Starsight

The vacuum consumed that eagerly, and I cut to the right, dodging the debris. I took deep breaths, struggling to slow my heart. Sweat soaked the pads on my helmet and leaked down the sides of my face.

“Spensa!” M-Bot shouted. “The drones!”

Scud.

I turned my ship and boosted to the side just as three flaring explosions lit my cockpit. I winced, but those lights weren’t the result of me getting shot—they were the lights of drones exploding one after another. Two DDF ships swooped past.

“Thanks, guys,” I said, tapping the group channel on the communications panel of my dash.

“No problem,” Kimmalyn replied over the channel. “As the Saint always said, ‘Watch out for the smart ones. They tend to be stupid.’ ” She had an accent and an unhurried way of speaking—somehow intrinsically upbeat, even when she was chastising me.

“I thought the idea was for you to distract the drones,” FM said, “then bring them back toward us.” She had a confident voice, the type that sounded like it should be coming from someone twice her age.

“I was planning to do it eventually.”

“Yeah,” FM said. “And that’s why you turned off your comm so Jorgen couldn’t yell at you?”

“It wasn’t off,” I said. “I just had M-Bot running interference.”

“Jorgen really hates talking to me!” M-Bot said enthusiastically. “I can tell by the way he says so!”

“Yeah, well, the enemy is retreating,” FM said. “And you’re lucky we were already on our way to help, even before you decided to admit you were in trouble.”

I was still something of a sweaty mess—heart racing, hands slick—as I reignited my shield, then turned my ship and flew toward the other two. The course took me past the wreckage of the ship I’d defeated, which was still moving along at roughly the same speed as when I’d hit it. That was space for you.

The ship had cracked apart rather than exploding completely, and so with a chill I was able to spot the corpse of the enemy ace. A boxy alien figure. Perhaps the armor it wore could protect it from the vacuum . . .

No. As I passed by, I saw that its armor had been broken apart in the blast. The actual creature inside was kind of like a small, two-legged crab—spindly and bright blue, with carapace along the abdomen and face. I had seen some of them piloting shuttles near their space station, which was farther out, monitoring Detritus from a distance. They were our jailers, and while the data we’d stolen called this crablike race the varvax, most of us still called them the Krell—even though we knew that was an acronym in some Superiority language for a phrase about keeping humans contained, not their actual race’s name.

This one was truly dead. The liquid bath that filled its armor had spilled out into the void, first boiling explosively, then freezing into solid vapor. Space was weird.

I fixed my gaze on the body, slowing M-Bot, and hummed softly one of the songs of my ancestors. A Viking song for the dead.

Well fought, I thought to the Krell’s departing soul. Nearby, some of our salvage ships came swooping in from where they’d watched the fight in relative safety nearer the planet. We always salvaged Krell ships, especially those that had been flown by living pilots. There was a chance we’d be able to capture a broken Superiority hyperdrive that way. They didn’t travel using the minds of pilots. They had some kind of actual technology that let them travel between stars.

“Spin?” Kimmalyn called to me. “You coming?”

“Yeah,” I said. I turned away and fell into line with her and FM. “M-Bot? How would you judge that pilot’s flying abilities?”

“Somewhere near your own,” M-Bot said. “And their ship was more advanced than any we’d faced before. I’ll be honest, Spensa—mostly because I’m programmed to be incapable of lying—I think that fight could have gone either way.”

I nodded, feeling much the same. I’d gone toe-to-toe with that ace. On one hand, it was a nice affirmation that my skill wasn’t tied only to my abilities to touch the nowhere. But coming fully out of my trance now—feeling the odd sense of deflated purpose that always tailed a battle—I found myself strangely worried. In all our time fighting here, we’d seen only a handful of these black ships piloted by live beings.

If the Krell really wanted to kill us, why send so few aces? And . . . was this really the best they had? I was good, but I’d been flying for less than a year. Our stolen information indicated that our enemies ran an enormous galactic coalition of hundreds of planets. Surely they had access to pilots who were better than I was.

Something struck me as off about all of this. The Krell used to only ever send a maximum of a hundred drones against us at once. They’d relaxed that, and now they would field upward of a hundred and twenty at once . . . but that still seemed a small number, considering the apparent size of their coalition.

So what was going on? Why were they still holding back?