“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 better 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.”
I grinned. “That ought to make you popular with the engineering and design teams.”
“Yeah, unless they start to get suspicious.” Rig hesitated, then spoke more softly. “I did eventually try and look at his AI mechanism, but he wouldn’t let me open the housing. He even threatened to electrify it. He says that device—along with some other systems—is classified. Stealth systems, communications systems … some very important stuff. Spin, to really help the DDF, we would need to let an expert in here to disassemble and analyze the ship. I can only do so much.”
I felt something wrench inside me, like gears locking up from lack of grease. I glanced back at M-Bot.
“He has warned,” Rig said, “that if we reveal him, he will attempt to destroy his own systems to keep from disobeying his old pilot’s orders.”
“Maybe … I can talk sense into him?”
“M-Bot doesn’t seem capable of sense,” Rig said, gazing at the ship and—yet again—seeming to take a moment to bask in just how great it looked. Clean, freshly painted, sleek and dangerous. The four destructor cavities, two on each wing, gaped open, and the rear booster was missing. But otherwise it was perfect.
“Rig,” I said softly, in awe, “I seriously can’t believe you let me rope you into this.”
“If you want to pay me back,” he said, “ask FM to meet me for lunch in the park someday.” Then he immediately blushed and looked down. “I mean, maybe, if the topic comes up or something. Or not.”
I grinned, punching him in the arm. “So you are still Rig. I was starting to worry there.”
“Yeah, yeah. Let’s ignore what I said and focus on the important things. The insane AI says its stealth systems are good enough to keep the DDF from noticing it, and I guess we just have to trust it on that one. So what do you say? Want to take it up for a quick test flight?”
“Scud, yes!”
Rig looked up. “Any ideas on how to get out though? That gap is barely large enough for a person.”
“I … might have an idea,” I said. “But it’s probably going to be a tad messy. And dangerous.”
Rig sighed. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected otherwise.”
About an hour later, I climbed into M-Bot’s cockpit, nearly trembling with excitement. I placed Doomslug in the seat behind me, then did up my buckles.
My little cavern looked bare now that we’d packed up my kitchen and all of Rig’s equipment. We’d stowed what we could in the cockpit, and had hauled the rest out through the crack using my light-line. Rig waited a safe distance away. I got to do the fun part myself.
And, like most “fun parts,” it would involve breaking things.
“You ready?” I said to M-Bot.
“I have basically two states,” he said. “Ready, and powered down.”
“Needs work as a catchphrase,” I said. “But the sentiment is pretty cool.” I rested my hands on the control sphere and the throttle, breathing in and out.
“Just so you know,” M-Bot said. “I could hear what you two were saying earlier, when you were whispering. The part where Rodge said I was insane.”
“I realized you could probably hear,” I said. “You are a surveillance ship, after all.”
“AIs can’t be insane,” he said. “We can only do what we’re programmed to do. Which is the opposite of insanity. But … you’d tell me, right? If I start to sound … off?”
“The mushroom thing is a little over the top.”
“I can sense that. I also can’t help it. The mandate is very strong inside me. Along with my pilot’s last words.”
“Lie low. Don’t get into any fights.”
“And wait for him. Yes. It’s why I can’t let you reveal me to your DDF, even if I know it would help you and your people. I simply must follow my orders.” He paused. “I am worried about you taking me into the air. Did my pilot mean ‘lie low’ as in ‘stay underground,’ or did he merely mean ‘don’t let yourself be seen’?”
“I’m sure he meant the second,” I said. “We’ll just do a quick flight around the area.”
“It will not be ‘quick,’ ” he said. “With only maneuvering thrusters, we’ll fly about as fast as you can walk.”
Good enough for now. I engaged the acclivity ring, raising us smoothly. I pulled up the landing struts, turned us around in a slow circle, then dipped us to one side and then the other. I grinned. The controls were similar enough, and there was an energy to the responses that my Poco simply didn’t have.
Now, how to get out of the cavern. I tipped the acclivity ring backward on its hinges, which in turn tipped M-Bot’s nose up. I launched the light-lance, spearing it into a cracked portion of the ceiling. I pulled back, using the rotational thrusters, then lowered the power of the acclivity ring. That gave us some force, even without a booster.
The light-lance went taut. Dust and chips of stone streamed down from the ceiling. Doomslug mimicked the sound from behind me, fluting in an energetic, excited way.
A portion of the ceiling collapsed in a shower of rock and dust. I disengaged the light-lance, looking up through the hole. There was no skylight nearby, so above was a dark uniform greyness. The sky.
“Can your hologram create a projection of a new roof?” I asked M-Bot.
“Yes, but it will be less secure,” he said. “Sonar imaging can see through the hologram. But … It feels like so long since I’ve seen the sky.” He seemed wistful, though he would probably claim that was some kind of programming quirk.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Come on. Let’s fly!”
“I …,” M-Bot said softly. “Yes, all right. Let’s go! I do want to fly again. Just be careful, and keep me out of sight.”
I raised us up through the hole, then waved to Rig, who was standing with our things a short distance away.
“Engaging stealth mechanisms,” M-Bot said. “We should now be invisible to DDF sensors.”
I grinned. I was in the sky. With my own ship. I slammed the throttle forward.
We stayed in place.
Right. No booster.
I engaged the maneuvering thrusters, which were intended more for fine-tuned positioning than they were for actual movement. And we started flying. Slooooooowly.
“Yippee?” M-Bot said.
“It is kind of a letdown, isn’t it?”
Still, I did a small loop for Rig, with diagnostics running. When I completed the circle, he gave a thumbs-up, then settled his pack on his shoulder and started hiking off. He had to get back to Igneous to return the sealing equipment.
I couldn’t quite persuade myself to land. After all this time, I wanted to fly a little longer with M-Bot. So I grabbed the altitude lever. The control sphere could make the ship bob up and down, powering the acclivity ring for the finer points of dodging. But if you wanted a quick ascent, this was the way.
I eased it toward me.
We shot upward into the sky.
I hadn’t expected it to work this well. We rocketed upward, and I felt g-forces slam into me, forcing me down. I cringed, noting how fast we were going, and eased off the lever. That kind of g-force would …
… crush me?
I felt the acceleration, but not nearly as much as I should have. I couldn’t be pulling more than three Gs, though I felt like it should have been much more.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Can you be more specific? I have over a hundred and seventy semiautonomous subroutines that—”
“The g-forces,” I said, looking out the window, watching the ground retreat at an alarming pace. “I should be blacking out about now.”
“Oh, yes. That. My gravitational capacitors are capable of belaying sixty percent of g-forces, with a maximum threshold of well over a hundred Earth standard. I did warn you that your ships had primitive systems for handling pilot stress.”
I let off on the altitude lever, and the ship stopped accelerating.
“Would you like to engage rotational g-force management for further help withstanding the forces?” M-Bot asked.
“Like where my seat turns around?” I asked, remembering what Rig had explained about M-Bot. Humans didn’t do well with g-forces in the wrong directions—it was much harder for us to take downward forces, for example, because they pushed all the blood in our bodies into our feet. M-Bot could compensate for that by rotating the seat, so that I took the forces backward—in a way easier for my body to handle.
“Not for now,” I said. “Let me first get used to how you fly.”
“Very well,” M-Bot said.
We quickly reached 100,000 feet, which was around the highest that we flew DDF ships in regular situations. I reached to decelerate, but hesitated. Why not go a little higher? I’d always wanted to. Now, nobody was there to stop me.
I kept us going, soaring upward until the altitude indicator hit 500,000 feet. There, finally, I slowed us, admiring the view. I’d never been so high. The mountain peaks below looked like nothing more than crumpled-up paper. I could actually see the planet curving—and not merely some faint arc either. I felt as if I could stretch onto my toes and see the whole planet.
I was still barely halfway to the rubble belt, which I’d been told was in low orbit starting at around a million feet. However, from this height, I could see it far better. What I saw from the surface as only vague patterns now manifested as enormous swaths of metal upon metal, vaguely lit by some sources I couldn’t make out.
Looking at it, realizing it was still well over a hundred kilometers away, the grand scale of it finally started to strike me. Those little specks that looked like individual dots … those had to be as large as the piece of debris that had crashed down during that fight a week back.
It was all so enormous. My jaw dropped as I gazed at it, taking in the many sections, all rotating and churning in esoteric orbits. Mostly just shadows, moving, swirling, layers upon layers.
“Would you like to get closer?” M-Bot said.
“I don’t dare. They said that some of the junk would shoot at me.”
“Well, those are obvious remnants of a semiautonomous defense grid,” he said. “With the shadows of outer habitat platforms behind, I’d say—all interspersed with broken shipyards and matter reclamation drones.”
I watched it shifting, moving, and tried to imagine a time when this had been functional. Used. Lived in. A world above the world.
“Yes, some of those defense platforms are clearly operational,” M-Bot said. “Even I would have difficulty slipping past them. Note those asteroids I’m highlighting on your canopy; slag formations on the surface indicate their ancient purpose. Some strategies for suppressing a planet include towing interplanetary bodies into position and dropping them. This can accomplish anything from the removal of a specific city to an extinction-level disaster.”
I breathed out softly, horrified to imagine it.
“Er … not that I was originally a combat ship. mind you,” M-Bot said. “I don’t know about orbital bombardment from my own programming. I suppose somebody must have told it to me once.”
“I thought you didn’t lie.”
“I don’t! I genuinely believe that I’m an advanced, well-armed, stealth-capable ship because it will help me harvest fungi better. That is not at all irrational.”
“So all the Krell really would need to do to deal with us,” I said, “is shove some of these asteroids down?”
“It’s a little harder than you make it sound,” M-Bot said. “The Krell would need a ship large enough to move something of such a sizable mass. That would likely require a capital ship—which those defense platforms would probably be able to shoot down with ease. Small ships could get through some of those gaps though. Which I guess you already know, considering how often you fight them.”
I settled back in the seat, letting myself enjoy the view. The expansive world below, the sky that somehow felt smaller than it once had. It was only a narrow band around the planet, capped by the rubble belt.
I stared upward for a time, admiring the grand motions of the rubble belt—the enormous shells and platforms, moving according to their ancient and esoteric design. There must have been dozens of layers, but in that moment—for only the second time in my life—it all aligned. And I saw out into space. True infinity, broken by a few twinkling stars.
Which I swore I could hear. Whispers. No distinct words, but something real. Gran-Gran was right. If I listened, I could hear the stars. They sounded like the horns of battle, calling out, drawing me toward them …
Don’t be a fool. I thought. You don’t have a booster. If the Krell find you, you’ll be little more than target practice.
Reluctantly, I began to ease us downward. That was probably enough for one day.
We descended slowly, letting gravity do most of the work. Unfortunately, we’d drifted some distance in the wind, so when we landed, I had to inch us—with those tiny maneuvering thrusters—back toward the hole.
It took long enough that by the time we got there, I was yawning. Doomslug imitated the sound of my yawn from where she’d settled down into the blanket behind my seat.
Finally, we lowered into the cavern and landed near M-Bot’s original resting spot. “Well, I’d call that a great first run,” I said.
“Er, yes,” M-Bot said. “We went very high, didn’t we?”
“If I can only figure out a way to get a booster, we’ll have you flying for real in no time.”
“Um …”
“You could try fighting the Krell, if you wanted,” I said, testing whether I could push him further. “We could do that while ‘lying low’—we just wouldn’t tell anyone what or who we are! The black phantom ship with no callsign! Flying in to help the DDF in times of need!”
“I don’t think—”
“Imagine it, M-Bot! Dodging and swooping amid exploding barrages. Soaring and striving, proving yourself stronger than your enemies. A grand symphony of destruction and power!”
“Or, even better, sitting in the cave! Doing none of that!”
“We could fight with stealth mode on …,” I said.
“That is still the opposite of lying low. I’m sorry, Spensa. I must not fight. We can fly again—I kind of liked it—but we cannot ever fight.”
“Ever fight,” Doomslug added.
I turned off the ship’s nonessentials, then leaned back my seat, feeling sick. I had access to something awesome, something powerful, something amazing—but I couldn’t use it? I had a weapon that didn’t want me to swing it. What should I do?
I didn’t know. But I found it most disturbing that my ship was … well, a coward.
I sighed and started getting ready for bed. My frustration with M-Bot faded; I was too excited by the fact that I’d actually gotten him into the air.
As I finally settled down—seat reclined, blanket pulled around me, Doomslug moved to a fold-out shelf in the canopy—M-Bot spoke again, softly. “Spensa?” he said. “You don’t mind, do you? Staying out of combat? I have to obey my orders.”
“No you don’t.”
“Um, I’m a computer. That’s basically all I do. I literally can’t even count to zero without an order.”
“I find that hard to believe,” I said. “Considering the things you’ve said to me.”
“That’s a personality programmed to interact with humans.”
“Excuses,” I said, yawning, dimming the lights. “You might have a machine mind, but you’re still a person.”
“But—”
“I can hear you,” I said, yawning. “I can hear your soul. Like the stars.” It was a faint hum in the back of my mind, and I hadn’t noticed it until right then. But it was there.
Whatever he thought, M-Bot was more alive than he gave himself credit for being. I could simply feel it.
I started to drift off.
He spoke again, his voice even quieter. “The orders are the only thing I know for sure, Spensa. My old pilot, my purpose. That’s who I was.”
“Become someone new then.”
“Do you have any idea how hard that is?”
I thought about my own cowardice. The feelings of loss, and of inadequacy, now that I actually had to do the things I’d always bragged that I would. I pulled my blanket close.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Why would I ever want to be anyone else?”
He didn’t respond, and eventually I drifted off to sleep.
