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.
Seven
When I left the command center, I headed toward the engineering bay to check on the taynix. I’d told Cobb everything I remembered from my conversation with Alanik, but Cobb had interviewed Jorgen separately, so I still didn’t know what Alanik had said in his head. Jeshua hadn’t been in on either of the meetings, which I was sure had angered her.
I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for her. I was furious that Alanik was gone—and with her our only chance to communicate with Cuna and to train Jorgen in more advanced cytonics. Spensa’s grandmother had helped some, but her knowledge was limited.
The National Assembly was so used to ordering people around and having everyone do what they said. I was glad Jorgen had taken me to talk to Alanik—but it highlighted a huge weakness in our government. We didn’t have diplomats. We weren’t used to cooperation. The Assembly wanted to treat this as a political situation, but they were scudding bad at it. We were supposed
to be Defiant, but what good did that do us if all we did was defy other people to our own detriment?
I had no way to know what Alanik was going to tell her people—our former allies—about the humans of Detritus, but I guessed it wouldn’t be good.
I stopped short at the end of the corridor that led to the engineering bay. Rig’s metal slug box, based off M-Bot’s supposed hyperdrive, was resting in the middle of the floor.
No one else was in sight, and I guessed that Rig hadn’t left it there. I knelt down and opened it, and found the two yellow taynix inside, snuffling around like they were hungry.
If one of them had hyperjumped, it had brought the box and the other slug along with it. Rig must have missed its disappearance, or he would have gone looking for the box and found it as soon as he opened the door to Engineering.
I didn’t know how much it would help, but at this point any news felt like good news. I dropped one of Rig’s location trackers on the floor, picked up the box of slugs, tucked it under my arm, and opened the doors to the engineering bay.
A couple of people from Rig’s team were working on a hunk of metal and wires that looked like it might have come from one of the platforms. Rig was nowhere in sight.
“Have you seen Rodge?” I asked them.
One of them waved a hand at me. “He’s at the platform controls in Charlie Sector.”
My instinct was to feed the taynix in the box first. But if their hunger made them teleport more, I’d wait a little longer and see if we could catch them in the act.
I carried the box with me to Charlie Sector to find Rig. As I passed a series of exterior windows, I looked up at the platforms above ours. I wasn’t exactly sure how they’d been built originally, but the technology of the people who lived here before us was far more advanced than ours.
Until they’d been destroyed by the delver, each and every one of them wiped out, leaving the planet barren and alone.
I didn’t really understand why humans had chosen to live on Detritus to begin with. I’d been born in the caverns, but the stories we told of other planets spoke of green trees and vast oceans, fertile land to grow food instead of vats hidden away in caverns. The surface of Detritus was a craggy wasteland of debris both natural and mechanical. We’d managed to scrape together enough fertile soil to grow orchards near Alta Base, but I didn’t imagine Detritus had ever been a paradise to live on. It seemed strange to me that people with such superior technology chose this place to call home.
If we did manage to use the taynix to escape Detritus, I wondered where we would go. How would we find a place to go, and if we did, how would we know if we’d be safe? Detritus was inhospitable, but it was also familiar. The idea of living somewhere with an ocean like Old Earth seemed mildly terrifying. How did all that water not consume the land around it?
I looked up at the platforms above, imagining the stars beyond—white lights burning brightly against the black. Some of those would have planets around them, planets we could visit in the blink of an eye with FTL travel. But if the Superiority controlled all of them, would we really be able to escape? Would we be able to run far enough, or would we merely be looking for a better battle position?
Alanik seemed to agree with the basic philosophies of the DDF. She didn’t trust peace, and was afraid that we would accept another set of chains for a false promise of safety, and the National Assembly seemed to be leaning in that direction.
I stood by what I said though. I knew my people. We didn’t trust peace any more than Alanik did. In fact, I was afraid we’d never be willing to set down our weapons. A wasteland could feel more comfortable than a paradise, if that was what you were used to. Though I agreed with the Disputers who yearned for peace, I didn’t know that I would be able to trust it.
I reached Charlie Sector and wove between the long rectangular blocks that held a lot of the machinery keeping the platform running. Power matrixes hummed with life, and a water pump churned, supplying our indoor plumbing. Most of the rest of the devices I couldn’t identify. I found Rig standing at the side of one such block. He’d pulled the paneling off the side, revealing a set of wires and circuit boards beneath. The ground around him was littered with pieces of machinery.
Rig’s boss in the Engineering Corps, a woman with long pale hair—whose name I thought was Ziming—stood to the side, looking over the rubble.
“I’ve got Thadwick picking up your work on the platforms,” she said. “We’re close to getting those gun emplacements working. Do you have anything more on the encryption?”
Rig shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’ve been working on the hyperdrives, so I haven’t had time.”
“We’ll keep at it,” Ziming said. “At least we’re into the shield system now. There are still too many questions to run a test yet, but we’re getting closer. Keep up the good work.”
Ziming strode past me, and I nodded to her. Rig was still looking into the tech behind the panel like it was a difficult problem.
“Rig?” I said.
Rig jumped, and then stared at me wide-eyed. “Hey,” he said. “Hey.”
That was not only a one-word utterance, but the same word twice. Not an auspicious beginning. “I found this in the hall.” I lifted the box for him to see. “So unless you left it there, I’m thinking the slugs teleported it.”
“Oh!” Rig said. “Oh, that’s good. Are they still in there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s been most of a day since they’ve eaten, so they’re probably hungry, but I thought I’d leave them that way for a bit so we could see if they’d do it again.”
“That’s great!” Rig said. He rubbed his palms on the pants of his jumpsuit. “Thanks.”
He blinked at me like he wasn’t sure what I was still doing there, and I sighed. I hadn’t trekked all the way out here just to turn around and go back. “Did you hear about what happened with Alanik?”
“I heard she disappeared,” Rig said. He winced. “I guess maybe we should have been more delicate about interrogating a cytonic.”
“I tried to be delicate,” I said. “But I didn’t have the rank to insist others do the same. I got to talk to her a little bit, and I think her people are also being oppressed by the Superiority.” Though evidently the Superiority wasn’t shooting at them. That must be nice.
Rig looked away from me back to the wall he’d been tinkering with. There were a lot of wires in there, and several blocky widgets similar to the ones he’d already removed. Layers and layers of circuits and machinery, extending deep into the unit. I wondered if there was any way to get inside this one, or if it was just a massive block of technology.
I’d meant to catch him at a moment when I could ask him about his work, and this seemed like a good time.
“What was your boss saying?” I asked. “You guys are close to getting the gun platforms working?”
“Not close enough,” Rig said. “The encryption on the gun platforms is a lot heavier than on most of the other platform systems. Which makes sense. If someone is going to hijack your water system, that’s bad. If they hijack your gun emplacements, that can be much worse.”
“I guess so,” I said. “Though I’d rather have working water than working guns.”
“Depends on whether there’s something you need to shoot at in a hurry,” Rig said. “The water will keep you alive in the long term, but it won’t matter if you don’t live through the moment.”
“What did she mean about the shields?” I asked. “It’s something experimental?”
Rig sighed. “Experimental would suggest that we’ve experimented with it. Some of my colleagues managed to hack into the planetary shield system. We’re not entirely sure what a lot of it does, but some of it was clearly intended to turn parts of the debris field into a shield against orbital attacks. But we don’t have a projection of what the shield is supposed to do, let
alone confirmation that it would work.”
I smiled. That was a lot of words all in a row. Coherent words, even. This was definitely progress. Maybe he’d never had an issue with me at all. Maybe he was just that socially awkward.
“What are you doing now?” I asked.
“Trying to find the communicator,” Rig said. “We received that communication, which means we must have some kind of hypercomm. If it can receive, it was probably once designed to send as well—so if we can find and examine it, we might be able to make it work.”
“Did you find it?” I asked. “How did you know where to look?”
“I followed the path of the alerts we received in the main system,” he said. He glanced at me self-consciously. “How is probably boring, but the trail led me here. I think the communicator is somewhere in this block, but I don’t know what a lot of this is.” He glanced at the mess around him. “I don’t want to break the thing in case Cuna sends us another transmission, but if we could get it working, we could respond. And that might be the only way for us to get in touch, now that…”
“Now that Alanik was scared away,” I said. “It really wasn’t my fault.”
Rig looked horrified. “I didn’t say that it was! I mean, I didn’t think it. I mean, I’m sure—” He blushed. “I’m sure you did a great job talking to her. Look, I’ll probably be working on this for a while, so you can take the box back to the lab. Or leave it here and I’ll watch it! Either way is fine.”
He turned back to the machinery, unplugging some wires and then pulling out another block and setting it to the side, inspecting what was beneath it.
I set down the box with the slugs in it. I’d thought we were making progress, but now I was being dismissed. “Is there something I can do to help?”
“No!” Rig said. “I mean, you’re supposed to be watching the slugs, right? I wouldn’t want to keep you.”
Yeah, definitely trying to get rid of me. I was getting really sick of wondering what was going on with him. “What’s your problem with me?” I asked.
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