Page 95 of Defiant

I turned toward the hologram, where Detritus began to transform—the platforms that protected the planet pulling back to make a hole leading toward the surface. Something flew out through that hole, small by comparison to the planet, but large on the scale of ships. A long, wicked-looking ship with sleek fins. A carrier?

We had a flagship now?

The shipyards that Rig was working on,I thought.He said he’d found a partially finished project in them…

The viewscreen changed to a shot of the imposing ship emerging from within Detritus’s ring of protections. A brilliant, wonderful sight—a carrier ship with bays for fighters, aglow with flashinglights. Emblazoned along the side, in enormous white letters—written in English—was a single word.

Defiant.The name of the ship that had carried us to Detritus all those years ago.

Another visual winked into existence: a shot of theDefiant’s bridge as Brade accepted the communication. There, seated in a captain’s chair, was an old woman wearing a crisp white uniform. Milky-white eyes. A small figure, yet somehow still strong. Gran-Gran?

She stood up, holding on to the armrests of the chair. “Superiority forces,” she said in a firm voice, “I am Captain Rebecca Nightshade of the starshipDefiant.Eighty years ago, you drewmypeople intoyourwar. You obliterated the ship we called home, stole our heritage, and tried to annihilate us.

“As the last living member of the originalDefiant’s crew, I’ve been granted my rightful commission as commander of this new vessel. I am of Clan Motorskaps, the people of the engines. You picked a fight with us that we did not want, but then you foolishly failed to exterminate us. And so, we are back.Iam back. The blood of my ancestors demands that I seek vengeance upon you.

“This is your only warning. Return to us the captives you’ve taken. Turn away from your path of tyranny. Or Iwillsee each and every ship that raises arms against usburned to slag,and your ashes will be abandoned to drift in the eternal expanse of darkness. Forever frozen, without home or memorial, lamented by your kin, never again to hear the voices or feel the touch of those you have loved. I swear it by the stars, the Saints, and the souls of a thousand warriors who have come before me. I willhave your blood.”

The room fell still, the Superiority soldiers and aides all staring at her, slack-jawed.

“Oh, Gran-Gran,” I whispered. “That wasbeautiful.”

For an expanded summary of this illustration, go to this page.

31

M-BOT

Mushroom-Bot felt Spensa’s joy at seeing Gran-Gran. If he’d been capable of it, he’d have smiled.

However, he couldn’t spare much thought for that battlefield. He had a job to do: he needed to learn how to defeat the delvers. So, he turned his attention back to the nowhere—a place that Spensa had always described as black, or white, or with other stark images.

To him it wasn’t a sight, but a different kind of sensation. A place that was afeeling,a frozen moment, where all computation could happen at its leisure. He brought his mind here, and set out on his mission. Find the secret. Save the galaxy.

No pressure.

He moved among the delvers, nudging their minds with his, careful to project the right ideas—ones he’d learned from them. Camouflage, essentially. The same thoughts they’d always been thinking, the frozen moment. It worked—and honestly, being a ghost was a lot less frightening than Mushroom-Bot had assumed it would be. Humans acted like dying was this super extremely terrible event. He had instead found it quite liberating.

Still, hedidmiss his body. And things like time, and space, andexistence. He maintained a connection to places—the somewhere—that the rest of the delvers didn’t. His perceptions were still those of a being living in linear space—because his heart was there. With his friends.

For now though, he needed to solve the riddle. He had to find a way to expose the delvers’ raw pain, then freeze them withthatinstead of this blank sense of comfort. The one they projected to each other with an almost forceful denial.

He got this same affirmation from each of them.

All is well. All is peaceful.

Lies. If they would let time pass, they’d recognize it. But the delvers were frozen in that moment of self-delusion. Their memories covered over. Falsely content.

All is well. All is peaceful.

He repeated it back to them, pretending to be just another delver. He knew it was a lie though, because the moment they touched the somewhere, the pain started again. They couldn’t hide from it when time passed.

Not a one recognized him. He’d been created, he now thought, by the figments—a group of secretive beings who slid through the Superiority and hid among their ranks. Spensa had flown with one at Starsight. Pieces of his code hinted at their hand in his origins.

Regardless, he had been designed for stealth, and so he had the skill to fool these others. The delvers didn’t know him for himself. He was just another clone. A deadly spores-death mushroom among the innocuous, identical lemiotod mushrooms. An unnoticed, incorrect homophone in the middle of a spoken sentence. A single line of commented-out code insulting the user.

The longer he spent here, the better he understood the delvers. One tidbit occurred to him: they claimed to never change, but that too was a lie. At one point, they had not known who Brade, Winzik, or Spensa were. Now they did. That was a change. Each time the somewhere leaked in, things changed. Slowly—not by much—but theydidchange.

Each time something changed, even in the slightest, they spread it among themselves. Like a virus. Making certain each repeated the same thing, changed in the same way. That was how they could keep pretending.

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