Two hours later, I sat in the DDF command center, holding a blanket around me, with my legs up on my seat. They’d given me Admiral Ironsides’s chair.
Ever since that moment in the nowhere, I’d felt cold. A chill I couldn’t shake, and which the blanket could barely help. My head still pounded, despite the metric ton of painkillers I’d swallowed.
A group of important people surrounded my chair, crowding me in. National Assembly Leaders, junior admirals, flightleaders. I was growing confident that they believed I wouldn’t turn against them, though at first—after I’d reentered the atmosphere—they’d been very cautious.
The door to the command center opened, and finally Cobb limped in. I’d insisted on waiting until the transport fetched him and brought him back, and until he’d gotten his afternoon cup of coffee.
“All right,” Ironsides said, folding her arms. “Captain Cobb is here. Can we talk now?”
I held up a finger. It might have been petty of me, but it felt really good to make Ironsides wait. Besides, there was someone else who deserved to be here before I explained.
As we waited, I reached for the radio at my side. “M-Bot,” I said. “Everything all right?”
“I’m trying not to be offended by how the engineers in this hangar are looking at me,” he said. “They seem overeager to rip me apart. But so far, nobody has tried anything.”
“That ship is DDF—” Ironsides began.
“That ship,” I said, “will fry all his own systems if you try breaking into him. The DDF will get his tech, but it will be on our terms.”
The way she looked—red-faced—when I said it was also extremely satisfying. But she didn’t challenge me any further.
Finally the door opened again, and Jorgen entered. He was actually smiling, and it occurred to me that the expression—while pleasant—didn’t really suit him. He just looked more like himself when he was being serious.
He wasn’t the one we’d been waiting for, however. Instead, it was the lanky young man Jorgen had been sent to fetch. Rig grinned like a fool as he stepped into the room, then he blushed as the flightleaders and admirals parted for him, saluting. Though Ironsides was angry that Rig and I hadn’t turned the ship in immediately, most seemed to agree that when working with an insane AI that threatened to destroy itself, Rig had performed admirably in getting technology to the DDF.
“Now will you talk?” Ironsides demanded.
“The Krell are not what we think,” I said. “My ship downloaded some of their databases, and discovered what happened before our ancestors landed here on Detritus. There was a war. A vast intergalactic one. Humans against aliens.”
“Against the Krell,” Ironsides said.
“There were no Krell at the start of it,” I said. “Just us versus the galaxy. And humankind lost. The victors were a coalition of aliens who, as best M-Bot and I can tell, considered humankind too brutal, too uncivilized, and too aggressive to be allowed to be part of the intergalactic community.
“They demanded that all human fleets, independent or not, surrender to their authority. Our ancestors, on the Defiant and its small fleet, considered themselves innocent. They weren’t part of the war. But when they refused to turn themselves in, the alien coalition sent a group to capture or contain them. That is what we call the Krell.”
I closed my eyes. “They cornered us. And—after a conflict on board the Defiant—my great-grandmother brought us here, to Detritus. A planet we knew about, but which had been abandoned centuries before.
“The Krell followed us, and set up a station to watch us once we crashed. They’re not murderous aliens. They’re prison guards. A force designed to keep humankind trapped here, as some of the aliens are absolutely sure we will try to conquer the galaxy if we’re ever allowed to get back into space.
“The lifebusters were designed to annihilate our civilization if we seemed to be getting close to escaping Detritus. But most of the time they attacked, I don’t think they were trying to actually destroy us. They have laws against destroying a species entirely. They consider this planet like … a preserve for humankind. They sent ships to keep us focused on the fight, to occupy us, so we wouldn’t have time to research how to escape. And while the fighters always tried to keep our fleet down to size, they were only authorized to use a certain amount of force against us, lest they accidentally cause us to go extinct.”
I shivered despite the blanket. “Something changed recently, however,” I said. “It seems this last bomb really was meant to destroy us. There have been … politics about how much they should tolerate from us. They tried to destroy Alta and Igneous, but we defeated them. That has them scared.”
“Great, wonderful,” Ironsides said, folding her arms. “But this doesn’t change much. We know why the Krell are attacking, but they’re still a superior force. This will only make them more determined to extinguish us.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But the aliens who contain us? They aren’t warriors. They’re prison guards who fly mostly unmanned drones that don’t have to fight well—because they can overwhelm us with numbers.”
“Which is still the case,” Ironsides said. “We are low on resources, while they have better technology and an orbital fleet. We’re still basically doomed.”
“This is true,” I said.
“Then why are you smiling?” Ironsides demanded.
“Because,” I said, “I can hear what they’re saying to each other. And anytime you know what your enemy is going to do, you have an advantage. They think we’re trapped on this planet.”
I shivered again and thought of that moment when I’d been nowhere. The Krell knew they had to target any of us who flew too well—because they knew about the defect. They knew that someone who had it might be able to do as I’d done.
I didn’t know how I’d teleported my ship. I didn’t know if I dared do it again. But I knew, at the same time, that Gran-Gran was right. Using that power was the key. To survival. To escaping this planet.
To being truly Defiant.
