Untitled 6619

by Penguin Random House

  Nothing happened.

  After a really long silence, Jorgen opened his eyes. “It’s not working.”

  “Maybe it’s not scared anymore,” Rig said. “You showed it the eyes and nothing happened. If someone showed me the same scary image over and over again, I would stop being frightened of it.”

  “Good point,” Jorgen said. “Maybe we need to think of something else that scares them?”

  “Or use another slug,” I said. I reached into the crate and pulled out Happy. “Let’s try this one.”

  With Happy secured inside the box, Jorgen closed his eyes again.

  And then, without warning, he disappeared.

  “Owwww,” Jorgen said, and Rig and I spun around to find him lodged inside one of the cubbyholes filled with rolled-up design schematics. The rolls of papers were all crushed to the sides, and Jorgen’s body was folded with his knees up to his chin. The box with the slug in it was jammed in front of him, and he pushed it out, shoving it onto the floor with a clang. Jorgen swore.

  I giggled, and Rig snickered and then started to laugh.

  “It’s not funny!” Jorgen shouted.

  “I think the evidence is against you there, Flightleader,” I said, though he was right. Sure, him being crunched up in that cubbyhole was amusing, but what if the slug had hyperjumped somewhere more dangerous, or smaller? The slugs were used to finding spaces for their own body mass, and we didn’t even know if they were perfect at that.

  I think Rig had the same thoughts at the same time, because he crossed the room and helped Jorgen extract himself. Jorgen rubbed one of the bandaged cuts on his elbow.

  “I don’t think we should test it like that again,” I said.

  “Agreed,” Jorgen said. “I wonder if the slugs have more awareness when they’re teleporting an entire ship. It seems like bad design to use a creature to teleport that wants to crunch you into a tiny space.”

  Rig nodded. “I’m still impressed we managed to make it work at all.”

  “We did,” I said. “But what’s the point?”

  “The point?” Jorgen asked. “Of learning to use the slugs as hyperdrives?”

  “Of having hyperdrives that only teleport cytonics,” I said. “If it requires a cytonic to use a hyperdrive, and cytonics themselves can teleport without hyperdrives—”

  “Maybe it comes back to the projections,” Rig said. “They project something frightening onto the inside of the box, and then a cytonic isn’t necessary. My team can work with the projector to see if we can get it to project inside a box we can install in a ship.”

  “Besides,” Jorgen said, “I am a cytonic and I don’t know how to hyperjump. If I can make the slugs do it, we’re still up from where we were, even if there are easier ways out there.”

  That was true, but something about it still bothered me.

  Rig considered for a moment. “You might be right that the slugs are more aware of their size when they’re taking a whole ship with them. M-Bot might also have had some way to deal with being placed in a small space, though I’m not sure what it would have been.”

  “So what do we do now?” I asked.

  “We don’t really have a choice,” Jorgen said. “Dangerous or not, we need to try this out in a ship.”

  Nine

  We all agreed it would be best if Jorgen didn’t try to use the hyperdrive for the first time while piloting a ship. Cobb granted us the use of one of the two-seater Dulo-class fighters, which had pilot and copilot seats side by side. The cockpit of the Dulo was still narrow, with the fuselage only a little wider than a Largo class. Even so, as I climbed in, the cockpit felt smaller than normal, like the fuselage was squeezing in on me.

  Rig had bolted his metal box under the dash between the instruments and the floor, so the slugs couldn’t hyperjump without taking the rest of the ship with them. He was already working on some duplicate boxes, in case we got this to work.

  At least this time we weren’t flying out into the black. The Krell hadn’t pierced the debris belt in months, so chances were good I wasn’t going to have to watch any of my friends get shot out of the sky today.

  Didn’t make it any easier to be in the pilot’s seat again.

  “You’re sure we’re ready for this?” I said to Jorgen as we climbed into the ship.

  “No,” Jorgen said. “But I don’t think we can afford to wait. The engineers are working on the defenses, but they say they have no way to know if they’ll ever be functional.”

  Jorgen settled in the copilot seat, shoulder to shoulder with me. This was going to take some getting used to; I was accustomed to having a bit more space from my flightleader while I was flying.

  Jorgen checked on the slugs in the box. We had Gill and Happy in there, plus a couple other yellow slugs. We all agreed we needed to bring more than one, in case something went wrong and we lost some of them in transport.

  “All right,” Jorgen said beside me. “Let’s do this.”

  I put on my headset and turned on my radio, setting the channel for Command, which in this case connected me with Rig.

  “We’re ready,” I told him.

  “Copy,” Rig said. “Skyward Flight, you are cleared for departure.”

  I engaged our acclivity ring, and several other ships lifted out of the landing bay alongside us. We hadn’t gathered the entire flight, but Sadie, Kimmalyn, Nedd, and Arturo were all accompanying us in case we got into trouble. Jorgen jumped on the channel we shared with them—he was still flightleader, even if he wasn’t technically flying.

  “Skyward Flight,” he said. “Descend to 100,000 feet and meet at coordinates 334-1280. Quirk and Sentry, you two fly ahead to scout the area for unexpected debris fall. Amphi and Nedder, follow us in point formation.”

  Our flightmates sounded off, and then I accelerated. We flew at half a Mag until we’d slipped down through a gap in the belt of platforms, soaring beneath the lights that illuminated the planet from the debris layer.

  Jorgen fidgeted nervously with the bandage beneath his chin. “You worried this won’t work?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I’m also worried that it will.”

  That made sense. We needed to be able to get off Detritus, but I didn’t envy Jorgen being the key to it all. We knew how to hide on this hole of a planet and fight for our lives. Everything else was a great unknown.

  “What did Alanik say to you?” I asked. “When she spoke in your mind right before she left?”

  Jorgen was quiet for a moment, and I expected him to say it was classified, but he didn’t. “She said I was powerful. That I shouldn’t let other people control me.”

  Huh. “Is that it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  “Why did you lie about it?”

  Jorgen sighed. “It didn’t seem like a great thing to say in front of my mother. But I told Cobb the truth when he debriefed me.”

  “Why do you think she said that?” Alanik seemed to have issues with authority, which made her fit right in with the Defiant League. She didn’t trust us either, though. Not that I could blame her.

  “I don’t know,” Jorgen said. “Maybe on her planet the cytonics are in charge? It might feel foreign to her that people who can teleport across the galaxy on a whim would listen to a chain of command.”

  “You don’t agree with that though,” I said. Jorgen was the champion of the chain of command. He knew protocol forward and backward, better even than Cobb did.

  Jorgen shook his head. “It’s one thing to have power, but if you don’t direct it you can end up making huge mistakes and hurting people. There’s a reason Command is in control.”

  “And the National Assembly?” I asked. “Do you think they should take command power away from the DDF?”

  Jorgen shrugged. “I think they have a point. Our military sho
uldn’t head up diplomacy for the Defiant League.”

  I gave him a look.

  Jorgen sighed. “Neither should my mother, okay? They sent her to be the liaison to the military. She isn’t a diplomat.”

  “Do we have people like that on Detritus?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jorgen said. “You did pretty well at it.”

  I snorted. “I don’t have training as a diplomat.”

  “No,” Jorgen said. “But no one here does. You’re a scudding better diplomat than my mother, that’s for sure.”

  That wasn’t a comforting thought. We had a system for training pilots, for fighting the Krell. We’d spent generations perfecting it.

  What would we do now that circumstances suddenly demanded different skills, skills we hadn’t valued as a people?

  “We’re going to have to figure it out,” I said. “Quickly, if this works.”

  Jorgen looked at the instrumentation. “We’re getting close to our heading. I’m going to focus on the slugs now.”

  “All right,” I said. “Just…try not to hyperjump us anywhere dangerous, okay?”

  Jorgen didn’t respond. He still didn’t know how to relay cytonic coordinates, which meant he’d have no control over where he sent us.

  There was a lot more debris down here to crash into if the slugs decided to teleport us into a tight space the way they did with Jorgen in the engineering bay, but we didn’t dare try this experiment outside the atmosphere where the remaining Superiority outposts might observe us.

  Still, the slugs had only teleported meters away in the lab. None of them had left Platform Prime—I’d always been able to find them again. They weren’t likely to choose this moment to take us light-years away. If they did, we’d still have a hyperdrive; we could figure out how to get back.

  Except Spensa left with the same intentions, and now no one knew where she was—another reason Jorgen shouldn’t try to hyperjump in a ship by himself.

  I didn’t think the two of us being lost in space was a huge step up.

  As we reached the area we’d designated for experimentation, Kimmalyn and Sadie shot off ahead, canvassing the area in their sleek scout ships. I liked flying scout-class ships better than the heavier classes, and I was going to miss that maneuverability if we needed it.

  “Call Rig,” Jorgen said, his eyes closed behind his visor. “Tell him we’re ready.”

  “Rig,” I said over the general channel. “We’re ready to begin.”

  “Everything’s clear out here,” Kimmalyn added. “No debris, no transport ships, nothing.”

  “Jerkface, you ready for this?” Arturo added.

  “Tell them I’m ready,” Jorgen said. But he was gripping the edge of his seat like he was terrified. I didn’t think that was a personal affront to my flying.

  “Jerkface is concentrating,” I said. “He says he’s ready.”

  “Try not to crash into us,” Arturo said.

  “She said Jerkface was concentrating,” Kimmalyn said. “Like the Saint always said, ‘A silent fool is a stealthy fool.’ ”

  “Who are you calling a fool, Quirk?” Nedd asked.

  “Not you,” Sadie said. “You’re never silent.”

  Nedd grunted. “Good thing I’m too dumb to know if that’s what she meant.”

  “Tell them to cut the chatter,” Jorgen said.

  “Guys, stay off the channel,” I said. “And track us on your proximity sensors. We may not move far, but we’ll need to prove if we did move.”

  The channel went quiet, and I glanced at Jorgen.

  “You look like you’re going to throw up,” I said. “Don’t do that in my cockpit.”

  “I’ll try not to,” Jorgen said. “Do you think we’re doing this too soon?”

  “No. I think we’re doing what needs to be done. But if you don’t relax, you might scare that slug enough to hyperjump us a lot farther than we want to go.”

  “Maybe,” Jorgen said. “I don’t know if that’s how it works. I’m trying to relax.”

  “You could hum again.”

  Jorgen opened one eye and glared at me.

  I was joking, but that gave me another idea. “Here,” I said, reaching for my transmitter. “Maybe this will help.”

  I flipped on the transmitter and chose a slow, beautiful piece, played by only a few string instruments. We had banjos and fiddles on Detritus, but the sounds that came out of those were pale shadows of the long, melodious notes soaring from my transmitter.

  Jorgen opened his eyes, and his shoulders did relax a little. “Where did you get that?”

  “From my father,” I said. “Isn’t it beautiful? This is the one I listen to when I’m nervous.”

  Jorgen took a deep breath. “It’s wonderful.”

  It was so sad that while we had this music, we didn’t play it publicly. On Earth, music used to play over the radio all the time. Tune in to an FM channel and you could listen to anything you wanted. It was incredible to me that the air used to be filled with these waves. That was why I picked FM as my callsign: it thrilled me that the initials of my name—Freyja Marten—were the same as the term for music that used to be so widely available.

  “Are you ready?” I asked.

  Jorgen nodded. He did seem a little more relaxed.

  I flipped on the radio again, not bothering to turn off the transmitter. “Rig, are we cleared to hyperjump?”

  “Cleared, FM,” Rig said. “When you’re ready.”

  “Scud, here it goes,” Jorgen said.

  For a moment the music ascended, but nothing else happened. I tightened my grip on my controls, looking out over the barren surface of the planet. We were too high up to see the craggy patterns of the surface, and too far from the debris belt to distinguish more than the largest platforms and pieces of debris. Suspended in the middle, flying at Mag-1 so I’d have more control if we needed to fall into evasive maneuvers. Beside me Jorgen breathed in deeply, and the music dropped into a series of quick, low notes that aligned with my heartbeat.

  Maybe this wasn’t working. Maybe something was wrong. Maybe—

  I blinked, and a chunk of metal debris appeared in front of my ship, bearing down on us.

  No. We were bearing down on it.

  I pulled up, narrowly missing the debris as I slipped into the crack between two large chunks of metal that spun freely in the debris belt—remnants of the systems up here that had long since started to disintegrate. Beside me, Jorgen snapped his eyes open and gasped in surprise as I slipped around the debris and shot downward—at least I thought it was downward; I’d lost all my bearings when we teleported.

  “Look out!” Jorgen shouted, and too late I saw the chunk of rock our boosters had destabilized spinning toward us. We rammed straight into it, cracking our shield, and I rolled the ship to the side to avoid colliding into another piece of debris.

  “FM!” Rig said over the radio. “You guys okay?”

  Jorgen grabbed the radio. “Rig, where the scud are we?”

  “I’ve located you in the debris belt. You’re deep in an unstable area. I’m trying to find the best heading for you to get out.”

  “Scud!” I said, slowing our speed as I wove between large pieces of debris that looked like a platform broken apart at the seams. “Tell him to do it quickly.”

  “Now, Rig,” Jorgen said. “We need that heading now!”

  I swept between two pieces of the platform, but they moved toward me instead of away, folding in on each other as if on a hinge. I accelerated, but Jorgen put a hand on my shoulder.

  And then suddenly we materialized just past the edge of the folding platforms. I watched on my monitors as the monstrous shapes clapped against each other behind us.

  “What did you do?” I asked, swinging us around another chunk of deb
ris.

  “I focused on the space where I wanted us to go,” Jorgen said. “I think I can give the slugs an instruction for where to run, as long as I can see the space I want them to run to. I might be able to do it if I can visualize the place and it’s somewhere they recognize. We’ll have to experiment with that though.”

  The section of the debris field in front of us was a little looser, and I continued to weave through the debris as the music swelled in long, slow swoops. Calm, I thought. Focus. I found a portion of the debris belt with wider, more open spaces and circled around and around while Rig worked on that heading.

  “We could experiment now,” I suggested. “You could visualize the space over Platform Prime and see if the slug will take us there.”

  Through his visor, Jorgen grimaced. He didn’t respond.

  “Jerkface,” I said, “you okay?”

  “Yeah,” Jorgen said. “But I think—I think that second time something heard me.”

  “Heard you?” I asked. “Like, cytonically?”

  “Yeah,” Jorgen said.

  My heart dropped. “A delver?”

  Jorgen shook his head. “I don’t think so. It was like—like it was surprised. It heard me reach out to the taynix, and it was shocked I was there. Like I opened a door and startled the person on the other side.”

  “If it wasn’t a delver, and it wasn’t a taynix—” The only other cytonic on the planet that we knew about was Spensa’s grandmother, though she knew about Jorgen, so she shouldn’t be surprised. “Are there more of you? Because we could use—”

  Jorgen shook his head. “I don’t think it was us,” he said. “I think it was them.”

  Oh. The Superiority? We knew they had cytonics, and it made sense that there would be one or two assigned to the battleships parked near Detritus, especially if they used cytonics to run their hyperdrives. “If they heard you—”

  “Then they know what we’re doing,” Jorgen said. “They might have sensed what we did just now. I don’t know that I want to try it again right away with them listening.”

  That did seem unwise. If they knew we were developing hyperdrives, what would they do to us?