Defy the Stars

by Claudia Gray

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 by Amy Vincent

  Cover design by Marcie Lawrence. Cover illustration by Bose Collins. Cover copyright © 2017 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  Visit us at lb-teens.com

  First Edition: April 2017

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gray, Claudia, author.

  Title: Defy the stars / Claudia Gray.

  Description: First edition. | New York ; Boston : Little, Brown and Company, 2017. |

  Summary: Teenaged soldier Noemi and an enemy robot, Abel, who is programmed to obey her commands, set out on an interstellar quest to save her home planet, Earth colony Genesis.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016028390| ISBN 9780316394031 (hardback) | ISBN 9780316394055 (e-book) | ISBN 9780316394062 (library edition e-book)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Soldiers—Fiction. | Robots—Fiction. | Interstellar travel—Fiction. | Orphans—Fiction. | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.G77625 Def 2017 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016028390

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-39403-1 (hardcover), 978-0-316-39405-5 (ebook)

  E3-20170214-JV-NF

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Acknowledgments

  For my parents

  1

  IN THREE WEEKS, NOEMI VIDAL WILL DIE—HERE, IN THIS very place.

  Today is just practice.

  Noemi wants to pray like the other soldiers she hears around her. The soft ebb and swell of their whispers sounds like waves against the shore. Zero-G even makes it look as if they’re underwater—their hair fanning out from their heads, their booted feet swaying out from their launch harnesses as if caught by the tide. Only the dark star field outside the few small windows reveals how far they are from home.

  The troops around her share a mix of faiths. Most of the People of the Book are seated close together: The Jews clasp hands with one another; the Muslims have been seated in one corner, to better pray toward the distant dot in the sky where Mecca lies. Like the other members of the Second Catholic Church, Noemi has her rosary beads in hand, the small stone-carved crucifix floating near her face. She clutches it tighter and wishes she didn’t feel so hollow inside. So small. So desperate for the life she’s already given up.

  Every single one of them volunteered, but none of them is truly ready to die. Inside the troop ship, the air is electrified with terrible purpose.

  Twenty days, Noemi reminds herself. I have twenty days left.

  It’s not much comfort to cling to. So she looks across the row at her best friend, one of the noncombatants who is here only to map potential trajectories for the Masada Run, not to die in the process. Esther Gatson’s eyes are shut in fervent prayer. If Noemi could pray like that, maybe she wouldn’t be so scared. Esther’s long golden hair is pinned up in thick braids that ring her head like a halo, and Noemi feels her courage kindle back into flame.

  I’m doing this for Esther. If I don’t save anyone else, at least I can save her.

  For a while, anyway.

  Most of the soldiers harnessed near Noemi are between the ages of sixteen and twenty-eight. Noemi is only seventeen. Her generation is decimating itself.

  And the Masada Run will be their greatest sacrifice.

  It’s a suicide mission—though no one uses the word suicide. Seventy-five ships will strike at once, all running at the same target. Seventy-five ships will blow themselves up. Noemi will be flying one of them.

  The Masada Run won’t win the war. But it will buy Genesis time. Her life for time.

  No. Noemi looks at Esther again. Your life for hers.

  Thousands have fallen in the past few years of this war, and there’s no victory in sight. This spaceship they’re on now is almost forty years old, which makes it one of the newest in the Genesis fleet. But each glance shows Noemi another flaw: the patching that hints at a past hull breach, the scarred windows that blur the stars outside, the wear on the harnesses that anchor her and her fellow soldiers into their seats. They even have to limit the use of artificial gravity to conserve power.

  This is the price Genesis pays for a pristine environment, for the health and strength of every living thing on their world. Genesis will make nothing new while something old still functions. Her society’s oath to limit manufacture and industry has profited them more than it cost—or it had, before the war erupted again, years after all the weapons factories had been shut down, after new fighter ships had been built.

  The Liberty War had seemed to end over three decades ago; of course they’d trusted in their victory. Her planet had begun scaling back. The scars of the war still lingered; Noemi understands that more than most. But even she, along with everyone else, had believed they were truly safe.

  Two years ago, the enemy returned. Since then, Noemi has learned to fire weapons and how to fly a single-pilot fighter. She’s learned how to mourn friends who had fought beside her only hours before. She’s learned what it’s like to look over the horizon, see smoke, and realize the nearest town is now only so much rubble.

  She’s learned how to fight. Next she has to learn how to die.

  The enemy’s ships are new. Their weapons are more powerful. And their soldiers aren’t even flesh and blood. Instead they have mech armies: robots, shaped like humans but without mercy, without vulnerabilities, without souls.

  What kind of cowards go to war but refuse to fight it
themselves? Noemi thinks. How evil do you have to be to kill another world’s people and risk none of your own?

  Today’s just a practice run, she reminds herself. No big deal. You’ll fly it through, get it down, so when the day comes, no matter how scared you are, you can—

  Orange lights along each row begin to flash, warning all troops that the artificial magnetic gravity is about to kick in. It’s too early. The other soldiers exchange worried glances, but the threat galvanizes Noemi. She shifts herself into position and takes a deep breath.

  Wham! Hundreds of feet slam onto the metal floor at once. Noemi’s hair tumbles down to her chin, kept back from her face by the padded band she wears at the top of her forehead. Instantly she snaps into battle mode, untethering herself from her harness and reaching for her helmet. Her dark-green exosuit feels heavy again, but it’s supple, as ready for battle as she is.

  Because it sounds like the battle is waiting for them.

  “All warriors to their fighters!” shouts Captain Baz. “Signs indicate we’ve got ships coming through the Gate any second. We launch in five!”

  Her dread vanishes, scorched away by warrior instinct. Noemi joins the lines of soldiers separating into squadrons and hurrying down the narrow corridors that lead to their individual fighters.

  “Why are they here?” murmurs one round-faced guy, a newbie just ahead of her in line, as they dash through a tunnel with missing panels and exposed wiring. His skin has gone death-white beneath his freckles. “Do they know what we’re going to do?”

  “They haven’t blown us up yet, right?” Noemi points out. “That means they haven’t found out about the Masada Run. It’s lucky we were up here when they came through, so we can fight them off farther from home. Okay?”

  The poor new kid nods. He’s shaking. Noemi would like to be more comforting, but the words would probably come out wrong. She’s all rough edges and sharp elbows, her heart hidden so well by a quick temper that almost nobody ever recognizes she has one. Sometimes she wishes she could turn herself inside out. That way people would see the good in her before they saw the bad.

  Battle brings out her bad side, where it’s actually a positive. Anyway, no point in trying to improve herself now.

  Esther, who’s directly ahead of the boy, turns and smiles at him. “It’s going to be all right,” she promises in her soft voice. “You’ll see. When you’re in your fighter, your training will kick in, and you’ll feel braver than anything.” He smiles back, already steadier.

  After Noemi was orphaned, she hated the world for existing, she hated other people for not hurting as much as she did, and she hated herself for continuing to breathe. As kind as the Gatsons had been to take her in, she couldn’t miss the looks Esther’s parents gave each other—the exasperation of doing so much for someone who couldn’t or wouldn’t appreciate it. Years went by before Noemi could feel any gratitude, or much of anything at all besides anger and bitterness.

  But Esther never made her feel bad. In those first awful days, even though they’d been only eight years old, Esther had already known not to try comforting her friend with cheap words about memories or God’s will. She’d known all Noemi needed was for someone just to be there, asking nothing of her but making sure she knew she wasn’t alone.

  How come none of that ever rubbed off on me? Noemi thinks as they hurry through the final corridors. Maybe she should’ve asked for lessons.

  Esther shifts to the side, guiding the scared boy ahead of her to fall into step by Noemi’s side. Immediately she says to Noemi, “Don’t worry.”

  Too late. “You don’t have a fighter today. Only a scout ship. You can’t go out into battle in that thing; you should just monitor us from here. Tell Captain Baz.”

  “What do you think she’ll say? Sit here, get some knitting done? Scouts can transmit a lot of valuable info during a skirmish.” Esther shakes her head. “You can’t keep me out of every fight, you know.”

  No, just the worst one. “If you get hurt up here, your parents will kill me, and that’s if Jemuel doesn’t get to me first.”

  Esther’s face does this thing every time Noemi mentions Jemuel: Her cheeks pink with pleasure, and she presses her lips together to hold back her smile. But her eyes look as stricken as if she’d just seen Noemi lying wounded and bleeding on the floor. Once, Noemi had been glad to see that—to know that Esther cared about Noemi’s heartbreak as much as her own happiness—but now it’s just irritating. She says only, “Noemi, it’s my duty to be out here. The same as yours. So let it go.”

  As usual, Esther’s right. Noemi takes a deep breath and runs faster through the corridor.

  Her division reaches its launch array—a line of small, single-pilot fighter ships as sleek and streamlined as darts. Noemi jumps into her pilot’s seat. Across the room, she can see Esther doing the same, with just as much purpose as if she could really fight. As the translucent cockpit canopy locks over her and Noemi clamps her helmet into place, Esther gives her a look, the one that means Hey, you know I’m not really upset with you, right? She’s good at that look, especially for someone who almost never loses her temper.

  Noemi gives her the usual smile back, the one that means Everything’s fine. Probably Noemi isn’t good at that, because Esther’s the only person she ever shows it to.

  But Esther grins. She gets it. That’s enough.

  The launch-bay panel begins to open, exposing the squadron’s fighters to the cold darkness of space at the farthest reaches of their solar system. Genesis is hardly more than a faint green dot in the distance; the sun she was born under still dominates the sky, but it appears smaller from here than either of her planet’s moons looks from the surface. For that first instant, when there’s nothing before Noemi but infinite stars, it’s beautiful—beyond beautiful—and she thrills at the sight as if it were her first time seeing it.

  And as always, she wishes her most secret, most selfish wish: If only I could explore it all—

  Then the panel opens fully to reveal the Genesis Gate.

  The Gate is an enormous, brushed-silver ring of interlocking metal components, dozens of kilometers wide. Within the ring, Noemi can glimpse a faint shimmer like the surface of water when it’s almost too dark for a reflection, but not quite. This would be beautiful, too, if it weren’t the greatest threat to Genesis’s safety. Each Gate stabilizes one end of a singularity—a shortcut through space-time that allows a ship to travel partway across the galaxy in a mere instant. This is how the enemy reaches them; this is where all the battles begin.

  In the distance Noemi can make out the evidence of some of those past battles—scrap left over from ships blown to pieces long ago. Some bits of the debris are mere splinters of metal. Other chunks are enormous twisted slabs, even entire blasted-out ships. These remnants have settled into lazy orbit around the Gate’s gravitational pull.

  But they hardly matter compared to the dark gray shapes speeding away from the Gate, slicing into their system. These are the ships of the enemy, the planet determined to conquer Genesis and take their lands and resources for its own forever:

  Earth.

  They poisoned their own world. Colonized Genesis only so they could move billions of people here and poison it in turn. But worlds that sustain life are few and precious. They’re sacred. They have to be protected.

  The signal lights flare. She releases her docking clamps as Captain Baz’s voice speaks to the squadron via her helmet mic: “Let’s get out there.”

  Disengage clamps: Check. Noemi’s ship floats free of its moorings, hanging weightless. The others rise beside her, all of them ready to scramble. Her hands move to the brightly colored panel before her. She knows each button and toggle by heart, understands what each light means. Systems readouts normal: Check.

  Ignition: Check.

  Her fighter leaps forward, a silver comet against the blackness of space. The shimmer in the Gate brightens like a star going supernova—a warning that more Earth forces are on the way.


  Her hands tighten on the controls as she sees the Gate burst into light, and ships begin to crash through, one after the other.

  “We have five—no, seven confirmed Damocles-class ships!” Captain Baz says over comms. “We caught ’em by surprise. Let’s use it.”

  Noemi accelerates, her silver fighter streaking toward the farthest Damocles vessel. These long, flat, boxy ships are unencumbered with artificial gravity or extensive life support, because they aren’t for carrying humans. Instead, depending on ship size, each Damocles carries anywhere from a dozen to a hundred mechs, each one heavily armed, programmed for battle, and ready to kill.

  Mechs aren’t afraid to die, because they aren’t even alive. They have no souls. They’re pure machines of death.

  Pure evil.

  Noemi’s eyes narrow as she sees the first hatches open. Thank God, these are smaller ships, but they’re still carrying a powerful mech force. If they could just blast one or two of the Damocles ships into atoms before they launch their deadly cargo—

  Too late. The mechs shoot out wearing metal exoskeletons, with just enough sheathing to keep the robotic warriors inside from freezing in the coldness of space. As the Genesis fighters approach, the mechs begin to shift position. They spread their limbs wide to expand their shooting range, like carnivores pouncing on prey. As long as Noemi’s fought, as hard as she’s trained, she still shudders at the sight.

  “Attack sequence—now!” Baz calls, and battle cries echo through Noemi’s helmet. Noemi spins her fighter left, choosing her first target.

  Over comms, one guy yells, “Kill ’em all!”

  Blaster bolts from the mechs slash through the air toward Noemi, fiery orange streaks that could cripple a fighter in moments. She banks left, fires back. All around her, Genesis fighters and Earth mechs scatter, formations dissolving in the chaos of battle.

  Like most people of Genesis, Noemi believes in the Word of God. Even if she sometimes has questions and doubts the elders can’t answer, she can quote chapter and verse on the value of life, the importance of peace. Even though the things she’s blowing out of the sky aren’t truly alive, they’re… human-shaped. The bloodlust stirred up inside her feels wrong in a way that all her righteous fury can’t entirely cure. But she powers through it. She has to, for the sake of her fellow soldiers, and for her world.