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 shoot 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.
But that could be a ruse, right? He said he couldn’t lie, but I had only his word on that. I …
“Spin?” Cobb asked, stopping near my mockpit. “You aren’t catching that cold too, are you?”
I shook my head. “This is just a lot to take in.”
Cobb grunted. “Well, maybe it’s a load of cold slag. Truth is, once we lost the archive, most everything about the old days became hearsay.”
“Do you mind if we tell Nedd about this?” I asked him. “When he gets back?”
“He’s not coming back,” Cobb said. “The admiral officially removed him from the cadet rolls this morning.”
“What?” I said, standing up, surprised. “Did he ask to be removed?”
“He didn’t report for duty, Spin.”
“But … his brothers …”
“Being unable to control your emotions, grief included, is a sign that one is unfit for duty. At least that’s how Ironsides and the other DDF brass see it. I say it’s a good thing Nedd is out. That boy was too smart for all this anyway …” He hobbled out the door.
I sank back down into my seat. So we really were just six now. And if being unable to control emotions made one unfit for duty … what about me? It was all piling on top of me. The loss of friends, the worry about M-Bot, the voices that whispered deep down inside that I was in fact a coward.
All my life, I’d fought with a chip on my shoulder, thundering that I would be a pilot and I would be good enough. Where was that confidence now?
I’d always assumed that when I made it—when I finally got here—I’d stop feeling so alone.
I dug in my pack and raised my radio. “M-Bot, are you there?”
“Acclivity ring: functional, but lacking power. Boosters: nonfunctional. Cytonic hyperdrive: nonfunctional.” He paused. “That’s a yes, in case you were confused. I’m here, because I can’t go anywhere.”
“Were you listening in on our conversation?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“And I admit, I was running some calculations on the likelihood of mushrooms growing inside that building, as your conversation was—typical of humans—slightly boring. But not completely! So you should feel—”
“M-Bot. Are you a Krell?”
“What? No! Of course I’m not a Krell. Why would you think that I am? How could you think … Wait, calculating. Oh. You think because I’m an AI, and they’re likely AIs, that we must be the same?”
“You have to admit it’s suspicious.”
“I’d be offended if I could be offended,” he said. “Maybe I should start calling you a cow, since you have four limbs, are made of meat, and have rudimentary biological mental capacities.”
“Would you know if you were a Krell?” I asked him. “Maybe you forgot.”
“You’ve forgotten why you came to Detritus,” I pointed out. “You have only one image of your pilot, if that’s even really him. You can barely remember anything about my species. Maybe you never knew. Maybe your memory bank is filled only with the bits that the Krell know about us, and you invented this entire story.”
“I’m writing a new subroutine now,” he said. “To properly express my outrage. It’s going to take time to get right. Give me a few minutes.”
“M-Bot …”
“Just a sec. Patience is a virtue, Spensa.”
I sighed, but started packing up my things. I felt hollowed out. Empty. Not afraid, of course. I bathed in fires of destruction and reveled in the screams of the defeated. I didn’t get afraid.
But maybe, deep down, I was … worried. Nedd dropping out had hit me harder than it should have.
I threw my pack on my shoulder and clipped the radio to its side. I set it to flash a light if M-Bot or someone else tried to contact me. I didn’t want him talking out of it while I walked the hallways, though I needn’t have worried. The building was empty; Cobb had dismissed us late, and the other flights had already gone to dinner. I didn’t spot any MPs or random support staff as I walked slowly toward the exit, my feet leaden.
I wasn’t certain I could keep doing this. Getting up early, working all morning on M-Bot. Getting wrung out by lessons each day, then trudging back to my cave at night. Sleeping fitfully, dreaming of the people I’d failed or—worse—having nightmares about running away …
“Pssst!”
I stopped, then glanced at the radio strapped to the side of my backpack.
“Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssttt! Spensa!”
I looked up and down the hallway. To my right—was that Kimmalyn there, in a doorway, wearing black? “Quirk?”
She waved me forward urgently. I frowned, suspicious.
Then I wanted to kick myself. Idiot. This is Kimmalyn.
I walked to her. “What are you—”
“Shhh!” she said, then scrambled down the hallway and peeked around a corner. She waved at me to follow, and more confused than anything else, I did.
This continued for a couple of turns through empty corridors—we even had to pull into the bathroom and she made me wait with her there, explaining nothing, until we finally reached a hallway lined with doors. The girls’ bunks. Two unfamiliar young women—wearing flight suits and the patch of Stardragon Flight—stood chatting outside one of the rooms.
Kimmalyn held me there, crouching at the corner until the two girls finally walked off in the other direction. I didn’t miss that Kimmalyn and I had come in the back way, the opposite direction of the mess hall. So was she sick, or not?
After the two girls left, FM’s head—her short hair clipped back with a glittering barrette—popped out of one of the doors. She gestured with an urgent wave. Kimmalyn dashed down the hall to her, and I followed, ducking into their room.
FM slammed the door, then grinned. Their small room was as I remembered it, though one of the beds had been removed, when Morningtide died. That left a bunk on the left wall, and a single bed by the right. A pile of blankets lay lumped between them, and the dresser held two trays of food: steaming soup in bowls, with algae tofu and slices of thick bread. Real bread. With real imitation butter.
My mouth started watering.
“We asked for extra,” Kimmalyn said, “but they sent soup, because they think we’re sick. Still, ‘You can’t ask for more when you already have it,’ as the Saint said.”
“They removed the extra bed,” FM said, “so we piled some blankets on the floor. The trick is going to be using the lavatories—but we’ll run interference for you.”
It finally sank in. They’d pretended to be sick so they could order food into the room—and share it. They’d snuck me to the room, and made a “bed” for me.
Stars. Gratitude surged up inside me.
I was going to cry.
Warriors did not cry.
“Oh! You look angry,” Kimmalyn said. “Don’t be angry. We’re not implying you’re too weak to walk to your cave! We just thought … you know …”
“It would be nice to take a break,” FM said. “Even a great warrior can take the occasional break, right, Spin?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak.
“Great!” Kimmalyn said. “Let’s dig in. Subterfuge makes me famished.”
