I didn’t want to find out.

“Yeah,” Jorgen said. “Those devils are slippery. I don’t know how they keep getting out of their crate.”

Huh. “Collecting more pets for Spensa?” I asked. That seemed a little pathetic, even for Jorgen. He and Spensa had been drooling over each other since before we left Alta. I was pretty sure Jorgen thought it was a well-kept secret.

“Not exactly,” Jorgen said.

“Seriously, though, where have you been?” There had to be an explanation beyond what Command had told us.

Jorgen sighed. “Come on. If you can get that thing back into the crate with the others, I’ll fill you in.”

I looked down at the slug, and its face pivoted docilely toward me. I wanted to know what Jorgen and the others had been doing planetside, and getting the slug into a crate didn’t seem like a monumental task. I knew a good trade when I heard one.

“You got it,” I told him, and followed him down the hallway into a mostly empty room with two large crates stacked in the center and more piled against the wall. On top of the stack in the center sat Nedd, one of our assistant flightleaders. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and made me feel small beside him, something few people could do. Arturo, our other assistant flightleader, leaned against the wall by the door. He was several inches shorter than me, with tanned skin and dark hair.

“FM!” Nedd shouted, much louder than was necessary. “It’s good to see you!”

“You too,” I said, with much less gusto, while Arturo gave Nedd a look.

Nedd was an expert at not taking hints. About a month ago during leave, he’d cornered me and asked if I wanted to go out. I’d been aware of his interest for a while; Nedd is cute and all, but not really my type, so I’d finally told him outright that I’d rather be friends. He’d taken it pretty well, but ever since then he’d been overly friendly to me, like he wanted to prove how not-weird the situation was by making it…more weird.

Which was exactly why I had ignored his interest to begin with.

Jorgen motioned for Nedd to climb off the knee-high crates. “Do we have them all now?”

“I don’t know,” Nedd said. “I thought maybe if I sat on them they would stay put—but the lid was closed all the way here, so I don’t know how we lost them to begin with.”

“They’re slippery,” I said. Though they weren’t, not literally. As I ran my hand down the slug’s back, it felt more like petting a well-polished pair of leather boots. “Doomslug used to get out of Spensa’s room all the time, even with the door locked.” I turned to Jorgen. “But I think you owe me an explanation.”

“Not until the slug is in the crate,” Jorgen said, pulling off the lid and pointing inside.

“Crate!” a couple of slugs trilled, their voices echoes of each other.

I still didn’t see what the big deal was about putting the slug in the box, but I gave its head one more scritch and then nestled it in the crate—

With so many other slugs that they filled the box, all crawling over each other. There were several yellow and blue ones, but also other colors I’d never seen—some purple with orange spines and others red with black stripes.

“Where did you get them?” I asked. “And why are they here?” I was guessing Cobb wasn’t starting some kind of pilot support-animal program—not that I would have minded having a slug for myself. For creatures that looked so inhuman, they were remarkably friendly and comforting.

Or maybe I’d been starved for the comforts of home for far, far too long.

“I don’t know what Cobb told you about where we went,” Jorgen began.

“That you were on leave for R&R,” I said. “All three of you. Simultaneously. Which I don’t believe for a moment.”

“Good,” Nedd said. “Because if that trip was supposed to be restful—”

“We went looking for something down in the caverns,” Jorgen said. “Something that makes the same vibration that Spensa heard from the stars.”

I stared at him. “You went searching for something that makes a vibration no one can hear but her?”

Jorgen looked nervously down at the floor.

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah,” Jorgen said. “I have the defect, same as Spensa.”

“I’m telling you, you shouldn’t call it that,” Arturo said. “If you can move yourself across the universe with your mind, that’s not defective. It’s awesome.”

“Theoretically I can travel across the universe,” Jorgen said. “In practice, I have no idea how to do that. Spensa’s done it, but she’s not here to explain. And the vibrations I felt came from…” He looked dubiously at the crate full of slugs. “These.”

I smothered a snicker. “So Spensa talks to the stars, and you talk to…slugs.”

Jorgen looked like he was already sorry for telling me this, so I kept talking, trying to make it better. “I mean, they’re cute slugs. And you have a whole crate of them, so that’s—”

“Good,” a voice said from the hallway. Cobb filled the doorway, wearing his admiral’s uniform and regarding us all with a stern expression. “That’s very good.” Cobb limped into the room followed by Rig, who had been part of our flight when we all started school together, but had since joined the Engineering Corps. His real name was Rodge, but our flight all referred to him by his callsign, same as they did with me. Rig was almost as tall as Nedd, lanky with pale skin and bright red hair. He was cute in a nerdy sort of way. Everyone said he was basically a genius. I wished we’d had a chance to get to know each other better before he’d left Skyward Flight.

Cobb stared into the crate at the slugs. “Apparently these things are called taynix. Why are they all different colors?”

Jorgen looked horrified at not having an answer to this question. “I don’t know. I assume they’re different kinds? Why do we have different colored hair, sir?”

“I’m sorry I asked,” Cobb said. “But they’re all cytonic? You’re sure?”

“We found them all in that same area,” Jorgen said. “The caves where I heard the…sounds. It’s harder for me to hear one or two of them at a time, but the whole crate sort of…vibrates. It’s difficult to describe.”

Rig looked at them thoughtfully. “It could be that only the one kind is cytonic in nature—or it could be that the colors are incidental, and they all have the same natural affinities.”

Huh. That was definitely the most words I had ever heard come out of Rig’s mouth at one time. Apparently he wasn’t some kind of mostly mute genius.

“I have no idea what kind of affinity that would be,” Jorgen said. “But I brought them back so you could experiment on them.”

“Experiment on them?” I asked. “You’re not going to hurt them, are you?”

“No,” Cobb said. “These creatures are far too valuable to waste. They’re hyperdrives.”

We all stared at him. Well, all of us but Rig, who apparently already knew. Rig looked around at all of us, but when he met my eyes he suddenly developed an interest in his fingernails.

“Sir?” Jorgen asked. “The slugs are hyperdrives? How do you know?”

“Spensa told me,” Cobb said.

“Spensa’s back?” Jorgen asked. He sounded so adorably hopeful that even Nedd, socially clueless as he was, had to have noticed.

“She was back,” Cobb said. I was ninety-nine percent sure that Cobb also knew about Jorgen and Spensa’s mutual crush-fest, but chose not to say anything about it. Or maybe he did say something about it, just not in front of the rest of us. “She showed up right before the Superiority fleet, and then left with them. She was unable to steal the hyperdrive technology, but she did learn that these things”—he gestured to the crate—“are the key.”

“She left,” Jorgen said. “Where did she go?”

“We don’t know,” Rig said.

Jorgen’s face fell instantly, and Rig looked sympathetic. He and Spensa grew up together. They were close, and I’d always suspected Rig had a crush on her, because he followed her around like a puppy. I wondered if Spensa talked to him about what was going on between her and Jorgen. It was hard to imagine Spensa talking about her feelings…ever.

“I love Spin as much as the next guy,” Nedd said, though I was pretty sure he didn’t. “But are we not a little more concerned with the fact that we’re sitting on a crate full of hyperdrives?”

“You’re not sitting on it anymore,” Arturo pointed out.

“And it’s a good thing, because if it’s true, these slugs are worth more than all the ships in the DDF combined!”

“They certainly are,” Cobb said. “But these things are worth nothing if we can’t figure out how they work.”

That was true from a tactical standpoint, but I didn’t like that he thought of these living beings as pieces of equipment that had no value unless they were useful. I really didn’t like the idea that they might be experimented on like the lab rats back home.

“I don’t know,” Rig mused. “It’s possible the Superiority is somehow extracting the cytonic organs from them and using those to build hyperdrives. But M-Bot’s hyperdrive was in a box. Maybe it’s the cage they used to house the slugs before using them to transport?”

“Hey Jorg,” Nedd said, “where do you suppose you keep your cytonic organs?”

“Shut up, Nedd,” Arturo said, probably because Jorgen was way too reserved to tell Nedd to shove it in front of Cobb, though Cobb didn’t blink an eye.

“The slugs are actually pretty intelligent,” I said. Doomslug mostly parroted sounds, but one time I taught her how to say “please” before I gave her each bite of caviar. It was adorable. “They’re definitely not things.”

“Things!” one of the slugs said from the crate.

“You are not helping yourself,” I told it.

“I don’t care if they’re geniuses,” Cobb said. “We need to figure out how to use them to get off this planet before the Superiority comes back with a force we can’t handle. They already did that once. If they hadn’t turned around and left on their own, that might have been our end. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Jorgen said, and the rest of us echoed him. The truth was, it wasn’t my decision. Like with my friends, there was very little I could do to protect these slugs.

“Rigmarole and Jorgen, I’m putting you in charge of the investigation.”

“Sir?” Jorgen said. “I don’t know anything about animals—”

“The Assembly wants us to put our focus on defending ourselves, and I can’t blame them for that. So, the Engineering Corps is busy working on the platform defenses. They’re lending us Rig because he has the most experience with this technology through his work with M-Bot. And you’re a cytonic, and the slugs are a cytonic…thing.” Cobb waved his arm in the direction of the slugs, somehow managing to sound authoritative even though he didn’t know the right term. I wasn’t sure there was a right term. This was entirely new territory for all of us.

“Sir, I’d like to help,” I said.

Cobb looked me over. “Fine. FM will also help. I want a report on your progress in twenty-four hours.”

Rig paled. “I’m not sure we’ll have results in—”

“Just a report of what you’ve learned. I know you and your pals in engineering would like a month to poke around and design experiments, but we don’t have that kind of time. Do I make myself understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Rig said.

“First, we need to figure out how to prevent them from escaping,” Jorgen said. “They keep getting out of the crate.”

“I hope you’ll have something more for me by tomorrow than whether you were able to keep an animal in a cage,” Cobb said.

“You don’t have experience with these animals, sir.”

It was weird how they kept escaping. The crate looked pretty secure, and I didn’t think the slugs were strong enough to lift the lid. Certainly not with Nedd sitting on it. Even Nedd would have noticed that.

“Do you think they’re hyperjumping?” I asked.

Jorgen and Cobb blinked at me, and then we all looked down at the slugs. One of the purple and orange ones climbed on the back of one of its friends, its bulbous face crinkling at us speculatively.

“Doomslug used to escape from Spensa’s bunk all the time,” I added. “And has anyone ever seen these things travel around? They just seem to…appear places.”

“Yeah, that would explain it,” Jorgen said. “The one FM found sure got away fast.”

“If that’s the case,” Rig said, “maybe we don’t try to contain them, and see what we can observe.”

Cobb clapped Rig and Jorgen on their shoulders. “I’ll leave that to you.”

“Sir?” One of Cobb’s aides stood in the hallway, peering into the room. “You have guests waiting for you in the command center.”

“What guests?” Cobb asked.

The aide looked around at the rest of us, as if she wasn’t sure she should say. “The National Assembly sent some representatives to talk to you about the defense effort, sir. Jeshua Weight is with them.”

We all looked at Jorgen. His mother was a famous pilot who’d fought in the Battle of Alta alongside Cobb. She was a legend, even among pilots. Now she mostly worked with her husband, Jorgen’s father, who was a leader of the National Assembly.

“Did you know your mom was here?” Nedd asked.

“No,” Jorgen said. “I’ve been with you for days, remember?”

“I dunno,” Nedd said. “Didn’t Spensa’s grandmother say she could, like, read people’s minds?”

“I can’t do that,” Jorgen snapped. He sounded more upset with himself than irritated with Nedd, as if being a cytonic should have come with a manual.

This was Jorgen. He probably did think being a cytonic should have come with a manual.

“I’m not going to keep her waiting,” Cobb said. “I expect that report by tomorrow.” And he strode out of the room, leaving us all standing around the crate full of slugs.

“All right,” Jorgen said, nodding purposefully. “Rig wants to observe the slugs to see what happens when they escape. Nedd, Arturo, and I will get these crates to the engineering bay, and then Rig can set up his equipment.”

“What am I going to do?” I asked. I wasn’t going to complain if I wasn’t asked to carry boxes, but I definitely wasn’t going to let Jorgen leave me out.

“You can be in charge of keeping the slugs in the crate,” Jorgen said. “Finding them if they escape, maybe tagging them all somehow so we can keep track of them.”

He looked at Rig. I assumed he was making things up when he talked about Rig setting up “equipment,” but I didn’t know much about what they did in engineering, so I wasn’t going to point that out and reveal my own ignorance.

Rig looked suddenly uncomfortable. “That sounds great.”

He didn’t seem like he thought it was great. He seemed like he thought I might be too incompetent to babysit the taynix. But Jorgen nodded as if nothing was amiss.

“All right. You heard Cobb. Let’s get moving.” Jorgen counted the slugs in the crate. “Scud, we’re missing one again.”

They all looked at me. It might have been easier to be assigned to carry the boxes. “I’ll go look for it, I guess.”

“We’ll probably want to have her put a marker wherever she finds the slugs,” Rig said. “So we can get a reading on their habitual distances.”

“She is standing right here,” I said. “And if you give me a marker, I’ll leave it when I find one.”

“Oh—okay,” Rig said. He looked abashed, but still refused to meet my eyes.

Apparently my interest in getting to know him wasn’t returned. That was a shame—there was a serious dearth of cute nerdy guys my age to hang out with up here on Platform Prime. Especially ones I hadn’t spent the last few months watching have contests to see how many callsigns they could utter in one belch.

I told myself it didn’t matter. I had work to do, so I spun around and stalked out, off to find myself a taynix.