Sunreach (Skyward Flight: Novella 1)

After I put Fine back in the crate and replaced the lid, I followed Jorgen to the infirmary. I had no idea what that slug had done to him—Doomslug had never done anything similar that I was aware of—but Jorgen was stressed out enough before being cut to ribbons. This couldn’t help.

When I arrived in the doorway, the medtechs were applying tiny bandages to his cuts and questioning him about what happened.

“It’s classified,” Jorgen told them.

I supposed that was true—and it meant he didn’t have to explain he’d been cut because he’d startled a slug. I looked through the glass into the room across the way where the alien girl lay asleep on a stretcher. She was humanoid, though her skin was a pale violet color and her hair was an unnatural white, matching the color of the growths that protruded from her cheeks. She looked so strange, with high cheekbones and a wide forehead that were almost human, but also definitely not. The effect was disturbing, even in her sleep.

“You can tell Command he’ll be fine,” one of the med techs said to me as they left the room. It made sense they thought I was waiting to report back, but Command wasn’t aware there was a problem yet.

With Jorgen’s face all bandaged, that wasn’t going to last long, and I worried about what it meant for the slugs.

I turned to look into the room. Jorgen was still sitting on the cot alone. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Jorgen said, looking at his reflection in the glass window. “Fantastic.” One corner of his mouth turned up. “Though clearly I should have listened to you about not squeezing the slugs.”

“I didn’t expect it to hurt you though,” I said. Doomslug had hung around Spensa enough to be startled a time or two, and she’d never exploded. Then again, only the yellow and blue slugs seemed to hyperjump, so maybe only the red and black ones…exploded?

“I don’t know if that’s all there was to it,” Jorgen said. “I was still trying to focus on that vibration, you know? The one I can definitely not approximate by humming.”

“That much is clear.”

Jorgen’s smile grew more genuine, though it pulled a bit at a cut on his lip and he winced. “But I feel it in my mind. It’s hard to pinpoint one of them at a time because the vibration is so soft, but I was trying to get it to…talk to me, I guess. Like you were saying.”

That sounded incredibly difficult. No wonder he was frustrated. “So you think when you talked to it, you convinced it to explode?”

“Sometimes I have that effect on people. Just ask Spensa.”

I laughed, and Jorgen joined me. Despite what people thought of him, Jorgen did have a sense of humor. He was simply too uptight to let it out most of the time.

“I do think it would help if you built a relationship with them,” I said. “They’re not machine parts. You can’t expect to plug them in and make them work. They’re living creatures.”

“So says the slug welfare specialist.”

“That’s right. And speaking of their welfare…” I sighed. “Do you think this will put them at risk? If people think they’re dangerous…”

Jorgen shook his head. “It won’t matter. If the taynix are really the secret to intergalactic travel, then we have to continue to experiment with them, no matter how dangerous they are. Though I may wear gloves next time. And a face mask.”

“Maybe Cobb could find you some full-body armor.”

“That might be nice.”

“It’s possible only the yellow ones are hyperdrives,” I said. “The different colors might indicate different powers. Doomslug never exploded.”

Jorgen nodded. “That’s a plausible theory. We have enough of the yellow kind to work with those first. We can worry about the other kinds later.” He looked up at me, fixing his dark eyes on me like he saw right through me. “Why are you so worried about the taynix anyway?”

I shrugged. “I’m not.”

“You appointed yourself slug welfare specialist, but you’re going to tell me you don’t care?”

“You appointed me slug welfare specialist.”

“FM, I told you to keep them in a crate. That makes you a slug location specialist. You made up the welfare part all on your own.”

I crossed my arms and leaned against the door frame. “I just think we shouldn’t treat them like they’re machines. If they can get us off this planet before the Superiority succeeds in destroying us, we have to do everything in our power to make that happen. But they’re living creatures. We don’t have to be monsters while we do it, do we?”

“Of course we don’t.” Jorgen winced. “And if I’d listened to you, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten my face sliced up. Tell me the truth. How bad is it?”

“The medical people said you’d be fine.”

“Right, but I look ridiculous.”

He had little pieces of plastic tape holding his face together, so it was kind of true. “Hey, girls like scars, right?”

Jorgen closed his eyes.

Right. There was only one girl whose opinion he cared about, and she wasn’t here to appreciate them.

Though, now that I thought about it…“I mean, really, if there was ever a girl who was going to appreciate a scar, it’s Spensa, am I right?”

Jorgen gave me one satisfying look of shock and horror that I’d called him out before he recovered and turned the conversation back on me. “I think we were discussing your sudden obsession with animal rights.”

“I think we were discussing your face, but if you want to talk about animal rights—”

Jorgen’s eyes caught on something behind me, and I turned to find one of Cobb’s aides standing in the hallway. “Admiral Cobb needs you in the command center,” she said to Jorgen. “Should I tell him you’re indisposed?”

Jorgen groaned. “No, tell him I’m coming. He’s going to hear about this eventually.”

“What do you think it’s about?” I asked. “It’s too early for your report.”

“Come with me and find out,” Jorgen said. “You can help me explain what happened to my face. Since you’re the slug welfare specialist and all.”

I still needed to hunt down Gill plus any others that had liberated themselves in the meantime. But I wasn’t going to pass up an opportunity to find out what Cobb’s plans were. I followed Jorgen down to Cobb’s command center, which was a large room with a wide table and a holoprojector at the front.

Cobb was seated at the table with two of his aides on either side of him. Across the table from him was a woman with dark skin and black hair that matched Jorgen’s, though she wore hers in twists along her scalp.

Jeshua Weight, Jorgen’s mother, was one of the most decorated pilots ever to retire from the DDF. Her political power had only increased when her husband joined the National Assembly. She had two other people with her—I guessed from their expensive clothing they were either minor politicians or other liaisons sent to speak on the National Assembly’s behalf.

Rig stood with one of the other engineers at the head of the table, fidgeting nervously. “We think we’re close to getting the planetary defense systems working,” Rig said. “The encryption is tough to crack, but we’ve broken some of the code, and we’re trying to make sense of what we’re looking at. It’s much more complicated than any of the programming we use in the caverns, and we’re not exactly sure what a lot of it does.”

Rig was apparently also capable of speaking in Cobb’s presence, though I could tell he was nervous. People tended to assume that anyone who passed the pilot’s test would be comfortable with public attention—or at least accustomed to it—but I didn’t think that was true in Rig’s case. At least he wasn’t trying to pretend they didn’t exist, even if he looked like he wished he didn’t.

“Presumably the code is what causes the gun platforms to shoot ships from the sky, yes?” Jeshua said in an even voice. “So if you can crack it, we would be able to use those guns in our favor. It would help us a lot to be able to use those turrets the way we use the antiaircraft guns around Alta.”

“That’s the hope,” Rig said. “We’re also working on reviving an old shielding system that might help us to protect the planet from future attacks. A lot of it is still a mystery to us, so we can’t promise anything.”

Jeshua didn’t look pleased about that, though Rig and the other engineers were clearly doing all they could.

“Thank you for your report,” Cobb said. He looked over at Jorgen and me standing by the door. “Son, what in the North Star’s Light happened to you?”

Jorgen winced. “We had a little incident with one of the taynix. Apparently they need to be handled carefully.”

Jeshua looked alarmed. “You didn’t tell me these creatures were dangerous,” she said to Cobb.

“They’re hyperdrives,” Cobb said. “I’d imagine they’re very dangerous.”

This did not seem to make Jeshua feel any better. “Perhaps someone more qualified should be conducting these experiments.” She eyed Jorgen with a look of disapproval. Jorgen somehow managed to stand at attention and appear like he was shrinking into himself at the same time. Which made sense—his mother had basically announced that he wasn’t capable of doing his job.

It wasn’t exactly my place to speak in this meeting, but Jorgen had asked me to help explain. “The slug reacted poorly when Jorgen tried to communicate with it cytonically,” I said. “But we’re working on some theories to keep it from happening again.”

Jeshua narrowed her eyes at me. “Who are you?”

“She’s one of the pilots in Jorgen’s flight,” Cobb said. “She’s helping Jorgen and Rig with the slug experiments.”

“FM has some experience working with the taynix,” Jorgen said. “She’s helping us figure out how best to handle them.”

Jeshua looked over Jorgen’s patched-up face and made a tsking sound. “She’s obviously not doing a very good job.”

I bristled, but kept my mouth shut.

“It’s not her fault,” Rig cut in. “It’s the nature of the scientific process. We have to try things out, or we won’t get results.”

Huh. Apparently Rig didn’t hate me, if he was willing to defend me to the brass. He was clearly more comfortable talking about things he understood, and none of us understood the taynix and the hyperdrives very well. Maybe if I found a minute to ask him about his other work, he’d stop treating me like a pariah.

“We don’t have a report for you yet,” Jorgen added. “We’re still working on it.”

“That’s fine,” Cobb said. “That isn’t why I called for you. There’s something I need you to hear.”

Cobb nodded to one of his aides, who pushed some buttons on the holographic projector. Instead of a hologram though, an audio recording began.

“Admiral Cobb,” a voice said. It was strangely accented and oddly even, like it might not be entirely real. “This is Minister Cuna. I’m sorry our earlier communication was interrupted. I was betrayed by the same people who sent the delver to your planet and am no longer able to hyperjump. I have information from your agent, Spensa. She asked me to come to your planet to offer aid, but I have been attacked by our mutual enemies and am unable to reach you as planned. Instead, I must ask for your help. My people and I are marooned on the abandoned outpost at Sunreach, and the radicals in control of the Superiority government are hunting for me. I fear we have very little time. If you can reach us, I offer you all the help I can give in return. We are located at—”

The voice read a few coordinates, but then the recording cut off.

“Is that it?” Jorgen asked.

Cobb nodded. “Even if we had the full location, I don’t know how to reach them without a functional hyperdrive. We were wondering if you felt anything from it. Any of those vibrations you keep talking about?”

Jeshua’s face darkened when Cobb asked Jorgen about his cytonic abilities, but she didn’t interrupt him.

“No,” Jorgen said. “Should I?”

“My previous communications from Minister Cuna came via radio,” Cobb said, “but this one came through the platform’s old communications systems. They’re probably using some kind of faster-than-light communication device. If it uses cytonic technology, we thought there might be some component only a cytonic could hear.”

Jorgen shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t feel anything.”

“How did we receive it?” I asked. “Do we have an FTL communicator?”

I probably didn’t have the authority to ask that question, but Rig answered it anyway. “Not that we know of,” Rig said. “But there are a lot of things the platform systems are capable of that we haven’t been able to figure out yet. The message was routed through one of the receptors in the communications system.”

“So we received it,” Cobb said, “but we don’t exactly know how. Engineering is trying to figure out if we have the ability to respond.”

Interesting. If we’d been able to get up here and investigate the platforms surrounding the planet years ago, we might have been better able to figure out how to defend ourselves.

Which was probably one of the reasons the Superiority had been so intent on keeping us in the caverns below the planet’s surface.

“What are we going to do if we can answer?” Jorgen asked.

“We don’t know for certain what this person’s intentions are,” Cobb said. “It might be a trap. Alternatively, it might be our only lead on an ally, and stars know we could use a few of those right now.”

“If this person is indeed a minister,” Jeshua said, “perhaps we could use their connections to reach people higher up in the Superiority government, to find a way to reach an agreement.”

An agreement?

Jorgen’s shock echoed my own. “You’re going to try to talk to the Superiority?”

Jeshua nodded. “We’ve been fighting this war for too long. Continuing the way we are will only result in our extinction. Now that we know more about the forces we’re facing, the National Assembly believes we should start considering the political implications of the situation, along with the military ones.”

In principle I agreed, but I hadn’t seen any evidence that the Superiority wanted to negotiate with us. Especially if they’d been the reason for the delver’s appearance.

Cobb cleared his throat. He had to hate this, but he was too good at his job to betray that on his face. “We’ll try to respond, but getting those coordinates does us no good if we can’t get there, and we can’t do that without a hyperdrive.” Cobb focused on Jorgen. “Spensa felt coordinates in her mind, and then she was able to travel to them. I was hoping that recording might do something similar for you, but if not, we’re going to have to go through with our other plan.”

“Other plan, sir?” Jorgen said.

Jeshua nodded. They’d obviously already discussed this. “Yes,” she said. “The alien who crashed here is the only one among us who might be able to produce coordinates that would allow us to reach this person. We’re going to need to wake her up.”