Unless I learned how to use my powers.
“Um, Spensa?” M-Bot said. “Jorgen is calling, and I think he’s annoyed.”
I sighed, then hit the line. “Skyward Ten, reporting in.”
“Are you all right?” he asked with a stern voice.
“Yeah.”
“Good. We’ll discuss this later.” He cut the line.
I winced. He wasn’t annoyed . . . he was furious.
Sadie—the new girl who had been assigned as my wingmate—flew up behind me in Skyward Nine. I sensed a nervousness to the posture of her ship, though perhaps I was reading too much into things. According to our plans, I’d left her behind when the Krell had sent an overwhelming force to destroy me. Fortunately, she’d had enough sense to follow orders and stay close to the others rather than tail me.
We had to wait for orders from Flight Command before flying back toward the planet, so we hovered in space for a short time. And as we did, Kimmalyn nudged her ship up beside mine. I glimpsed through her canopy into her cockpit. She always looked odd to me wearing her helmet, which covered her long dark hair.
“Hey,” she said to me on a private line. “You all right?”
“Yeah,” I said. It was a lie. Every time I used my strange abilities, I felt a conflict inside me. Our ancestors had been afraid of people like me, people with cytonic powers. Before we’d crashed on Detritus, we’d worked in the ships’ engine rooms, powering and guiding our travel.
They’d just called us the people of the engines. Other crew members had shunned us—instilling in our culture traditions and prejudices that had lasted even after we’d forgotten what a cytonic was.
Could it all be just superstition, or was there more to it? I had felt the malevolence of the eyes. In the end, my father had attacked his own kind. We blamed the Krell for that, but I worried. He’d seemed so angry on the tapes.
I worried that whatever I was, my actions would bring more danger than any of us understood.
“Guys?” Sadie asked, pulling her ship up alongside mine. “What does this warning on my console mean?”
I glanced at the flashing light on the proximity monitor, then cursed under my breath and scanned out into the void. I could just barely see the Krell monitoring station out there, and as I watched, something new appeared next to it. Two objects that were even larger than it was.
Capital ships. “Two new ships just arrived in the system,” M-Bot said. “My long-range sensors confirm what Flight Command is seeing. They appear to be battleships.”
“Scud,” FM said over the line. So far, we’d faced only other fighters—but we knew from stolen intel that the enemy had access to at least a few large-scale capital ships like these.
“We have limited data on the armaments of ships like those,” M-Bot said. “The intel you and I stole contained only generalized information. But my processors say those ships are likely equipped to bombard the planet.”
Bombard. They could launch ordnance on the planet from outer space, hitting it with enough firepower to turn even those living in deep caverns to dust.
“They won’t be able to get past the defensive platforms,” I said. That was, we assumed, why the Krell had always used low-altitude bombers in the past, not orbital bombardment. The planet’s platforms had been built with countermeasures to prevent bombardment from a distance.
“And if they just destroy the platforms first?” Sadie said.
“The defenses are too strong for that,” I said.
It was bravado, in part. We didn’t know for sure if Detritus’s defenses could prevent a bombardment. Perhaps once we gained control of them all, we’d be able to determine their full capabilities. We were months away from that, unfortunately.
“Do you hear anything?” Kimmalyn said.
I reached out with my cytonic senses. “Just a faint, soft music,” I said. “Almost like static, but . . . prettier. I’d have to get closer to understand any specifics of what they’re saying.”
I’d always been able to hear the sounds coming from the stars. I’d first thought of it as music when I was younger. During my months of training, and talking to my grandmother, we’d determined that “music” to be the sound of FTL communications being sent through the nowhere. Likely, what I heard now was the sound of that station or those battleships communicating with the rest of the Superiority.
We waited for a long time, orders saying for us to hold position to see if those battleships advanced. They didn’t. It seemed that whatever they’d been sent to do, it wouldn’t happen in the immediate future.
“Orders are in,” Jorgen eventually said over the comm. “Those battleships are settling in, so we’re to report back at Platform Prime. Come on.”
I sighed, then turned my ship around and headed toward the planet. I’d survived the battle.
Now it was time to go get yelled at.
3
M-Bot calculated our approach.
The others still weren’t completely comfortable with him. A computer program that could think and talk like a person? Gran-Gran—who had been a little girl during the days before our people had crashed on Detritus—said she’d heard of such things, but they had been forbidden.
Still, M-Bot provided an advantage we couldn’t ignore. With his hyperefficient calculations, we could easily navigate a path through the defensive platforms surrounding Detritus without the aid of DDF mathematicians.
We carefully maintained the course he indicated, passing just outside the range of the gun emplacements on metal platforms the size of mountain ranges. I noted the shadows of skyscrapers. During my schooling, I’d taken mandatory heritage classes each year—where we’d seen pictures of Old Earth, and had been taken to see animals of many varieties in special caverns where they were bred. So I knew about life there, and about things like skyscrapers, even if I’d always found Gran-Gran’s stories of the ancient times more interesting than the heritage classes.
Those skyscrapers indicated that these platforms around Detritus had been inhabited once, like the planet had been, but something had destroyed them centuries ago.
The sight of all the platforms—curving into what seemed like infinity—never failed to leave me breathless. Our fifty starfighters were specks of dust by comparison. How long had it taken to build all of this? There were maybe a hundred thousand people living in the cave networks that made up our nation, the Defiant Caverns. But that entire population could vanish into just one of these platforms.
The command came to decelerate. I spun M-Bot with the others and pointed my boosters toward the planet. A quiet, easy burn slowed my ship.
Facing backward toward the shells, it all looked faintly like the gears of some eldritch clock going about an unknowable purpose. Each platform rotating in its turn, guns ready to vaporize anyone—human or alien—who tried to interfere. These shells were the reason we were still alive though, so I wasn’t complaining.
Our ships soon passed the nearest shell to the planet, which was distinctive for several reasons. The most obvious was that it held thousands of massive lights that shone like spotlights, illuminating sections of the planet below. These skylights created an artificial day/night cycle.
This inner shell was also in a far worse state of repair than the outer ones. Enormous fields of debris tumbled through space here just outside the atmosphere. This junk was the remnants of—we assumed—platforms that had been destroyed. Some sections had fallen inward, crashing into the planet after losing power.
A voice crackled in my helmet speaker. “Skyward Flight,” a man’s voice said, “and Xiwang Flight. Admiral Cobb has ordered you to dock on Platform Prime. The rest of you, head down to the surface for off-shift rotation.”