Skyward

by Brandon Sanderson

  I used my light-lance to turn sharply into the tunnel.

  “You have slightly under two minutes until you die a fiery death and I’m left with only Rig and the slug. I haven’t been able to compute which of those two is the less engaging conversationalist. Take that tunnel above you.”

  I followed his instructions, curving through the maddening complex of turns and tunnels. The sounds outside grew louder. Wrenching steel. Shaking. Hollow explosions.

  Sweat soaked the sides of my helmet. I gave my entire attention to the flying, absorbed. Dedicated. Focused.

  Though I never lost control of my flying, a part of me started to feel disconnected. The insides of my helmet began to grow hot, and I could swear that I could hear voices inside my head. Just fragments of words.

  …detonate…

  …turn…

  …booster…

  Nedd and I burst back into that cavernous opening at the outer rim of the shipyard. My focus faded into relief, and I didn’t need M-Bot’s instructions to turn straight for the glowing gap in the wall.

  Nedd and I darted out of the hole and nearly plowed right into the ground. The shipyard had almost hit the surface.

  I pulled up and skimmed the blue-grey surface, kicking up dust behind me. Nedd cursed softly. We’d entered a narrow, shrinking gap of space between station and ground.

  “The Krell have just detonated several large explosives on the top of the shipyard,” M-Bot said.

  I bolted forward under the shipyard. The steel ceiling overhead lowered, chunks of metal breaking off and warping around us as the thing’s structural integrity collapsed.

  “At current velocity, you will not escape the blast wave,” M-Bot said softly.

  “Overburn, Nedd!” I shouted, slamming my throttle all the way forward. “Mag-10!” The GravCaps kicked in, but quickly overloaded, and a moment later I was smashed backward in my seat.

  My face grew heavy, the skin pulling back from my eyes and around my mouth. My arms felt leaden and tried to slip away from the controls.

  Ahead, the way out—freedom—was an ever-shrinking line of light.

  My Poco started to rattle as I hit Mag-10, then continued, pushing to Mag-10.5. The vibration got worse, and my shield grew bright from the sudden heat of wind resistance.

  Blessedly, it was enough. Nedd and I exploded out from underneath the shipyard as it crashed down, spraying dust and debris after us. But at these speeds, we quickly outran that—and outran the sound of the crash, since we were going several times the speed of sound.

  I breathed out, decelerating carefully, the rattling subsiding.

  Nedd on my wing, we swooped around—and in those seconds of flight after escaping, we’d gotten far enough away that I couldn’t even see the dust of the crashing shipyard. My sensors barely registered the shock wave when it finally hit us on our way to rendezvous with the others.

  Eventually, we did get close enough that I could make out the enormous dust cloud the crash had caused. The wreckage itself was just a big dark shadow in the dust, swarming with smaller specks above. Krell ships, making sure nothing useful could be salvaged from the enormous wreck. Acclivity stone could often be recovered from the core of fallen debris, but concentrated destructor fire—or the intense heat from the right kind of an explosion—would ruin it.

  “Finally,” Jorgen said as we fell in with the flight. “What in the stars were you two thinking?”

  I didn’t respond, instead doing a count of our team. Seven ships, including mine. We’d all made it. We were sweaty, rattled, and solemn—almost nobody said anything as we met up with Riptide Flight for the return to base. But we were alive.

  Coward.

  Nedd’s voice echoed inside my brain, more distracting than the heat from the sensors in my helmet, or the surreal place my thoughts had gone as we flew out. Had I really thought I’d heard voices?

  I wasn’t a coward. Sometimes you had to retreat. The entire DDF had pulled back from this fight. I wasn’t less of a soldier because I had convinced Nedd to escape. Right?

  It was growing dark by the time we landed at the launchpad. I stripped off my helmet and climbed from the cockpit, exhausted. Jorgen met me at the bottom of the ladder.

  “You still haven’t answered me,” he snapped. “I left you alone during the flight back, as I’m sure you’re rattled, but you are going to explain yourself.” He grabbed me by the arm and held on to it tightly. “You nearly got Nedd killed with that stunt.”

  I sighed, then looked at his hand.

  He carefully let go. “The question remains,” he said. “That was crazy, even for you. I can’t believe you’d—”

  “As much as I like being the crazy one, Jerkface, I’m too tired to listen to you right now.” I nodded toward Nedd’s ship in the dim light. “He flew in. I followed. You’d rather I let him go alone?”

  “Nedd?” Jorgen said. “He’s too levelheaded for something like that.”

  “Maybe the rest of us are getting to him. All I know is there were a couple of Sigos from Nightstorm Flight who picked up some enemy tails, and Nedd would not let go.”

  “Nightstorm Flight?” Jorgen asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  Jorgen fell silent, then turned and walked toward Nedd’s ship. I followed, feeling wrung out, my head starting to ache in a strange way—like needles behind my eyes. Nedd’s ship was empty, and he wasn’t with the others, who were gathering at the rooms near the launchpad to change out of their pressure suits. They were laughing together now that the stress of the battle had faded.

  Jorgen took off down the path between launchpads, and I followed, confused, until we reached a line of seven Sigo-class starfighters branded with the Nightstorm Flight logo. They’d gotten back before us, and their pilots had already gone, leaving the ships to the maintenance crews.

  Nedd knelt on the pavement near two empty spots in the line of ships.

  “What?” I asked Jorgen.

  “His brothers, Spin. They’re wingmates, Nightstorm Six and Seven.”

  The pilots we’d been following. The ones who, it now became obvious, had both died in those dark tunnels.

  Nedd didn’t come to class the next day.

  Or the day after that. Or all that week.

  Cobb kept us busy running chase exercises. We swooped, dodged, and tagged one another, like real pilots.

  But in the moments between the action, Nedd’s voice haunted me.

  Coward.

  I thought about it again as I sat in my classroom mockpit, running through exercises. I’d broken off the chase and had forced Nedd to abandon his brothers. Was that something any hero of legend would ever have done?

  “Statistical projections indicate that if you’d remained in your pursuit for another seven seconds,” M-Bot said as I ran through a holographic dogfighting exercise, “you’d have died in the crash-down or subsequent explosion.”

  “Could you have broken into the radio channel?” I said to him, whispering because we were in the classroom. “And called Nedd’s brothers?”

  “Yes, I probably could have.”

  “We should have thought of that. Maybe if we’d coordinated, we could have helped them escape.”

  “And how would you have explained your sudden ability to hack DDF communications signals?”

  I dove in my chase of the holographic Krell, and didn’t reply. If I’d been a true patriot, I’d have long ago turned the ship over to my superiors. But I wasn’t a patriot. The DDF had betrayed and killed my father, then lied about it. I hated them for that…but hate them or not, I’d still come begging to them to let me fly.

  Suddenly, that seemed to be another act of cowardice.

  I growled softly, using my light-lance to spin around a chunk of hovering debris, then slamming my overburn. I darted past the Krell ship and hit
my IMP, killing both of our shields, then rotated on my axis. That pointed my nose backward while I was still flying forward—but I managed to spray destructors at the Krell behind me, destroying it.

  That was a dangerous maneuver on my part, as it oriented me the wrong way for watching where I was going. Indeed, another Krell ship immediately swooped in on my right flank and fired on me. I died with my “shield down” klaxon blaring in my ear.

  “Pretty stunt,” Cobb said in my ear as my hologram reset. “Great way to die.”

  I unbuckled and stood up, tearing off my helmet and tossing it aside. It bounced off my seat and clattered against the floor as I walked to the back of the room and started to pace.

  Cobb stood in the center of the circle of imitation cockpits, little holographic ships spinning around him. He wore an earpiece to speak with us over our helmet lines. He eyed me as I paced, but he let me be.

  “Scud, Quirk!” he yelled at Kimmalyn instead. “That fighter was obviously going through an S-4 sequence, trying to bait you! Pay attention, girl!”

  “Sorry!” she exclaimed from inside her cockpit. “Oh, and sorry about that too!”

  “Sir?” Arturo asked, shrouded in his training hologram. “The Krell do that a lot, don’t they? Lead us along?”

  “Hard to say,” Cobb said with a grunt.

  I continued to pace, working out my frustration—mostly at myself—as I listened. Though they were seated in the circle, their voices were muffled by their helmets and the mockpit enclosures. Hearing it all reassured me that when I whispered to M-Bot in my mockpit, the others wouldn’t overhear, so long as I remembered to be very soft.

  Their flight chitchat was calming to me. I slowly stopped my pacing, stepping up to join Cobb near the central hologram.

  “The other day,” Arturo continued, “with that big chunk of space debris. Their attack wasn’t to defeat us, but to destroy it—and presumably keep us from salvaging it. Right?”

  “Yes,” Cobb said. “What’s your point, Amphi?”

  “Just that, sir, they must have known it was going to fall. They live out there, in space. And so they probably saw that chunk up there, all those years. They could have destroyed it at any time, but they waited until it fell. Why?”

  I nodded. I’d wondered the very same thing.

  “Krell motives are unknowable,” Cobb said. “Other than their desire to exterminate us, of course.”

  “Why have they never attacked with more than a hundred ships at once?” Arturo continued. “Why do they continue to bait us into skirmishes, instead of sending in one overwhelming attack?”

  “Why do they let salvage fall in the first place?” I added. “Without it, we wouldn’t be able to get enough acclivity rings to keep up a resistance. Why don’t we attack them in the rubble belt? Why wait for them to come down here and—”

  “Enough training,” Cobb said, walking over to his desk and hitting the button that disengaged all of the holograms.

  “Sorry, sir,” I said.

  “Don’t apologize, cadet,” Cobb said. “You either, Amphisbaena. You both ask good questions. Everyone, helmets off. Sit up. Pay attention. Considering how long it’s been, we’ve learned frighteningly little about the Krell—but I’ll tell you what we do know.”

  I felt myself growing eager as the others removed their helmets. Answers? Finally?

  “Sir,” Jorgen said, standing up. “Aren’t Krell details classified, only available to full pilots?”

  Arturo groaned softly and rolled his eyes. His expression seemed to read: Thank you, Jorgen, for never being any fun whatsoever.

  “Nobody likes a tattler, Jorgen,” Cobb said. “Shut up and listen. You need to know this. You deserve to know this. Being a First Citizen gives me some leeway on what I can say.”

  I stepped back beside my mockpit as Cobb called up something with his hologram: a planet. Detritus? It did have chunks of metal floating around it, but the rubble belt extended farther—and was thicker—than I’d expected.

  “This,” he said, “is an approximation of our planet and the rubble belt. Truth is, we have only a rough idea what’s up there. We lost a lot of whatever we did know when the Krell bombed the archive and our command staff back in LD-zero. But some of our scientists think that at one time, a shell surrounded the entire planet, like a metal shield. Problem is, a lot of those old mechanisms up there are still active—and they have guns.”

  He watched the holographic planet—which glowed softly blue and was transparent—launch a group of holographic fighters. They got close to the rubble belt, and were shot down by hundreds of destructors.

  “It’s dangerous up there,” Cobb continued. “Even for the Krell. That’s why the old fleet came here, to this old graveyard of a planet. What little the old people remember indicates that Detritus was known, but avoided, back in the day. Its shielding severely interfered with communications, and when facing the old orbital defense platforms, our fleet barely made it through to crash on the surface.

  “The Krell don’t seem to explore much out there. They might have known that old shipyard was going to fall, but getting to it through the rubble belt would have been costly. They seem to have found a few safe pathways to the planet, and they use those almost exclusively.”

  “So…,” I said, fascinated. This was all new to me. “Could we use those old defense platforms somehow?”

  “We’ve tried,” Cobb said. “But it’s dangerous for us to fly up there as well—the platforms will fire on us too. Also, the Krell are more deadly up in space. Remember the way this planet is shielded? Well, the Krell have strange advanced communications abilities. The planet’s shielding interferes with their capacity to talk to each other; we think that’s why they fly worse down here.

  “There’s another issue, smaller,” Cobb said, seeming to grow hesitant about something. “In space, beyond the planet, the Krell can…well, the old crews say that Krell technology lets them read what humans are thinking. And that some people are more susceptible to this than others.”

  I shared looks with the rest of the flight. I’d never heard anything like that before.

  “Don’t tell anyone I told you that part though,” Cobb said.

  “So…,” Arturo said. “This communication interference, and those orbital defenses, are why the Krell don’t bombard us from space?”

  “In the early days of Alta,” Cobb said, “they tried to bring in some larger ships, but those got destroyed by orbital defenses. The Krell can only get small, maneuverable ships through to attack us.”

  “That doesn’t explain why they send relatively small flights,” Arturo said. “Unless I’m wrong, they’ve never sent an assault larger than a hundred ships. Right?”

  Cobb nodded.

  “Why not send two hundred? Three hundred?”

  “We don’t know. Dig into the classified reports, and you’ll find nothing more than wild theories. Perhaps a hundred ships is the most they can coordinate at once.”

  “Okay,” Arturo said, “but why do they seem to only be able to prepare a single lifebuster at a time? Why not load every ship with one, and suicide them into us? Why—”

  “What are they?” I interrupted. Arturo had good questions—but in my opinion, less important than that.

  Arturo glanced at me, then nodded.

  “Do we know, Cobb?” I asked. “In those secret files, does somebody know? Have we ever seen a Krell?”

  Cobb changed the hologram to a hovering image of a burned-out helmet and some pieces of armor. I shivered. Krell remains. His hologram was a much more detailed, much more real version of the artistic renditions I’d seen. The photo showed a few scientists standing at a table around the armor, which was squat and bulky. Kind of squarish.

  “This is all we’ve ever been able to recover,” Cobb said. “And we only find it in occasional ships we s
hoot down. One in a hundred or fewer. They aren’t human, of that we’re sure.” He showed another image, a closer-up hologram of one of the helmets, burned out from a crash.

  “There are theories,” Cobb continued. “The old people, who lived on the Defiant itself, talk of things impossible to our current understanding. Maybe the reason we never find anything but armor is because there isn’t anything else to find. Maybe the Krell are the armor. In the old days, there were legends of something strange. Machines that can think.”

  Machines that can think.

  Machines with advanced communications technology.

  I suddenly felt cold. The room seemed to fade, and I stood there beside my mockpit, hearing the others talk as if from far away.

  “That’s crazy,” Hurl said. “A piece of metal can’t think, any more than a rock can. Or that door. Or my canteen.”

  “More crazy than the idea that they can read minds?” Arturo asked. “I’ve never heard anything like that.”

  “There are obviously wonders in this galaxy that we can barely comprehend,” Cobb said. “After all, the Defiant and other ships could travel between stars in the blink of an eye. Thinking machines would explain why so many Krell cockpits we investigate are empty, and why the ‘armor’ we recover never seems to have any bodies in it.”

  Machines that can think.

  Cobb called the end of the day then, and we all gathered our things to leave for dinner. Kimmalyn and FM both complained that they had a cold—one had been going around—so Cobb suggested they go back to their room and rest. He said he’d have an aide send dinner to their bunks.

  I heard all of this, but didn’t really. Instead, I sat down in a daze. M-Bot. A ship that could think, and could infiltrate our communications with apparent ease. What if…what if I was repairing a Krell? Why hadn’t I ever bothered to think about that? How could I be so blind to what seemed like an obvious possibility?

  He has a cockpit, I thought, with English writing. Facilities for a pilot. And he says he can’t fly the ship himself.