I switched off my transmitter and flipped my radio on. “Nose?” I said. “What the scud was that?”
“Command says delver,” Nose said. “I don’t know what that means, but I’ve heard rumors.”
We’d all heard the rumors. Kimmalyn and some of the other members of Skyward Flight had been there when the engineers managed to break the encryption on the footage of what had happened to the people who used to live on our forgotten planet. I’d missed the footage, but I’d heard about it. Some giant thing had materialized in the space outside the planet and devoured everyone and everything who lived here. I’d expected it to be more…substantial, I guess. More material. That had hardly seemed like a creature at all.
If that was what this had been, why were we still alive?
“Nose,” I said. “Lizard went down over by the gun platforms. The Krell got her. We tried to save her, but—”
“Copy, FM,” Nose said. “You’re sure she didn’t survive?”
I swallowed. “Affirmative. She spiraled into range of the gun platform. Her ship was annihilated.”
The radio was silent again. Nose was Lizard’s flightleader. I’d failed to save Lizard, but Nose hadn’t even been there.
She’d feel as responsible for her loss as I did, maybe more.
“FM? Nose?” Sadie said, only now getting the message it was safe to turn her radio back on. “What just happened?”
“I’m sure we’ll know more soon,” Nose said. “Orders are to regroup, hold until we know the enemy is leaving, then head on back to base.”
That made sense. We couldn’t abandon the battlefield if they intended to rally and keep fighting.
The concern turned out to be unnecessary. The Superiority fleet gathered at the carrier ship, and then the carrier ship blinked out of existence as if it had never been there at all.
“They had a hyperdrive,” I said to Kimmalyn on a private channel. “Maybe we should have been trying to steal it.”
“Spin might have found us one,” Kimmalyn said.
I hoped she had, because the confusion of this fight made it clearer than ever that we were completely out of our depth. Yeah, we were better pilots than the enemy, and we had gained some ground by taking the fight into space. Platform Prime was a convenient place from which to fight, but it was also vulnerable to attack. It was one small step, barely meaningful if we didn’t find a way to get off this rock—if we couldn’t find a way to take the fight to our enemy rather than merely defending ourselves.
In general, I found self-defense to be a much more admirable pursuit than invasion, but a fish could only live in a vat for so long before it was fried.
We were trapped on Detritus, while the enemy could travel anywhere in the universe, had every resource at their disposal. We needed more. More resources. More pilots. More help. More than we could muster with only what remained of the Defiant fleet after it crashed here almost a century ago.
We lost Lizard today; we were dwindling one by one. I was a pilot. I could follow orders. And my team was the best there was, even when pieces of it were missing. But I also wasn’t stupid.
I might not have Cobb’s experience or Spensa’s vision, but I knew if we didn’t figure out how to change the course of the war soon, humanity wasn’t going to survive.
Three
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. H
e 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?”
Untitled 6619 Page 3
