Skyward

by Brandon Sanderson

  I frowned. Why…ask? Why not just say the words? She had the power now that I’d broken her rules, didn’t she?

  Ironsides turned her chair, fixing me with a cold stare. “Nothing to say, cadet?”

  “Why do you care so much?” I asked. “I’m only one girl. I’m no threat to you.”

  The admiral set down her coffee, then stood. She straightened her crisp white uniform jacket, then stepped up to me. Like most people, she towered over me.

  “You think this is about my pride, girl?” Ironsides asked. “If I let you continue in the DDF, you’ll get good people killed when you inevitably run. So, I offer again. Walk away with the pin. In the city below, it should be enough to secure you any number of jobs, many quite lucrative.”

  She stared at me, hard. And suddenly it made sense.

  She couldn’t kick me out. Not because she lacked the power, but because…she needed me to prove that she was right. She needed me to drop out, give up, because that was what a coward would do.

  Her rules weren’t about tricking me into an infraction. They were about making my life terrible so that I backed down. If she kicked me out, I could continue the narrative. I could claim my family had been wronged. I could scream about my father’s innocence. My treatment would only support my victimhood. Not being able to sleep in the cadet quarters? No food during my training? That would look terrible.

  But if I walked away, she won. It was the only way she won.

  In that moment, I was more powerful than the very admiral in command of the Defiant Defense Force.

  So I saluted. “Can I return to my classes now, sir?”

  A blush rose to her cheeks. “You’re a coward. From a family of cowards.”

  I held the salute.

  “I could destroy you. See you impoverished. You don’t want me as an enemy. Reject my kind offer now, and you will never have another chance at it.”

  I held the salute.

  “Bah,” the admiral said, turning from me and sitting down hard. She grabbed her coffee and drank, as if I weren’t there.

  I took it as a dismissal. I turned and let myself out, and the MP, still standing outside the door, let me go.

  Nobody came for me as I walked to the classroom. I went straight to my mockpit and sat down, then greeted the others as they arrived. When Cobb hobbled in, I realized I was excited for class. It felt as if I’d maybe, finally, escaped the shadow that had been hovering over me since Bim and Morningtide had died.

  The girls and their kindness were part of that, but my conversation with Ironsides was a bigger part. She’d given me what I needed to keep fighting. She’d invigorated me. In a strange way, she’d brought me back to life.

  I would fight. I would find the answers to what had really happened to my father. And Ironsides would regret forcing me to do both.

  Admiral Judy “Ironsides” Ivans always watched the battle replays. She used the main control room, which had a large holographic projector in the center of the circular floor. She preferred to stand in its center, light shining up across her, the rest of the room dark.

  She watched them fight. She watched them die. She forced herself to listen to the audio, if there was any, of each pilot’s last words.

  She tried to read the enemy’s goals in the pattern of red and blue ships—red for the DDF, blue for the Krell. It had been years since she’d been a pilot, yet as she stood with headphones on—ships swirling around her—the feel of it returned to her. The hum of the booster, the rush of a banking ship, the rattle of destructor fire. The pulse of the battlefield.

  Some days, she entertained fancies of climbing into a ship and joining the fray again. Then she banished those idiot dreams. The DDF was too low on ships to waste one on an old woman with shriveled reaction times. Fragmented tales—and some old print history books—spoke of great generals who took up a weapon and joined their soldiers on the front lines. Judy, however, knew she was no Julius Caesar. She was barely a Nero.

  Still, Judy Ivans was dangerous in other ways.

  She watched the battle spin and fly beneath the shadow of the slowly dropping shipyard. The Krell had committed almost sixty ships to this fight—two-thirds of their maximum, a major investment for them. It was clear they knew that if that wreckage had fallen into DDF hands intact, it would have been a huge boon. There had been hundreds of acclivity rings on that massive ship/station.

  Now, salvage reported that fewer than a dozen so far were recoverable—and Judy had lost fourteen ships in the engagement. She saw, in their deaths, her own faults. She hadn’t been willing to truly commit. If she’d raised all of their reserve ships and pilots, then thrown them at the battle, she might have earned hundreds of acclivity rings. Instead she’d wavered, worried about a trap, until it was too late.

  That was what she lacked, compared to people like Caesar of old. She needed to be willing to commit everything.

  Rikolfr, her aide, stepped up to her with a clipboard full of notes. Judy rewound the battlefield, highlighting a specific pilot. The cadet who had given her so much trouble.

  Ships exploded and pilots died. Judy wouldn’t let herself feel for the deaths; she couldn’t let herself feel for them. As long as they had more pilots than acclivity rings—and they did, slightly—then personnel was the more disposable of the two resources.

  Finally, Judy took off her headphones.

  “She flies well,” Rikolfr said.

  “Too well?” Judy asked.

  Rikolfr flipped through papers on his clipboard. “Newest data is in from her helmet sensors. It hasn’t been encouraging during her training—almost no anomalies. But that fight you’re watching, the battle at the falling shipyard, well…”

  He turned the clipboard toward her, showing a set of readings that were literally off the chart.

  “The Writellum section of her brain,” Rikolfr said, “went crazy with activity when she was around the Krell. Dr. Halbeth is certain this is proof of the defect, though Iglom is less certain. She cites the lack of evidence except for this one engagement.”

  Judy grunted, watching the coward’s ship loop around, then fly into the very bowels of the falling shipyard.

  “Halbeth recommends immediately removing the girl from duty,” Rikolfr noted. “But Dr. Thior…well, she is going to be trouble, as you would guess.”

  Thior, who was unfortunately head of Alta Base medical, didn’t believe that the defect was real. Even the history of the thing was controversial. Reports of it dated back to the Defiant itself—and the mutiny on board the flagship that had ended with the fleet crashing here on Detritus.

  Few people knew about the mutiny, and fewer still the fact that a defect in some of the crew had been the cause. These things weren’t clear even to Judy. But some of the most important—and most merited—families in the lower caverns traced their lineage to the mutineers. Those families fought against acknowledging the defect, and wanted to keep rumors of it secret. But they hadn’t seen what it could do to someone.

  Judy had. Firsthand.

  “Who is supporting Thior this time?” Judy asked.

  Rikolfr flipped a few pages, then displayed the latest round of letters from prominent party members. At their head was a letter from NAL Algernon Weight, whose son, Jorgen, was in the coward’s flight. Jorgen had spoken highly of the girl on repeated occasions, so now came the questions. Wouldn’t it be for the best to hold this girl up as a sign of true Defiant redemption? A symbol of how any person, regardless of heritage, could return to the fold and provide service to the state?

  Damn it, Judy thought, pausing the hologram as the coward hit her overburn in a near-disastrous attempt to escape. How much proof is Algernon going to require?

  “Orders, sir?” Rikolfr asked.

  “Tell Dr. Halbeth to write a condemnation of Thior’s explanations, then see if Dr. Iglom can
be persuaded to offer strong support of the defect’s existence, particularly in this girl. Tell her I’d consider it a personal favor if she could strengthen her stand.”

  “As you wish, sir.”

  Rikolfr retreated, and Judy watched the rest of the battle, remembering a similar fight long ago.

  Thior and the others could call the defect superstition. They could say that what had happened with Chaser was coincidence. But they hadn’t been there.

  And Judy was going to make damn sure nothing like that ever happened again. One way or another.

  “So I’m pretty sure she won’t ever kick me out,” I said, working with Rig to apply new sealant to M-Bot’s wing.

  “You can infer more from a look than anyone I know,” Rig said. “Just because she didn’t kick you out this time doesn’t mean she won’t in the future.”

  “She won’t,” I said.

  “She won’t,” Doomslug said with a fluting trill, imitating the inflection of my voice from her perch on a nearby rock.

  Rig had done an amazing job with M-Bot’s broken wing. Together, we’d torn off the bent metal, then recovered the usable parts. Then somehow, Rig had persuaded his new supervisors to let him practice on one of the manufactories.

  With new parts in hand, we’d been able to repair the entire wing. The next week had been spent removing the old layer of sealant. Today, we were going over the entire hull with a new coat. Now that I’d entered my third month of training, we’d earned occasional R&R—so today, our flight had only a half day of classes.

  I’d come back early and had met Rig to work on the ship. Rig painted the sealant on with a small spray device, and I followed behind with a two-handed machine that looked kind of like a big flashlight. The blue light from it made the sealant firm up and solidify.

  The process, though slow and grueling, filled in scratches and dents on M-Bot’s hull. The slick, air-resistant sealant also filled in and smoothed out seams, leaving behind a sleek, shiny surface. We’d chosen black, to match his old color.

  “I still can’t believe they let you borrow all this stuff,” I said as I slowly positioned the light behind where Rig was spraying.

  “After how enthused they were by my atmospheric scoop designs?” Rig said. “They seemed ready to promote me to head of the department on the spot. Nobody even batted an eye when I asked if I could bring this stuff home to ‘disassemble it and see how it works.’ They think I’m some kind of prodigy with eclectic methods.”

  “You’re not still embarrassed, are you?” I said. “Rig, this technology could single-handedly save the entire DDF.”

  “I know,” he said. “I just wish…you know, that I really were a prodigy.”

  I set the light on the ground to give my arms a break. “Seriously, Rig?” I waved toward M-Bot’s wing, which now glistened with a new black sealant job. “You’re telling me that fixing a technologically advanced starship’s wing, practically on your own, in the middle of an uninhabited cave with minimal equipment, isn’t the work of a prodigy?”

  Rig stepped back, raising his goggles and inspecting the wing. Then he grinned. “It does look pretty good, doesn’t it? And it will be even better when that last part is sealed. Eh?” He hefted the spray.

  I sighed, stretching, but picked the lighting device back up. I followed behind as he started spraying the last section of the hull, near the front.

  “So, you going to spend more nights in the bunks now?” he asked as we worked.

  “No. I can’t risk getting the others involved. This is between me and Ironsides.”

  “I still think you’re reading too much into what she said.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Ironsides is a warrior. She knows that to win this fight, she can’t just defeat me—she needs to demoralize me. She needs to be able to say I was a coward, like the lies she tells about my father.”

  Rig continued to work in silence for a few minutes, and I thought he was going to let the argument pass. He sprayed a careful line of sealant under the part of the hull that locked into the cockpit. Then, though, he said in a more subdued tone, “That’s great, Spensa. But…have you ever paused to wonder what you’ll do if you’re wrong?”

  I shrugged. “If I’m wrong, she’ll kick me out. Nothing I can do about that.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the admiral. I meant your father, Spensa. What if…you know…what if he did retreat?”

  “My father wasn’t a coward.”

  “But—”

  “My father was not a coward.”

  Rig glanced away from his work and met my eyes. The glare I gave back would have been enough to silence most people, but he held my gaze.

  “What about me?” he asked. “Am I a coward, Spensa?”

  My fury sputtered, then died.

  He looked back to his spraying. “You say if you drop out, it will prove you’re a coward. Well, I dropped out. So I’m a coward. Basically the worst thing you could imagine.”

  “Rig, it’s different.”

  “Is Cobb a coward? He ejected, you know. He got shot down and ejected. Would you call him a coward, to his face?”

  “I…”

  Rig finished covering the last metallic section with black sealant, then stepped back. He shook his head and looked at me. “Spin, maybe you’re right. Maybe there’s some big conspiracy that has pinned a great betrayal on your father. Or maybe, you know, he just got scared. Maybe he was human, and acted like humans sometimes do. Maybe the problem is that everyone has made such a big deal of it.”

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” I said, setting down the sealing light. I stomped off—though the only place I could stomp to was the other side of the cavern.

  “Spin, you can’t walk off and ignore me,” Rig said from behind. “This cavern is, like, twenty meters across.”

  I sat down. Doomslug trilled beside me, imitating my huff of annoyance. Like usual, I hadn’t caught sight of her moving over. The way she snuck about only when nobody was watching her was uncanny.

  From the sounds of it, Rig picked up the light and sealed the last section himself. I sat with my back to him as he worked.

  “Fume if you want,” he noted. “Snap at me if you want. But at least think about it. You seem like you really want to defy the admiral and the DDF. Maybe you should consider not allowing them to define victory or failure for you.”

  I snorted. “You sound like FM.”

  “So she’s smart and cute.”

  I twisted to look back. “FM? Cute?”

  “She has nice eyes.”

  I gaped at him.

  “What?” he said, blushing as he worked.

  “You didn’t stutter, or fumble, or anything,” I said. “What did you do with Rodge, you Krell monster?”

  “What?” M-Bot said, lights on his wings flashing on. “Rodge is a Krell!”

  “Sarcasm,” the two of us said in unison. Rig finished the sealing, then set the device down. He looked over at me. “You will not tell her I said those things. She probably doesn’t even remember who I am.” He hesitated. “Does she?”

  “Of course she does,” I lied.

  Rig smiled again. He looked so different now. So confident. What had happened to him these last two months?

  He found something he loves, I realized as he put his hands on his hips and smiled at M-Bot’s new finish. And really, the ship did look incredible.

  All our lives, Rig and I had dreamed of the DDF. But what had he said when he dropped out? That’s your dream. I was just along for the ride.

  Deciding not to be a pilot had been the right choice for him. I’d known that, but had I known it? Really?

  I stood up, then walked over and put an arm around him. “You’re no coward,” I said. “I’m an idiot if I made you feel like you were. And this? What you’ve done here? This is be
tter than ‘pretty good.’ Rig, this is scudding incredible.”

  His smile widened. “Well, we won’t know for certain on that count until you take the ship into the air.” He checked his watch. “I should have time enough to watch you take off.”

  “Take off?” I gaped. “You mean he’s ready to fly? He’s fixed?”

  “M-Bot!” Rig called. “Basic status update!”

  “Acclivity ring: functional. Life support and pilot care facilities: functional. Maneuvering and flight controls: functional. Shield: functional. Light-lance: functional.”

  “Incredible!” I said. With the acclivity ring and the maneuvering thrusters, I could move up into the air and get around a little—though not at any reasonable speed.

  “We still need a booster,” Rig said. “And new guns; I’m not going to risk trying to fabricate either of those, even with my newfound status in the engineering department.”

  “Boosters: nonfunctional,” M-Bot added. “Destructors: nonfunctional. Cytonic hyperdrive: nonfunctional.”

  “I also have no idea how you’ll get out of here,” Rig said, looking up at the ceiling. “How did you even get in, M-Bot?”

  “Likely I used a cytonic hyperjump to teleport,” M-Bot said. “I…can’t tell you how it worked. Only that this device allowed faster-than-light travel through the galaxy.”

  I perked up. “Can we fix that?”

  “Best I can tell,” Rig said, “it’s not broken—it’s missing. M-Bot’s diagnostics indicate where this ‘cytonic hyperdrive’ should be, and it’s an empty box with a display panel on one end. Someone must have taken the mechanism—whatever it was.”

  Huh. Maybe the old pilot had taken it?

  Rig flipped through his notebook, then waved for me to look over his shoulder. “I’m pretty certain I fixed the maneuvering thrusters on that broken wing,” he said, pointing at a schematic. “But be sure he leaves diagnostics on to record it all, so I can check to make sure everything is in order.” He flipped to the next page. “And once we know he’s flying right, I want to disassemble his shield igniter and see if I can figure out why it can apparently—by his specs—take three times the punishment of a standard DDF shield.”