Sunreach (Skyward Flight: Novella 1)

Over the next few hours, I became certain that the slugs were teleporting out of the box. The yellow and blue ones would periodically disappear, regardless of whether the lid was on or off. Sometimes I’d find them slithering around some other part of the engineering bay. Sometimes I’d find them out in the hall, or down the corridor. A few times I had to venture all the way up to the command center or out to the landing bay to find the slugs chilling on someone’s chair or on the wing of a ship.

There didn’t seem to be any way to stop them from doing this, but only the yellow and blue ones had a penchant for wandering. The others remained in their crate, crawling over one another. The teleporting slugs seemed to leave less often when I played them music from my transmitter, so I left it looping a slow melodic song next to the crate. The slugs trilled along, echoing the notes. If the music bothered the engineers, they seemed to accept it as a necessary part of the scientific process, because they didn’t ask me to turn it off.

I returned to the engineering bay with my most frequent traveler, the slug with the blue gill-like markings. The slug shivered slightly—a lot of them did that after I found them, especially if I did it quickly. They’d startle when I approached, like they were frightened of something.

Retrieving them from all over the platform wasn’t my favorite pastime, but it kept my mind off of Lizard, so I was grateful for it.

“Well,” I said to Rig, “at least you’ve got a lot of data about how far they go.”

Rig sat at his desk, looking over what I assumed was an array of said data, though it could have been something else for all I knew. He didn’t even glance up. “Yeah,” he said. “Thanks.”

I scowled at the back of his head. Since Jorgen had gotten called away to talk to his mother shortly after we arrived in engineering, Rig was back to talking in single-syllable sentences.

Maybe I wasn’t the most scintillating person around, but it still stung that he seemed to barely notice I was here. Or worse, he did notice and wasn’t happy about it.

I scritched my most recent escapee—who I had named Gill for obvious reasons—on the head, and then counted the slugs. I had all of them again—or at least all that had been there when I took over responsibility for them. They’d been disappearing with greater frequency over time, and I thought I knew why.

“I think it’s time to feed them,” I said to Rig, not taking my eyes off the slugs. I was still waiting to catch one of them teleporting away, which they never seemed to do while I was looking. “Do you know how we do that?”

Rig did look at me then, but only to give me a wide-eyed look of terror, similar to Jorgen’s when Cobb asked why the slugs were different colors.

“Do you know how to feed them?” I asked again. “I think they’re wandering away faster because they’re hungry, and I don’t have enough caviar for all of them.”

“Caviar?” Rig asked. “Why would you—”

“There’re mushrooms in one of the crates,” Jorgen said, and I turned around to find him standing in the doorway. “We assumed that’s what they eat because there were a ton of them in the cavern where we found them. They seem to like them well enough.” He walked over to one of the other boxes and pulled off the lid. Sure enough, it was filled with wide-capped mushrooms in various shades of cream and brown.

Gill trilled eagerly. I gave him the first taste and then dropped several more mushrooms into one of the slug crates. The slugs migrated toward the mushrooms, all clustering together. Hopefully that would motivate them to stay put for a while.

“How was the thing with your mom?” I asked Jorgen.

“Complicated. Apparently the National Assembly was frightened by the appearance of the delver, and now they want to have more say in what the DDF is doing. Cobb doesn’t like it.”

I understood why—it wasn’t like the National Assembly had any practical experience with the Superiority, let alone a delver.

Then again, neither did the rest of us.

“There’s more,” Jorgen said. “The assembly has been able to monitor some of the information on the Superiority datanets. They say Spensa was the one who turned the delver away from Detritus. Then she apparently turned it on them.”

Rig and I both gaped at him. “Do you think that’s true?” I asked.

“Maybe,” Jorgen said. “If anyone could figure out how to wrangle a space monster, it would be her.”

That was fair. Spensa was a little mythic in the things she pulled off. If I didn’t know her well, I would have thought she was something better than human.

“If so,” Jorgen said, “we need her back. The Superiority doesn’t seem to know where she went. They do seem to know she’s not here. They’re reaching out to all their people, telling them they need to mobilize and destroy us while our cytonic is gone.”

“They don’t know we have you,” I said.

A shadow passed over Jorgen’s face. “And I’m no good to us unless I figure out how to use my powers. Or we learn how to use these.”

“Is that what your mother wants?” I asked. “To oversee the development of the hyperdrives?”

“She wants to oversee everything,” Jorgen said. “Or the Assembly does. I think they decided since my mom was in the DDF for so long, she’d be a good liaison as they begin negotiations.”

“And you don’t agree?”

“I think it makes sense,” Jorgen said. “But she’s…less happy I admitted to Cobb that I have the defect. It’s supposed to be a family secret.”

I understood why they’d kept the secret this long. After all, the Superiority had taken advantage of Spensa’s father, using his powers to turn him against his allies. That…couldn’t happen to Jorgen…could it? “But you can’t keep it a secret now, can you? You’re basically our only hope.”

“Spensa was a better hope,” Jorgen said. “I think my mom’s worried about what’s going to happen to me if I start experimenting with my powers.”

That also made sense. I wondered if Jorgen’s parents were behind the move to keep the engineers focused on defense and away from hyperdrives, which would put Jorgen in more danger.

“Spensa will find her way home,” I said. “She did it before, and she’ll do it again.”

Jorgen gave me a suspicious look, like he wondered why I was trying to comfort him about Spensa. If Rig hadn’t been sitting right there, I might have told him I knew how he felt about her. Rig was watching us curiously from his desk—I think this was the longest he’d ever bothered to look at me at one time.

“Of course she’ll be fine,” Jorgen said. “And Cobb and the National Assembly will figure out what to do. We just need to learn how to turn these slugs into hyperdrives.”

“No pressure,” I said. We both looked down at the slugs, which had finished their mushrooms and were slithering around the large crate, looking for more. I tossed a few more in the box, and they set about devouring them while I fed the other crate of slugs as well.

Jorgen sighed and turned to Rig. “What do we know so far?”

“Not a lot,” Rig said. “I’ve gathered the data FM generated with the trackers. The slugs don’t tend to go far, the farthest distance being about two hundred meters, but most went less than twenty.”

“But we think they’re hyperjumping,” Jorgen said.

“I don’t know how else to explain it,” I said. “Unless they suddenly move really fast when we aren’t looking. And probably invisibly. And can open crates and close them again.”

“Okay,” Jorgen said. “So if they already hyperjump, we probably aren’t going to need to cut them up. We just need to figure out how to get them to do it over bigger distances and to go where we want them to.”

“And to take you with them,” Rig said.

“Right.”

“How would you get it to go where you want?” I asked. “It’s not like you can give it directions.” The slugs were smart enough to mimic basic words and get themselves out of small spaces, but I wouldn’t exactly want to give one a map and then sit back and trust it to send me across the universe.

“When Spensa left for Starsight, the alien girl Alanik put some coordinates into her mind,” Jorgen said. “She did it cytonically, I guess. The way that Spensa’s grandmother said she could hear Spensa talking to her all the way from Starsight. I don’t know how to do that—but if we could give them to the slugs…”

“Too bad we can’t ask the alien girl,” Rig said, and Jorgen nodded.

Alanik had been shot down by the gun platforms upon arrival, and was still in the medical bay, unconscious. I think the medtechs were hoping she would heal on her own, since they didn’t know enough about her anatomy to do much besides keep her medically sedated and wait.

The slugs finished their second round of mushrooms and snuffled around for more. We would clearly have to send a team to harvest more. Hopefully there were a lot of these to be had somewhere in the caverns. The slugs seemed to have been surviving down there okay.

I grabbed a few more mushrooms out of the crate and saw the layer of mushroom below it…moving. When I lifted it up, I found two more yellow and blue slugs, looking fat and happy and lying on an extra-large half-eaten cap.

“Well, aren’t you clever,” I said. If the slugs were going off looking for food, at least some of them had found it. I pulled out the two slugs—one of which had an especially long blue comb down its back, which flopped over to one side as it snoozed—and placed them back in a slug crate.

“So,” Rig said. “I’ve constructed a box out of the same metal used in the one M-Bot indicated was his hyperdrive.”

Jorgen looked the thing over intently. “What does it do?”

“Nothing,” Rig said. “It’s just a box.”

“Okay,” Jorgen said. “So what was its purpose in M-Bot’s design?”

“My guess,” Rig said, “is that it’s supposed to contain the slug so it doesn’t zip all over the ship, or teleport outside the hull and die in space. Even if they can survive without atmosphere, a pilot could get stranded if his slug wandered away from him mid-flight.”

Rig was all chatty again, now that Jorgen was here. Had I done something to offend him? I had no idea what that could be.

“Okay,” Jorgen said. “So the slugs can’t hyperjump out of the box.”

“That’s the theory,” Rig said. “We’ll have to put some in it to make sure. I also think the box may cause the slug to take the ship with it when it hyperjumps, but I’m not sure how.”

“So we don’t know how to make it move,” Jorgen said, “but if it decided to, it might teleport the whole box?”

“Possibly,” Rig said. “We’ll have to try it and find out.”

“Great,” Jorgen said. “FM, grab a couple slugs and put them into Rig’s box.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. It came out more sarcastic than I intended. I had volunteered to be the slug handler, after all. Jorgen gave me a sharp look, but I ignored him and lifted two more blue and yellow slugs out of the crate. These two were less skittish than some of the others, and let me stroke them for a few moments before I placed them into Rig’s box and fastened the dark metal lid.

Both Rig and Jorgen stared at it.

“I think we’ll notice if the box hyperjumps away,” I said. Which it might have been more likely to do if I hadn’t just fed them. I decided not to bring that up.

“Good point,” Jorgen said.

Rig looked nervously at me, and then at Jorgen. “Maybe you should try to make one of them move on purpose. Even if you don’t know any coordinates, could you try to figure out how to communicate with it?”

“You want me to talk to a slug.” Jorgen stared down at the slugs in the crate.

“I talk to them,” I said. “You don’t have to make it sound like it’s crazy. It might be easier with one of the ones you can see. That way you can get to know it.”

Jorgen gave me a look that said he thought maybe I was crazy, but he still leaned over the crate, considering the slugs. The red and black slugs had finished with the mushrooms the fastest, and were now lounging about trilling softly. The way they sang almost sounded like music, though it was lower and deeper than the trills of the yellow and blue ones. The purple ones’ tones were somewhere in between. Their voices all together were calming, in an eerie sort of way.

“Anyone have a suggestion as to how I should do this?” Jorgen asked.

“You could start by befriending one,” I said. “Maybe give it a name?”

“They aren’t my friends,” Jorgen said. “We’re not naming the test subjects.”

“I already did,” I told him, pointing to one of the slugs. “This one is Gill. And I’m thinking those two”—I pointed to the extra-fat slugs I’d found in the mushroom crate—“should be Happy and Chubs.”

Rig smiled, and both his cheeks dimpled adorably. He was really cute when he wasn’t snubbing me.

Focus, FM. “Your turn,” I told Jorgen. “You name one.”

“Really?” Jorgen said. “This is supposed to help me figure out how to talk to the slugs with my mind?”

I put a hand on my hip. I understood that he liked to study everything out before he did it, but he was being a baby. “Do you have any better ideas?”

He groaned, but reached in and picked up one of the purple and orange ones. It gave a shrill squeak.

“You’re squeezing it too tight,” I said.

“I don’t think I’m doing any irreparable harm to it.”

“No. But if you were a little bit more gentle with them, they might like you better.”

“I don’t care if they like me!” Jorgen said. “I only want to figure out how to use them so we have the tools we need to fight against the Superiority.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. Usually I thought Jorgen was a really good commander. A little too stiff, a little too interested in running things by the book, but he cared about the pilots in his flight, and he went out of his way to make sure we were all okay even when it made him personally uncomfortable to do so.

But Spensa had nicknamed him Jerkface on our first day as cadets, and at this moment I felt the callsign was well deserved.

“It’s okay,” I said to the slug in his hand, mostly to bother him. “That’s how they treat the rest of us here too.”

“All right!” Rig said. “So, Jorgen, do you feel anything? Like, that vibration you were talking about earlier?”

“I don’t know,” Jorgen said. “I mean, I can hear the mass of them…humming, I guess. Singing in my mind.”

“Can you hum back to it?” I asked.

Jorgen glared at me, even though it was a perfectly reasonable question.

I held up my hands. “We’re supposed to be experimenting with them, aren’t we? You could at least try.”

“Fine, but I’m not naming it.”

“Fine!” the slug trilled at Jorgen.

“I think maybe you just did,” I said. “Fine.”

“Fine!” the slug enthusiastically agreed.

“Okay, Fine,” Jorgen said. “Be quiet now. I’m going to hum to it.”

Jorgen squinted at Fine, then closed his eyes. He kept them closed for a moment and then he started to hum, a noise I would have described as off-key if it wasn’t so completely tuneless.

Kimmalyn appeared in the doorway. “Is he constipated?” she asked. Probably Nedd and Arturo had mentioned to her what we were doing with the slugs, so she’d stopped by to check it out.

Jorgen’s eyes popped open and he dropped Fine into the crate—a good two feet down. The slug gave a low, grumpy trill. I reached in and scritched its back in apology on Jorgen’s behalf, though Jorgen didn’t seem the least bit apologetic.

“No,” I told Kimmalyn. “He’s trying to commune with the slugs. Cytonically.”

“Close the door!” Jorgen said. “We don’t have to announce that to everyone.”

“Did the humming seem to do anything?” Rig asked.

“It made me feel stupid,” Jorgen said.

“It’s like the Saint says,” Kimmalyn added, “ ‘I feel, therefore I am.’ ”

Jorgen squinted at her, but Kimmalyn just smiled at him innocently.

Jorgen sighed and looked over at the hyperdrive box. “What about those slugs? Are they still in there?”

I opened the lid and peered inside. “Yes. Both of them. And they appear to be asleep.” One of them made a soft wheezing sound with its comb that I thought might be a snore.

Jorgen looked down at the crate. “Maybe this would be easier if there were fewer of them. I can’t focus on this many at once. FM, pull out three of them, one of each color.”

At least I was more gentle with them than he was. Rig brought me a cardboard box and I gingerly picked up purple Fine, yellow Gill, and one of the red and black slugs who was as yet unnamed.

“I’m going to hum at them,” Jorgen said. “And you all are going to keep your comments to yourself. That is an order.”

“Bless your stars,” Kimmalyn said.

I bit my lips to keep from snickering. Jorgen’s hum sounded like a wounded animal.

Finally Jorgen sighed. “This isn’t working. Maybe I should have some time alone with them.”

“I still think you should try treating them nicer,” I told him. “Bond with them.”

Jorgen rolled his eyes. “I don’t see how that’s going to help.”

“Spensa has a bond with her slug, right? Maybe that’s how she found out it was a hyperdrive.”

“We don’t have any idea how Spensa found out Doomslug was a hyperdrive.”

“I’m just trying to help,” I said. “You’re the one who appointed me slug welfare specialist.”

Jorgen stared at me. “What?”

I thought what I’d said was obvious. “Slug welfare specialist. I’m here to take care of the slugs.”

“FM,” Jorgen said, “you don’t know any more about these slugs than we do.”

“I do so,” I said. “I was friends with Spensa’s slug.”

“You were…”

“Friends,” I repeated. “With Doomslug. You remember her?”

“Of course I remember her,” Jorgen said. “That thing was supposed to stay in Spensa’s bunk, but it would show up all over the platform. I found it in my cockpit once, and I couldn’t get it to leave! Every time I tried to catch it, the thing kept shrieking ‘Jerkface’ at me. I swear Spensa trained it to do that on purpose.”

“See?” I said. “Clearly you have no experience handling these animals. But Doomslug and I had a relationship. She used to sit on my arm and purr while I fed her caviar.”

Jorgen looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “The slugs purr?”

“I mean, they trill, but it was a purr-like trill—”

“And you fed her caviar? Where did you even get caviar?”

“My parents send it to me, okay?” I said. “The bottom line is that without Spensa, I’m the next best person to help you handle the slugs. And I think if you make them comfortable—”

“We’re not trying to make them comfortable. We’re trying to develop hyperdrives. Spensa said these things—”

“They are animals, not things.”

“—these animals are the key to getting us off Detritus. And in case you didn’t notice, we need to develop them as quickly as possible, because we were just visited by a delver, and it might return at any time to destroy us.”

“I don’t think it’s coming back,” Rig said.

We both looked over at him.

“You said Spensa drove it off, right?” he said. “She’ll have figured out a way to keep it away from us.”

Yeah, okay. He definitely had a crush on Spensa. Which was fine. It wasn’t like I was trying to date the boy—that wasn’t a pressing concern, what with the Krell on our doorstep—but a conversation would have been nice.

Jorgen sighed. “Maybe. But even Spensa can’t keep the Superiority away from us forever. These slugs are our most important lead.”

“Exactly,” I said. “So we need to make sure we’re treating them with the respect they deserve.”

“I simply think,” Jorgen said, “that we shouldn’t let your affection for the slugs get in the way of our progress.”

“I wasn’t aware you were making progress,” I said.

“Maybe we would be if we were focusing on the slugs instead of having this conversation,” Jorgen said. “We selected a box of three slugs—”

“Two slugs,” Rig said.

Jorgen blinked at him.

“Technically,” Rig clarified, “there are only two slugs in this box.”

Jorgen looked into the box, where there were in fact only two taynix—Fine and the red and black one.

“Clearly the slug welfare specialist isn’t doing her job,” Jorgen said. “You were supposed to get them to stay in the box.”

“Fine,” I said.

“No,” Rig said. “Fine is still here; it’s the other one.”

Kimmalyn laughed. Maybe Rig did have a sense of humor after all. But when I grinned at him, his cheeks grew pink, like he’d messed up somehow by joking with me.

Had someone told him not to talk to me?

I looked around, but Gill appeared to have hyperjumped out of sight. “All right, I’ll go find him, but—”

“Hey!” Jorgen said. I looked down to find that the red and black slug had eased its way out of the box and was now carefully sampling Jorgen’s bootlace. He reached down to pick it up, squeezing it too tightly again.

“Jorgen, you need to be more—”

“FM,” he said, raising his voice, “I’ve got it—”

“Got it,” the slug trilled.

Jorgen looked at the slug with a long-suffering expression.

And then the slug exploded.

The slug itself stayed intact and unharmed, but something pushed out of it, like it sent the air itself spinning in all directions.

Jorgen dropped the slug and jumped back as ribbons of red opened up on his forearms and cheeks and across his nose. Rig startled, and even Kimmalyn looked terrified. The cuts weren’t particularly deep, but there were many of them, like they’d been opened by the soft touch of a dozen razor blades.

We all stared at Jorgen. The slug crawled placidly across the floor.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“I think you should name that one Boomslug,” Kimmalyn said.

“I think you need to go to the infirmary,” Rig added.

Jorgen pressed his fingertips to his nose, smearing blood in a streak across his face. “FM, do you think you can get the slug back into the crate?”

“Sure,” I said. I bent down and let Boomslug inspect my hand before gingerly lifting it into the crate with the others.

“Good,” Jorgen said. “Meeting adjourned.” And then he strode out of the room with little rivulets of blood still running down his skin.