Sunreach (Skyward Flight: Novella 1)

The next morning, I was paged to the medical bay almost immediately upon waking. I found Jorgen standing outside, looking into Alanik’s room through the glass. The bandages on his face were new and clean, but still numerous. “They say her wounds have mostly healed,” he said. “They’ve been keeping her sedated, but now they’re bringing her around. Cobb suggested that I talk to her since we’re both cytonics. I could use your help. You’re…better with people than I am.”

“Of course,” I said. That was quite the admission for Jorgen, who never liked to appear less than perfect. But this was a delicate situation—Alanik had been unconscious for weeks now, and we didn’t know much about her. “Will we be able to speak to her?”

Jorgen held up a pin. “Rig says this is a translator. Spensa took the one Alanik was wearing when she crashed, but the engineers found more in her ship. It should make it so we can understand each other.”

That would make things a lot easier. “Any particular tactic you think we should use to talk to her?”

“No idea. Do you have a suggestion?”

“I think maybe we should try to convey that we’re friends first. Help her feel like we’re all on the same side.” I didn’t know much about what had gone on between Alanik and Spensa. “We are, right?”

“I hope so,” Jorgen said. “That sounds like a good tactic. Thanks.”

One of the doctors stepped out of the medical bay and nodded to Jorgen. “She’s waking. She may be disoriented at first, so don’t be surprised if she has a hard time talking.”

Jorgen gave the doctor a crisp nod and then we walked into Alanik’s room, stopping at her bedside.

The yellow overhead lights cast eerie shadows over Alanik’s strange features. With her cheeks oddly pronounced, her skin that strange shade of violet with white growths protruding from her skin like crystals, she was beautiful in an unnerving sort of way. She stirred, murmuring something softly, and then opened her eyes.

They looked human, except for their violet color. I’d never seen a human with eyes quite that pale and arresting. She looked up at us in confusion.

Jorgen glanced at me. He wanted me to take point on this.

“Alanik,” I said. “My name is FM. I’m glad you’re awake.”

Jorgen held the pin awkwardly between us, and it translated the words into a lilting language I’d never heard. Maybe I should have used my real name, but I had become accustomed to everyone using my callsign. Besides, to an alien, “FM” probably wouldn’t seem any more strange than “Freyja.”

Alanik squinted at me, still confused. If she was alarmed by the many bandages on Jorgen’s face, she didn’t show it. Probably a lot of things here looked strange to her, so what was one more? “Human,” she said. “Where is…the other one.”

“Spensa,” I said. “She left. You gave her coordinates, and she went to take your place.”

Alanik closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them again, she looked more focused. More alert. “Where am I?”

“In a medical facility,” I told her. “On a platform above a planet called Detritus. You were shot down by autonomous platforms. That wasn’t my people. We can’t control them. The guns shoot at us too.”

Alanik nodded. “Humans,” she said again. “How have you survived?”

“With difficulty,” I said. “We’ve been defending this planet against the Superiority for years.”

“We were allies once,” Alanik said. “My people were punished for working with you. The Superiority…they say they want peace, but in truth they oppress us. Their peace is only control.”

“Yes,” I said. “And they want my people dead. We need your help.”

Alanik’s eyes narrowed slightly. “I need to contact my people,” she said. “The other one…Spensa…may have already arrived at Starsight. They are expecting me to check in, and I will need to tell them what’s happened.”

Jorgen and I exchanged a glance. Alanik thought it was still the same day as she’d arrived. “About that,” I said. “You were injured in the crash, and our doctors have been trying to help you, but they didn’t know much about your physiology. They’ve been keeping you in a coma, giving you a chance to heal.”

Alanik looked at me in horror. “How long?”

How long? I looked to Jorgen. “About nineteen days,” he said.

“That long?” Alanik struggled to sit, though the tubes and wires attaching her to the medical monitor got in her way. She grabbed at them with her slender hands, and I noticed her nails were made of the same white substance that protruded from her cheeks. They were sharp and pointed, almost like talons.

“We need your help,” Jorgen said again. “We’re all trapped here.”

Alanik stared at him. “You aren’t trapped,” she said. “You are cytonic, same as Spensa. Can you—”

Jorgen shook his head. “I can’t do anything,” he said. “I’ve only just learned about my powers, and I don’t know how to use them. I need you to teach me, so we can get my people off this planet. I need your help.”

He looked at me, but I didn’t know what to say beyond that. He’d made a pretty good case. “Please,” I added. “You said we were allies, right? Well, we need allies now, and it sounds like your people do too. We have a message from someone in the Superiority, a faction that wants to help us. But we don’t know how to reach them—”

“Don’t trust them!” Alanik said. She pulled at the tubes on her chest, tugging them free. Thankfully they seemed to only be sensors, though she had a needle in her arm hooked up to an IV. As she shifted it, a spot of dark blood formed on the bandage that held it in place. “You can’t trust them. They say they want to help, but they don’t. They only want control. You can’t—”

She broke off as a shadow darkened the window to the hallway. I turned and saw Cobb standing there with Jorgen’s mother. They were speaking quietly enough that we couldn’t hear them through the glass, but Jeshua Weight did not look happy.

“Okay,” I said, trying to hold Alanik’s attention. I reached down and took her hand, hoping this wasn’t some sort of cultural taboo to her people, but she didn’t pull away. “We can’t trust them. This is why we need your help. You know more than we do, so we need you to guide us. We don’t know how to use the powers, but we do have ships, and resources. We can help you in return.”

“FM,” Jorgen said. He gave me a warning look, and I knew I’d gone too far. We couldn’t promise her resources. That would be up to Command and the National Assembly. I might have just lied to her. It could be a tactically sound decision to make promises to Alanik’s people, but I didn’t have the authority to do that.

Jeshua knocked on the glass and gestured to the door, which I’d closed behind me. Jorgen sighed, set the pin down on the edge of Alanik’s bed sheet, and walked to the door, stepping out into the hall to talk to his mother.

Alanik was still holding my hand. Her lavender skin looked so strange against mine, but the anatomy of her hand was human. She was a person, same as me. Alien, but familiar. She was far from home, alone and frightened. I could imagine what that would feel like.

“What were you going to do when you reached Starsight?” I asked her.

Alanik hesitated. “I am a spy for my people,” she said. “We need their hyperdrive technology. Without it, they isolate us on our planet. They deny us passage on their ships. They control our imports, our economy, our ability to progress. We need to know their secrets.”

“So the hyperdrives,” I said. “You don’t know how they work.”

“No,” Alanik said. “That was what I was going to learn. But if it has been weeks, the opportunity may have passed.”

It had—Spensa had taken her place, pretended to be Alanik. Sharing the information Spensa had discovered—the very secrets Alanik had intended to steal—might go a long way toward building goodwill between us.

But I definitely didn’t have clearance to do that. I glanced out the window and found Jorgen talking to Cobb and his mother. From the look of it, Jeshua was doing most of the talking.

“Are you also a prisoner here?” Alanik asked.

I looked down at her. “You’re not a prisoner,” I said. “We were trying to help you.”

Alanik shook her head. “All of you. You are prisoners on this planet, dependent on the Superiority.”

Oh, that. “More than your people, I think,” I said. “They don’t trade with us. They’ve attacked us for years, making us fight them to survive. We live underground, using only the resources of this planet and the means we had with us when our ships crashed here—that was generations ago.”

“So you are desperate,” Alanik said. “You will do anything to escape.”

It was true, but I didn’t like the way she said it. “We want to work together,” I said.

“You want to speak with the Superiority,” she said. “To respond to their message.”

“We have a message from someone,” I said. “If you would listen to it, maybe you could help us figure out if that person is—”

“You will make a deal with them,” Alanik said. “You will do it because their false peace is better than your war.”

That was startlingly similar to what Jeshua Weight had said the National Assembly wanted to do.

“Have other planets tried that?” I asked.

“Yes,” Alanik said. “My people were punished because we fought alongside yours. Some on my planet think it is better to go along with the Superiority. To accept their peace. But their peace is a tool to maintain their power.”

“We don’t want that kind of peace,” I said. The decision wasn’t up to me, so I was surprised by the strength of my response. “They’ve murdered my friends, our people. They tried to wipe out our entire planet, and I’m still not sure why we survived. I don’t want to work with them, Alanik, and I don’t think others will either. We aren’t a peaceful people. We will fight.”

That should have been the opposite of what I wanted. It was the opposite of what my Disputer friends stood for.

Maybe my time in the DDF had changed me the way they all said it would. Several of them had tried to talk me out of taking the pilot’s test. They said the DDF would make me see things their way, compromise my ideals. I thought becoming a pilot would give me more authority to speak up for those ideals, so I did it anyway.

And here I was, arguing for war instead of peace.

Alanik had it right though. Not all peace was of equal value. I wasn’t going to trade one cage for another. I hoped that in the end, the warlike nature of the Defiant League would protect us from that kind of prison, even if it certainly also had its downsides.

Alanik’s eyes met mine, staring at me intently. And I thought for a moment that she believed me.

The door opened, and Jorgen motioned to me. “FM,” he said, “Command wants to talk to her.”

Alanik looked at me, as if gauging my reaction, so I tried not to look alarmed. I squeezed her hand and then stepped away, but I didn’t leave the room. I wasn’t going to leave unless Cobb ordered me to.

He and Jeshua strode into the room, and Jeshua stared at Alanik with obvious disdain. I glanced at Jorgen, who hovered by the door, and he shrugged. He couldn’t do anything about this, and neither could I.

“It’s Alanik, is that right?” Cobb asked.

Alanik narrowed her eyes at him. “Who are you, and why have you kept me here?”

“We were trying to help you, Alanik,” I said. “We were just—”

“We need to know who you are,” Jeshua said. “And where you come from.”

Alanik sat up straighter. She’d removed all the sensors except the needle in her arm, but she appeared to be growing stronger and more alert the longer she was awake. Hopefully she’d healed enough that we weren’t putting her in danger by overtaxing her. “I am Alanik of the UrDail,” she said. “And you are?”

“I am Admiral Cobb,” Cobb said. “And this is—”

“It does not matter who we are,” Jeshua said. “We need you to tell us what you know about hyperdrives and the Superiority’s faster-than-light communication.”

I closed my eyes. I was pretty sure from my conversation with Alanik that we knew more about hyperdrives than she did. I looked over at Jorgen. We should have coordinated before this conversation, made a plan.

He shook his head. We couldn’t stop this from happening.

“I am your prisoner, then,” Alanik said. “You intend to use me.”

“We only want to exchange information,” Cobb said. “We have a mutual enemy.”

“This isn’t an exchange,” Jeshua said, cutting him off. “Tell us what you know, and we’ll let you go.”

Alanik straightened up further. “You’ll let me go,” she repeated. “You think you can hold me here?”

“We have your ship,” she said. “We will negotiate for your release if you will cooperate with us.”

Did Alanik need her ship to transport herself to her planet? The slugs clearly didn’t need ships to hyperjump.

“Mom,” Jorgen said. “I think—”

“You know nothing,” Alanik said.

Jeshua straightened to her full height—which wasn’t especially tall—and looked down her nose at Alanik. “You’re not doing yourself any favors here.”

“Mom—” Jorgen said. Alanik looked over at him and Jorgen cried out, squeezing his eyes shut and putting a hand to his forehead between the bandages. I took a step toward her—I didn’t know what she was doing to him, but she was obviously an accomplished cytonic. We barely knew what they were capable of.

“What are you doing to my son?” Jeshua said, grabbing Jorgen by the arm.

Jorgen collided with the doorframe, opening his eyes wide.

And then Alanik disappeared. One moment she was there and the next she was gone, leaving the bandage and the IV needle to fall against the sheets, the dark stain of her blood spreading onto the white fabric.

“Seriously?” I said. “Why did you do that?”

“FM,” Cobb said. His tone held a warning—I obviously wasn’t supposed to speak to Jeshua Weight that way—but at the moment I didn’t care.

“I was making progress with her,” I said. “She might have helped us.”

Jeshua was still focused on Jorgen. “What did she do to you?”

“She was talking to me, that’s all,” Jorgen said. “Speaking in my mind.”

“What did she say?”

We all stared at him, and Jorgen hesitated. “Not much,” he said. “Just that she didn’t trust us.”

Cobb raised an eyebrow at him. Jorgen wasn’t a particularly good liar, but if he decided to withhold information from his superiors, he must have a scudding good reason for it.

“What are we going to do now?” I asked Cobb. “She was our only chance at communicating with Cuna, wasn’t she?”

“What did she say when you were talking to her?” Cobb asked me.

“She said we shouldn’t trust anyone from the Superiority. She said they would lie to us, that we would trade away our freedom to them if we tried to make peace with them.”

“We need a full report of everything she said to you,” Jeshua said. “We’ll send it down to the National Assembly, so they can decide what we should do.”

“We’ll make that report,” Cobb said. “And then I will decide what to share with the National Assembly.” Jeshua scowled at Cobb, but he kept talking. “FM, Jorgen, let’s head up to the command center for debriefing.”

He stalked out of the room and Jorgen and I trailed after him, leaving Jeshua behind.