Chapter Three Sadie
Three
Sadie
I had the enemy Krell ship in my sights. My finger hovered over my destructor button as the ship wove ahead of me. Gilaf kept it engaged so I could stay entirely focused on lining up my shot, while Alanik watched my six so I didn’t have to worry about other ships taking out my shields.
“I will roast your entrails over an open flame,” I said to the ship.
“I don’t think a drone has entrails, Sadie,” Alanik said, “since it doesn’t have a pilot.”
She had a point. The drone was about the same size as my own ship, but while mine had a sleek fuselage and triangular wings, the enemy was shaped more like a jellyfish with tentacles flailing out behind.
Despite its more organic shape, it wasn’t alive, and its pilot was somewhere far away, steering and shooting remotely. “I will roast your power matrix over an open flame!” That didn’t have quite the right ring to it. “And then I will feed the remains to…a horde of hungry puppies!”
No, that definitely didn’t have the right ring to it.
My former wingmate Spensa had taught me to fling insults and violent promises at my enemies, but no matter how many creative things I threatened to do with my enemy’s innards, I couldn’t catch up to her oratory skill, not by a kilometer.
Most of the time I didn’t even get the insults right.
“What’s a puppy?” Alanik asked.
“I saw a picture of one once,” Gilaf said. “It’s like a fat monkey with sharper teeth.”
I held my shot steady, ready to fire, when the enemy ship cut beneath Gilaf’s hull and performed a roll, circling back with a barrage of destructor fire. I steadied my hand on the control sphere. I took a deep breath and pressed the trigger.
And missed. My destructor blast went wide, speeding off into oblivion.
The ship hit its boosters, rocketing toward me and leaving Gilaf behind.
Alanik covered me from the other incoming ships while this one showered me with destructor fire, and I switched to evasive maneuvers.
Not fast enough; the ship took out my shields and fired one final shot.
My ship exploded.
I died.
I deflated in my seat while Alanik reset the simulation.
“Stars, I thought I had that one.” I should have.
Yes, the ship was moving. Yes, my shot had to be incredibly precise.
But since so many of our flight members had left, we had an opening for a crack-shot pilot who could be counted on never to miss.
“I’m never going to be our sniper if I shoot like that. ”
“Shoot like that,” Nope agreed from the bottom of my mockpit. I bent down, petting the blue taynix down her long green spines. Nope was our flight’s inhibitor slug.
“Everyone misses sometimes,” Gilaf said, climbing out of his mockpit and sticking his face through my holographic canopy.
He and Alanik were siblings, UrDail from the planet ReDawn.
The image of the cockpit fizzled around his face, bits of my shield casting an electric blue glow over his bright white hair and the white bone protrusions that emerged from the purple skin on his cheekbones.
In the holographic light, his hair looked almost as blue as mine, which was also a bright, electric color, a gift from my Yeongian heritage.
Gilaf scrutinized me. “You seem like you could use cheering up. Should I tell you a joke?” He spoke in the lilting UrDail language, but a pin on his jumpsuit translated his words into English.
“No,” Alanik said from her mockpit.
Gilaf looked confused. “Humans like jokes, yes?”
“We do,” I said. “Do UrDail not like jokes?”
“Not like jokes!” Nope trilled.
“Not Gilaf’s jokes,” Alanik said.
“Well, I want to hear it,” I said.
“Did you hear about the monkey that fell out of the tree?” Gilaf asked.
I shook my head.
“It plummeted.” Gilaf grinned at me, as if expecting me to laugh.
The trees on ReDawn were kilometers tall, suspended in the atmosphere of their gas giant planet.
A monkey falling out of one of those trees would plummet a long, long way, and I didn’t find the image of its terror particularly amusing.
Alanik sighed. “The UrDail word for ‘plummeted’ is a homophone for the color green. The same shade of green as a common species of monkey.”
I was trying to piece that together, but found myself distracted by the image of a green monkey. I’d never seen a monkey in real life, but—“Your monkeys are green?”
“Of course,” Gilaf said. “What color are yours?”
“Brown, I think? Black, maybe?”
Gilaf shook his head. “Ah, I see why the joke was not funny to you.”
“That joke is not funny to me either,” Alanik said.
“Yes,” Gilaf said, “because you don’t have a sense of humor.”
“It’s okay!” I said. “Your joke worked. I’m all cheered up now.”
Gilaf didn’t look convinced, which was fair. I didn’t sound cheered up and I wasn’t, particularly.
“I thought humans smiled when they felt cheer,” Gilaf said.
I forced a smile onto my face and pointed to my mouth with one finger. “See? Smiling now!” When Gilaf still looked skeptical, I added, “Isn’t it impressive the way I missed three out of four shots? That’s got to be some kind of record! Maybe if I keep at it I’ll be able to miss even more!”
“Better,” Gilaf said. His face retreated out of the hologram.
I was pretty sure Gilaf understood my sarcasm and was answering with his own, but it was sometimes hard to tell if we understood each other. Still, my fake enthusiasm did make me feel a bit better.
“Are we going to go again?” Alanik asked. She started the simulation over, and I stared at the enemy ship in the distance, back to taunt me.
“No,” I said. “I think I’m done for today.” I’d begged Alanik and Gilaf to practice with me to keep our skills sharp, since we hadn’t seen much battle lately. Theoretically, if the diplomats did their jobs, we might not see any more battle, which would be great. I didn’t enjoy being shot at.
But they hadn’t disbanded our air force, which meant the DDF still anticipated a use for us.
It was my job to be ready, so I had to find some way to distinguish myself.
Arturo was our flightleader. Nedd was his second-in-command.
Alanik was cytonic. T-Stall and Catnip were the big brothers of the flight.
Gilaf was the best at evasives. Apparently he and Alanik had both learned to fly playing an UrDail sport that involved lots of dodging.
Gilaf had promised to take me to a match on ReDawn someday, and I was going to make sure he made good on his promise.
Try as I might, even after months with Skyward Flight, I was still the new girl.
The inexperienced one. The innocent one.
The young one—youngest on the team at barely seventeen and a half.
The labels had stuck so hard I worried we’d take on new recruits and I still wouldn’t be able to shake them.
I needed to find something I was good at, some way to prove myself.
Which meant I’d better keep practicing, even if I sucked at it. “Same time tomorrow?” I asked.
Alanik shut down our mockpits, and my canopy dissolved in little glimmering sparks. “Not tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll be on assignment.”
I perked up in my seat. “We have an assignment?” Lately we’d just been escorting various diplomats to our allied planets, but even that was a welcome distraction.
“Did you not hear?” Gilaf asked. He and Alanik exchanged a look.
Was I not being called up with the others? I wasn’t on official leave or anything. “What’s the assignment?” I asked.
“We’re going to one of your human planets,” Gilaf said. “Apparently there’s some weird space phenomenon that Alanik needs to poke at with her mind.”
“It’s an inhibitor field,” Alanik said. “And how else would I investigate it besides with my mind?”
My stomach sank, the crisp algae strips I’d had for lunch suddenly feeling very heavy.
“You guys are going to a human planet?” Stars, another colony of humans.
I wondered if their planet was a barren wasteland surrounded by space junk, like Detritus, or if they lived on a planet with clouds and sky and green plants, like Old Earth before it disappeared. “Without me?”
“Maybe your briefing message was lost somehow,” Gilaf said.
“I hope so,” I said, “because if I don’t get to go on the adventure to contact other humans, I will die.”
“Die!” Nope said, wrapping herself around my ankle.
“Someone should tell Arturo about the oversight,” Gilaf said. “He won’t want to be responsible for her death.”
“She is not going to die,” Alanik said. “It’s a hyperbole.”
“Is it?” I asked. “Are you sure?”
Alanik stared at me, and I wilted. She was intimidating at the best of times.
“Okay, it is a hyperbole,” I said. “But I’ll be sad.”
“He won’t want to be responsible for her sadness,” Gilaf said.
I wasn’t so sure. Arturo’s job was to follow orders and do what was best for the flight. It gutted me to think that what was best for the flight might be to leave me behind, but maybe it was.
I stewed on that as I left the simulator and dropped Nope off at the slug lounge for lunch.
My hyperslug copilot, Cheeky, was currently absent on shore leave in the caverns below the surface of Detritus, where most of our population had settled to avoid being destroyed by the Superiority.
I missed her, but as our diplomacy division worked out the details of our treaty with the taynix, they’d agreed that slugs should have ample repatriation time and therefore couldn’t be assigned to any of us permanently.
I didn’t know what a slug did on shore leave, but I imagined Cheeky gathered with hundreds of other slugs, all fluting little melodies and eating mushrooms and falling asleep fat and happy, even if that wasn’t exactly how the biologists described it.
It made sense that the slugs wanted time at home, given that they still had one.
We, on the other hand, were preparing to move our people off planet and return to our former nomadic life.
Or maybe we were working on a way to terraform Detritus, emerge from the caverns, and live in the open.
It was hard to tell. Sometimes I thought we needed a team of biologists to tell us what our natural habitat should be now that we weren’t stuck in caverns and had literally the whole galaxy to explore.
I was headed to the gym to change out of my jumpsuit and into regulation exercise shorts when Arturo approached, wearing a serious expression. He’d recently cut his dark, curly hair, and it made him look even less approachable. “Sadie,” he said. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
I perked up, hoping he was here to tell me my lack of notification about the mission was all a big mix-up. “Sure,” I said. “I heard the flight was called up, but I didn’t get the briefing.”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Arturo said, leaning against the corridor wall. “I’m only taking a few pilots.”
Not a misunderstanding, then. If he wasn’t taking the whole flight, it made sense I’d be the last one picked. “I understand—” I started to say, but Arturo cut me off.
“Jorgen suggested I bring you along,” Arturo said. “But I have concerns.”
I…had no idea how to react to that. On one hand, the admiral himself suggested me for this mission! But on the other…“Concerns?”
Arturo sighed. “I’ll be up-front with you.
Our assignment is to check out a strange cytonic disturbance, which will be primarily Alanik’s job, and also to accompany some diplomats to make contact with another settlement of humans.
When the team is with the diplomats, we’re going to stay quiet and watch their backs while they do the talking.
So I need pilots who know how to keep their mouths shut. ”
Oh. I’d assumed Arturo would leave me behind because I hadn’t done anything to set myself apart, but apparently I had, and not in a good way. “You think I talk too much?”
“It’s not just about the volume of words,” Arturo said.
“You’re not always the most aware of what’s going on around you.
You’re a great pilot. I’m glad you’re in my flight.
I would trust you to have my back in a firefight any day.
But if we land on the planet and act as ground security for diplomats in a tenuous political situation… ”
“You’d rather have pilots that don’t ask questions,” I said.
“Yes,” Arturo said, sounding relieved that I said it so he didn’t have to. Technically, as my commander, Arturo was supposed to tell me what I was doing wrong. But it clearly wasn’t his favorite part of the gig.
I kind of wished he’d just left me home and not told me why. Now I would spend the whole time replaying every word I’d ever said in his presence. “So I’m not coming with you.”
“Jorgen wants me to take you,” he said again. “But I need to know that you can be discreet and stick to the mission.”
This conversation was giving me whiplash. So I was invited…but only if I agreed not to talk much? “I can do that,” I said quickly. “We’ve been in difficult political situations before, and I didn’t mess anything up.”
“That’s true,” Arturo said. “But lately you’ve been…”
“Louder?” I suggested.
“More assertive,” Arturo said. “When you first came to the flight, you were happy to hang in the background. Maybe it’s because the flight’s smaller now, but it seems like you’re more comfortable asking questions and being, well, yeah, louder.”
I knew exactly what had changed. Our flight split up.
One of my former wingmates was off working for the new DDF exploration team, getting to travel the galaxy and see exciting new planets every day.
Another of my old wingmates now ran the DDF diplomatic corps, also traveling to new planets and meeting new, exciting alien people.
Our old flightleader was the scudding admiral of the DDF.
I wanted to distinguish myself the way they had, so I’d been trying harder.
But apparently all my efforts had earned me was a reputation for being unprofessional. A part of me wondered if he should leave me home, but the rest of me desperately wanted to meet these other humans and see what their lives were like.
Even if I wasn’t allowed to speak to them.
“I can be quiet,” I said. “If you bring me, I promise I won’t talk when I’m not supposed to.”
Arturo nodded. “Okay. I’ll forward the briefing to your datapad so you can prepare. We’re leaving in the morning, and tonight we’re gathering with the scouts and diplomatic team for a mission send-off.”
“You won’t regret bringing me,” I said.
“I’m counting on that,” he said, and walked away, leaving me standing outside the changing rooms.
I bounced a little on my feet. Maybe Arturo didn’t want to bring me along, but he was giving me a chance.
I needed to make it count.