Starsight

INTERLUDE

Jorgen Weight stepped into the infirmary, flight helmet under his arm. Perhaps he should have stowed the helmet, but there was no rule requiring it—and he felt good carrying it. Made him feel ready to fly at a moment’s notice. Gave him the illusion that he was in control.

The creature lying in the infirmary bed proved that wasn’t the case. They’d hooked the alien woman to all kinds of tubes and monitors, with a mask over her face to control her breathing, but what drew Jorgen’s attention immediately were the straps binding her arms to the table. The DDF brass wanted to be extra careful, even though Spensa had seemed to think the alien wasn’t a danger.

The fallen pilot’s alien physiology left the DDF medics scratching their heads. The best they’d been able to do was patch her up and hope she eventually woke. Over the last two days, Jorgen had checked on her at least six times. He knew it was unlikely she’d wake up while he was there, but he still wanted the chance to be the first to speak to her. The first one to make the demand.

Can you find Spensa?

He felt a growing sense of worry each day Spensa was away without communication. Had he done the right thing, encouraging her to leave like that? Had he stranded her alone, without backup, to be captured and tortured?

He’d broken DDF chain-of-command protocol in telling her to go. Now, if she was captured because of it . . . Well, Jorgen could think of nothing worse than disobeying, then realizing he’d been wrong to do so. So he came here, hoping. This alien was a cytonic; she’d be able to find Spensa and help her, right?

But first, the alien had to awaken. A doctor with a clipboard stepped up to Jorgen, dutifully showing him the report on the alien’s vitals. Jorgen couldn’t read most of the chart, but people tended to be deferent to pilots. Even the highest government officials would often step aside for a man or woman bearing an active-duty pilot’s pin.

Jorgen didn’t care for the attention, yet he bore it because of the tradition. His people existed, lived, because the machine of war worked—and if he had to be one of its most prominent gears, he would bear that position with solemnity.

“Any update?” he asked the doctor. “Tell me what’s not on the chart. Has she stirred? Does she speak in her sleep?”

The doctor shook her head. “Nothing. Her heartbeat is irregular, and we don’t know if that’s normal for her species. She breathes our air just fine, but her oxygen levels are low. Again, we can’t tell if that is normal or not.”

The same as before—and it could be weeks before she awakened, if she ever did. Engineering was analyzing her ship, but so far they hadn’t been able to break the encryption on her data banks.

The scientists could analyze that all they wanted. The secrets Jorgen wanted were inside this creature’s brain. He felt an . . . electricity when he drew near her. A quiet shock that ran through him, like the sensation of being splashed with cold water. He could feel it now, standing over her, listening to the steady hiss of the respirator.

He’d felt that same sensation before, when he’d first met Spensa. He’d thought it was attraction, and surely he felt that. For all she frustrated him, he was attracted like a moth to a flame. There was something else though. Something this alien had too. Something he knew was hidden deep within his family line.

He turned to the doctor. “Please make a note to send me word if anything about her situation changes.”

“I’ve already done so,” the doctor replied.

“By the code at the bottom of the chart, you’ve updated her status priority, requiring me to renew my request. Department procedures 1173-b.”

“Oh,” she said, looking over the chart again. “All right.”

Jorgen nodded to her, then left the infirmary, returning to the corridor of Platform Prime. He was on his way to his ship’s berth to take the ground crew shift report when the klaxons went crazy. He froze, reading the pattern of buzzing alarms that rang through the sterile metal corridor.

Incoming fire, he thought. Not good.

Jorgen fought against the tide of scrambling pilots and crew members running for their ships, and headed straight for the command room. Incoming fire, not incoming ships. The fighters weren’t being scrambled. This was something bigger. Something worse.

His stomach churned as he reached the command room, where the guards let him enter. Inside, the alarm sounds were muted. By now, the DDF had moved much of their command staff up from Alta Base to Platform Prime. Admiral Cobb wanted to separate the military installation from the civilian population, to divide potential Krell targets.

They were still setting everything up though, which made this room a mess of wires and temporary monitors. Jorgen didn’t bother the command staff, who had gathered around a large monitor at the far side of the room. Though he was of a rank to join in operations here, he didn’t want to be a distraction. Instead he made his way down the line of workstations to that of Ensign Nydora, a young woman in the Radio Corps whom he knew from their time in school together.

“What’s happening?” he asked, leaning down beside her.

She responded by pointing to her monitor, which—by the designation at the bottom—was displaying a feed from one of their scout ships out beyond the shells. The feed showed two enormous Krell battleships moving toward the planet.

“They’re settling into positions,” Nydora whispered, “where they can shoot through an upcoming gap in the defensive platforms and hit Alta Base on the surface.”

“Can we fire back?” Jorgen asked.

Nydora shook her head. “We don’t have control of the long-range guns on the outer platforms yet—and even if we did, those battleships are far enough away that they’d be able to move before our shots arrived. The planet, though, can’t move.”

Jorgen’s stomach twisted upon itself. From orbit, the enemy could bombard the surface of Detritus with a devastating rain of fire and death. With sustained shelling, and with the planet’s own gravity working in the Krell’s favor, those battleships would be able to obliterate even the deepest caverns.

“What are our chances?” Jorgen asked.

“Depends on how far engineering got . . .”

Jorgen felt helpless as he watched the two battleships glide into position, then open gunports.

“No response to our requests to speak to them,” someone down the row said. “Doesn’t seem like they’re going to give us a warning shot first.”

That had always been the Krell’s way. No warning. No quarter. No demands for surrender. The DDF knew—from the information Spensa had stolen—that much of what the Krell had done so far had been intended only to suppress the humans. Six months ago, however, the enemy had moved to attempting full-on extermination.

“Why now, though?” Jorgen asked.

“They had to wait for an alignment of the platforms,” Nydora said. “This is their first clear shot at Alta in weeks. That’s why they’re moving now.”

Indeed, Jorgen watched the screen as the inscrutable motion of the many platforms that made up Detritus’s shells lined them up, providing an opening. The battleships immediately started firing hefty kinetic shots, projectiles that were the size of fighters. Jorgen sent a silent prayer to the stars and the spirits of his ancestors who sailed them. For all his skill and training in a cockpit, he couldn’t fight a battleship.

The fate of humankind rested in the hands of the Saints and the DDF engineers.

The room grew so silent, Jorgen could hear his own heartbeat. Nobody breathed as the rain of projectiles dove toward the planet. Then something changed—one of the platforms at the side of the opening started moving, its ancient mechanisms lighting up. Data started streaming across Nydora’s secondary monitor—reports from engineering and DDF scout ships.

The planet Detritus was no easy target. Nydora’s main screen highlighted the platform in motion, a flat sheet of metal. It seemed to move slowly, but so did the bombs. Jorgen was watching from such a distance that his brain had trouble comprehending the scale of the encounter—that section of metal was a hundred kilometers across.

As the bombs approached, sections of the platform opened up and launched a series of bright energy blasts into space. The blasts crashed into the projectiles fired by the battleships, meeting force with energy, blowing them away and negating their momentum. A shield sprang up around the platform, intercepting the debris, slowing it and preventing it from raining down upon the surface.

Everyone in the room let out a collective sigh of relief. Nydora even whooped. The battleships slowly withdrew, indicating—although they’d fired on Alta itself, and obviously wouldn’t have minded destroying it—that this had been a test of the planetary defenses.

Jorgen patted Nydora on the back, then stepped to the side of the room, breathing in and out to calm his nerves. Finally some good news. One of the vice admirals called in over the main comm line to congratulate the engineers on their work.

Oddly though, Admiral Cobb himself remained in place at his monitor, limply holding an empty coffee cup and staring at the screen, even after all the others had gone to make announcements or offer congratulations.

Jorgen stepped closer. “Sir?” he asked. “You don’t look pleased. The engineers got the defenses up in time.”

“That wasn’t one of the platforms our engineers worked on,” Cobb said softly. “That was Detritus’s old defensive programming. We got lucky that a working platform was nearby, and was still capable of deploying anti-bombardment countermeasures.”

“Oh,” Jorgen said. A little of his relief melted away. “But . . . we’re still safe, sir.”

“Note the power readings at the bottom of the screen, Captain,” Cobb said. “The amount of energy that disruption drained is incredible. These old platforms barely have any juice in them. Even if we get others functioning, it will take months or years to fabricate new solar collectors.

“And even if we get that going, and the countermeasures continue to work . . . well, if the Krell start a sustained bombardment, they’ll cut through these platforms eventually. Our defenses aren’t meant to protect us from a long-term attack. They’re a last-ditch fail-safe meant to stall invaders so that friendly battleships can get to the system and fight them off. Only we don’t have friendly battleships.”

Jorgen gazed back across the room of people celebrating. They looked commanding in their stiffly pressed and spotless DDF uniforms. That was just a front. Compared to the enemy’s resources, the DDF wasn’t an opposing military—it was a group of ragged refugees with barely a gun between them.

“We stay trapped on this planet,” Cobb said, “and we die. It’s that simple. We’re an egg with an extra-hard shell, yes, but we’re done as soon as the enemy realize that they can’t crack us with a spoon and decide to get a sledgehammer instead. Unfortunately, our only chance of escape vanished without a trace. That girl . . .”

“I stand by my decision, sir,” Jorgen said. “Spensa will come through for us. We just need to give her time.”

“Still wish you’d called me,” Cobb said. There hadn’t been any repercussions for what Jorgen had done. He could argue that, under code 17-b, he’d been capable of making the call he’d made, but the truth was that he hadn’t even been the senior officer on that mission. Colonel Ng from the ground forces had been leading the security team. Jorgen should have talked to him, or called Cobb.

It was possible that, in sending Spensa away, Jorgen had doomed them all. We stay trapped on this planet, and we die. It’s that simple . . .

Jorgen took a deep breath. “Sir. I might need to disobey another rule.”

“I don’t know half of them anyway, Captain. Don’t worry about it.”

“No, sir. I mean . . . a family rule. Something we’re not supposed to speak about.”

Cobb eyed him.

“You know,” Jorgen said, “about how my family fought to keep the defect from being talked about? Kept it from being known to the general public? The one that Spensa’s father had, the . . . the . . .”

“Cytonics?” Cobb asked.

“There’s a reason, sir,” Jorgen said.

“I know. Some of your ancestors had it. Wasn’t confined just to the engine crews. You saying you’ve been hearing things, son? Seeing things?”

Jorgen pressed his lips closed tight and nodded. “White lights, sir. In the corners of my vision. Like . . . Like eyes.”

There. He’d said it. Why was he sweating so much? Speaking the words hadn’t been that hard, had it?

“Well, that’s something at least,” Cobb said, and held his cup to the side. An aide helpfully grabbed it and ran to get him a refill. “Come with me. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“From the fleet Psychological Corps?” Jorgen asked.

“No. She’s an old woman with an excellent taste in pies.”